The Operator’s Advantage: Why 40 Years of Building Beats 40 Years of Advising

What the consultant misses

The gap between advising and operating is not about access to information. Consultants are smart people. Many are very smart people. The gap is about what happens when they’re wrong.

When a consultant’s recommendation doesn’t work, they write a new recommendation. When an operator’s decision doesn’t work, they live in it. The staff lives in it. The bank notices. That difference in consequence is what shapes how you think about a problem in the first place — before you ever get to the solution.

I ran hotels for 35 years. Albert at Bay Hotel in Ottawa from 1985. Best Western Ottawa Downtown Suites from 1990. Sold both in October 2020. Between those two buildings I made most of the mistakes an operator can make and had to figure out, in real time, how to fix them. Without the luxury of a revised deck. Without a client to bill. Just a payroll that had to clear on Friday.

The thing a consultant misses is not the analysis. It’s the texture of what it actually costs to be wrong. Cost measured in staff morale, in lost accounts, in the particular silence in a room when you’ve made a call that didn’t land. That texture shapes judgment in ways that no amount of study replicates.

BookDirect and the cost of distribution

In 1995, before Expedia had publicly launched and before Booking.com existed as anything other than a Dutch idea, I founded BookDirect — one of the first online hotel reservation platforms globally. The premise was straightforward: hotels were paying 15–30% commissions on every room sold through traditional travel agents. The internet was about to change that equation entirely. Get there early. Build the direct channel. Own the relationship.

What I built correctly was the vision. What I underestimated was the speed and scale of what the OTAs would do to consumer behavior. By the time Expedia and then Booking.com had finished training travelers to shop by price comparison, independent platforms without their distribution infrastructure and marketing firepower were fighting a different battle than the one they’d prepared for.

I ran BookDirect for 18 years. Over that period, I made money but ultimately lost more.

I don’t lead with that number to perform humility. I lead with it because it’s information.

It answers the question of what kind of experience I’m bringing to a strategic engagement. Not case studies. Not frameworks I read about. Actual decisions that cost actual money and required actual reckoning.

The money I lost bought me an education in what happens when strategy and execution aren’t connected — when the plan is right and the execution chain breaks somewhere between idea and result. That gap is where I spend most of my time now. Not building new strategies on top of broken ones. Finding where the chain broke.

The OTA era also clarified something about the distribution landscape that informed everything I’ve done since. BookDirect launched into a world where independent platforms could still carve out meaningful space. What the OTA era produced was a structural shift in who controlled demand. Hotels that understood this early enough — that brand trust was the only thing that couldn’t be intermediated — are the ones that survived. The operators who missed it spent the next decade buying back their own guests through commission channels. That’s not a distribution problem. It’s a strategy problem that got mistaken for a distribution problem. There’s a difference. It’s a meaningful one.

Governance under scrutiny

In May 2021, I was appointed the first ministerially appointed Board Chair of TICO — the Travel Industry Council of Ontario, the statutory regulator for Ontario’s travel industry. I took the chair at the worst possible moment for travel and stayed for five years.

Regulatory governance is not like corporate governance. The stakeholders aren’t investors who can sell their shares if they disagree with the board’s direction. They’re consumers who already paid for trips that may not happen. The margin for governance theatre is zero.

Two years in, the Office of the Auditor General of Ontario launched a value-for-money audit. Not an advisory review — an independent, public examination of whether the board was governing effectively and whether the organization was delivering on its statutory mandate. The kind of scrutiny that distinguishes boards that govern from boards that perform governance for the minutes.

The audit produced findings. The board responded to every one. We navigated five ministerial transitions, a pandemic that rewrote the economics of travel quarterly, an industry restructuring, and ongoing complexity across a heavily intermediated regulatory environment. Through all of it, the governance held and the consumer protection mandate stayed intact.

Regulator-tested isn’t a line on a profile. It’s a description of what the experience actually was. Boards answerable to shareholders have a specific kind of accountability. Boards answerable to the public, under statute, with consumer protection as the mandate, operate under a different kind. I know both. Most people who advise on governance know neither.

What the difference actually looks like

Here’s the concrete version. A consultant and an operator both walk into a business with a broken pricing structure.

The consultant benchmarks it against comparables, identifies the gap, and recommends an adjustment. The recommendation is technically correct. The invoice follows.

The operator asks something different: why is the pricing broken? Who set it, and when? What does the cost structure actually look like at the margin level? Do the people selling these products know they’re leaving money on the table on specific segments? What will changing the pricing do to the client relationships the business depends on? Is this actually a pricing problem, or is pricing the symptom of something upstream?

The second set of questions isn’t more intelligent. It comes from having already been in the room when a price change landed badly and had to figure out why. That prior experience changes what you look for before you look for it.

I’ve rebuilt pricing strategies, distribution systems, governance structures, and digital platforms — not because I studied how but because I did it, watched some of it work, watched some of it fail, and had to diagnose the difference in real time with money on the table. The questions I ask now are the direct product of the answers I had to find then.

What you’re actually buying

When you bring in a strategic advisor, you’re buying judgment. The only question worth asking is where that judgment was formed.

A good consultant can model a market, build a framework, and present a recommendation. That’s a real skill set. If what you need is a rigorous external perspective from someone who has read broadly and thought carefully, hire a consultant.

If what you need is someone who has been inside enough operating situations to recognize what’s actually wrong — not what the numbers suggest might be wrong, but what’s wrong — that’s a different engagement entirely.

I’ve sat in rooms where the decision had to get made before the analysis was finished. I’ve been the person who had to choose between the financially correct answer and the practically executable one. I’ve seen what happens when those two things are the same and when they’re not, and I’ve had to live with the outcome either way.

That experience doesn’t make me right more often than a consultant. It makes me useful in different situations. Specifically: situations where the problem isn’t unknown — it’s avoided. Where the business knows something is broken and keeps designing around it. Where what’s needed isn’t a new strategy but a clear reading of what the current one is actually producing.

I don’t sell strategy. I find what’s broken and rebuild it.