From Restaurant Floors to Technology Company

Starting on the Floor

I started in the UK restaurant industry. Not in a marketing department; on the floor. Clearing tables, taking reservations, working double shifts on bank holidays, learning how a good service actually feels from the inside before I ever thought about how to market one. That operational instinct shaped everything that followed: start with the work, understand how a venue actually runs, build the strategy around reality rather than aspiration. Most people who enter hospitality marketing from the outside never develop it.

Going International

Hong Kong was where the work became international and the scale changed completely. I spent more than a decade working with some of the city's most prominent hospitality brands. As a consultant for Hakkasan, I facilitated one of China's most successful restaurant launches in years, navigating the particular challenge of introducing a Western brand with a Chinese culinary offering into Shanghai's fiercely competitive market. I worked with Aqua, with Gordon Ramsay's Bread Street Kitchen and Maze Grill, with Duck & Waffle, and with dozens of independent operators across the city. Each engagement deepened the range: brand strategy, concept development, content production and photography, social media, event programming, menu design, investment proposals, launch campaigns.

The Four Seasons Hotels & Resorts project was a defining one. I was selected to develop EQUIS, their flagship social venue in Beijing: a 3,000-square-metre dining and entertainment space that needed to bridge the capital's heritage with contemporary luxury. I led the concept creation, branding, menu design, and project planning. It was the kind of project that teaches you what world-class hospitality execution demands at scale.

Building My Own

I also built my own venues. Upper East, a converted villa in Shanghai's French Concession, was my first self-propelled project: a main bar, lounges, a wine room, dining, and a rear courtyard with DJ booth. I handled everything from pre-opening to operational management. CVRVE breathed new life into the Ritz-Carlton Shanghai's former Long Bar; a modern craft bar with international mixologists and MediterrAsian cuisine that became a pre-club destination with nightly DJs. Building and running my own venues taught me things that consulting for other people's venues never could.

The Pattern

But the more venues I worked with, and the more I built, the more clearly the same structural friction appeared everywhere. Discovery was broken. Guests could not find great venues, and great venues could not reach the right guests. Recruitment drained operators who should have been focused on their food and their guests. The marketing tools available were designed for entirely different industries and bolted awkwardly onto hospitality workflows. I was solving these problems manually, venue by venue, market by market.

Shanghai, Beijing, and Dubai broadened the pattern further. The friction was not local. Hospitality operators everywhere were running world-class experiences on software built by people who had never set foot in a restaurant kitchen.

From Consulting to Building

The pandemic was the inflection point. Relocating from Hong Kong to Thailand gave me something that years of operating intensity never could: perspective. Distance from the daily client cycle created space to see what I had been observing for two decades as a systemic problem rather than a series of individual consulting briefs. Consulting scales linearly; one client, one solution, one fee. Technology scales differently. The problems I had been solving one client at a time could be solved once, properly, as software.

Glia Hong Kong Holdings was incorporated in Hong Kong. Eight products now, four live, with the rest in active development: healthcare, hospitality recruitment, web quality, tourism, productivity, and SEO. Every product addresses a gap I either experienced as an operator, encountered as a consultant, or watched a client struggle with repeatedly. The company runs from Hong Kong and Thailand with a distributed team across multiple countries.

I still write about hospitality marketing. The Insights blog has been running for years and it remains the most honest expression of how I think about this industry; where it is heading, what operators are getting wrong, and what the shift to AI-driven discovery means for venues that want to be found. I still take photographs. The gallery below is a small selection from two decades of shooting venues, food, and the people who make hospitality work.