Hospitality looks different from the inside.
Cassie Davison is a hospitality SME expert, author and speaker helping founder-led hospitality businesses thrive, and helping the organisations that serve them understand how these businesses really work.
Kith & Kin Hospitality is the home of Cassie’s work with hospitality SMEs.
After more than 30 years in hospitality and 25 years building and leading her own award-winning businesses, Cassie understands the decisions, pressures and realities behind founder-led hospitality businesses from the inside.
She works with founders themselves, and with the suppliers, funders, trade bodies, BIDs, local authorities and organisations whose success depends on understanding them.
Because hospitality SMEs do not behave like smaller versions of large businesses.
And when that difference is misunderstood, good products fail to land, support goes unused, marketing misses the mark and businesses make decisions without enough strategic clarity.
Where do you sit?
I run a hospitality business
If you are building or leading a pub, restaurant, café, bar, small hotel, venue or hospitality group, Cassie’s work helps you step back from the day-to-day and make clearer decisions about the business you are building.
Through Stand Out Hospitality, Step Back strategic sessions, speaking, resources and Kith & Kin, the work focuses on the foundations that make hospitality businesses stronger: standards, identity, distinctiveness, customer loyalty, belonging, story and strategic clarity.
Explore Stand Out Hospitality →
I work with hospitality businesses
If your organisation sells to, supports, funds, represents or influences hospitality SMEs, understanding how founders actually think and make decisions matters commercially.
Cassie works with suppliers, technology businesses, funders, pub companies, BIDs, local authorities, trade bodies and sector organisations through speaking, consultancy, workshops and licensed operator development.
She helps organisations understand what hospitality SME founders are prioritising, what they are likely to respond to, why apparently good ideas fail to land and where assumptions are costing time, money and trust.
Hospitality SMEs are different
Hospitality SMEs make up almost all of the UK hospitality sector and contribute a substantial share of its economic value.
But they are still too often understood through the lens of larger businesses.
A founder-led hospitality business is different.
The person setting the strategy may also be dealing with the customer complaint, recruiting the next team member, questioning the marketing spend, reviewing the numbers and deciding whether a new piece of technology is worth the disruption.
The thinking and the doing sit unusually close together.
That changes how decisions are made.
Time, trust, identity, risk, confidence, cash and immediate operational pressure all compete for attention.
That is why apparently rational solutions do not always get adopted.
It is why support programmes can struggle to engage the businesses they were designed to help.
And it is why hospitality founders themselves can spend so much time running the business that the strategic decisions shaping its future get postponed.
Understanding that reality changes what works.
Expertise built inside the businesses
Cassie Davison has spent more than 30 years in hospitality, including 25 years as a founder and owner of pubs, bars, cafés, restaurants and festival concepts.
Her businesses earned 3 AA Rosettes and more than 25 hospitality and business awards.
She is the author of Stand Out Hospitality, a Business Book Awards 2026 finalist, holds an MBA, is an Ambassador for the British Institute of Innkeeping and Strategic Advisor to De Montfort University Business School.
Today she works as a hospitality SME expert, speaker and consultant.Her work focuses on the questions that sit behind commercial performance:
Why do customers choose, return and recommend?
Why do some businesses remain distinctive while others become interchangeable?
Why do founders make the decisions they do?
Why do apparently good products, support and technology fail to land?
What gives an established hospitality business the strategic clarity to grow, change or realign?
How Cassie works
Speaking
Commercially grounded keynotes and conversations about hospitality SMEs, founder decision-making, customer loyalty, distinctiveness, belonging and what makes these businesses thrive.
Hospitality SME consultancy
For organisations that need to understand hospitality SMEs before making decisions about products, propositions, customer strategy, support, engagement or growth.
Bad assumptions about SME customers are expensive.
Cassie brings the founder perspective into those decisions before money, time and trust are wasted.
Step Back
A strategic reset for established hospitality SMEs that need to decide what matters now, what needs to change and where limited time and resources should go next.
Licensed Stand Out Hospitality
A scalable strategic development programme for organisations that want to strengthen the hospitality SMEs they serve while building deeper, more valuable customer relationships.
Explore Stand Out Hospitality →
Kith & Kin
Kith & Kin is the founder-facing home of Cassie’s work.It connects hospitality founders with the thinking, resources and conversations around Stand Out Hospitality and the realities of building businesses that matter.Because founder-led hospitality can be lonely.
It does not have to be.
Thinking, conversations and hospitality SME expertise
Cassie writes and speaks regularly about founder-led hospitality businesses, customer behaviour, leadership, loyalty, technology adoption, business identity and the relationship between hospitality SMEs and the organisations that serve them.
Start a conversation
If you are planning an event, developing something for hospitality SMEs, trying to understand why something is not landing, or looking for a stronger way to support the businesses you serve, Cassie can help.