Cassie Davison
Author of Stand Out Hospitality, hospitality speaker, entrepreneur and operator insight advisor.
Cassie Davison brings more than 30 years’ hospitality experience and 25 years as an independent owner-operator to her work with operators, suppliers, funders, business associations, local authorities, trade bodies, corporate partners and sector organisations.
She is the author of Stand Out Hospitality, founder of Kith & Kin, and a speaker and advisor helping organisations understand independent hospitality more clearly.
Her work sits at the intersection between independent operators and the organisations trying to support, serve, fund or reach them.
She helps operators feel seen, supported and reconnected with the businesses they are building. She also helps organisations understand how independent operators think, decide, respond and prioritise, so they can engage the sector with more relevance and trust.
From the inside
Cassie does not speak about independent hospitality from the outside.
She has lived the reality of it.
For more than two decades, she was the person holding the business: the team, the customers, the standards, the numbers, the pressure, the decisions and the responsibility of building places people love.
She has opened, built and led award-winning pubs, cafés, fine-dining restaurants and festivals, shaping them into distinctive hospitality businesses recognised for food, design, entrepreneurship, leadership, culture and community impact.
That lived experience is what makes her work different. It is not theory, commentary or observation from the sidelines. It is the perspective of someone who has built businesses, carried the risk, made the decisions and stayed close enough to the work to understand why it matters.
What Cassie does now
Across speaking, advisory, operator insight, workshops, partnerships and Kith & Kin, Cassie’s work has one focus: helping independent hospitality be better understood, better supported and more clearly valued.
Her work is grounded in one central belief:
Belonging is independent hospitality’s competitive advantage.
For operators, that means space to step back, reconnect with what they are building and remember why the business matters.
For organisations, it means a clearer understanding of the real operator experience before decisions are made, money is spent or support is designed
Approach
Cassie’s work is direct, grounded and shaped by lived experience.
She is known for bringing clarity to complex, emotionally loaded and commercially important conversations. She can hold the reality of operator pressure without reducing hospitality to struggle, because she also understands the pride, purpose and meaning that keep people in the work.
Her approach is not about adding more noise. It is about helping people see more clearly.
Recognition & Media
Cassie’s work has been widely recognised across hospitality, business, food, design, entrepreneurship and community impact, with more than 25 awards across her career.
Selected recognition includes:
Selected recognition
Chamber of Commerce Entrepreneur of the Year
Niche Magazine Businesswoman of the Year
Visit England Best Pub
3 AA Rosettes
Which? Good Food Guide Best Newcomer
Midlands Restaurant of the Year
Most Instagrammable Venue
Wish It Was Our Local
Press & Features
The Guardian
The Times
The Telegraph
BBC
Forbes
Restaurant Magazine
The Caterer
Olive Magazine
Roles & affiliations
Author of Stand Out Hospitality (2025)
Ambassador for the British Institute of Innkeeping
Strategic Advisor – De Montfort University Business School
Judge – Licensee of the Year Awards
Contributor to industry panels and roundtables
MBA (2010)
Why this matters
Independent hospitality is often misunderstood.
It is easy to see the pressure, the hours, the risk and the complexity. It is harder to understand why people keep doing it, why it matters so deeply, and why the businesses themselves often carry so much personality, purpose and emotional connection.
Cassie helps articulate that reality.
She understands the operator because she has been one.
She understands business because she has built, studied and led it.
She understands the wider sector because she now works with the organisations trying to support, fund, serve and engage it.
That combination makes her work especially valuable wherever independent hospitality, entrepreneurship and customer-facing SMEs need to be represented clearly, honestly and usefully.
Next step
To explore working with Cassie: