Cassie Davison
Hospitality SME expert, author, speaker and consultant.
Cassie Davison brings more than 30 years’ hospitality experience and 25 years as a founder and owner to her work with hospitality SMEs and the organisations that serve them.
She is the author of Stand Out Hospitality, a Business Book Awards 2026 finalist, founder of Kith & Kin, and a hospitality speaker and consultant specialising in founder-led hospitality businesses.
Her work focuses on how hospitality SMEs think, decide, grow and thrive, and why apparently good ideas, products and support sometimes fail to land.
Cassie works directly with founders and established hospitality businesses, helping them make clearer strategic decisions and strengthen the foundations of the business.
She also works with suppliers, funders, technology businesses, BIDs, local authorities, trade bodies and sector organisations whose success depends on understanding hospitality SMEs properly.
Because misunderstanding how founder-led businesses make decisions is expensive.
Products go unused. Support fails to engage. Marketing misses the mark. Investment is directed at the wrong problem.
From the inside
Cassie does not speak about hospitality from the outside.
For more than two decades, she was the founder carrying the business: the team, the customers, the standards, the numbers, the pressure, the decisions and the responsibility of building places people wanted to return to.
She has opened, built and led award-winning pubs, cafés, fine-dining restaurants and festival concepts, with businesses recognised for food, design, entrepreneurship, leadership, culture and community impact.
Her businesses earned 3 AA Rosettes and more than 25 hospitality and business awards.
That lived experience gives Cassie a perspective that is practical, commercially grounded and difficult to replicate.
She understands what it means to make strategic decisions while still being close to the customer, the team, the cash flow and the immediate reality of the business.
In hospitality SMEs, the thinking and the doing sit unusually close together.
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)
A hospitality SME perspective
Hospitality SMEs are not simply smaller versions of large businesses.
Founders often sit unusually close to strategy, customers, people, standards, risk and cash. That changes how decisions are made.
Cassie’s work is built around understanding that reality and helping both hospitality businesses themselves and the organisations around them make better commercial decisions because of it.
She applies that expertise through speaking, strategic work with established hospitality businesses, consultancy for organisations serving the sector, and the licensed Stand Out Hospitality programme.
Work with Cassie
If you run a hospitality SME, work with hospitality businesses, or need an experienced perspective on how founder-led hospitality businesses think and make decisions, explore the ways Cassie can help.
