Speaking
Hospitality keynote speaker for audiences who need to understand how founder-led hospitality businesses really think, decide and thrive.
Cassie Davison is a hospitality SME expert, author and speaker with more than 30 years in hospitality and 25 years building and leading founder-led businesses.
Her talks explore the human decisions behind commercial performance: why customers choose, return and recommend, what makes hospitality businesses distinctive, how founders make decisions under pressure and why apparently good ideas, products and support sometimes fail to land.
This is not generic motivational speaking.
It is commercially grounded thinking built from lived experience inside hospitality SMEs.
Cassie speaks to founders and hospitality businesses themselves, and to the suppliers, technology companies, trade bodies, funders and organisations that need to understand them better.
Watch Cassie Speak
Watch a full keynote or explore recent conversations to hear Cassie’s approach, thinking and delivery.
The keynote themes
Cassie works from one core body of thinking and shapes each keynote around the audience, event and commercial objective.
The emphasis changes depending on who is in the room.
Stand Out Hospitality
What makes a hospitality business worth choosing?
Being competent is no longer enough.
Drawing on the framework from Stand Out Hospitality, Cassie explores how standards, distinctiveness, identity, belonging, customer loyalty and story influence commercial performance.
For hospitality founders and SME audiences, this is a chance to step out of the day-to-day and look again at what makes the business valuable, memorable and difficult to replace.
Inside the Founder Mind
Why good ideas, products and support fail to land with hospitality SMEs.
Founder-led hospitality businesses do not make decisions like smaller versions of large companies.
Time, cash, operational pressure, identity, confidence, trust and risk all affect what gets prioritised and what gets ignored.
Cassie brings audiences inside that decision-making reality.
This keynote is designed particularly for suppliers, technology businesses, funders, trade bodies and organisations whose success depends on understanding hospitality SME customers.
If you want founder-led businesses to behave differently, you first need to understand the world they are making decisions inside.
Places for Humans to Be Human
Why hospitality matters more in an increasingly digital world.
As more of life becomes automated, remote and transactional, hospitality remains one of the places where people gather, connect, celebrate, recover and belong.
Cassie explores the commercial and social value of that human connection, why it remains one of hospitality’s greatest competitive advantages, and what businesses risk losing when efficiency becomes the only measure of progress.
What SMEs Can Learn from Hospitality
The human decisions behind why people choose one business over another.
Hospitality makes customer behaviour unusually visible.
People choose emotionally, justify logically, build habits, develop loyalty and form relationships with businesses that feel distinctive and human.
Drawing on more than 25 years of founder experience, Cassie explores how standards, identity, distinctiveness, belonging and story influence commercial performance, and what owner-led businesses in other sectors can learn from hospitality.
What audiences take away
Cassie’s aim is not simply to give an audience more information.
It is to change how they see the business, customer or market in front of them.
Energy. Optimism. Agency.
Audiences leave with a clearer understanding of what is shaping decisions, renewed confidence about what can still be changed, and practical ideas they can use immediately.
Depending on the audience, that may include:
how hospitality SME founders make decisions
why customers choose, return and recommend
standards, identity and distinctiveness
customer loyalty, advocacy and belonging
why products, technology and support fail to gain adoption
trust and the relationship between hospitality SMEs and the organisations serving them
what makes founder-led businesses commercially resilient
Every keynote is shaped around the room, but the outcome is consistent: people leave seeing something differently and knowing what to do next.
Why Cassie
Cassie Davison spent more than 25 years building and running hospitality businesses across 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.
Her businesses and work have been featured by The Guardian, The Times, The Telegraph, BBC, Forbes, Restaurant Magazine, The Caterer and Olive Magazine.
She has judged national hospitality awards, advised organisations across the sector and spoken at conferences, trade shows, leadership events and industry roundtables.
But her real authority comes from having spent decades inside the businesses she now speaks about.
That gives her a perspective hospitality founders recognise and organisations outside the operational frontline rarely hear.
What audiences say
“It was brilliant having Cassie speaking at our launch event - she has a raw, unadulterated passion for hospitality and quality of service and gave some spectacular insight into her experiences as an industry professional- I highly recommend her!”
“A massive thank you to Cassie Davison, for delivering such a fantastic session.The feedback we’ve had has been incredible, people left energised, focused, and already thinking differently about how to stand out in their markets. ”
“A real highlight of the day was listening to Cassie Davison. A number of points resonated strongly. There were many valuable lessons that I will take , my mind now full of ideas.”
“An impactful and insightful talk, followed by a thoughtful discussion and a genuinely engaged crowd!”
“You were absolutely fantastic, Cassie. Thank you so much for giving us your time and knowledge.”
“Cassie Davison was a fantastic guest speaker and very insightful.”
Formats
Cassie speaks at conferences, trade shows, leadership events, partner events and industry gatherings.
Formats include:
conference keynotes
short provocations
panels and roundtables
facilitated conversations
webinars
event hosting
podcast and media interviews
For consultancy, Step Back and licensed Stand Out Hospitality, visit Work With Cassie →
Speaker resources
Planning an event, podcast or interview?
Download ready-to-use biographies, Cassie’s introduction script and high-resolution photography.
Book Cassie to speak
If your audience includes hospitality founders, hospitality SMEs or organisations that need to understand them, Cassie brings a perspective built from decades inside the sector.
For an audience that needs more than commentary about hospitality, bring someone into the room who has actually built the businesses being discussed.