Watch & Listen
Conversations, keynotes and interviews with Cassie Davison on hospitality SMEs, founder-led businesses and what makes them thrive.
Cassie Davison is a hospitality SME expert, author, speaker and consultant with more than 30 years’ experience in hospitality and 25 years building and leading founder-led businesses.
Her conversations explore how hospitality SMEs think, decide, grow and adapt, why customers choose and return, what makes businesses distinctive, how founders make decisions under pressure, and why apparently good ideas, products and support sometimes fail to land.
This page brings together keynotes, podcast appearances, interviews and longer-form conversations around that work.
Featured keynote
The Business of Belonging
A full-length keynote exploring why belonging matters commercially, why customers choose some hospitality businesses over others, and what founders can do to build stronger loyalty, identity and connection.
Podcast appearances
Cassie regularly joins podcasts and industry conversations to discuss hospitality SMEs, founder decision-making, customer loyalty, leadership, technology, belonging and the realities of running founder-led businesses.
What’s The Story? Hash Brown Glory! with Tom Bower and Lee Harding
Cassie Davison joins Tom and Lee to discuss Stand Out Hospitality, customer experience, consistency, marketing and the decisions that help founder-led hospitality businesses become distinctive, memorable and worth returning to.
Hospitality Mavericks — Crafting Purpose-Driven Success
Cassie Davison joins Michael Tingsager to discuss Stand Out Hospitality, the Five Pillars, customer loyalty, identity, belonging and what helps founder-led hospitality businesses become more distinctive, purposeful and commercially strong.
How I Failed in Business — Decision Making, Restaurants & Being in the Public Eye
Cassie Davison joins Rob Spence and Sophia Grace to discuss the realities of building and running hospitality businesses, making difficult decisions, dealing with public scrutiny and learning from the mistakes, pressures and setbacks that come with entrepreneurship.
Kankei Interviews — Developing a Brand That Your Clients Will Love
Cassie Davison discusses how hospitality businesses can build brands people genuinely connect with, including the role of identity, customer understanding, consistency and creating an experience people want to return to.
The Business Spotlight — The Importance of Vision and Collaboration in Business
Cassie Davison joins Matt Bull to discuss her journey through hospitality, the importance of vision and collaboration, and the skills founder-led hospitality businesses build through constant decision-making, problem-solving and working closely with people.
British Institute of Innkeeping — Pioneering Pub People: How To Make Your Pub A Community Favourite
Cassie Davison discusses customer care, building a strong team and how she turned The Gate Hangs Well into both a community favourite and a destination pub, exploring the role of identity, belonging and consistency in a successful hospitality business.
Future of Hospitality Podcast with David Carruthers
A podcast exploring the future of hospitality through conversations on people, leadership, service, culture and how the industry can evolve while staying human.
Cassie’s episode coming soon.
The SMARTA Podcast with Sonia Marta
A podcast about leadership, personal growth and creating a life with greater purpose, featuring honest conversations with inspiring guests about ambition, resilience and making meaningful progress.
Cassie’s episode coming soon.
The Michelle Pascoe Hospitality Podcast
A hospitality podcast focused on guest experience, people, leadership and the future of the industry, featuring conversations with hospitality leaders and practitioners from around the world.
Cassie’s episode coming soon.
Interviews & industry conversations
Cassie also takes part in webinars, LinkedIn Lives, panels, roundtables and industry interviews. These conversations often explore the same core questions that sit behind her wider work:
how hospitality SME founders make decisions
why customers choose, return and recommend
why technology and support do not always land
what makes founder-led hospitality businesses distinctive
how hospitality creates loyalty, belonging and human connection
what organisations need to understand before trying to reach or support hospitality SMEs
The Burnt Chef Project — Powering People: The Future of Leadership in Hospitality
Cassie Davison joins Mica Maurtua, Michelle Moreno and Kris Hall for a live conversation on modern hospitality leadership, moving beyond firefighting, balancing people and performance, and creating greater clarity inside hospitality businesses under pressure.
Tourism in East Anglia: Tourism Business Survey Panel Discussion
Cassie Davison joins Chris Scargill, David Scott of The Hotel Folk and Ben Marshall of Pensthorpe to discuss the challenges facing tourism, leisure and hospitality businesses, how those pressures show up inside founder-led SMEs, and what the survey results mean in practice.
Stand Out Hospitality Conversations — Michael Tingsager on Agile Hospitality
Cassie Davison speaks with Michael Tingsager, host of the Hospitality Maverick podcast, about the leadership principles that help hospitality businesses remain resilient, adaptable and commercially strong. They explore purpose, mastery, transparency, team ownership and why people-first leadership matters in founder-led hospitality businesses.
S4labour — A Pint With Cassie Davison, The Gate Hangs Well
Cassie Davison talks about what pubs really mean to people, why hospitality is about far more than food and drink, and the role pubs play in creating belonging, connection and places where people can simply be themselves.
Redesigning the Future of Hospitality: Human-centric Hospitality
Weekly LinkedIn Live hosted by David Carruthers, with Nicole Antonio-Gadsdon, author of Help Wanted, and Cassie Davison, author of Stand Out Hospitality. A conversation about what the future of hospitality looks and feels like when people, places and planet are designed to thrive, including human connection, hiring, and the realities of independent hospitality ownership.
The Access Group — What Does Game-Changing Hospitality Marketing Look Like Right Now?
Cassie Davison joins The Access Group to explore how changing customer behaviour should shape hospitality marketing, including brand identity, storytelling, customer loyalty and how hospitality businesses can respond to trends without losing what makes them distinctive.
Stand Out Hospitality Conversations — Natalie Dunning on Hospitality Social Media Strategy
Cassie Davison speaks with Natalie Dunning, founder of Kitch Social, about how pubs, restaurants and cafés can use social media more effectively, why big-brand marketing often fails to translate to hospitality SMEs, and how clarity, local relevance and customer experience drive stronger engagement and bookings.
Stand Out Hospitality on YouTube
Cassie is serialising Stand Out Hospitality on YouTube, chapter by chapter.
Across the series, she reads and explores the ideas in the book, including the Five Pillars, customer loyalty, identity, belonging, standards, distinctiveness, story and the realities of building and leading a hospitality SME.
It creates a growing video library of the thinking behind Stand Out Hospitality, designed for hospitality founders who want to step back from the day-to-day and think more clearly about the business they are building.
[Watch Stand Out Hospitality on YouTube →]
About Cassie
Cassie Davison is a hospitality SME expert, author, speaker and consultant.
She has spent more than 30 years in hospitality, including 25 years building and leading founder-led pubs, cafés, restaurants and festival concepts.
She is the author of Stand Out Hospitality, a Business Book Awards 2026 finalist, and works with hospitality SMEs and the organisations that serve them.
Book Cassie
If you are planning an event, podcast, panel, interview or industry conversation and need a commercially grounded perspective on hospitality SMEs and founder-led businesses, Cassie is available for speaking and media contributions.