Real hospitality leadership reduces staff turnover, lifts team productivity, and builds guest loyalty — and according to Eoin Clancy, Principal Associate at Galileo Hospitality Consultants and a 40-year veteran of Hilton, Marriott, and the Cheesecake Factory, the clearest measure of a great leader is simple: would your team drop everything to work with you again?

Would you pass that test?

Michelle Pascoe is a Certified Speaking Professional and hospitality training expert with over 30 years' experience helping clubs, hotels, and hospitality venues build service cultures that retain staff and delight guests. In this episode, Michelle sits down with Eoin Clancy for a candid, experience-rich conversation about what servant leadership looks like in practice, why the hospitality revolving door keeps spinning, and what it actually takes to slow it down.

Servant leadership works in hospitality because it creates the conditions where people stay longer, work harder, achieve their KPIs, and genuinely enjoy their jobs. Eoin learned this first-hand under a general manager at a 1,674-room Marriott in Atlanta who knew the names of all 1,800 staff members. Not from name badges. He actually knew them. That is what retention looks like in practice.

Michelle Pascoe and Eoin also explore the multigenerational workforce challenge facing hospitality operators right now, and why blending age groups on the floor creates a stabilising dynamic that younger-only or older-only teams simply cannot replicate.

Key Takeaways

Next Steps

About Michelle

Michelle Pascoe helps hospitality leaders build multigenerational teams, lift service standards, and embed values-led culture. A Certified Speaking Professional with over 30 years in the hospitality industry and Disney Institute Alumni credentials, Michelle delivers bespoke keynotes, workshops, and leadership programs for clubs, hotels, and hospitality venues across Australia and internationally. 

Book customer service workshops and middle management programs: https://www.michellepascoe.com/traininganddevelopmentprograms

About Eoin

Eoin Clancy is the Principal Associate at Galileo Hospitality Consultants and a seasoned hospitality professional with 40 years of hard-won experience across Hilton, Marriott, the Crowne Plaza, and the Cheesecake Factory. He has designed, built, and opened operations across Europe, the United States, and the Middle East, including his own multi-unit ventures. Eoin now brings that operational depth to hospitality businesses navigating leadership, culture, and performance challenges.

Website: www.galileohospitality.co.uk

Poor customer service keeps winning in registered clubs because the cost of inaction is invisible. Hospitality training expert Michelle Pascoe, a Certified Speaking Professional with over 30 years in the industry, explains that until club leaders build a single service liability number, training investment stays optional, budgets stay cut, and service standards keep drifting.
What would change at your club if the board could finally see what poor service is actually costing them?
In this episode, Michelle identifies the structural reason service training doesn't stick: the environment it lands in was never designed to hold it. Training works because the culture surrounding it reinforces it. When middle managers aren't modelling the same standards, when recognition systems only notice what goes wrong, and when frontline staff intelligence never reaches the decision-making level, even the best workshop evaporates within weeks.
The same revolving door that loses members also loses good people. Every time a service-oriented team member leaves, they take with them the member relationships they built, the institutional knowledge they developed, and the standard they were holding.
Key Takeaways

Next Steps

About Michelle

Michelle Pascoe helps hospitality leaders build multigenerational teams, lift service standards, and embed values-led culture. A Certified Speaking Professional with over 30 years in the hospitality industry, Michelle delivers bespoke keynotes, workshops, and leadership programs for clubs, hotels, and hospitality venues across Australia and internationally.

Book customer service workshops and middle management programs: https://www.michellepascoe.com/traininganddevelopmentprograms

Is customer experience dead? No -- but the way hospitality leaders have been managing it is. Rick Denton, host of CX Passport and a 30-year corporate customer experience veteran, joins Michelle Pascoe to explain why CX as a discipline isn't dying, but the branding around it is -- and what hospitality leaders must do differently to stay ahead.

Are your venues investing in the right things, or are you cutting the very people who make the guest experience worth returning for?

In this conversation, Michelle and Rick get specific about what hospitality leaders are getting wrong right now -- from over-relying on data dashboards without acting on them, to cutting frontline staff in the name of efficiency and wondering why revenue is falling. Rick's view is direct: CX will never die because customers and experiences will always exist. What's dying is the version of CX that couldn't prove its value in dollars.

Key Takeaways

Next Steps

About Michelle

Michelle Pascoe helps hospitality leaders build multigenerational teams, lift service standards, and embed values-led culture. A Certified Speaking Professional with over 30 years in the hospitality industry, Michelle delivers bespoke keynotes, workshops, and leadership programs for clubs, hotels, and hospitality venues across Australia and internationally. Book customer service workshops and middle management programs: https://www.michellepascoe.com/traininganddevelopmentprograms

About Rick

Rick Denton is the creator and host of CX Passport, a global customer experience podcast with more than 250 episodes and listeners in over 100 countries. Before podcasting, Rick spent three decades leading customer-focused initiatives inside large organisations. He is also the co-host of The Loud Quiet, a podcast and community he launched with his wife Clancy for empty nesters navigating a major life transition -- which became the basis for their 2026 book, The Loud Quiet: Love, Laughter and Life in the Empty Nest. Rick is based in Dallas, Texas.

Guest loyalty in hospitality breaks down when operators rely on third-party booking platforms and treat checkout as the end of the guest journey. Michelle Pascoe, Certified Speaking Professional and hospitality training expert with over 30 years' experience, explores how hospitality operators can own the guest relationship, reduce platform dependency, and build the direct connections that turn one-time guests into loyal repeat customers.

Are your guests leaving happy and never coming back -- and you don't even know why?

In this episode, Michelle sits down with Carlos Castillo, founder of DirectBookMe, to examine the service gap that opens after checkout and what smart operators are doing to close it.

Guest loyalty in hospitality is built or lost after checkout. When operators hand the guest relationship to an OTA or third-party platform, the guest remembers where they booked -- not where they stayed. The data to fix this already exists inside most hospitality businesses. It simply isn't being used.

Michelle and Carlos discuss why the post-checkout gap is where loyalty disappears and how to close it with direct, intentional systems.

Key Takeaways

Next Steps

About Michelle

Michelle Pascoe helps hospitality leaders build multigenerational teams, lift service standards, and embed values-led culture. A Certified Speaking Professional with over 30 years in the hospitality industry, Michelle delivers bespoke keynotes, workshops, and leadership programs for clubs, hotels, and hospitality venues across Australia and internationally.

Book customer service workshops and middle management programs: https://www.michellepascoe.com/traininganddevelopmentprograms

About Carlos

Carlos Castillo is the founder of DirectBookMe, a platform helping hospitality operators increase direct bookings, build stronger guest relationships, and move beyond third-party platform dependency. Based in Arizona, Carlos works with property owners and operators globally to create repeat, direct business.

Website: www.directbookme.co | Email: [email protected]

Human connection cannot be automated away in hospitality. Michelle Pascoe, Certified Speaking Professional and hospitality training expert with over 30 years' experience, sits down with Brian Vujnovic, CEO and Co-Founder of MIA Hospitality Management, to explore how AI is reshaping hotel operations and guest experiences while the human touch remains the irreplaceable core of the industry.

Can technology make us more human in hospitality -- or does it risk taking away the very thing guests come for?

Michelle Pascoe is a Certified Speaking Professional and hospitality training expert with over 30 years' experience helping clubs, hotels, and hospitality venues build service cultures that retain staff and delight guests. Michelle brings together global voices to explore what it really takes to lead, connect, and deliver excellence in hospitality.

Brian Vujnovic brings 25+ years of hotel operations, development, and asset management expertise. His view is clear: AI will automate the administrative so that hospitality teams can invest more in the experiential. The guest who wants a seamless text interaction gets that. The guest who wants a human moment gets that too. Both are possible -- and both are necessary.

Key Takeaways

Next Steps

About Michelle

Michelle Pascoe helps hospitality leaders build multigenerational teams, lift service standards, and embed values-led culture. A Certified Speaking Professional with over 30 years in the hospitality industry, Michelle delivers bespoke keynotes, workshops, and leadership programs for clubs, hotels, and hospitality venues across Australia and internationally.

Book customer service workshops and middle management programs: https://www.michellepascoe.com/traininganddevelopmentprograms



About Brian

Brian Vujnovic brings 25+ years of hotel operations, development, and asset management expertise. He previously led asset management at Robert Finvarb Companies, overseeing 10 new hotel developments, and played a key role in launching award-winning rooftop venues Rosa Sky in Miami and Charlie Park in Tallahassee. He now leads MIA Hospitality Management, a Marriott and Hyatt-approved platform driving operational excellence and portfolio growth across the US.

Website: https://miahospitalitymanagement.com/

Building a leadership pipeline in hospitality means investing in your managers' skills, confidence, and capacity before a crisis forces your hand. Michelle Pascoe, Certified Speaking Professional with over 30 years in the Australian hospitality industry, explains why promoting without a development plan sets managers up to struggle and clubs up for costly, avoidable turnover.

If your best manager resigned tomorrow, who would step up — and are they actually ready?

In this episode, Michelle draws on conversations with three of the sharpest leadership minds she has interviewed this month — Christin Marvin, Hanna Bauer, and Rich Ellis — to bring together a practical three-layer framework for building leaders who last.

Michelle Pascoe's core argument is this: a leadership pipeline is not a spreadsheet or a succession chart. It is a living, breathing investment in your people. When clubs promote the most loyal person in the room without a structured development plan, they are not building a pipeline — they are setting that person up to struggle and the venue up for the consequences: manager burnout, team turnover, culture drift, and the CEO back in the weeds handling issues that should have been resolved two levels down.

The clubs that will thrive over the next five years are the ones building their leaders now, not when the crisis hits. Michelle Pascoe's Middle Management Movement and Executive Leaders Movement programs are built specifically for registered clubs and hospitality venues that are ready to make that investment.

Key Takeaways

Next Steps

Resources & Links

About Michelle

Michelle Pascoe helps hospitality leaders build multigenerational teams, lift service standards, and embed values-led culture. A Certified Speaking Professional with over 30 years in the hospitality industry, Michelle delivers bespoke keynotes, workshops, and leadership programs for clubs, hotels, and hospitality venues across Australia and internationally.

Book customer service workshops and middle management programs: https://www.michellepascoe.com/traininganddevelopmentprograms

Burnout in hospitality teams shows up long before the dramatic crash — in dropped shoulders, extra coffees, and withdrawal from team conversations. Michelle Pascoe, a Certified Speaking Professional with over 30 years' experience in hospitality, and energy coach Rich Ellis share practical tools for reading early warning signs and embedding a simple 1-to-10 check-in system that prevents burnout before it becomes a resignation.

Are you seeing the signs in your team — or are you too busy to notice them?

If you have ever ended a busy season wondering how your team made it through, or found yourself managing someone's exit that you never saw coming, this episode is worth your full attention.

Rich Ellis has spent nearly two decades helping leaders understand that energy is not a wellness topic — it is a performance discipline. He and Michelle Pascoe explore what burnout actually looks like in a hospitality environment, why the standard responses rarely work, and what small, sustainable changes make a real difference over time. This is not a conversation about self-care programs or office fruit bowls. It is a practical framework for leaders who are serious about retaining their best people.

Key Takeaways

LINKS AND RESOURCES 

WORK WITH MICHELLE 

Michelle Pascoe helps hospitality leaders build multigenerational teams, lift service standards, and embed values-led culture. A Certified Speaking Professional with over 30 years in the hospitality industry, Michelle delivers bespoke keynotes, workshops, and leadership programs for clubs, hotels, and hospitality venues across Australia and internationally. 

Book customer service workshops and middle management programs: https://www.michellepascoe.com/traininganddevelopmentprograms

ABOUT RICH ELLIS 

Rich Ellis is an energy, resilience, and wellbeing coach with nearly 20 years of experience working with business owners, leaders, and corporate teams. Known as The Energy Coach, Rich helps organisations take control of their energy through practical, sustainable habit change — combining his background in fitness coaching with workplace wellbeing strategy to reduce burnout and build cultures where people genuinely thrive. 

Website: https://richellis.nz/

Middle management in hospitality is the critical connector between leadership vision and frontline guest delivery. Certified Speaking Professional Michelle Pascoe and leadership expert Hanna Bauer of Heartnomics agree: middle managers who make daily trust deposits, hold non-negotiable service standards, and champion psychological safety are the primary defence against team burnout and high staff turnover in clubs and hotels.

What if the gap between your service vision and the experience your guests actually receive comes down to one overlooked role in your organisation?

Subscribe to The Michelle Pascoe Hospitality Podcast on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify.

In this episode, Michelle sits down with Hanna Bauer, founder and CEO of Heartnomics, to explore why love and excellence are not opposing forces in leadership, and why the middle manager holds the heartbeat of any hospitality organisation.

The conversation covers a critical truth: you cannot consistently meet high service standards without first acknowledging the human delivering them. As Hanna explains, love in leadership is not about softening standards. It means holding them with consistency, because inconsistent standards are not kind, they are confusing. The standard does not change to fit the person. What changes is how leaders communicate, support, and see the people upholding it.

Michelle Pascoe has spent decades working with hospitality venues that confuse having standards with communicating them. This episode tackles exactly that gap, with practical insights on how to stop burnout before it starts, how to lead through rapid change without burying your team, and how to make the daily trust deposits that mean your people show up for the hard moments.

Key Takeaways

LINKS AND RESOURCES

WORK WITH MICHELLE

Michelle Pascoe helps hospitality leaders build multigenerational teams, lift service standards, and embed values-led culture. A Certified Speaking Professional with over 30 years in the hospitality industry, Michelle delivers bespoke keynotes, workshops, and leadership programs for clubs, hotels, and hospitality venues across Australia and internationally.

ABOUT HANNA BAUER

Hanna Bauer is the founder and CEO of Heartnomics, a leadership and organisational transformation firm based in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. A Maxwell Leadership faculty member, Lean Six Sigma Black Belt, and Baldrige examiner, Hanna blends human-centred leadership with practical systems to help organisations eliminate burnout and align culture with purpose. Her Heartnomics framework draws on her experience as a childhood heart disease survivor to reframe love and excellence as the twin foundations of sustainable leadership performance.

Effective restaurant leadership means moving beyond survival mode into a CEO mindset built on three pillars: people, process, and profit. Michelle Pascoe, a hospitality training expert with over 30 years' experience helping clubs, hotels, and hospitality venues build service cultures that retain staff and delight guests, sits down with restaurant coach Christin Marvin to share how independent operators can scale intentionally, reduce staff turnover, and build culture-led teams that run without the owner present. 

Are you building a business, or building a trap for yourself? 

Subscribe to The Michelle Pascoe Hospitality Podcast on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify. 

In this episode, Michelle is joined by Christin Marvin, founder of Solutions by Christin and creator of the Independent Restaurant Framework. Christin has helped restaurant groups scale from six to 48 locations in seven years. Her message is direct: hospitality businesses cannot cut their way to profitability, and prioritising wellness is not a weakness. It is the competitive edge most owners are still missing. 

Cutting staff to save money does not save your business. It destroys the guest experience, drives customers away, and creates a spiral that is far harder to recover from than the original cost pressure. The answer is smarter labour scheduling, stronger leadership development, and the discipline to step back from operations so your team can step up. 

Key Takeaways   

🎙️Subscribe to The Michelle Pascoe Hospitality Podcast on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify: https://www.michellepascoe.com/The-Michelle-Pascoe-Hospitality-Podcast

📖 Join Michelle's newsletter for leadership, culture, and service excellence: https://www.michellepascoe.com/blog

🎓 Book customer service workshops and leadership programs tailored to clubs, hotels, and hospitality venues: https://www.michellepascoe.com/traininganddevelopmentprograms

About Michelle

Michelle Pascoe helps hospitality leaders build multigenerational teams, lift service standards, and embed values-led culture. A Certified Speaking Professional with over 30 years in the hospitality industry, Michelle delivers bespoke keynotes, workshops, and leadership programs for clubs, hotels, and hospitality venues across Australia and internationally. Book customer service workshops and leadership programs: https://www.michellepascoe.com/traininganddevelopmentprograms

About Christin   

Christin Marvin is a restaurant coach, speaker, and author based in Denver, Colorado. As founder of Solutions by Christin and creator of the Independent Restaurant Framework, she specialises in helping independent and multi-unit restaurant owners scale without losing their minds or their culture. With over 20 years of hands-on experience across fine dining and high-volume growth concepts, she has helped restaurant groups scale from six to 48 locations in seven years and has opened 13 restaurants. Christin is the author of Multi-Unit Mastery: Simplify Operations, Maximize Profits and The Hospitality Leaders Roadmap: Move from Ordinary to Extraordinary, and hosts the Restaurant Leadership Podcast. 

Find her at https://www.columbinehospitality.com/.

Or book a FREE coaching session here: https://api.leadconnectorhq.com/widget/bookings/christin-marvin-personal-calendar-r1jjarmnw

When was the last time your venue did something for your community because you decided it mattered — not because a grant required it?

In this month's solo recap, Michelle draws on four extraordinary conversations to make the case that community is not something you bolt onto the bottom of your annual report. Community IS the job.

Christopher Hill of Hands Up Holidays and Impact Destinations has spent twenty years proving that when you give people the opportunity to contribute to something beyond themselves, it changes them. His framework — that meaningful luxury means both parties leave better than they arrived — applies directly to every hospitality service interaction.

Damien Schofield, founder of the Younger Heroes, built nature-based programs reconnecting veteran families because he lived what happens when community breaks down. His insight that resilience spreads through a team from the leader down is one of the most important leadership principles covered this month.

Debbie Dickson at The Ary Toukley turned a domestic violence hotspot ranking into a board-adopted action plan, eight years of specialist staff training, and a statewide committee role. Her team didn't wait for permission. They saw the need, they had the platform, and they acted.

Jenny Holt at Club Rivers has built a community culture so embedded that her team volunteers over 1,000 hours a year — not from mandate, not for pay, because the culture makes it feel like the obvious thing to do.

In this episode, Michelle Pascoe covers:

Links

Subscribe to The Michelle Pascoe Hospitality Podcast on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify: ⁠michellepascoe.com/The-Michelle-Pascoe-Hospitality-Podcast⁠

Join Michelle's newsletter for hospitality leadership, culture, and service excellence: ⁠michellepascoe.com/blog⁠

Book customer service workshops and leadership programs tailored to clubs, hotels, and hospitality venues: ⁠michellepascoe.com/traininganddevelopmentprograms⁠

Work With Michelle

Michelle Pascoe helps hospitality leaders build multigenerational teams, lift service standards, and embed values-led culture. A Certified Speaking Professional with over 30 years in the hospitality industry, Michelle delivers bespoke keynotes, workshops, and leadership programs for clubs, hotels, and hospitality venues across Australia and internationally. 

Book customer service workshops and leadership programs: ⁠michellepascoe.com/traininganddevelopmentprograms⁠