Steele at a Glance | Levelling the Playing Field with Collective Tech

                                                  

Steele at a Glance | Levelling the Playing Field with Collective Tech

In our first post, we touched on a reality facing hospitality operators everywhere: the way venues compete is changing.

Rising costs, labour pressure, tighter margins and changing customer expectations are forcing operators to rethink some of the traditional ways they do business. For smaller clubs, boutique hotels and independent venues, that challenge is often made harder by scale.

Large hospitality groups can spread the cost of technology, marketing, procurement and data systems across dozens of venues. Independents usually cannot.

But independence does not necessarily have to mean operating alone.

So, what could a more collective approach actually look like?

The Power of Shared Loyalty Networks

Customer loyalty is one example.

For a standalone club, hotel or restaurant, a digital loyalty program can be difficult to make genuinely engaging. A customer might visit once or twice a month, earn a few points, and eventually forget the app is even on their phone.

Now imagine that same customer could earn and redeem rewards across a curated network of independent venues.

A local club, a regional hotel, a restaurant and a boutique accommodation provider could remain completely separate businesses while participating in the same broader loyalty ecosystem.

For the customer, the value proposition becomes stronger. Rewards accumulate faster, there are more places to use them, and there is a greater incentive to remain within that network.

For operators, the potential benefits go beyond loyalty points. Technology costs can be shared, cross-promotion becomes easier and participating venues can gain a much clearer understanding of how customers move between different hospitality businesses.

Of course, a shared network also raises important questions. Who owns the customer relationship? How are reward liabilities divided? How is data managed? How do venues avoid subsidising one another?

Those are not small questions, but they are design problems worth solving rather than reasons to dismiss the idea altogether.

Beyond Loyalty

Shared loyalty is only one example of what collective technology could enable.

Lets consider purchasing power.

A group of ten independent venues negotiating individually still looks like ten small customers to a supplier. The same ten venues purchasing collectively can suddenly represent meaningful volume.

The venues remain independent, but their negotiating position changes.

The same principle could apply to marketing. Independent venues could contribute to shared campaigns that none could justify funding alone, while still maintaining their own brands and customer relationships.

Then there is benchmarking.

Most independent operators know their own numbers, but often have very little context around them.

Is a 28% beverage cost good for a venue of your size? Is your labour percentage genuinely high, or simply typical for your trading model? Is your average customer spend increasing at the same rate as comparable venues?

A secure benchmarking network could allow operators to compare performance against genuinely similar businesses without exposing commercially sensitive information.

That type of information is readily available to large hospitality groups because they already operate multiple venues.

There is no reason independent businesses could not find ways to create some of that same advantage collectively.

Independence Without Isolation

The point is not that every hospitality business should suddenly share its systems, customers or purchasing decisions.

Independence remains one of the greatest strengths of smaller operators. It allows venues to develop their own identity, respond quickly to their communities and offer experiences that large groups often struggle to replicate.

But there is an important distinction between being independent and being isolated.

Technology gives smaller operators an opportunity to cooperate in areas where scale matters, while still competing and operating independently everywhere else.

Perhaps the question for hospitality is no longer simply:

How do smaller venues compete with the resources of large hospitality groups?

Maybe the better question is:

Which advantages of scale could independent venues create for themselves by working together?

We do not need to reinvent the wheel on our own, we just need to share the drive.

Thank you for tuning into this second instalment of Steele at a Glance. Keep smiling, keep serving, and let’s keep finding smart ways to support each other.

Ben