A recruiter I follow wrote somethin this week that most hiring managers will not say out loud: the general manager’s job is quietly becoming a contract role. Fewer ten-year GMs, more specialists who come in, fix the pre-opening, the renovation, the guest scores, and move to the next challenge.
He is right. And I would take it one step further. It is not just the GM’s job. It is the whole shape of help in our industry.
I spent thirty years inside hotels, from waiter to general manager, and now I consult on the owner’s side of the table. Looking back, the best money I ever saw an owner spend was never on the longest contract. It was on the clearest task.
That is how I work today, and I think every owner should demand it, from consultants and increasingly from leaders too. Here is why.
1. The empty seat costs more than the specialist. Owners tell me they will wait for the perfect permanent hire. Meanwhile the pre-opening slips three months, the reviews slide, and the team drifts. A task-based expert costs money for ninety days. An empty chair costs money every single day, and it never sends an invoice, so nobody adds it up.
2. A task has a finish line. A retainer has a renewal. When scope is written down — raise GOP by this much, deliver the pre-opening by this date, fix the audit score — both sides know what done looks like. Work that cannot be measured has a way of never ending.
3. Specialists carry pattern recognition you cannot grow at home. A man who has opened fifteen hotels has made fifteen hotels’ worth of mistakes, on someone else’s budget. Your permanent team, however good, has lived one hotel. Sometimes you need the man who has seen the film before.
4. Your own people get stronger, not replaced. The right way to run a task-based assignment is shoulder to shoulder with your team, so the methods stay behind when the consultant leaves. If nothing transfers, you have rented a crutch, not hired a teacher.
5. The math favors it. A permanent senior hire costs salary, benefits, and the risk of a wrong fit for years. A defined assignment costs a fee, once, against a result you agreed in writing. Owners who think consultants are expensive should price the alternative honestly.
I say this from the middle of it, not from a podium. My last two assignments have been exactly this: task-based, eighteen months each. The deliverables were written down and the path laid out before the contract was signed. Every milestone of the eighteen-month journey was marked before I walked in the door. Both sides knew what done looked like from day one, and nobody has had to renegotiate anything since. That is not a theory. That is my calendar.
Now the caution, because this model fails too, and I have watched it fail.
A task-based engagement dies when the brief is vague. “Come and improve things” is not a task; it is a wish. Before you bring anyone in, write down the problem in one sentence, the number that will prove it is fixed, and the date. If you cannot do that, you are not ready to hire help — you are ready to sit down with your own team first. And some roles genuinely are permanent. You cannot task-force the daily running of a full hotel. The art is knowing which problems have edges and which do not.
The ten-year GM is not disappearing, and good ones are worth their weight in gold. But the owners who learn to buy expertise by the task — clear scope, agreed deliverables, a beginning and an end — will always outrun the ones still waiting for the perfect resume to walk through the door.
Hire for the problem. Measure the result. Shake hands at the finish line. That is what keeps both sides honest, and this old hotelier soul happy.
HPRD
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