The long way round —
and why it matters.

Francois Briel spent the first decade of his career in F&B — managing restaurants, bars, and banqueting operations inside South Africa's most demanding luxury properties. He learned cost control from the inside, built menus that worked commercially, and trained teams to hold a standard night after night.

The move into general management changed his perspective without erasing the first one. He became responsible for the whole hotel — rooms, revenue, owner relations — but he never stopped understanding F&B as the part of the operation most GMs got wrong. Too often treated as a liability or a tick-box, rarely as a genuine revenue driver or a brand signal.

He now works with hotel owners, operators, and asset managers who want an F&B consultant who thinks in terms of the whole business. His work is hands-on, direct, and built around what the numbers actually need to do — not what looks good in a presentation.