Sometimes I want to quit.

But you don’t quit a business you love on a tired day right?

You may know that feeling. And sorry, but I won’t sell you the 5 ways to fall back in love with your business. Not here, not with me :)

Don’t mean stopping LOBBY specifically. More like everything around it. Hospitality, projects, meetings, plans, architects, contractors, budgets, admin, emails, another floor plan, another call about something being 12 centimeters too far to the left, another opening, another fucking photoshoot, another event where you carry shit around for six hours before everyone arrives and tells you how effortless the place looks.

I’ve been doing this for years now. Building places, talking about places, thinking about places, photographing places, writing about places. And some days I genuinely wonder how many more conversations I can have about the height of a counter before my brain quietly packs a bag and leaves my body.

Lately, I’ve been tired. Not the kind of tired that disappears after one good night of sleep, a surf session, or one day pretending you’re going to answer emails later. More like the kind of tired that makes you ask a question much bigger than the day deserves.

Do I really want to do this for another ten years?

And I think this is something we don’t talk about enough when we talk about entrepreneurship, especially when you actually like what you do. When people hate their job, the story is easy. Quit. Move. Change career. Start something else. Follow your passion. Buy a van. Open a ceramic studio in Portugal. Everyone has an opinion and a very inspiring quote saved somewhere.

But when the thing exhausting you is also the thing you love, the answer gets messier.

Because I still care. That’s the problem, I think. I care about the places. I care about the people building them. I care about the stupid chair arriving on time. I care about the name, the light, the smell, the first guest walking in, the way a space feels when it finally stops being a PDF and becomes a place where people sit, talk, eat, drink, work, kiss, argue, read, wait and return.

I care about all of it. And sometimes, honestly, I’m completely fucking sick of it.

So this week, I wanted to write about that. The tiredness that arrives when you’ve been doing something for a long time. The weird guilt of being bored by something you once dreamed about. The small moments that bring you back. And maybe the only rule I’ve found for now.

You don’t quit what you love on a tired day (I’ll make a tshirt of this one)

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I don’t wake up every morning obsessed with hospitality. Some mornings, I don’t want to hear the word. I don’t want to think about occupancy rates, coffee machines, staffing, guest flows, RFPs, or whether the fucking chair will arrive before the photographer.

Some mornings, I want to disappear. Ride somewhere. Surf. Take my car and ride somewhere. Open a tiny garage in a town nobody can pronounce. Spend three days without anyone asking me if the bar height should be 105 or 110. You know the fantasy. Every founder has one.
The fake simple life, where nobody calls you, nothing scales, no team waits for an answer, no payroll, no client asks for a deadline, no supplier forgets the thing they promised, and your biggest operational issue is choosing between two coffees in the morning.

Beautiful fantasy ahah

Because after a few days, something usually happens. I walk into a space we are working on. Someone sends me a photo of something they finally built. We find the right name for a project. I see people sitting together in a place that was an empty room a year ago. I find an piece that is absolutely perfect for LOBBY’s office. Someone writes to me after reading this letter saying they finally opened their place.

And there it is again. That little fucking thing.

I care.

Loving the work doesn’t protect you from being tired of it

There’s a very childish idea around passion, like passion should feel like permanent electricity. Like if you really love what you do, you should wake up every morning with the energy of a motivational speaker who had too much matcha, ready to fight for your mission, optimise your calendar, and post a thoughtful LinkedIn carousel before breakfast.

I don’t believe that anymore, (and listen, I promise myself I won’t be on this stage anymore, and I’ll make my businesses work without it…)

Passion after 15 years has a different face. At the beginning, everything is new. Your first client, your first opening, your first team member, your first press article, your first invoice that makes you think maybe this strange thing can actually work. Every small win feels enormous because you have no reference point yet. Everything is proof. Everything feels like it matters because you’re still building the first version of the story.

Then time passes. You’ve done it before. You’ve opened places before. You’ve had the meetings, the delays, the budget issues, the client panic, the opening week adrenaline, and the Monday after, when the place is open and real life enters without asking permission.

After a while, novelty stops carrying you. What remains is much less sexy. Work, repetition, responsibility, and love, if you’re lucky (I’m the luckiest on this one, and I can tell you that any piece of LOBBY wouldn’t exist if I was not)

And the love for work is still there, but it doesn’t always look like excitement. Sometimes it looks like showing up tired

And that’s what doing something for a long time does. It removes the fantasy and leaves you with the real relationship. And real relationships have fatigue inside them. Even with work. Even with places. Especially with hospitality, because hospitality gives you the beautiful thing and the broken thing in the same hour.

A guest says the place feels amazing, and the dishwasher breaks. A client sends a lovely message, and the budget explodes. A room finally comes together, and the sofa is delayed. Someone writes best place in town, and someone else complains about the ice like you personally attacked their family.

This job is emotionally stupid sometimes.

And still, we stay.

The fantasy of quitting often hides a need to evolve

When I feel like quitting, I try not to trust the first version of the thought, because the first version is usually dramatic. Let’s get the family in the car, grab the surfboards, Lea’s cameras and sell everything else. Stop the studio. Move somewhere. Open a garage. Disappear. Block everyone. Grow tomatoes. Become a guy who says, I don’t really do email, with a calm face and suspiciously clean hands.

Incredible lifestyle. Probably unbearable after nine days.

Most of the time, I don’t think I actually want to quit. I want something to change. From the rhythm to the role. The pressure also, the kind of projects I accept and the amount of tiny decisions that land on my desk.
The difference between what only I can do and what I keep doing because I’ve done it for years.

That’s where the question becomes more useful. Maybe I want fewer projects with more depth. Maybe I want to write with more honesty and less content pressure. Maybe I want LOBBY Studio to choose better and say no earlier. Maybe I want the media side to become more alive. Maybe I want Frank’s Market to teach me something that client work can’t. Maybe I want to take more photographs because it gives me back the eye that business sometimes steals.

Maybe I want the same world, but a different position inside it.

I’ve seen this with hospitality founders too. A restaurant owner says they’re done, but what they really mean is they’re done being the only person who can fix everything.

A hotel founder says they lost the love, but the place has slowly become payroll, repairs, reviews, staffing and bank calls, with no space left for the original reason they built it.

A café owner says they want to sell, and sometimes what they need first is two real days off and someone else opening the place on Monday morning.

That doesn’t mean quitting is always wrong. Sometimes leaving is the right move. Sometimes the project has taken everything it could take. Sometimes the next chapter needs a clean break, and pretending otherwise just turns everyone bitter.

But tired days are terrible strategic advisors. They speak loudly. They sound convincing. They wear the voice of truth. Most of the time, they need food, sleep, and movement.

Big decisions deserve better conditions.

Staying has to include movement

The line that keeps coming back to me is simple (and I’m proud of this one): you don’t quit what you love on a tired day.

But staying can’t mean becoming a museum of your own habits. That would be depressing, and very bad for the people around you. Staying has to include movement. Otherwise you become the founder who still tells the same story from ten years ago, still fights the same battles, still opens the same tabs, still complains about the same things, still says I’m tired every quarter while changing absolutely nothing.

I have no interest in becoming that guy. Nobody needs that guy. That guy has a podcast and bad lighting.

Maybe the point is to keep the love and change the form. LOBBY can evolve. My role can evolve. The kind of projects we take can evolve. The way I write can evolve. The podcast can evolve. The studio can evolve. The things we build ourselves can evolve. The relationship with hospitality can evolve.

That feels healthier than quitting from a place of fatigue.

The real danger is continuing without changing anything. That’s where people become bitter. That’s where founders start hating the thing they built and that’s where the work becomes a loop. Another meeting, same pressure, same place, same founder pretending everything is fine because the business still looks alive from the outside.

No thanks.

I still want to care and to be surprised. I still want to walk into an empty space and imagine something. I still want to see people use a place in a way we couldn’t fully predict.

But I also want to be honest about the cost. Doing something you love for years doesn’t turn you into a machine.

What would you stop doing tomorrow if ego, money and habit were less involved?

What would you protect because it still makes you care?

What decision are you trying to make on a tired day?

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I wish I had a cleaner ending. I don’t.

I haven’t found the secret way to stay motivated. I don’t wake up every morning grateful, focused, energized, perfectly aligned with my mission and ready to optimise my calendar like a LinkedIn monk. Some mornings I want to quit. Some mornings I want to disappear. Some mornings I’m bored by my own world. Some mornings I feel like I’ve said everything I had to say.

Then something happens.

A place opens, I meet someone building the dream place. A location and a gold card.

And I care again.

Maybe that’s the whole thing. Maybe doing something for a long time looks less like constant fire and more like returning. Returning because some part of you still knows there is something here.

I don’t know if I’ll be doing exactly this in ten years. I hope not, actually. I hope it changes. I hope I change.

But today I’m still here. Still making places. Still opening too many tabs. Still talking to architects. Still writing this letter every week.

Why?

I don’t have a sophisticated answer.

You don’t quit what you love, I guess.

Or at least not on a tired day.

See you next week,

Kevin