Hi all,
First of all, sorry.
Sorry for the new subscribers of this week. You won’t get into any cool mid-century branding topic :)
This week, I want to talk about something deeply unsexy, which usually means it is probably more important than the things we like to talk about.
Let’s talk about BACK OFFICE baby.
I know. Very hot. You can already feel the glamour arriving. And true, nobody opens Instagram and thinks like Woooow, I really hope this guy from LOBBY talks about internal dashboards and supplier workflows this week.
Fair enough. I also prefer talking about chairs, coffee, hotels, photography, naming, interiors, and the exact feeling of a place when you walk in and immediately know someone gave a shit.
But the longer I build hospitality projects, the more I think the invisible part decides if the visible part survivs.
Everyone loves the front of house. That’s the part guests feel, and of course it matters. But behind that, there’s another place. A much less sexy one. The place where requests arrive, suppliers send invoices, coffee needs to be ordered, clients ask for something outside the scope, someone has to validate a price and the founder says “yes, I’ll remember” with the confidence of a man about to forget everything in twelve minutes.
For a long time, I thought we were quite structured at LOBBY, specially when we had to push our back office with the olympics and the project we’ve done for VISA.
Then LOBBY became a small ecosystem with a lots of living parts.
From LOBBY Studio, client projects, our own projects, things we operate, things we build, things we probably shouldn’t start but will anyway.
At some point, the romantic chaos became just chaos wearing nicer shoes.
You know how it is. Your friend tells you about this beautiful Notion template, that runs its company itself, then you buy this subscription that adds x10 to production time for your employee :)
We had too many tools and too many small decisions hidden in people’s heads, and too many processes depending on someone being available and magically remembering the thing at the right moment.
So we started building a proper back office. A dashboard that opens every morning. A place to see what matters before the day starts eating your face.
A system to manage B2B requests, client follow-ups, suppliers, project status, tasks, stock, purchasing, coffee shop orders, invoices, and all the tiny operational things that never look urgent until they suddenly become the only thing anyone can talk about.
We also started coding a lot of our own tools with AI. Small internal tools. Personalized tools. Sometimes ugly tools, but useful ugly, which is an underrated category.
Tools built around how we actually work, instead of forcing our company into a SaaS product designed by someone who has never opened a café, managed a client request, ordered furniture from three countries, or discovered at 8:42am that the thing everyone needs today was never ordered.
In 2025, our SaaS expenses were more than €15,000 a year. In 2026, we reduced them to around €3,500, and the funny thing is that the system now works better. Less subscription theatre. More tools that fit our processes. More internal logic. More direct workflows. More things happening without me being the human bridge between every problem and every answer.
This didn’t turn us into a perfect company. Let’s stay calm.
I still open too many tabs. I still send voice notes that should probably be a proper task. I still occasionally use my brain as a project management tool, which is very brave and very stupid at the same time. But a lot of the repeated friction disappeared. A lot of our processes now onboard through tools. A lot of stupid admin weight has been removed from the team. And most importantly, the businesses feel less dependent on memory.
That’s a big one. Because when you run places, projects, clients, products, coffee, furniture, events, content and a studio at the same time, memory becomes expensive.
And this week is special because I’ll make the format of this letter a bit shorter as I’ll be hosting a Live Event on October 5th to share EVERYTHING I built for LOBBY in back office to help you setup your own.
So if you run a house collection, a coffee shop, a small hotel, you better jump on this live talk because it will be worth it!
