The past week, I came across the question I think most place’s founders should ask before opening a place.
I live where people go on holidays. And its always the same thing when we have friends visiting:
I want to get my hotel here or my coffee shop, then I could surf whenever I want and enjoy the beach with the kids.
Here is my answer to this: my last surf session was last Sunday, and the one before, 4 months ago.
So the question to ask yourself, would be a much more personal one.
What kind of life does this project create if it works?
Because that’s the part people forget.
Founders are usually very good at imagining the place. The room, the light, the music, the menu, the atmosphere, the mood, the guests they want to attract, the story they want to tell. They can see the finished thing very clearly.
What they often don’t see as clearly is the life attached to it.
The opening hours.
The staffing pressure.
The weekends gone.
The late nights.
The seasonality.
The fact that a place doesn’t just need your taste. It needs your time, your attention, your nervous system, and sometimes your entire calendar.
And this is where things get interesting.
Because some projects are beautiful on paper and exhausting in real life. Some concepts sound exciting but create terrible founder lives. Some places look sexy from the outside and quietly eat the person who built them.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately because the hospitality world has a strange tendency to romanticize what it takes to run certain formats. A dinner restaurant sounds beautiful until you remember it means every evening belongs to someone else. A bakery sounds charming until your alarm starts acting like an enemy. A seasonal hotel sounds dreamy until you realize your year is now one long conversation with pressure and payroll.
That doesn’t mean these projects are bad.
It just means they might be wrong for the life you actually want.
And I think more founders should be honest about that before they fall in love with the place.
Because the real question is not only Do I want to build this?
It’s also Do I want to live with what this builds around me?
In the extended version, I want to go deeper into that. Because I think a lot of people are not choosing projects with enough honesty. They’re choosing identities. And those are not always the same thing.
