An Open Letter to Every Private Equity CEO:

You’re Killing the Customer Experience (and Here's How You’re Getting Away With It)

Let’s cut the nonsense and get to the meat:
Private equity is gutting the customer experience.

You may not see it from your corner office or while staring into a spreadsheet, but out here in the real world—the one where guests walk through doors, not dashboards—it’s painfully obvious.

I recently hosted a business event at a hotel managed by one of your portfolio companies. And what I witnessed wasn’t just bad service. It was a full-on case study in what happens when bean counters run the show and no one—not one soul—remembers what the “H” in “hospitality” actually stands for.

This post isn’t just a rant.
It’s a warning. And an invitation.

The Financial Takeover of Hospitality

You bought the brand. You brought in your “efficiency experts.”
You optimized, restructured, and recalibrated every operational process.
Then you celebrated shaving 2.3% off food cost and cutting two heads off the labor schedule.

What you didn’t notice?
You also slashed the soul out of the business.

Here’s what’s happening inside PE-owned service businesses today:

• Nickel-and-diming guests for basics that used to be included: Want coffee with breakfast? That’s $45 a gallon. Need both bacon and sausage? Sorry, pick one.

• Broken amenities left unfixed for months (or years): I’m talking empty shampoo bottles in guest rooms and a guest-use computer that’s been down for over a year.

• No front-line empowerment: Staff who can’t make decisions, solve problems, or even find a bottle of mustard for the hotdogs.

• Everything built around policies, not people: Breakfast arrives cold. Lunch is late. Dessert is served on a beat-up kitchen sheet pan (while the nice serving tray is used for clearing dirty dishes). No one bats an eye.

This isn’t hospitality.
It’s what happens when a spreadsheet replaces common sense and service culture is replaced with cost-cutting culture.

The C-Suite Culture Problem

Here’s where things really go off the rails.

When I looked up the executive team of this particular hotel management company (one of yours, by the way), I saw a tidal wave of titles like:

• Chief Revenue Officer

• VP of Finance & Strategy

• Director of Yield Management

You know what I didn’t see?

Anyone who’s ever handed a guest a room key, answered a phone, or solved a real-time service problem in their life.

It’s no wonder things are falling apart.
The people at the top are driving decisions based solely on cost containment and asset returns—because that’s all they know.

No one’s championing guest experience.
No one’s fighting for hospitality.
No one’s asking: “How do we actually make people want to come back?”

And because no one at the top cares, the people at the bottom don’t either.

What That Looks Like in the Real World

Let me give you the highlight reel from my recent experience (feel free to take notes):

• Three shampoo bottles: all empty.

• Burgers so big they didn’t fit the buns (but not in a good, gourmet way—just sloppy).

• No one to help lift chafing dish lids—guests had to do it themselves.

• Macaroni salad? Missing. Mustard? Nowhere.

• Housekeeper left dirty boot prints in the bathtub after "cleaning" the room.

• Cold food.

• Disengaged, disappearing staff.

• Guests cleaning up after themselves.

• A corporate office that refused to connect me to a single executive. “Not allowed,” they said.

And after I messaged the entire C-suite directly?
Crickets.

The Real Cost of Cutting Corners

You might be thinking: “So what? The P&L looks good.”
Sure. For now.

But here’s what you’re not seeing (or choosing to ignore):

• Loyalty is evaporating. Guests notice when you start shaving the good stuff off the top.

• Your brand reputation is rotting. One cold breakfast at a time.

• Your team is disengaged. Because they’re not empowered to fix anything.

• Your customers are telling people. And not in a “Hey, check this place out!” way.

You can only cheapen an experience so far before people walk.
And once they walk, no discount, promo code, or weak apology will bring them back.

The Solution? It Starts at the Top.

If you’ve read this far, maybe you’re one of the good ones.
Maybe you still care about building something that lasts—not just something that exits.

If that’s you, here’s what to do:

✅ Put hospitality leaders back into leadership.
✅ Empower your front line to make things right.
✅ Audit your experience like a customer, not a CFO.
✅ Make guest satisfaction an actual KPI—with consequences.
✅ And for the love of revenue, stop letting your systems out-prioritize your people.

Final Thoughts (A Friendly Fire Warning)

Look, I’ve run businesses.
I know margins matter. I know efficiency pays.
But if you think guest experience is just window dressing, you are setting yourself up for a very expensive wake-up call.

One day your spreadsheet will show a problem.
And you’ll ask: “Why are we down?”

The answer will be simple:

Because you stopped being worth coming back to.

P.S.
If you're serious about fixing this—about rebuilding a business that creates loyalty and profit—I’ll show you how.

Because experience isn’t a liability.
It’s your last true competitive advantage.

If you’re brave enough to invest in it.

Reach out to me: vance@deliverprofitsnow.com