We are starting a desk about the women who own these rooms. Here is the deal.
A new desk covering the women who own bars, clubs and restaurants. Here is what it will be, what it will not be, and how to be in it.
There is a particular kind of profile that gets written about women in hospitality. You know the one. It leads with how hard it was to be taken seriously, spends a paragraph on a supplier who assumed she was the hostess, and ends on something about resilience.
Those things happen and they are worth reporting. But they are not an operating story, and an operator reading it learns nothing she can use on Tuesday.
This desk is the other thing.
What we will publish
How the deal actually got done. What the purchase price was, where the money came from, what the landlord wanted, what the licence took, what got personally guaranteed. The parts that usually get compressed into "and then I opened my bar."
The first-year numbers, where owners will share them. What it actually cost. What was underestimated. What the break-even month turned out to be versus the one in the plan.
The decisions that were close. The lease that was walked away from. The partner who did not work out. The concept that changed six months in because the room told them to.
What they would tell you before you sign. Every operator who has done it has two or three of these. They are worth more than any business plan template.
What we will not publish
We will not run a profile that is mostly adversity. If a woman's operating story is genuinely shaped by who she is, that belongs in it, told the way she tells it. But it is not the assignment, and it is not the reason she is interesting.
We will not run numbers an owner has not agreed to publish. Anything financial is confirmed with the operator before it goes out, in the form she approved.
We will not run PR. If a publicist sends it, it does not run here.
Why this desk exists
Ownership is where the leverage is. An operator who owns her room makes different decisions than one who runs someone else's, and the path from managing to owning is the least-documented transition in this industry. Most of what exists is either a franchise pitch or a memoir.
There is a real body of hard-won operating knowledge sitting with women who own bars, clubs and restaurants, and almost none of it is written down anywhere another operator can find it.
That is the whole reason for this.
How to be in it
Reply to this email.
If you own a bar, club, restaurant or venue, or you are partway through buying one, we want the operating story. You choose what is on the record. You see every number before it publishes. You can kill anything you do not want in print, up until it goes out.
If you know someone whose story should be here, send it to her.
We are not looking for people who have already been profiled. We are looking for operators who have never been asked.
Women Who Own the Night is part of RollCall Media. We publish operators, not consultants. Reported facts link to their sources, modelled examples are labelled, and if we get something wrong we correct it in the open.