20 Years in Operations — Beyond What School Teaches

I was a good student. School came easily to me — perhaps too easily — so while my classmates were focused on exams, I was building a small catering company with a group of friends. Dinners, cocktails, weddings, baptisms. Real clients, real pressure, real money on the line.

I didn't realize it at the time, but that was where my real education started.

When I joined InterContinental Santiago as head of purchasing, I understood quickly that the theories worked — cost ratios, Pareto, negotiation frameworks, supplier analysis. The classroom had given me the right vocabulary. What I had not been taught was how to use it — how to apply a principle inside a real organization with real people, real incentives, and constraints no textbook anticipates.

Here is what the operation taught me.

People project their own reality onto others — and it costs you money

When I was F&B director at Hotel Sonesta Concepción, I noticed that our expensive bottles were not moving. The stock sat there, cash tied up in inventory, rotation close to zero.

When I started asking why, the answer came quickly: they're too expensive.

I asked who they were too expensive for. The answer was guests.

I pushed further. Our guests were largely foreigners — business travelers, Americans, Germans, British. Their spending habits were different from those of the local team. But the team was applying their own economic reference point to customers who lived in a completely different reality. "Too expensive for me" had silently become "too expensive for them."

Rather than explain this, I decided to demonstrate it.

I divided the restaurant. I took half the tables myself. I started recommending the better bottles, explaining the wine, suggesting pairings, spending time with each table. The other half of the restaurant continued as usual.

At the end of the service, I had sold more than the rest of the team combined — with fewer tables. And my tips were eight times higher. A wealthy American or German diner, well-served and genuinely engaged, will leave 10–15% without thinking about it.

I gave the tips to the team. The point wasn't the money. It was the evidence.

The visible problem is almost never the real problem

In 2013 I was working as assistant to the F&B director at the Westin Kuala Lumpur. My assignment: figure out why the internal guest satisfaction surveys were not being completed.

The obvious hypothesis: guests didn't want to fill them out.

When I went to observe the operation, I found something different. The team was actively steering satisfied guests toward TripAdvisor, not toward the internal Starwood survey. Why? Because TripAdvisor reviews drove real reservations. The internal survey was head office data that had no visible impact on their daily business.

The problem wasn't guest reluctance. It was misaligned incentives. The team was rational — they were optimizing for what they could see working. There was also a second layer: in 2013, connecting to hotel WiFi and scanning QR codes required downloading an app. The friction was real. Guests who weren't tech-comfortable simply gave up.

The solution wasn't to push harder on surveys. It was to rebalance the incentive system and train staff to help guests navigate the technology themselves.

The data was there. Nobody was looking at it.

When I arrived at InterContinental Santiago as head of purchasing, the kitchens and F&B outlets were ordering the way they always had — day by day, or at best week by week. There was no system. There was no memory. Every Monday, someone called the suppliers and ordered what felt right.

I started doing something no one had done before: I tabulated everything. Every order, every product, every outlet. Over time, patterns emerged — annual consumption curves, seasonal trends, correlations with occupancy and event calendars. I began forecasting instead of reacting.

That forecasting gave me something I could take to suppliers: certainty. Instead of calling every week to place a small, unpredictable order, I could sit across the table and say — here is what we will buy from you over the next twelve months. Volume in exchange for price.

The deal that nobody believed was possible was the one we made on beef. I was buying premium cuts — ribeye, filet — for the restaurant. I negotiated a bundle that included a different cut for the staff canteen: less prestigious, but tender and of genuine quality. Same supplier, same standards.

The kitchen team thought I was wasting time on the canteen menu. But the results were hard to argue with. Staff who eat well feel respected. A team that feels respected shows up differently — to colleagues, to guests, to the work. The impact on cohesion and motivation was visible within weeks.

My grandfather used to say: the no is always guaranteed. The yes — that you have to try for.

It became my rule in every negotiation: don't assume the answer before you ask the question. The worst they can say is no, and you were already there.

Beyond the theories

School gave me the frameworks. I still use them. Cost analysis, supplier evaluation, service design — these tools are real and they work.

But the classroom teaches you to apply principles to problems that are already defined, already clean, already solved. Real operations don't arrive that way.

What experience teaches is something different: the habit of looking past the surface. Of asking not just what is happening but why is it happening — and then asking that again, because the first answer is usually not the real one. Of questioning the assumptions behind your own reading of a situation, especially when the answer feels obvious.

The professionals I've seen grow the fastest across different organizations and cultures are not the ones who know the most. They are the ones who stay genuinely curious — who treat every gap between theory and reality as something worth investigating, not explaining away.

That is what I try to teach. Not frameworks. Not ratios. The habit of going further.