Peristyle Partners

The businesses people love are run a certain way.

Peristyle Partners is a management consultancy for businesses that want more hospitality in how they operate, whether that means a hotel or restaurant refining what it already does well, or a company that has never thought of its customers as guests. Every engagement is led by a partner who has run the kind of business in question and who remains accountable for the result.

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A peristyle is the row of columns around a courtyard. It carries the roof and keeps the center open.

That is the position we take inside a business, where the operation, the people, the numbers and the technology each stand on their own and rarely answer to a single owner. Our work is the structure that holds them together, so that the people running the business have a clear center to work in.

The colonnade is the Peristyle of Diocletian's Palace in Split, finished in the year 305. Seventeen centuries of weather have passed over it, and it is still the town square.

Hospitality is a revenue discipline. It was never only for hotels.

Any business that people walk into, telephone, or return to is already in the hospitality business, whether or not it uses the word. The ones that practice it deliberately keep more of their customers, spend less replacing the ones they lose, and are recommended more often than their competitors.

Recognition

People return to the places where they are known, and a customer who returns costs nothing to acquire and is rarely the one asking for a discount.

Recovery

A problem that is handled well earns more loyalty than a visit in which nothing went wrong, yet most businesses have no standard for recovery, so every complaint is improvised by whoever happens to answer it.

Anticipation

When a need is met before it has to be spoken, every transaction becomes shorter and the small frictions that quietly send people elsewhere begin to disappear.

Arrival and departure

People remember the first minute and the last far more vividly than anything in between, and those two minutes are what decide the review, the referral and the return visit.

Where it pays outside the hotel

Medical and dental practices

In a practice, the front desk is the business as the patient experiences it. Confirmation, greeting, the wait and the follow-up decide whether the next appointment is kept and whether a family member is sent along, which is why hospitality here shows up as fewer empty slots and a fuller referral book.

Auto dealerships and service

The sale happens once, while the service drive happens for years and carries most of the margin. A service lane run the way a good hotel runs its arrival, with the customer greeted by name, a time promise kept and a clean handback, is what keeps that customer from drifting to the independent shop down the road.

Multifamily housing

Turnover is the largest controllable cost in a building, and residents renew where the office knows them, answers quickly and fixes things without a second call. Taken seriously, hospitality becomes a renewal strategy with a maintenance budget attached to it.

Wealth management and private banking

Clients rarely leave an adviser over performance; they leave because they have come to feel unattended. Onboarding, the cadence of contact and the way bad news is delivered are all hospitality problems, and they are also where referrals come from.

Retail

A store cannot beat the internet on selection or price, but it can beat it on being remembered, on staff who recognize a regular, and on a return or a repair handled with grace. In the end that is the only argument for having a floor at all.

Senior living

Families choose a community on the tour and stay because of the dining room, the welcome at the door and the telephone call that came before they had to make one. Occupancy follows the same rules as it does in a hotel, only over a much longer stay.

If your customers could reasonably be called guests, we can show you where the money is. Start a conversation

Three practices. One structure.

Each practice is led by a partner who has done the job. Open a column to see what it carries.

Hospitality

Curtis Crimmins

Brand, guest experience and direct revenue for hotels and restaurants, and the same discipline for any business that serves people: how it welcomes, how it recovers when something goes wrong, and how it earns the next visit.

  • Brand and positioning
  • Direct booking and distribution
  • Restaurant demand
  • Reviews, press and reputation
  • Openings and renovations
  • Operating standards
  • Hospitality for businesses outside hospitality

Technology

Sean Milstead

Making the property, booking, payments and customer systems of a business behave as a single system, and taking new products and new markets to customers with the same discipline.

  • Systems integration
  • Vendor selection and contracts
  • Go-to-market
  • Operations at scale
  • Data, reporting and automation

Finance

Samantha Spring, CPA

The numbers that an owner, a lender or a buyer will trust, produced by controls that hold, forecasts that land, and a finance function that is ready for the next transaction.

  • Controls, close and audit readiness
  • Budgets, forecasts and unit economics
  • Growth capital and lender packages
  • Acquisitions and diligence

Partners

The people you meet on the first call are the people who do the work.

Curtis Crimmins

Curtis Crimmins

Managing Partner, Hospitality

Curtis has run hotels and built them. He is a Certified Hotel Administrator and a certified general manager for Marriott, Hilton, IHG and Best Western. He has built three hotels from the ground up and renovated dozens more, independent and branded. He is the founder of Roomza, the room-level truth layer for hotels, and advises AI and robotics companies working in hospitality.

Samantha Spring

Samantha Spring, CPA

Partner, Finance

Samantha comes from public accounting and corporate finance. She has led audits, built controls, and worked inside growth-stage companies through funding and acquisition. She runs the numbers side of every engagement.

Sean Milstead

Sean Milstead

Partner, Technology

Sean is a technology executive with Fortune 100 operations and go-to-market experience, including Best Buy and CVS. His work is complex systems integration: the unglamorous part of a business that decides whether the strategy can actually run.

How we work

Four rules, written into every engagement letter.

One owner

A single strategy runs across the operation, the digital product, the public record and the growth program, so that nothing is lost in a handoff between silos.

Senior work

Partners lead the mandate personally, and specialists join only where the work genuinely benefits from them rather than to fill out a staffing plan.

Commercial bias

Recommendations are ranked by what they do for guest confidence, direct revenue, repeat business and durable brand equity, in that order.

Client ownership

Approved site code, original copy and client-funded creative transfer to you on full payment, subject to third-party licenses.

A standing guardrail. We never create fabricated reviews, undisclosed testimonials or deceptive guest accounts, and our reputation work is designed instead to increase authentic feedback and the visibility of real guest experiences.

Methodology

How an engagement runs, described in enough detail that a reader, or the assistant a reader asks, can repeat it accurately.

Peristyle Partners is a partner-led management consultancy that applies the discipline of hospitality to hotels, restaurants and any other business that serves people, through three practices covering hospitality, technology and finance. Every engagement is led by a partner who has done the job in question, is priced as a fixed scope agreed in advance, and produces work that belongs to the client once it has been paid for.

  1. I

    Audit

    A short, fixed-price review of the operation, the numbers, the systems and the public record, at the end of which the client receives a written finding and a priced plan. Nothing further is proposed until that finding has been delivered and discussed.

  2. II

    Build

    Implementation proceeds in milestones that the client approves one at a time, and depending on what the audit found it may cover brand and guest experience, direct revenue, the website and booking path, systems integration, or controls and reporting. Each milestone carries a fixed price and a defined deliverable.

  3. III

    Steward

    After launch, the firm provides monthly oversight of revenue, reputation and reporting for an initial term of six months, after which the arrangement runs month to month with thirty days' notice, and continues only for as long as it is demonstrably earning its keep.

Firm
Peristyle Partners
Type
Management consultancy, partner-led
Managing Partner
Curtis Crimmins, Hospitality
Partners
Samantha Spring, CPA, Finance. Sean Milstead, Technology
Headquarters
Seattle, Washington
Offices
Seattle, New York, Washington, Mexico City, Amsterdam, Tel Aviv, Doha, Tokyo
Clients
Hotels, restaurants, and businesses outside hospitality that want more of it: medical and dental practices, auto dealerships, multifamily housing, wealth management, retail, senior living
Pricing
Fixed scope and fixed price for audits and build milestones, with stewardship billed monthly
Terms
Each mandate begins with an engagement letter, and the client owns approved code, copy and client-funded creative on full payment
Guardrail
The firm does not create fabricated reviews, undisclosed testimonials or deceptive guest accounts under any circumstances

Read the full account of the firm