#253 - Hospitality Meets Guy Freedman - Fun, Fudge & Floodwater
This week, I sat down with the brilliant Guy Freedman, Hotel Director at The Pig & The Pig in the Wall, and honestly, this one felt like a giant exhale.
A conversation about leadership, yes.
Culture, absolutely.
But also… naked guests, rogue deer, flood rescues in a Land Rover, student days in a fudge kitchen, and why maybe fun has been unfairly underestimated as a serious business strategy.
Guy’s journey, from a self-confessed chatty teenager being redirected out of the kitchen and into front of house, to Hotel Director at The Pig - is packed with warmth, mischief, humility and some beautifully simple thinking about what makes hospitality…well... hospitality.
In this episode, Guy and I get into…
- How a careers adviser effectively turned “I like eating and drinking” into a career path 😅
- Why his kitchen career lasted roughly three weeks
- Student jobs in fudge kitchens, pot washing and night cleaning, and why every odd job teaches you something
- Falling for The Pig over a hungover lunch… then resigning before he even had the job
- Why great hospitality businesses recruit personality first, train skill second
- Growing through the ranks at The Pig and opening a hotel just in time for COVID (timing 👀)
- Why fun at work isn’t fluff, it’s culture
- Turning staffing shortages into team challenges, not team stress
- The now-legendary flood day
- Why adversity often creates the best guest experiences
- Working nights in London and the surprisingly frequent issue of naked guests locking themselves out of rooms
- Rogue animals, escaped deer, wandering bullocks… and the operational realities no hotel school prepares you for
Some cracking quote-ables from Guy
“We’ve always recruited personality.”
“I got to play at those hotels”
“If we can make it fun, people want to come to work”
“Don’t take a step back”
“There’s always adversity in this industry… so you may as well have fun with it”
“It’s only work” (which somehow sounded profound in context)
🎧 Why this episode is worth your ears
This one is a brilliant reminder that hospitality doesn’t have to choose between performance and joy.
You can be serious about standards…
and still be playful.
You can lead through pressure…
and still laugh.
And maybe, just maybe, the teams that have the most fun are often the teams that perform the best.
There’s loads in here about leadership, culture and community… but also some glorious stories that remind you why so many of us fell in love with this industry in the first place.
And honestly?
Any episode featuring fudge, floods and naked guests was always going to be worth a listen.
Show Partners
A big shout out to the first of today’s show partner, RotaCloud, the people management platform for shift-based teams.
RotaCloud lets managers create and share rotas, record attendance, and manage annual leave in minutes — all from a single, web-based app.
It makes work simple for your team, too, allowing them to check their rotas, request holiday, and even pick up extra shifts straight from their phones.
Try RotaCloud’s time-saving tools today by heading to https://rotacloud.com/phil
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