Building Hospitality Businesses Through Relationship-Driven Deals | Steven Kamali

Sam Schneider and Steven Kamali explore the unpredictable path of building businesses in hospitality and beyond on Inside Deal. Kamali shares how early cold-calling experience, a chance motel purchase in Montauk, and creative deal structures launched a twenty-five-year consulting career, and how losing it all in 2020 forced a complete reinvention. The conversation captures the resourcefulness required to pivot from restaurant brokerage to hotel consulting to staffing, often through relationships built years earlier. They discuss: Using seller financing and partnership structures to acquire properties with limited capital How Surf Lodge and The Capri became unintentional marketing engines for a consulting practice Rebuilding after dissolving a 27-person company during the pandemic Why being deliberate rather than reactive separates sustainable growth from chaos The role of AI in scaling a modern staffing business without traditional overhead This episode offers a grounded look at entrepreneurship for anyone navigating setbacks, considering unconventional deal structures, or questioning whether their next move needs to be the obvious one. Topics: 00:00 - Intro 01:19 - Growing up entrepreneurial 03:57 - Learning the art of the cold call 06:15 - Starting a restaurant brokerage business 10:04 - Shifting from restaurants to hotel consulting 12:58 - Creating value through hotel food and beverage 18:54 - Buying Surf Lodge with creative financing 26:25 - The Capri deal and using expertise as currency 30:30 - The importance of trying and failing 32:03 - COVID hits the hospitality business 36:12 - The ghost kitchen experiment 38:08 - The SPAC attempt and pivoting again 41:21 - Building The Staffing Agency from the ground up 48:42 - Structuring a scalable and sellable business 50:31 - Synthesizing information as a superpower 51:54 - Advice for young entrepreneurs today Steven Kamali LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevenkamali/ The Staffing Agency - https://thestaffingagency.com/ Sam Schneider LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/sam-schneider-... Imperium Capital — https://www.imperiumcap.com