"The lines between hotels and members' clubs are blurring" - Daniel Kyriakides on the evolution of this model

Hi Daniel, welcome to Checking In and thank you so much for joining us.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Pleasure to be here.

So yeah, to get us started, can you tell us a little bit about your career journey to date and more about your current role at Reed Smith?

Yeah, so I'm a partner in the real estate department at Reed Smith, which is an international law firm.

And I actually started my career there many years ago.

Having listened to a couple of your podcasts, I feel a bit of an imposter, just given how much some of your other interviewees have travelled, etc.

My story is a lot more boring, unfortunately.

No, no.

And when I came out, well, when I was deciding what to do at university, my mother was quite proactive.

So she said that I had to find a profession.

And so the options were sort of accounting, law or medicine, I guess.

And I wasn't very good at maths or biology.

So that kind of left me with with law.

And yeah, initially, I thought that I was going to probably go into something like international arbitration sounds very glamorous and like you're traveling around a lot but ended up qualifying into the real estate department and that was purely just because I really liked the transactional aspects of the job and working with like a broad range of different clients all in different industries and with a particular focus in central London which is great you know I live and work in central London so it's it's been great to kind of see a lot of the projects that I've worked on um in the flesh and get a real feel for them

yeah wonderful and what other aspects of the role um you know excite you obviously that must be very satisfying to see those projects come to life yeah

yeah i think um working with a broad broad client base is is great because you get a lot of different perspectives so um i'm kind of sector agnostic in the sense that i'll work with clients across all types of, you know, all different kind of real estate needs that could be in the hotel and private members place.

But it can also be in, you know, a number of other areas, industrial development, retirement homes, et cetera.

And I think a particular area that I really enjoy is working with, entrepreneurs who may not have that much specialist real estate knowledge, and just helping them really grow their business.

It could be from them taking a new lease for a new flagship store in London, or it could be looking at ways to raise financing for their business so that they can then look to grow that business.

And some of my best clients are the ones where I've been there from the very start.

And kind of seeing the business grow and feeling almost like an extension of their in-house teams is really good.

And I think that's probably the biggest compliment that clients can ever give me is when they turn around and say that they just feel like, you know, that I'm an extension of myself.

of their their in-house team

yeah