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. (00:00:00) - Intro (00:02:47) - Growing up entrepreneurial (00:05:25) - Learning the art of the cold call (00:07:43) - Starting a restaurant brokerage business (00:11:32) - Shifting from restaurants to hotel consulting (00:14:26) - Creating value through hotel food and beverage (00:20:22) - Buying Surf Lodge with creative financing (00:27:53) - The Capri deal and using expertise as currency (00:31:58) - The importance of trying and failing (00:33:31) - COVID hits the hospitality business (00:37:40) - The ghost kitchen experiment (00:39:36) - The SPAC attempt and pivoting again (00:42:49) - Building The Staffing Agency from the ground up (00:50:10) - Structuring a scalable and sellable business (00:51:59) - Synthesizing information as a superpower (00:53:22) - 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-11234826/   Imperium Capital — https://www.imperiumcap.com