Scaling a hospitality concept is one of the industry’s toughest challenges. Open a second location and suddenly the magic that made your first property special can start to fade. Add a third and fourth, and that startup energy—the creativity, the autonomy, the sense of ownership your team had—gets buried under layers of hierarchy and process.
Matt Bell has cracked this problem. As the former Chief Hotel Operations Officer at citizenM and now Managing Director at Mollie’s, he’s scaled hospitality brands while maintaining the energy and creativity that made them special. His secret? An organizational design principle he calls “the starfish.”
In a recent conversation with Danica Smith on Hospitality Daily, Bell shared the frameworks that allow ambitious hospitality teams to maintain their creative edge while growing. If you’re thinking about expansion or struggling with how to preserve culture as you scale, these insights offer a practical blueprint.
Why Traditional Hierarchies Kill Creativity at Scale
Bell’s approach starts with a fundamental rejection of how most hospitality companies organize themselves.
“As soon as you create silos, as soon as you create this top-down approach to what you’re doing, naturally as you scale, people become further from the end product,” Bell explains. “You have to make that decision-making closer. You have to empower those people to do that.”
The problem with traditional organizational charts is that they create distance. Your corporate office makes decisions about guest experience without touching guests. Your regional managers create standards without working a shift. Your property-level teams execute directives without understanding the why behind them.
This distance doesn’t just slow you down—it fundamentally changes what you’re able to create.
The Starfish Principle: Subdivide, Don’t Stretch
Bell’s alternative is what he calls the starfish principle, inspired by the biological difference between starfish and spiders.
“The starfish, if you cut it in half, it grows again, becomes a whole starfish,” Bell says. “Whereas a spider, if you cut it in half, it dies.”
In organizational terms, this means building self-contained teams that have everything they need to deliver your core product. When you grow, you don’t stretch these teams thinner—you subdivide them and create new complete units.
Each team remains:
- Cross-functional (not siloed by department)
- Self-contained (with all resources needed to execute)
- Empowered (able to make decisions without constant approval)
- Connected to the end product (close to guests and operations)
What This Looks Like in Practice
Bell points out that this structure already exists in hospitality—we just fail to recognize it.
“Within a kitchen, it’s a cross-functional team that’s working. In a restaurant, it’s a cross-functional team,” he notes. “Putting a plate of food on the pass takes a number of people that are touching that process. And if you’re putting multiple plates on the pass simultaneously, you’ve got this notion of agile at scale happening that’s then connected from your kitchen to your restaurant.”
The irony? This same structure exists at the C-suite level.
“At a C-suite level, your CEO has a collection of individuals sat around them that have those competencies. Why would you not replicate that?” Bell asks. “If you know that is what you need at a C-suite level, why would you not replicate that through the business?”
Instead of a traditional org chart with functional silos (operations, sales, marketing, finance), imagine circle teams where each location or cluster has its own mini C-suite—a complete team with all the skills and authority needed to execute brilliantly.
The Framework That Enables Autonomy
Empowered teams without direction become chaos. Bell’s solution is what he calls “clarity on North Star.”
“There’s the strategic framework that sits around that and then that gives the freedom,” Bell explains. “If you remove all of that, there is an element that becomes intimidating. If there is no framework to what you do, people can be scared to move away from where they are.”
The key is finding the right balance. Too little framework and teams drift. Too much and they can’t innovate.
“If they understand where their boundaries are, they’re more happy to go and explore it,” Bell says. “You need to find frameworks that create security and understanding and you need people that operate within that that are happy to explore.”
This means being crystal clear about:
- Your brand promise and what you stand for
- Non-negotiables that define your guest experience
- Success metrics that matter
- Decision rights and escalation paths
Within those boundaries, teams have real autonomy to experiment, adapt, and improve.
Learning Across Teams Without Losing Agility
One concern with distributed decision-making is losing the benefit of collective learning. Bell addresses this through structured collaboration between teams.
“By taking a collaborative approach, we can then learn from what each individual team is doing and put that back in and see if it works on a broader level,” he says.
This creates a rhythm:
- Teams execute with autonomy within their frameworks
- Teams share what’s working (and what isn’t)
- Successful innovations get tested more broadly
- If they work across contexts, they become part of the framework
- If frameworks need updating based on what teams are learning, they evolve
The key is that learning flows bottom-up from operations, not top-down from corporate.
Bell introduces another crucial concept: understanding that hospitality operates in polarities, not absolutes.
“You talk about polarities in citizenM—that idea of affordable and luxury. Those things are apparently contradictory, the paradox, and yet we’re delivering,” Bell notes. “Mollie’s is the same principle of what we’re doing in value lux, affordable lux, budget lux.”
This applies to organizational design as well. Teams need freedom AND structure. Autonomy AND alignment. Local adaptation AND brand consistency.
“Understanding all the time that there is a spectrum in which you move along and you have to be relatively dynamic,” Bell says. “There is freedom and there is rigidity and where it sits within that is not absolute in any area. We have to flex along that spectrum all the time.”
The mistake is thinking you need to choose one or the other. Great hospitality—and great organizational design—requires holding both sides of these tensions simultaneously.
What This Means for Your Hotel Operation
If you’re scaling a hotel concept or struggling with how to maintain energy as you grow, here are the practical takeaways from Bell’s approach:
Audit your organizational structure. Are people getting further from the guest experience as you grow? Are decisions being made by people who aren’t touching the operation? If so, you’re stretching when you should be subdividing.
Build cross-functional teams. Each property or cluster should have all the competencies needed to execute your brand promise—not just operations staff waiting for direction from corporate functions.
Define your North Star clearly. Your team needs to know exactly what you’re trying to achieve, what defines success, and what non-negotiables frame their work. Without this clarity, autonomy becomes chaos.
Create frameworks, not rules. Give teams boundaries and guardrails, but within those boundaries, let them experiment and adapt. The goal is security with exploration, not compliance.
Enable learning across teams. Create structured ways for teams to share what they’re discovering. Let successful innovations bubble up and become part of your broader approach.
Hire for the structure. Bell emphasizes finding “team members that fit and buy into the vision and understand that they are a single cog in a more complex machine and therefore there is an interdependency.” People who thrive in this environment are collaborative, comfortable with autonomy, and understand their role in the bigger picture.
The Bottom Line
Scaling hospitality without losing your creative edge isn’t about choosing between growth and culture. It’s about designing your organization to support both.
As Bell puts it: “Organizational design is absolutely fundamental to be able to scale, retain that sense of startup nature, that energy, that sense of directness, and agency that you want and then do that at scale. Top-down hierarchical political structures don’t work.”
The starfish principle offers an alternative: subdivide instead of stretching, empower instead of controlling, and create frameworks that enable autonomy instead of rules that demand compliance.
Your kitchen and restaurant teams already work this way. Your C-suite already operates like this. The question is whether you’ll extend this model throughout your organization as you scale.
Because in the end, the magic of hospitality doesn’t come from corporate mandates or operational manuals. It comes from empowered teams who are close enough to guests to understand what they need, autonomous enough to respond creatively, and aligned enough with your vision to deliver consistently.
That’s how you grow without losing your soul.
Listen to Matt talk more about this here on the Hospitality Daily Podcast
