Ted Schama wrote something recently that stuck with me
This piece was originally shared on LinkedIn in response to recurring conversations with founders and leadership teams around this topic.
I’m publishing it here as part of an ongoing body of thinking around restaurant strategy, market entry, and operational decision-making.
He made a great point about brand polarisation from an investor’s perspective. There’s scale and value at one end, ultra-luxury and experiential at the other, and everything in between can become a little bit lost.
He's right. And the same logic applies to landlords and developers.
Scalable brands offer certainty: Portfolio deals, reliable income and proven models that work across multiple sites.
Luxury brands offer something different entirely: At a certain level, investors and developers are buying into the brand’s halo effect. The right name changes property valuations, hotel room rates, and the view of the wider portfolio.
I've seen negotiations where developers agreed to almost anything just to secure the right brand.
That leaves the middle.
The middle can still trade, of course, but it rarely creates the same certainty as a scalable brand or the same halo effect as a luxury one. In tougher markets, that becomes a much harder sell to a potential investor or a site landlord.
The brands that really move the conversation tend to do one of two things: scale efficiently, or elevate everything around them.
Since first sharing this, I’ve seen the same issue surface repeatedly — particularly with businesses entering new markets or scaling too quickly. The underlying challenge is rarely strategy itself, but how early decisions constrain execution later.
Andrew Jobes is the founder of Jobes & Co., a Dubai-based advisory working with restaurant and hospitality businesses across the Middle East and international markets.