A Deal Desk for the Operator’s Side of the HMA
Most operators bid Hotel Management Agreements without dedicated financial expertise on the deal. The bid economics — the single most consequential financial decision in the cycle — get worked through alongside twenty other priorities, by people whose primary job is something else. Dash Decisions does only this. It prices the bid, sizes the risks the headline number does not capture, and backward-solves the terms that move the math — for US hotel operators, one HMA at a time, delivered asynchronously per engagement.
Two Analyses
Bid Economics Brief. Prices an HMA bid from the operator’s side: a floor, a target, and the negotiating room between them. Behind the number sits Monte Carlo performance-test exposure across ten thousand simulations, an eight-flag screen of the proposed terms, and the structural risks a point estimate hides. Delivered as a decision brief a CEO or CFO reads in five minutes — judgment on top, numbers underneath.
Operating Levers Analysis. For the marginal deal that should not simply be walked. Runs the model backward to find the smallest change to a single lever — occupancy, ADR, comp-set position, fee, key money — that moves the deal from likely walk to bid-if-we-can-execute. It turns a binary into a negotiable ask: here is the one thing that has to be true, and here is how far it has to move.
The Method, Applied
Two anonymized engagements, each chosen for a single analytical move.
A convention headquarters hotel under a long-term agreement. A clause buried in the incentive-fee terms meant the outcome everyone was waiting for was the one that would quietly break it — activating a performance gate the asset fails structurally. The incentive fee was not dead. It was contingent on the single event that would eliminate it. Finding that required reading the contract, not just the model.
A new-build resort hotel with a long ramp to stabilization. The entire downside lived in the opening years. Across ten thousand simulations, the losing outcomes were overwhelmingly the ones where the ramp came slowly — risk concentrated in a single window, not spread across the term. The right response was a contract term, not a lower bid: ramp protection that binds only in the scenarios where the hotel underperforms anyway.
How the Work Is Structured
Engagements are scoped per deal and delivered asynchronously — no retainers, no standing meetings. The full analytical framework behind both analyses is described on the methodology page.
For a conversation about a specific deal: dave@dashdecisions.com