On Reopening a House: My First Weeks Leading ESI

A letter from Larissa Zwart

Rome, 20 May 2025

Dear friends of the House,

People have been kind enough to ask, these past weeks, how it feels to take over ESI. It is a question I have tried to answer honestly in small groups: over coffee with candidates, over dinner with long-standing clients, in corridors at industry gatherings. I thought I would take the time here to answer it once, carefully, in writing.

The truthful answer is this: it does not feel like a beginning. It feels like continuation, which is a different thing altogether.

What I did not do

When we agreed with the Biscioni family, in early 2025, to take over all the assets and activities of ESI, I did not arrive at Piazza del Popolo with a strategy deck. I did not commission a rebrand. I did not, in the first fortnight, send a single email beginning with the words “moving forward”. These things can be done, and sometimes should be. But they were not what the House needed.

What the House needed, I think, was simply for someone to walk in, sit down, and begin listening.

So I listened. I read the correspondence Stefano had left behind, and the notes of searches completed long ago. I spoke at length with the owners and operators who had worked with ESI for twenty years or more, and asked them a single question: what do you expect of this firm, and what have you always expected of it? The answers were remarkably consistent. They expected discretion. They expected candidates who were not just qualified but were right. Right for the culture, right for the moment in the property's life, right for the people who would work with them. They expected, above all, patience.

Patience is a word one hears less and less in executive search. The industry has learned to promise speed. ESI, from what I could see in its file cabinets spanning decades, had learned the opposite lesson: that the appointments that shape a hotel for a decade deserve to be considered for more than a week.

What I learned in the first weeks

A few observations from the early days, offered in no particular order.

Old clients remember. When I introduced myself to owners who had worked with ESI in the Bernd Wosgien era, and later in the Stefano Biscioni era, almost every one of them began the conversation with a story. A placement made twenty years ago, a difficult search that had gone right, a candidate who had gone on to run two or three hotels after being found by ESI. These were not nostalgic stories. They were records of craft. They reminded me, if I had forgotten, that our work is not measured in placements completed but in careers shaped and houses strengthened.

The phone still matters. A surprising amount of serious business in hospitality executive search happens on telephone calls, not on video. When a general manager of a five-star property wishes to explore a confidential move, they do not want a digital trail. They want a voice, at a discreet hour, in a conversation that leaves no record until they choose to make one. ESI has always understood this. I have made it my habit, in these first weeks, to answer my own phone.

Rome helps. I wrote about this in my previous letter, but it deserves repeating: working from a city that is older than most of our anxieties has a clarifying effect. When I sit at my desk at Piazza del Popolo and look at a list of searches that stretches over decades, the daily pressures of the inbox recede. The work becomes what it has always been.

What comes next

In the coming months, I will continue to write these letters. Some will be practical: what to look for in a general manager, how to structure a confidential search, when to use our proprietary CADT assessment and when a simpler conversation will serve. Others will be observations, market reflections, occasional reports from conversations I have been privileged to take part in.

If you are an owner or an investor considering a leadership change at a hotel, resort or collection, I would be honoured to hear from you. You can read here how we approach such engagements. If you are a hospitality professional thinking about the next step in your career, we would be glad to speak. Everything we do begins with a confidential conversation, and nothing is rushed.

A quiet truth

Before I close: one thing I have come to believe more firmly in these first weeks than before. The true work of an executive search firm in luxury hospitality is not transactional. It is custodial. We hold, for a time, the trust of a client who is about to make a decision that will shape years of their business, and the trust of a candidate who is about to make a decision that will shape years of their life. These two trusts meet, if we have done our work well, at a single meeting where both sides feel, quietly, without fanfare, that this is right.

That is the work. It was the work in 1977 and it is the work today. I am grateful to continue it.

Echte gastvrijheid, van oudsher.

With hospitable regards,
Larissa Zwart
President, ESI Executive Search International