FROM THE FOUNDER
What Changed When I Became a Business Owner
Twenty years of running venues taught me operations. Owning a business taught me something else entirely — and it shaped why Gravitie exists.
Pearlyn Lee · Founder & CEO
For twenty years, I opened venues for other people. Hotels, pubs, bars, restaurants, a five-star property with all the trimmings.
I knew how to run operations. I had budgets, P&Ls, a system for everything.
People used to ask why I never opened my own place. My answer was always the same: I wanted to make my mistakes with someone else’s money first.
Then in 2020, I did it anyway.
Five weeks later, COVID hit.
Everything I thought I knew about running a business got thrown out immediately. But the real lesson wasn’t the pandemic. It was what came after.
I was doing my own bookkeeping. My own invoicing. Running day-to-day operations. At the same time, I’d taken on outside projects — another venue rebrand, stepping in to run another business — while trying to keep mine standing.
I was wearing every hat, all at once, constantly switching between them.
Twenty years of hospitality experience hadn’t prepared me for that.
Because in corporate, someone else always held the piece you didn’t. Finance had finance. Ops had ops. Engineering had maintenance. I could focus on my function and trust the rest of the machine.