Four Walls Inc.

One hotel or a thousand

Start with a single building and a bank loan. Stay small and polish a handful of hotels, or grow into a company with hundreds of them in nearly 300 cities. Every hotel keeps its own guests, prices, reviews and results, however big you get.

Your brand, or theirs

• Create brands, pick their category and audience, and make them famous region by region.

• Build a hotel and run it yourself, or hire an outside operator to run it for you.

• Run other owners' hotels for fees, and sell franchises of your brands around the world.

Buy out your rivals

Rival chains put hotels, whole portfolios and entire companies up for sale. Take them over, keep their brands alive or fold them into yours, and inherit their management contracts.

Land, partners and joint ventures

• Buy land and design hotels from scratch, with branded residences sold off-plan.

• Take a plot for a share of the building, bring in partners for capital, or let a developer build with you in a joint venture.

• Borrow against your buildings, sell and lease back, sell a brand, or sell the whole company.

Regional offices that run on their own

Open offices on every continent, staff their teams and decide what each regional director handles: hiring general managers, promoting the best ones, finding owners for your brands. Set the rules once and step in only for the calls that matter.

A world that doesn't wait

• Economic cycles, property bubbles and crises hit each region at its own time.

• Rival chains open hotels, bid for yours and poach your best people.

• Guests write reviews about what is really wrong: tired rooms, a missing lift, no air conditioning in the heat.