A London mixed-use block at dusk, a hotel entrance and lit shopfront with a delivery van pulling away

Sectors

Where We Work

Why these five industries belong under one roof.

Hospitality, real estate, e-commerce, retail and gaming look on paper like a disparate collection. Underneath the surface they share the same underlying problem: heavy operational machinery running behind a public-facing brand, with a customer whose attention has to be re-earned every day. Solmesa Partners picked these five because they reward advisors who know the operating side, which is where most consultancies are weakest.

Hospitality

A grand luxury hotel lobby with marble floors, a crystal chandelier and arched windows

Hospitality is a labour-intensive business dressed up as a brand experience. Margin is made or lost in the back-of-house economics: staff scheduling, food cost, distribution mix, and how well the ownership structure aligns operator incentives with owner returns. Most hospitality advisory work is written by people who have never run a P&L on a hotel or restaurant. That gap is why our clients call us.

We work with independent hotel operators, restaurant groups scaling past the founder, branded hotel owners weighing management-versus-franchise decisions, and institutional investors underwriting hospitality assets inside a broader portfolio. The mandates typically involve some combination of asset-level diligence, operator selection, brand positioning and unit-level economics.

Focal areas

Hotel acquisition diligence and operator selection for institutional owners
Restaurant group strategy for founder-owned businesses scaling past single-unit
Branded residence and mixed-use hospitality development advisory
Food and beverage concept underwriting for real estate and destination developers
Management contract and franchise agreement review

Workers in hygiene whites on a chilled prepared-food production line in a UK factory

Recent Hospitality Project

Greencore's Acquisition of Bakkavor

Greencore's acquisition of Bakkavor brought together two substantial prepared-food businesses: Greencore's food-to-go platform and Bakkavor's fresh-prepared operation. The £1.2 billion transaction completed in January 2026 and produced a combined group with roughly £4 billion in revenue. Solmesa Partners worked as part of the wider adviser group, focusing on the commercial and operational reading of the fit between the two businesses once the headline valuation was set. That work covered category overlap, customer concentration, manufacturing footprint and the practical questions that integration would raise from day one.

The mandate turned on a specific question: what the combined group would become as a business, over and above the terms on which it changed hands. Solmesa Partners translated that into an operating-level assessment for the decision-makers involved. Where the two portfolios were genuinely complementary we said so; where duplicated capability would produce friction we said so as well, and set out which operating choices would matter in the first hundred days after completion. The output was a transaction case grounded in the economics of chilled convenience food, written in a form that could carry from signing into implementation.

Read the announcement

Real Estate

A partly repositioned London shopping arcade under a glazed roof

Real estate advisory at Solmesa Partners is written for the point where the physical asset meets the operating business on top of it. A shopping centre is a real estate asset that lives or dies on retail tenant strategy. A hotel is a building whose value depends on the operator running it. Advising on the bricks without understanding the business inside them produces the kind of diligence report that misses the reason a deal will fail.

Our real estate mandates cluster around commercial assets with a consumer-facing use, and around residential-at-scale where operational management is part of the value proposition. Our clients on this desk are institutional owners and family offices, along with the specialist real estate investors underwriting acquisitions or repositioning existing stock.

Focal areas

Acquisition diligence for hospitality, retail, leisure and mixed-use assets
Repositioning strategy for underperforming commercial properties
Operator selection and management contract negotiation
Portfolio-level strategic reviews for real estate investors with consumer exposure
Development advisory for consumer-facing schemes

E-Commerce

A packing bench in a railway arch workspace

E-commerce is the sector where a plausible top-line story most often hides an unworkable unit economics story underneath. Contribution margin per order, blended CAC, retention curves, warehouse and last-mile costs, returns rates: these are the numbers that decide whether a business is worth what an investor is being asked to pay for it. Our diligence and strategy work goes straight to them.

We work with pure-play direct-to-consumer brands and digital marketplaces, alongside traditional retailers whose e-commerce channel is now the majority of the business. On the investor side, we advise growth equity and private equity funds evaluating consumer digital assets, including cross-border targets where local logistics economics can rewrite the deal thesis.

Focal areas

Commercial diligence on direct-to-consumer and digitally-native brands
Marketplace and platform strategy for multi-sided businesses
Cross-border e-commerce entry and localisation strategy
Unit economics and contribution margin reviews for growth-stage businesses
Omnichannel strategy for traditional retailers with a scaled digital operation

Retail

The curve of Regent Street in London, wet after rain, shopfronts along both sides

Retail has been in structural transition for a decade, and the archetypes that survive it are now visible. On one side are multi-site operators who treat the store as a media channel worth investing in. On the other are category specialists with a defensible reason to exist against platform competitors. Our retail work is written for the operators and investors making bets against that backdrop.

Mandates in this sector typically involve strategy work on the store estate: which units to open and which to close, and the operating model behind them. Diligence on retail businesses in a transaction context is the other half of the desk's work. The retail businesses we advise span luxury and mid-market specialty, along with the category-defining independents that still set the pace.

Focal areas

Store estate and portfolio strategy for multi-site operators
Commercial diligence on retail businesses in M&A processes
Operating model reviews focused on labour, inventory and store productivity
Category strategy for specialty retailers under pressure from platform competitors
International expansion and franchise model design

A footwear boutique interior with a single row of shoes and empty plinths

Recent Retail Project

Next's Acquisition of Russell & Bromley

Next's acquisition of Russell & Bromley was a focused brand-and-assets transaction. In January 2026, Next acquired the Russell & Bromley footwear brand, its intellectual property and selected assets for £2.5 million, alongside £1.3 million of stock. Only three stores were retained inside the transaction: Chelsea, Mayfair and Bluewater. XX worked as an adviser inside the wider deal team. Our assessment focused on what was worth carrying Solmesa Partners: the residual equity in the brand itself, and the commercial case for separating that name from the remainder of the physical network.

The work centred on the question that matters in a distressed retail acquisition: what survives once the legacy cost base is removed. Solmesa Partners helped frame the post-completion plan around a smaller and more defensible operating model. That model turned on two questions: what to keep live from day one across the retained locations and digital assets, and at what point the brand could be re-established at scale without inheriting the full weight of the historic estate. The deliverable was an acquisition thesis written for implementation, drawing a definite line between the assets Next acquired and the 33 stores and nine concessions left outside the transaction.

Read the announcement

Gaming

Gaming covers two distinct businesses under one label: interactive gaming studios and publishers on the entertainment side, and licensed gambling operators on the regulated side. The two intersect in real-money iGaming and sports betting, where the regulated perimeter is doing most of the strategic work. Each side has its own economics and its own counterparty set. Solmesa Partners works across both, with the regulatory literacy the sector demands.

Our gaming mandates are typically transaction-driven. Diligence on studios and publishers is the largest single workstream, alongside M&A advisory for licensed operators and market entry work into newly-regulated betting and iGaming markets. We work with a small number of specialist funds and corporates that give the sector the sustained attention it needs.

Focal areas

Buy-side and sell-side M&A advisory for licensed gambling operators
Commercial diligence on interactive gaming studios and publishers
Market entry into newly-regulated betting and iGaming markets
Regulatory-driven strategic reviews for operators facing licence changes
Advisory retainers for specialist gaming investors

If A Sector Here Is Yours

Tell us which industry you are working in and what you are weighing up. We will tell you honestly whether Solmesa Partners is the right firm for the brief.

Begin the Conversation