Executive coach Winn Clark, Forbes Travel Guide's Michael Conte, and Four Seasons' Francesco Maria Corazzi on the choices behind a non-accidental career.
Most hospitality careers move forward. Fewer move forward with intention. On 1 October 2026, Hosco brought three people whose combined experience sits at the intersection of coaching, luxury operations, and Forbes Travel Guide's learning programs into one conversation:
- Winn Clark, executive coach, with a decade of coaching after a 25-year corporate career
- Michael Conte, Manager of Learning and Development, Forbes Travel Guide
- Francesco Maria Corazzi, Hotel Manager, Danieli, a Four Seasons Hotel, Venice
Moderated by Hosco's Raksha Daryanani, the session followed a deliberate arc: look back, look forward, build a roadmap. Two very different careers were used to show, in practice, what it takes to make the choices.
The Five Drivers of Career Agency
Clark opened with the framework she uses with coaching clients. The shift she asks them to make is orientation: from reacting to what is happening in a career to actively captaining it. Five drivers carry the weight.
- Education and experience. What you have learned and done, and which gaps you should intentionally fill next.
- People. Who has shaped your growth, and who you need around you going forward.
- Strengths. What comes naturally, and where you create distinctive value.
- Purpose. What lights you up, and the kind of future you are drawn toward.
- Game plan. Where you want to go, and the next steps that move you there.
Clark pointed to tools she uses with clients to make the self-knowledge pieces concrete: the free SparkType assessment, Gallup's CliftonStrengths, the Enneagram, Jim Collins' hedgehog concept, and ikigai. On purpose specifically, she offered a line worth holding onto: "Purposes tend to find you if you're open to spot the signals of what they are." Direction comes from intention. The other four drivers turn that direction into a practical path.
Francesco Corazzi: The Traditional Leadership Journey
Corazzi represents what a long-term vision looks like applied patiently over two decades. He now runs one of Venice's most storied properties, the 1822 Danieli, reopened as a Four Seasons. The path there was neither linear nor obvious.
He began as a runner in a London restaurant after hospitality school in Italy, moved to The Baglioni, then to The Savoy, where he spent six years. A former mentor had told him early that if an Italian wanted to become a GM, London was the training ground. He listened.
What makes the story useful is what came next. Four Seasons rejected him four times. London, Miami, Dubai. Each time he reached the final interview. Each time the answer was the same: great talent, not this time. "There must be a way from a non-Four Seasons to enter Four Seasons," he recalled thinking.
The fifth attempt landed in Bahrain. The offer required a step down, from managing a team of 30 in the Seychelles to running two people as an assistant manager. He took it. From there came Costa Rica as front office manager, then the pre-opening of San Domenico Palace in Taormina as assistant director of rooms before the property had a director of rooms or a hotel manager in place. Then the Four Seasons flagship in Dubai, 237 rooms, 72 percent occupancy, as director of rooms, where he was named a Forbes Rising Star. The call to reopen the Danieli followed.
Corazzi's framing of leadership is unsentimental. It is service, of owners, of teams, of guests. It also demands vulnerability. "If you are the first one to say, listen, I'm not sure about the P&L, I never done it before, let me learn that part," he said, "that's a skill a leader should possess." The sentence captures something closer to the modern GM profile than most job descriptions do.
Michael Conte: The Specialist, Less-Linear Path
Conte's route into luxury hospitality began nowhere near it. He trained at the Boston Conservatory in musical theater and spent 17 years as a professional entertainer. The decisive shift came when his father died of cancer when Conte was 26.
He went back to school in San Diego to study holistic health, with acupuncture in mind before settling on massage therapy. In one class, a teacher asked students to make vision boards. Conte flipped through magazines and clipped an image of a day spa in Orange County called Spa Gregory's. He put it on the board. He looked at it every day.
He applied once he was qualified. He was turned down for lack of day spa experience. A colleague at the clinic where he was working happened to be close friends with one of the spa's co-owners. She picked up the phone. He got the job and quickly became one of the most requested therapists on the roster.
From there the pattern recurred, with mentors opening doors and Conte stepping through them before he felt ready. Pelican Hill, where the spa earned a Forbes Five-Star rating in its opening year. Montage Laguna Beach, where he was handed an operations manager title with a path back to assistant director, then became interim director when the spa director went on maternity leave. He walked into his first P&L meeting unable to read the spreadsheet in front of him. The finance director offered to teach him. Napa's Meadowood followed, with a 14 million dollar spa and another Five-Star rating in year one. Along the way, he closed gaps deliberately, including a spa hospitality course at UC Irvine when he saw operational knowledge he still needed.
Fifteen years as a spa director, three Five-Star properties, then a move to Forbes Travel Guide, where he has spent the past four and a half years training the industry he grew up in and helping to develop its Verified Luxury Certifications.
The theater years were not a detour. Seventeen years of performing in New York taught Conte to command a room, read an audience, and perform under pressure. The skills translated directly into luxury service leadership. What looked, on paper, like a career pivot was, in practice, continuous. Expertise, deepened and recombined, created a path that no job ladder would have mapped out.
What the Two Stories Share
Both men were persistent to the point of being uncomfortable with the answer no. Both were willing to accept lateral moves, or steps backward, to reach a target they had already named. Both relied on mentors who did more than offer advice. They made calls.
Neither started in luxury. "None of us started from luxury at the beginning," Corazzi said. The point is less that it is possible to break in, and more that the mechanics are repeatable. Patience. A long view. A refusal to let a closed door end the conversation.
Practical Habits the Panel Converged On
Several concrete habits surfaced across the session:
- Check in with one person every week. A former colleague, a mentor, someone whose work you admire. Keep the network alive before you need it.
- Cross-train deliberately. Rooms into F&B. F&B into rooms. Four Seasons calls this cross-exposure and builds it into its leadership pipeline for a reason. Depth in one department is table stakes; breadth is what makes a GM candidate.
- Keep the CV to one page. Corazzi was blunt on this. Impact lives in restraint.
- Lead with vulnerability. Admitting the gap is often how it closes.
- Practice how you explain your gaps. Clark recommended writing the answer on an index card and rehearsing until the discomfort fades. Career gaps are only awkward in the telling.
The One Thing to Take Away
Clark closed with the question she asks every client. What is the one action step you can take in the next 30 days to move closer to the career you want? Write it down. Then do it.
Career agency is not about having every answer. It is about choosing a direction and taking the next step. Two very different careers, one shared principle. Deliberate choices compound.
The full masterclass recording is available on Hosco's YouTube channel. Forbes Travel Guide's Verified Luxury Certifications and other professional development programs are listed at ForbesTravelGuide.com. The next Hosco masterclass will be announced shortly.