In luxury hospitality, if the founder is the product, you damn sure better know what happens when he leaves.

Some of the most valuable small hotels in the world were built by founders, families, and obsessives. That’s often why they’re valuable. An institution might not have had the nerve to make the decisions the founder did. She chose the scale, the feeling, the rituals, the staff, and the strange little things that make the place unique.

A founder can create myth, rate power, loyalty, staff culture, and above all, buyer desire. But he can also become the underwriting problem fast if nobody knows what survives without him.

When iconic properties change hands, the buyer has to separate transferable value from personality value. The building, the location, and the name might remain. But the founder’s eye, relationships, temper, and weird little decisions might not. A buyer who misses that can pay for a business and end up owning an empty museum.

The same question applies to greenfield construction. There’s a firehose of money being sprayed at ultra-luxury, sub-100-key hospitality right now. Unfortunately, a lot of them are crap. Some actually deserve to be built, and some are in fact being built right now. I know because I’ve arranged the capital for them.

The founder question often shows up earlier there, before the hotel even exists, before the first guest has arrived, before the market has rendered its verdict. Investors have to ask a very blunt question: What happens if the founder exits?

For that matter, what happens if she gets bored? What happens if she dies? What happens if the person with the taste, relationships, nerve, and fury walks away before the hotel can stand on its own?

If the founder is the asset, price him. If the founder is the risk, structure around him. If the founder is just the person in love with the idea, you need to stop pretending that’s vision.

Founder-led hotels can be extraordinary businesses. But investors still have to know what remains after the founder leaves. Price the dependency before signing the check, because personality can look like enterprise value right up until the personality is gone.