Episode Details

How a second-generation restaurant owner took over a 25-year family business with 18 venues across Sydney and refuses to let it go corporate. Daniel Drakopoulos on running SRG Hospitality, scaling without losing the heart, and what most family businesses get wrong.

Daniel Drakopoulos didn't choose hospitality. He was born into it.
He was polishing cutlery at 13 in the family's first restaurant — Aqua Dining at Milsons Point — opened by his parents Bill and Kathleen in 2000. 26 years later, he's just stepped up as co-Managing Director of SRG Hospitality alongside his brother Perry, with his dad finally easing back after a quarter-century of running the group day-to-day.

The portfolio reads like a who's-who of iconic Sydney venues: Aqua, Ripples Milsons Point, Ormeggio at the Spit, Sails, Akti, plus the recent Langham Sydney hotel takeover — their first hotel partnership and one of the biggest moves in the group's history. 18 venues currently, 550 staff, and six more openings coming in the next two years.

But the bigger story isn't the scale.

It's how they got here without becoming the kind of corporate group that loses its soul along the way.

In this episode, Daniel sits down with Tim to talk through the family operating philosophy his parents built — the hospitality, the food obsession, the refusal to standardise their venues — and how he and Perry are scaling that DNA into the next generation without breaking it.

You'll hear:
00:00 – Polishing cutlery at 13: how the Drakopoulos family got into hospitality
05:00 – The 26-year journey from Aqua to 18 venues
15:00 – Why every SRG venue has to feel different (and the temptation to standardise)
25:00 – The Langham takeover: their first hotel partnership and biggest move yet
35:00 – Generational handover: what changed when Bill stepped back
45:00 – Scaling a family business without losing the family feel

Key takeaways:
A family operating philosophy is the hardest thing to scale — and the only thing worth scaling
Standardising venues for efficiency is the fastest way to lose what made you great
The handover from founder to second generation isn't a single day. It's a decade of slow trust.
"Looking after our staff is the way we look after our customers" — get the team right and everything downstream sorts itself out
Family in business is harder than it looks. The conversations you avoid become the bottlenecks.

If you're ready to build a hospitality business that grows without losing what makes it yours, book a free Profit Finding Session with the Foodie Coaches team at https://discover.foodiecoaches.com/bac

Follow Daniel and SRG Hospitality:
@srghospitality
@aquadiningmilsonspoint
@ripplesmilsonspoint

Follow along:
@foodie_coaches
@tim.kummerfeld

New episodes every Wednesday.