Peter Henley, president and CEO of the Onyx Hospitality Group, came to Hong Kong in the 1990s as a lawyer, but left as something rather different. Born in Venezuela and educated in England from the age of seven, he spent the '90s working for the Holiday Inn in Hong Kong. He started as one of the company's in-house lawyers, but over time shifted into its development department, becoming what he calls a 'development guy'.
Driven by an ambition to become a dotcom billionaire, he left the hotel sector to study an MBA and became an entrepreneur at the age of 40. Unfortunately, things didn't quite work out. Returning to the hotel industry, he joined Raffles Holdings in Singapore, before moving to Morgan Stanley in London to become an investment banker.
In 2008, he was appointed CEO of Onyx with one mission: to take the business to the next level. He explains how, in 10 years, he plans to turn the Thailand-based company into one of the leading hospitality providers in Asia-Pacific.
What is your mission with Onyx?
Onyx is a privately held company that has been owned by a Thai family for 40 years. For 35 of those years, it had the same managing director [Kurt Rufli] and had built up an excellent reputation in Thailand for running very good hotels.
In 2008, I was brought in with a single brief by the family: to take the business to the next level. I spent three months figuring out what the business was right then, and the next five months putting together a plan. The plan was to grow the business from being a Thai-only, single-brand [Amari] company, to become a leading Asian hospitality provider by 2018. We are to grow from a portfolio of 11 properties, all in Thailand, to having 51 properties in nine countries in the Asia-Pacific region within 10 years.