The End of Priority.

01 — Priority is out

Here is the shortest sentence in this letter, and the reason I sat down to write it.

The word priority no longer exists in my company.

Not “de-emphasised.” Not “revised.” Retired. I do not want to hear it, I do not want to be asked for one, and I am not going to give one. If I set priorities I am telling the people who run this club — the girls, the entertainment, the hospitality, the welcome, the concierge, the systems behind it — that most of them can go home for the year. That is not what I hired them for.

We are behind the eight ball. We were the number one gentlemen’s club in Bangkok for a decade. We are not right now. Getting there again does not happen by doing one thing at a time — it happens by doing all of it, at once, with the best people I can find on each piece, and me in the middle of it like the maestro of an orchestra. Or a bull in a china shop, on the nights that is what the job needs. Either way — moving. Not queued.

The tools in 2026 can hold that. The people I can hire can hold that. The only thing that cannot hold that is a manager who still thinks his job is to draw a line through the list. That manager is done. I am done being him.

This letter is my case for why anyone still working the old way is going to lose the next ten years to whoever isn’t.

02 — The trap

“What is the priority?” is not a question. It is a trap.

I have fallen into it more times than anyone who works here, so I am the last man entitled to be self-righteous about it. But I know its exact shape now, and I am going to describe it once so that nobody in this company ever walks into it again.

The trap works because the question sounds so reasonable. It arrives in the voice of diligence. It sounds like someone being careful with your money and honest about their capacity, and it puts the entire weight of the problem back on the person who has to answer it.

But look at what has actually happened by the time that question reaches you. Someone has looked at the work, decided privately that not all of it can be done, and is now asking you to agree with them. That is the whole mechanism. The moment you answer, you have agreed. You have taken their limit and made it your strategy, and you have done it while feeling like a decisive leader.

To my managers, plainly: it is going to come to you the way it came to me. From your own staff. From somebody good, somebody tired, somebody you like. Do not fall for it. Do not make my mistake. Do not do them the disservice of accepting the first limit either of you can see.

Say this instead, and mean it: “We are doing all of it. Tell me what stands in the way, and tell me what you need.” Then go and actually find it. Another pair of hands. A freelancer. A tool. An AI agent that works overnight. A supplier who moves faster. A completely different way around the obstacle. The honest answer to “we cannot do all of it” is almost never a ranking — it is nearly always a resource, and in 2026 a resource is two searches and one approval away. You have my approval in advance.

And then the harder half, which I have avoided for years and will not avoid any longer. If someone we work with cannot stop asking that question — after we have said this clearly, once, and offered them what they need to avoid asking it — then they have told us who they are. They have handed us a stop sign where a plan should have been. We should not build the next decade of this club with people whose first instinct is to narrow what we are allowed to want.

The best operators in the world do not take that question from anyone inside their companies. They state the direction and expect the result, and people who can only work in single file do not last there. That is not cruelty. It is respect for the goal — and respect for the guest who does not care which order we did it in.

In 2026, it is not an acceptable question. Not from a vendor, not from a supplier, not from us.

One thing I do not want misread. Be generous with people — genuinely, expensively generous. Pay for the help they need before they have to ask twice. Then be completely immovable about the work. Those two things have never been in conflict. I simply spent years confusing them, and called the confusion kindness.

03 — The honest objection, answered

“So we do everything?” No. We do everything that points the right way.

There is a fair criticism of what I am saying, and I want to answer it before anyone has to raise it in a meeting. If nothing is a priority, does that mean every idea anybody has now gets built? Of course not. That would be a worse company, not a better one.

But the answer is not a ranking. It is a direction.

We do not rank the work. We filter it — and then we run everything that survives the filter, at the same time.

The difference matters more than it sounds. A ranking is a queue, and a queue always has a bottom, and the bottom never gets built. A filter has no bottom. Everything inside it is live.

And the filter is a question of direction, not importance. Elon Musk is not drilling a hole toward the centre of the earth. He would burn up long before he got there, and it would not matter how carefully he had planned it or how hard the team had worked. Effort in the wrong direction is not a lower priority. It is not work at all.

So the test is never how important is this. The test is which way does it point.

He is going up. So are we.

04 — The real reason, plainly

I am not going to run this company forever.

I have avoided writing this part, and then I realised that leaving it out is what makes the rest of the document sound like a management theory instead of the truth.

I am not a young man. I have a certain number of good working years left to do this in. I know roughly what that number is, and it is not large enough to do things one at a time.

That is the actual argument. Everything above it is evidence.

A priority list is a written promise that something will still be unfinished on the day I hand this over.

Think about what a list really is. It is a ranking of what gets done, which means it is also a ranking of what does not. And if I keep one, then the bottom of it is a description of the things I have quietly decided to leave undone — and I will hand somebody a company with that list stapled to it. Here is what we finished. Here is what we always meant to.

I have watched other men do exactly that. I have sat in their offices and listened to them explain the second half of the list. I am not going to be one of them.

What I intend to hand over is finished. Not perfect — finished. Systems that work and are documented. More than one way for this company to make money. People who own their zones and do not need to ask me what matters most, because they already know which way we are pointing. A company back on top, and secure enough to stay there without me.

That is what I want, and I would like to be here to see it. Which is the entire reason I no longer have any patience for the word priority. It is not a plan. It is a way of agreeing, in a friendly and professional tone, that we will run out of time.

So let us not.

05 — The replacement

Three questions. Every project. Every conversation.

Priority is not being replaced with chaos. It is being replaced with something harder and far more useful. From now on, in every conversation about every project that passed the direction test, there are three questions — and only three.

And three things that are not on the list

06 — Why the word stopped working

Priority made sense when resources were physically scarce.

One architect. One production line. One shipment leaving on Friday. In that world, sequencing was the entire job of management, because scarcity was real and sequence was destiny.

That is not the world we operate in. Ten AI sessions can run in parallel on one laptop and produce work overnight. A server exists ninety seconds after you decide you want one. A specification, a set of test cases, a staging deploy and a code review now cost less than the meeting we used to hold to schedule the meeting. The cost of a line of code, a mockup, a migration, a landing page — approaching zero.

What has not changed is the cost of management attention. That is still finite, and that is the whole game.

Every time we hide behind the word priority, we are pretending attention is scarcer than it is, so that we never have to admit the real bottleneck: we had not yet learned how to run more than one thing at a time.

That is the gap this closes. Not more hours. A different machine.

07 — Where I part company with the experts

Everyone else looking at this has drawn the opposite conclusion.

Before anybody tells me this has all been said before, let me be exact about what is mine and what is not.

The history of the word is not mine. The English language kept it singular for five hundred years. Only in the twentieth century did we start talking about priorities, plural, and management has not been able to think straight about the word since. That history is a fact. The conclusion most people draw from it — do less, choose one thing, take them in order — is the respectable modern answer, and it is not the one I am giving.

The diagnosis is not mine either. Everybody who works in software in 2026 will tell you the same thing: building got cheap, and when building gets cheap, strategy gets harder. That part I agree with. It has certainly happened to me.

Here is where I get off the bus. Everyone who has looked at that fact concludes that selection must therefore become sharper — that when building is cheap, choosing is the whole job. I think they stop one step too early. If attention is the last remaining constraint, the answer is not to ration attention more elegantly. It is to build a company that does not require a man standing in the middle of it deciding what matters this week. A ranking is a device for rationing attention. Replace it with a direction and you have removed the reason to ration.

Which brings me to the part I have not seen anyone state plainly, and the reason I am willing to put my name on a page like this. A ranked list is not merely inefficient. It is unsafe. The project that protects you in a bad year is never the most urgent thing on the day you write the list, because urgency belongs to tonight, and there is always a tonight. So the ranking does not delay the defensive business. It guarantees it is never built. That is not a productivity problem. That is how clubs die, and I have watched it happen to better clubs than mine.

I may be wrong about this. I would still rather be wrong having tried to do all of it than right having ranked my way into a smaller life.

08 — Read the whole thing

Two documents. One operating agreement.

The same doctrine, written for the two positions people hold in this company. Read the one that is yours. Read the other one too, so nobody wonders whether this applies to them.

09 — What all of it means

So here is all of it.

This is not a memo about culture in the abstract. It is the list of what we are doing between now and the end of 2027 — and not one thing on it is standing in line behind another.

The club. The walk in off the street through the door into a room a guest never forgets. Light, sound, sixteen VIP rooms, four party rooms, a pool zone that seats a hundred and fifty. Modern décor, high-energy vibe, world-class sound. A guest decides how they feel about us in the first ninety seconds, long before anyone brings them a drink. I want those ninety seconds to be the best in Bangkok — because they already are, on our best nights, and I want every night to be that night.

The entertainment. Live bands every night. Erotic shows Thursday, Friday, Saturday. Themed nights. Top DJs. Two hundred PIMP Girls — the most beautiful models in Thailand, notorious for a reason. World-class entertainment is the phrase our guests use, and I will not settle for anything less than what that phrase promises.

The girls. The roster — depth, quality, freshness. Trained, present, professional. Every PIMP Girl accountable to the club, not to a private list of clients. A guest walks in expecting the best in Asia, and every one of them delivers on that expectation.

The staff. Hosts, floor directors, security, service — hired above our weight and trained properly instead of hoped-at. Attentive without being intrusive. Discreet without being distant. Because we are a home away from home, a safe-haven — that is the promise our regulars have kept coming back to us for since 2011, and it is the promise every new guest is trusting us with the first time they cross the threshold.

The welcome. What happens inside The PIMP stays inside The PIMP. That has always been our rule, and it is the reason the men who matter come back. A guest of ours does not want to be studied and does not want to be catalogued — they want to be received. To be recognised the moment they walk in. To find their bottle already on ice. To be handed the room they prefer without ever having to ask. That is not customer service. That is the whole business. And it is what the next generation of the club is being built to deliver — quietly, invisibly, and without a single guest ever seeing how it is done.

The concierge. Yachts, villas, cars, hotels, private travel — bundled around the club so a guest who wants their night in Bangkok to keep going has one number to call. We are not building a database. We are building a family. The PIMP family.

All six of those are moving right now. Not one of them is queued behind another. Nobody on this team is going to wait eighteen months for their turn and then be told the plan changed.

Because that is the whole point of this letter. The goal was never a tidier list. It is a club that can hold twenty things in the air at once, all pointed the same way, without me standing in the middle of it deciding what matters this week. That club becomes the number one gentlemen’s club in Asia. A club that does one thing at a time does not — no matter how beautifully it ranks the list.

I am not going to work the old way anymore. I do not think you should either.

We dreamed this place into existence once already, and it was famous. Everybody who came in the great years remembers what this club felt like at its best. That version was not a memory. It was a proof. And with what we can now build with — the girls, the entertainment, the rooms, the pool, the family — the next version is bigger than the last, not smaller. I do not have the time left to be modest about it, and I do not intend to be.

Picture the night this is finished. A man walks in off the street in Bangkok who has been to the best clubs in Tokyo, in London, in Dubai. He is received the way our regulars have been received for fifteen years, only faster and warmer. His bottle is on ice at a table nobody had to think about. The show is one he has not seen. The girls are the girls the internet cannot stop talking about. The club remembers him the way a family remembers you when you come home for the holidays. Nobody on the floor is standing in the middle of it deciding what matters. Everybody is already moving. He sits down, and inside ninety seconds the club has told him — without anyone saying it — that this is the best gentlemen’s club in Asia.

That is what we are building. Come see us in Bangkok.