Hayden Pace

Hayden is a hospitality consultant with more than two decades of experience helping hotels, resorts, restaurants, clubs, and other hospitality businesses address complex workforce and operational challenges. His consulting work focuses on wage-and-hour audits and compliance reviews, workplace-practice assessments, labor relations, and training concerning wage and hour, harassment prevention, discrimination, and effective employee relations.

Hayden helps hospitality employers examine their existing practices, identify potential risks, and implement practical improvements suited to the realities of their operations. His experience encompasses the distinctive challenges created by round-the-clock operations, fluctuating staffing demands, decentralized management, and varied compensation models, including tipped employees, service charges, incentive compensation, and overtime.

He also designs and delivers training for executives, human-resources professionals, property leaders, and front-line managers. His programs translate complicated workplace requirements into clear operational guidance, helping leaders make better decisions, strengthen workplace culture, and address employee concerns before they become larger problems. Hayden regularly speaks on hospitality workforce issues and has presented to audiences nationally and internationally.

Before transitioning from legal practice, Hayden spent more than twenty years advising and representing hospitality and entertainment businesses. In 2009, he founded Pace Law, P.C., a boutique firm dedicated to those industries. He later merged his practice with Stokes Wagner, a national hospitality-focused law firm, where he served as Chief Executive Officer. Through that work, he developed a broad perspective on the relationship among hospitality operations, compensation practices, employee relations, organizational culture, and business risk.

Hayden also brings experience as a technology executive, giving him additional insight into how hospitality organizations can use systems, data, and well-designed processes to improve workplace practices and operational decision-making.

Hayden earned his bachelor’s degree in Government from the University of Virginia and his juris doctorate from Emory University School of Law. Born in Northern California and raised in New York’s Hudson Valley, he has worked with hospitality organizations throughout the United States and internationally.