You Never Know Who's Walked Through Your Door Today
Aug 21, 2026
This article touches on themes of domestic and family abuse. If you or someone you know needs support, contact 1800RESPECT on 1800 737 732, available 24/7.
There's a regular at most venues who everyone knows without really knowing. She has the same order, the same table, the same fifteen minutes of small talk with whoever's on shift. Your staff would describe her as lovely, easy, no trouble at all. What none of them can see is what she's walking back into once she leaves, or how long she's been quietly working out when she'll finally have the chance to leave it for good.
I think about this a lot in the context of hospitality, because our industry has a strange advantage that most people never think to use. We see the same faces, at the same times, more consistently than almost anyone else in a person's life outside their own household. A GP sees a patient a few times a year if they're lucky. A hairdresser, every six weeks. Your front desk staff might see someone three times a week for years. That kind of repetition builds a picture nobody else gets to see, and it's exactly why your team is often the first to notice when something in that picture changes.
The Story That Stuck With Me
I recorded an episode recently with Stacy Jane, who founded Escabags after surviving an abusive relationship herself, and one story she told me immediately gave me goosebumps. A Escabags stockist in regional Victoria, a Bendigo Bank branch, had a couple who came in every week for years. Same day, same time, always together. Nobody at that branch ever had reason to think anything was wrong, because on the surface, nothing ever looked wrong.
Then one ordinary Tuesday, the husband stepped outside for a moment, and his wife turned to the woman behind the counter and quietly asked if she could have an escape bag. She was gone before her husband came back.
What strikes me about that story isn't the moment itself. It's everything that had to happen before it for that moment to work. Staff had to know what an escape bag was. They had to have one on hand. They had to be discrete and know how to handle the aftermath. And most importantly, they had to be paying enough attention, over years of routine visits, to understand that this particular request from this particular customer meant something urgent. None of that happens by accident. It happens because a workplace decided in advance that this was worth being ready for.
Readiness Isn't the Same as Training Everyone to Be a Counsellor
There's sometimes a fear in the industry that talking about domestic violence with frontline staff means asking eighteen-year-olds working their first shift to somehow become qualified to handle a disclosure and, understandably, that feels like far too much responsibility to hand someone who's still learning the till system.
That's not actually what's being asked of them, and I think that misunderstanding stops a lot of good intentions from turning into anything real. Nobody needs your bar staff to know how to create a safety plan for a domestic violence situation. What they need is permission and encouragement to notice, and the confidence to say something as simple as "are you alright?" when a regular seems different to how they usually are. That's the entire skill. Noticing a change and making a connection, without needing to solve anything on the spot.
The reason this matters so much is that most people in unsafe situations aren't looking for someone to rescue them. They're looking for one small signal that somebody has noticed, and that if they ever did want to ask for help, it wouldn't be met with awkwardness or a blank stare. A consistent, low-key "how are you going" over months does more than one dramatic, well-meaning intervention ever could, because it tells someone that this is a safe place to eventually say more, whenever they're ready to.
This Has to Be Built Before You Need It
Every leader I've spoken with who's handled one of these situations well says some version of the same thing: they'd already thought about it before it happened. Nobody was improvising in the moment. Somebody, at some point, was prepared for this kind of thing to walk through their door and had made sure the team knew what to do if it did.
That's really a leadership decision more than a training exercise. It's about deciding that your venue is the kind of place where staff are encouraged to pay attention to people rather than just process orders, and where checking in on a regular who seems off isn't seen as overstepping, but as exactly what a good hospitality culture looks like. That has to be modelled from the top. If management treats these conversations as awkward or unnecessary, staff will follow that lead. If leaders treat them as simply part of doing the job properly, so will everyone else.
Practical resources make this a great deal easier to act on. Something like an Escabags stockist relationship means your team isn't left guessing what to actually offer someone in that moment. The resource already exists, sitting on a shelf, ready to go when needed. All that's asked of your staff is the willingness to notice, and the confidence to say something.
What This Comes Down To
You genuinely don't know who's going to walk through your door today. Most days, it's simply your regulars, ordering the usual, and nothing more needs to happen than good service. But every so often, it's someone who's been building up the courage for weeks to ask for help the moment the right opportunity appears, and whether your team is ready for that moment depends entirely on decisions made long before it arrives.
This is exactly the kind of capability I work on with hospitality leaders, not as a single awareness session that gets forgotten by the next roster, but as part of the everyday leadership culture that makes noticing normal. If you'd like to talk through how Middle Management Movement, Executive Leaders Movement, or Leadership Coaching could help your team build this kind of readiness, you'll find all three at https://www.michellepascoe.com/traininganddevelopmentprograms.
And please be sure to watch the full episode with Stacy below.
