Will Guidara: The Leadership Strategy Behind the World’s Best Restaurant | Leadership | E403

One leadership decision helped Will Guidara transform Eleven Madison Park from the lowest-ranked restaurant on the World's 50 Best Restaurants list into the number one restaurant in the world. While most businesses competed on products, pricing, and technology, Will became obsessed with something most companies overlook: how people feel. In this episode, Will shares his philosophy of unreasonable hospitality and reveals why customer experience is a powerful business advantage. He explains the leadership skills, strategic planning, and team-building principles that empower employees to create unforgettable moments and build the kind of customer loyalty that drives business growth. In this episode, Hala and Will will discuss: (00:00) Introduction (02:02) The Role of AI in the Hospitality Business (05:07) Service vs. Hospitality: The Key Difference (10:49) Going from Last Place to Number One (14:55) Mapping Every Customer Touchpoint (21:58) Turning Transactions Into Unforgettable Experiences (28:27) Balancing Excellence and Hospitality (33:50) Building Team Culture With Shared Language (37:48) Will’s Hospitality Catchphrases (46:36) Scaling Hospitality Through Pattern Recognition (54:31) How Leaders Can Empower Their Teams (01:03:15) Turning Business Mistakes Into Loyalty (01:08:03) Giving Feedback and Inspiring Teams Will Guidara is a restaurateur, speaker, and bestselling author of Unreasonable Hospitality. As the former co-owner of Eleven Madison Park, he helped lead the restaurant to three Michelin stars and the title of World’s Best Restaurant. His work has since redefined hospitality as a core leadership and business strategy across industries. Will is also a co-producer on the Emmy Award-winning series The Bear. Sponsored By: Indeed - Get a $75 sponsored job credit to boost your job's visibility at Indeed.com/profiting Shopify - Start your $1/month trial at Shopify.com/profiting. Quo - Run your business communications the smart way. Try Quo for free, plus get 20% off your first 6 months when you go to quo.com/profiting Remitly - Transfer money internationally across 100+ currencies with no hidden fees. Download the Remitly app or visit remitly.com to get started. Use code BUSINESS to get a $100 bonus after you send $300 or more. New customers only. Prolon - Reset your body with Prolon’s five-day plant-based program. Go to ProlonLife.com/PROFITING for 15% off sitewide plus a $40 bonus gift when you subscribe to their 5-Day Program. Northwest Registered Agent - Get a complete business identity with Northwest. Visit northwestregisteredagent.com/YAPFree and start using free resources to build something amazing. Cash App - If you’ve been curious about bitcoin but haven’t made the jump yet, Cash App makes it easy. Sign up at https://click.cash.app/ui6m/qmgmlraz For a limited time, new customers can get $10 added to their balance. Just use code CASHAPP10 when you sign up, and—don’t forget this part—send at least $5 to a friend in the first two weeks. Terms apply. Cash App is a financial services platform, not a bank. Banking services provided by Cash App’s bank partner(s). Bitcoin services provided by Block, Inc. brand. For additional information, see the Bitcoin disclosures at cash.app/legal/podcast Resources Mentioned: Will’s Book, Unreasonable Hospitality: bit.ly/WG-UHosp Will’s Book, The Field Guide: bit.ly/WG-FieldGuide Will’s Website: unreasonablehospitality.com Will’s Instagram: instagram.com/wguidara/ Will’s LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/willguidara/ Active Deals - youngandprofiting.com/deals Key YAP Links Reviews - ratethispodcast.com/yap YouTube - youtube.com/c/YoungandProfiting Newsletter - youngandprofiting.co/newsletter LinkedIn - linkedin.com/in/htaha/ Instagram - instagram.com/yapwithhala/ Social + Podcast Services: yapmedia.com Transcripts - youngandprofiting.com/episodes-new Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneurship Podcast, Business, Business Podcast, Self Improvement, Self-Improvement, Personal Development, Starting a Business, Strategy, Investing, Sales, Selling, Psychology, Productivity, Entrepreneurs, AI, Artificial Intelligence, Technology, Marketing, Negotiation, Money, Finance, Side Hustle, Startup, Mental Health, Career, Leadership, Mindset, Health, Growth Mindset, Networking, Goal Setting, Time Management, Problem Solving, Decision Making

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Hala Taha?

  Today's episode is sponsored in part by HeyGen, Shopify, Life at the Speed of Play, and Indeed. HeyGen helps you create AI avatar videos without constantly being behind the camera. Get your first three videos free at heygen.com/profitting. Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you grow your business. Start your $1 per month trial at Shopify.com/profitting. Life at the Speed of Play by Mark Pincus helps entrepreneurs quickly test ideas and find the ones worth pursuing. Get two books for the price of one at GetMark'sBook.com/Yap. Indeed helps you attract, interview, and hire all in one place. Get a $75 sponsored job credit to boost your job's visibility at Indeed.com/podcast.

• 0:45Hala Taha?

  As always, you can find all of our incredible deals in the show notes or at YoungAndProfiting.com/deals.

• 0:52Speaker 01

  If you come into my business and you have a good time, you're going to talk about it a bit. If you come in and you have a bad time, you're going to talk about it a lot more. If you come in and you have a bad time, though, and I do whatever it takes to turn it around, that's the experience you're going to talk about the most.

• 1:09Hala Taha?

  Our guest today is Will Gidara. He's the genius who turned 11 Madison Park into the number one restaurant in the world. But this conversation is not just about fine dining. It's about why the future of business belongs to the founders who know how to make people feel seen, valued, and remembered.

• 1:26Speaker 01

  So many people reserve their best efforts for consistency and excellence and don't invest nearly enough into those things that actually will lead to the kind of memories that people can hold on to. I just think you're leaving way too much opportunity on the table.

• 1:40Hala Taha?

  Help us understand, like, what are some of the touchpoints that we really need to pay attention to that our clients are going to remember?

• 1:46Speaker 01

  If you have an office, the touchpoints don't just start the moment someone walks through the door. What happens when they park in the parking lot? What happens when they walk through the door? What happens when they're going up the elevator? Those are the moments that no one else has ever really thought about, and that's why you can make an impact.

• 2:02Hala Taha?

  And like in agency business, what are some creative ways that we can give somebody the bill without having a bad experience?

• 2:10Speaker 01

  The way I talk about it is like...

• 2:18Hala Taha?

  What's up, young and profiteers? Today, we're talking about a massive business cheat code that most entrepreneurs completely ignore, and that's hospitality. And if this is your first time with us as the hospitable host that I am, consider this your official welcome. Make sure you follow the podcast, subscribe on YouTube, and join us every week for conversations that help you profit in every sense of the word. Well, welcome to Young and Profiting Podcast.

• 2:46Speaker 01

  Thank you so much. I'm thrilled to be here.

• 2:48Hala Taha?

  I am so looking forward to this conversation. I feel like there's so much for our young and profiteers to learn about unreasonable hospitality. So AI is obviously taking over. I can't stop hearing news about layoffs and, and jobs being automated and business for entrepreneurs is better than ever in terms of AI and we're getting so much efficiency. But we are losing that human connection in all of it. So I'd love to understand from you why hospitality is more important than ever.

• 3:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, it's interesting and we can get into this a little bit later. One of the questions I get most often is centered around this idea that AI is antithetical to hospitality. And I actually don't believe that's true. I think AI is a tool and it can be used to make us more hospitable. But you're correct. AI is just almost an exclamation point in a sentence that's been getting written for a while that is bringing us further apart from one another and is lessening the amount of human connection and interaction that exists. I see that as an opportunity. Listen, luxury effectively implies scarcity.

• 4:05Speaker 01

  And I think that human connection, the people that make the choice to make their experiences as human as humanly possible, will soon be the most luxurious among us. And I think this is just a moment where it's more important than ever to fully lean into these ideas to seize on every opportunity. To make people feel seen, to give them a general sense of connection to us and the products we serve. And those that do it well, I believe will be the winners.

• 4:35Hala Taha?

  I totally agree. And as I was reading your book, I know a lot of your experiences in the restaurant business, but it couldn't help but apply the things that I was learning in your book to my own business and to so many other industries. So tell us why hospitality doesn't only have to do with the restaurant or hotel industries.

• 4:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's kind of remarkable. The book has been out for about four years. And at this point, I spend much more time with companies not traditionally in what we've always called hospitality than I do with those that are. Here's the reality. America's economy, it was once a manufacturing economy. Now it is a service economy. More than three quarters of our GDP is driven by services, industries. And therefore, statistically speaking, we actually do the same thing for a living. We are in the business of serving other people. We may just serve them different things. And if you engage with other human

• 5:36Speaker 01

  beings, you have an opportunity to make the choice to be in the hospitality industry simply by deciding to invest as much of yourself, to be as creative, as intentional in pursuit of how you make people feel as anyone who has achieved any level of success invariably already is in pursuit of the product they're selling.

• 5:58Hala Taha?

  So we are all in the business of people, which I love. I love that quote from you. And a lot of people think hospitality is just service, like doing your service well, doing your service excellent. But you make a real case that service and hospitality are not one and the same. Can you explain that?

• 6:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think far too many people conflate them as meaning the same thing. And in fact, I believe that the companies who understand they are different have an unfair competitive advantage. Service is the thing that you do, right? In a restaurant, everyone can relate. We've all been to restaurants. That is getting the right plate of food to the right person within the right amount of time. Hospitality is how you make that person feel. Whether through just unique bespoke gestures or through things as simple as being present and maintaining eye contact and slowing down for long enough to actually listen and care

• 7:01Speaker 01

  about the individual. Back in the day when I still used a script during interviews, one of my favorite questions was that, what's the difference between service and hospitality? And the greatest answer I ever got was service is black and white. Hospitality is color. Hospitality is how you turn a transaction into a memory. And when you do that, yeah, to say what I've already said, I really do believe it's the greatest competitive advantage any business can have.

• 7:33Hala Taha?

  I remember reading your book where you kind of talk about a story in the book where, you know, you had a really sick mother who ended up passing away and your father still kept a reservation at a restaurant. And that was one of your first exposures to really great hospitality. Can you tell us that story and how you started to get a love for learning how to have better hospitality?

• 7:58Speaker 01

  It was probably two weeks after I graduated college. My mother, who was sick for a lot of my young life, finally passed the day after I graduated college. And that summer, I was meant to go to Spain to study. And I almost canceled it, but then I decided not to. And the dinner that my dad and I had the night before I left was at a restaurant called Daniel. And Danielle is the flagship restaurant of a chef named Danielle Balloud. Anyone who really follows restaurants would would know that name. He's one of the greats. And it was actually me that had made the reservation. Danielle had been a guest chef at Cornell, where I was a student.

• 8:41Speaker 01

  And he and I had established a rapport and he invited me in. So I say that because it was the first time in my life I got to take my dad out for dinner, which is always a special moment when you get to reverse roles and and show your parent something that they wouldn't have experienced themselves. And we went there and we walked into the restaurant, through the bar, through the dining room. They walked us into the kitchen, up to this special little private room that overlooked the kitchen. There was a table for two. Danielle himself served us, it must have been 12 courses. Explained everyone himself, stayed until the very end of the meal, toured us around, and there was no check.

• 9:25Speaker 01

  It was a remarkable, over the top, fancier than anything I'd ever experienced evening. And yet, that's not why I remember it. I don't remember any individual bite of food we ate. What I remember is that through the unbelievable amount of care that they extended to us, in the midst of the saddest season of my life, my dad and I had one of the greatest nights of our lives. I talk often about how there is nobility in serving other people. I think it's an important thing to name because absent the acknowledgement that what you do matters, it's impossible to bring your most fully realized self to the job,

• 10:10Speaker 01

  especially in the hard days. And I talk about in restaurants, we have the opportunity to help people celebrate. But that night showed me how we also have the ability to give them the grace to forget, to put the world on pause, if only for a few hours. And how through hospitality, and this is true not just in restaurants, but across industries, we can create our own little magical worlds in a world that needs more magic.

• 10:39Speaker 01

  And that night was one of the first times I experienced that.

• 10:42Hala Taha?

  When people think of hospitality, a lot of the times that they're thinking of like very fancy, very expensive things. But there was a moment in that meal where you dropped your napkin and the waiter picked it up or gave you a new one and called you sir.

• 10:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, that I mean, there's these little moments, right? And by the way, that is likely also true in a fancy restaurant. Probably someone's not bringing you a fresh napkin at a Chick-fil-A. But I think what you're alluding to is this idea that hospitality doesn't exist at a certain price point. I've experienced remarkable hospitality in on a Southwest Airlines flight. I've experienced it at a UPS store. All it requires is making the choice to be a bit more thoughtful.

• 11:36Hala Taha?

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• 12:16Hala Taha?

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• 12:44Hala Taha?

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• 13:27Hala Taha?

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• 13:54Hala Taha?

  Hello, young improfitters. If you're running a business, getting website traffic is only half the battle. The real key to profiting is turning those visitors into paying customers. And I know checkout friction can quietly kill your sales. That's why I always say, "Serious entrepreneurs build on Shopify." Shopify is a commerce platform that helps you launch and run an online store without needing to be super technical. You can build your storefront, manage your business, and make it easy for people to buy. And here's the major advantage. Shopify Checkout with Shop Pay converts up to 36% higher than the competition. With Black Friday coming up, now's the time to get your store ready and simplify your checkout experience. If you're ready to launch your business before Black Friday,

• 14:38Hala Taha?

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• 14:50Hala Taha?

  That's Shopify.com/profitting. We'll talk all about how to get our employees more on board with hospitality and what we can do as leaders. But first, I want to keep digging on your story. So I also learned that you were part of a competition where you were named number 50 out of all the restaurants. And in the actual event, 50 was last. So you weren't feeling very great about that. And that actually gave you the motivation or the idea to kind of focus on hospitality and people and differentiate your your restaurants in that way. Can you talk to us about that?

• 15:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. So what you're referencing is years after I started at Eleven Madison Park, I began there as an employee, then I was able to buy the restaurant. And when I got there, it was a middling brosserie in New York City. The food was good, but it wasn't great. The service was friendly, but not very precise. But gosh, our dining room, it was one of the most beautiful in the world. And I was brought in as a part of the team that was charged with elevating the experience. And understandably, the beginning, we did that through a pursuit of excellence in the product. Right? We hired better cooks, we sourced better ingredients, we removed tables from the rooms, so we could deliver a better experience to fewer people. We purchased fancier

• 16:10Speaker 01

  glasses and silverware. We were relentless in pursuit of excellence. And within a few years, that started to pay off. We went from two stars in the New York Times to three stars to four stars. We got three Michelin stars. And then one day, I was invited to London for the ceremony of the 50 best restaurants in the world, which is kind of the pinnacle in in fine dining restaurants. And yeah, to your point, we got there, very excited about where in the list we were going to fall, and we came in last place.

• 16:44Speaker 01

  Now, in the moment, I was very, very disappointed. I was embarrassed. Some people challenged that. They say you're one of the best in the world. Why were you angry? That's just the way I look at the world. If I'm going to play a game, I want to win the game.

• 17:00Speaker 01

  But gosh, I look back on that moment with gratitude now. One of my favorites of my dad's quotes is that adversity is a terrible thing to waste. We cannot always control what life throws at us, but we can control how we respond to those moments. And that night, I left the party early, went back to the hotel and started processing what was next for us.

• 17:27Speaker 01

  Every time I set out to achieve a seemingly audacious goal, I always like to start by studying those who've accomplished it before me, learning what I can from them, taking those ideas, making them my own, and then having a go at it. And every restaurant that had been number one on that list was run by chefs, chefs who were unreasonable in pursuit of the food. They were serving their product and relentless in pursuit of innovation. I think oftentimes when we're growing a business, we look at others who are successful and we benchmark ourselves against them. What are they doing well so that we can start doing those things well? And that's important. Although I think there's just as much wisdom in reverse benchmarking, looking at the things

• 18:08Speaker 01

  that your competitors are not focusing on and making the choice to go like fully into those ideas. In that room, I was the only dining room guy. I was the only hospitality person. And so literally that same night, I wrote on a cocktail napkin, "We will be number one in the world." But a goal without a strategy is nothing more than a pipe dream. I needed to identify our impact. And so if they were unreasonable in pursuit of product, we were going to be unreasonable in pursuit of people. And if they were unreasonable in pursuit of change, we were going to be, but in pursuit of the one thing that would never change, which is to the point of how we started the conversation.

• 18:54Speaker 01

  Our collective human desire to feel seen, to feel cared for, to be welcomed. And so it was that night underneath, we will be number one in the world, that I wrote those two words, unreasonable hospitality.

• 19:06Hala Taha?

  What was one of the first things that you went and did in your restaurant to look at like, okay, where are the gaps in hospitality and how can I start to fill those gaps? Like, how did you start to evaluate your first steps to improve your hospitality?

• 19:19Speaker 01

  Well, the first thing I did was I made sure that it wasn't just me doing it. There's a retired naval captain named David Marquet, who famously said that in most organizations, the people at the top have all the authority, while the people on the frontline have all the information.

• 19:35Speaker 01

  I don't think you can do anything of significance, especially as it pertains to how you serve your end users, absent bridging the gap between authority and information. And so I came back and I told the team, we're going to be number one. I told them, we're going to do it through hospitality. And then I invited them to sit with me so we collectively could figure out how we were going to get there.

• 19:59Speaker 01

  In the beginning, we all worked together on what felt the most obvious, right? Looking at the experience we were serving and trying to figure out how to make it more hospitable. And gosh, we did some pretty cool innovations around how we welcomed people through the door, how we took their orders, how we delivered their food. But one day I had a moment of realization that we were focusing only on the most obvious touchpoints in the experience, which by definition were the same ones our competitors were focusing on. Something I've come to realize, not just in the years I spent owning and operating those restaurants, but in the years since, as I've gotten to work with leading companies across pretty much every industry, is that very few companies actually know what every

• 20:43Speaker 01

  touchpoint in the experience is, what every moment of interaction is, because people don't slow down for long enough to genuinely understand the experience they are serving.

• 20:56Speaker 01

  And so one day, we closed the restaurant. We brought in the entire team. And we did an exercise that I now call an interrogation of the customer experience, where over the first few hours, we isolated in excruciating detail, every single touch point, every moment of interaction, so that we could then start isolating as many of them as possible. And we did really cool innovations around what happened when you washed your hands in the bathroom? How did we deliver the check to you? What would happen if someone stepped outside and had a cigarette in the midst of their meal? I found when you invest even the smallest amount of creativity

• 21:39Speaker 01

  into the more overlooked moments in an experience, it can have a significant impact on the experience as a whole. Because, well, it's you saying very clearly to the people you're serving, we're willing to care about things that no one else has ever paused for long enough to consider. I think about it like when it comes to a real estate agent, right? Like every time I bought or rented a new apartment, at the end, there's a little note with a bottle of sparkling wine as the thank you gift. That is a touch point, one that no one has approached with any creativity. This is someone who I've spent months with.

• 22:22Speaker 01

  If they were actually getting to know me, they could give me a gift that actually showed me they cared enough to listen and then do something with what they heard. And the amount of a bond I'd feel would result in the kind of loyalty that would last a lifetime. So that was step one, just looking at every little detail and figuring out how to make as many of them just a little more awesome, honestly.

• 22:48Hala Taha?

  I feel like that is such a great idea for all businesses. Like immediately, I'm like, okay, I want to get my team together and think of every single touch point. And there's certain touch points that you mentioned that are sort of unobvious that you don't think about. And touch points that have a lot of friction, like getting paid always has a lot of friction and could really break or make the customer experience. So help us understand, like, what are some of the touch points that we really need to pay attention to that our clients are going to remember?

• 23:17Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, listen, when I, when I talk about isolating every single touch point, I think people, if you just run that process once, you will not come even close to identifying all of the opportunities. Every time I've sat down with a team to do this exercise, they, on the first pass name, about half of the touch points. Because it's when you actually start to get more granular that the opportunity really arises. If you have an office, the touch points don't just start the moment someone walks through the door. What happens when they park in the parking lot? What happens when they walk through the door? What happens when they're going up the elevator? Those are the moments that no one else has ever really thought about, and that's why you can make an impact.

• 23:59Speaker 01

  And so my first answer to your question, where can you make the most impact? Is in the little moments that people would never expect you to invest any energy.

• 24:11Hala Taha?

  And your competitors are certainly not thinking about it.

• 24:13Speaker 01

  And the competitors certainly aren't. Like, one of the examples I love to use is Five Guys. If I ever ask a room full of people, what do you think of when you think of Five Guys? Half of the room will always say peanuts. Why? Because Five Guys, of all the fast food chains that are out there, is the only one I know of that had the wherewithal to recognize that the time spent waiting for your food to be cooked is a touch point in the experience. And they're the only ones to have done anything with it. Now, say what you will about what they do, they put out the peanuts, you eat them while you wait. Maybe it's for generosity's sake, or to make the wait go by more quickly, or maybe it's to warn you that their fries are cooked in peanut oil. Whatever the reason, it doesn't matter.

• 24:56Speaker 01

  They're doing something where no one else has done anything, which I'd argue gives them an unfair competitive advantage. Mm hmm. The second category of if you're trying to just do a couple to make the biggest impact, there's a rule that was conceived years ago. It's called the peak end rule. And it really talks about how we remember experiences. And the two moments in an experience that most dictate our memory of it is the peak and the end. The peak, meaning the furthest deviation from zero, for better or worse. And then the very end. Now, as it pertains to the peak, why I love that is because if you mess up, all you need

• 25:38Speaker 01

  to do is recover in a way that's more significant than the mess up. And then obviously, it means you need to stick the landing. That whatever the end of the experience is, make sure you get that right. And by the way, in most experiences, the ending is kind of the worst. It's when you send someone the bill. Yep. Or they're left to leave on their own. And yeah, we can extend the ending.

• 26:03Hala Taha?

  Hello, young and profiteers. If you're running a business, getting website traffic is only half the battle. The real key to profiting is turning those visitors into paying customers. And I know checkout friction can quietly kill your sales. That's why I always say, serious entrepreneurs build on Shopify. Shopify is a commerce platform that helps you launch and run an online store without needing to be super technical. You can build your storefront, manage your business, and make it easy for people to buy. And here's the major advantage. Shopify Checkout with Shop Pay converts up to 36% higher than the competition. With Black Friday coming up, now's the time to get your store ready and simplify your checkout experience.

• 26:48Hala Taha?

  If you're ready to launch your business before Black Friday, go to Shopify.com/profitting to start your free trial. That's Shopify.com/profitting. Go to Shopify.com/profitting today to hear your first

• 27:05Hala Taha?

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• 29:16Hala Taha?

  I'd love to stick on this, like paying the bill with your restaurants. You've got the story about serving cognac at the end because you can't really guess when to give the check and it makes sure that they're not rushed. And they get some sort of a gift. So I'd love for you to tell that story. And then I'd love to understand in like an agency business or in a business outside of the restaurant business, like what are some creative ways that we can give somebody the bill without having a bad experience?

• 29:44Speaker 01

  The check is a hard part in the experience to get right.

• 29:49Speaker 01

  First, because I think it's just a timing issue, right? Like, everyone has this in common, whether they realize it or not. People get very impatient the moment they ask for the bill. If it takes too long for the restaurant to give it to you, the meal's kind of ruined. At the same time, I can't drop it on your table because as you said, you think I'm trying to rush you out. It's especially hard in a fine dining restaurant because let's name it, it's a big bill. And the moment you realize how much the meal cost, it's a little bit harder to still love what you've just had. For those reasons, no innovation. But once we'd written it down, we had the opportunity to make it better. This is what we came up with. If you were in my restaurant, I knew you were done. You hadn't asked the check yet, but it was clear to me that you were done.

• 30:32Speaker 01

  I'd go over to your table with a glass for you and whoever you were dining with, and an entire bottle of cognac. And I'd pour just a splash of cognac into each of your glasses and say, "Thank you for joining us," a little something with my compliments. In fact, I'm going to leave the entire bottle here. Please help yourselves to as much as you'd like. And then I'd put the check down and say, "Your check is here, ready whenever you are." It might sound like a small change, but the impact was profound. First, no one ever had to wait for their check again. Second, no one could ever think I was trying to rush them out. I just gave you an entire bottle of free booze. It didn't cost us very much. Rarely did anyone drink more than that first splash we poured into their glasses.

• 31:16Speaker 01

  And yet, at the moment where we brought over a big bill, we matched it with a gesture of profound generosity, keeping the value proposition intact. Press my favorite part. Listen, I don't care what you do for a living. If you want to make the experience feel genuinely hospitable, we need to find creative ways to make it feel, even in the slightest of ways, like you've just invited somebody to your house for dinner. One of my favorite parts when I have people to mine is that moment at the end of the night where there's just a couple people left and someone grabs that last half empty bottle of wine and pours the remains into the remaining people's glasses. At the end of an evening where I had served your every need with unbelievable attentiveness. I gave you and your friend the opportunity to serve one another.

• 32:02Speaker 01

  All because we wrote this down and decided to make it matter. In terms of how I've seen this manifest in other worlds. I mean, one story I just heard recently, it was from a big, one of the, one of the top four law firms in America. And they're really spending a lot of time with my book. And the cognac thing was something they resonated with, and this is what they came up with. Anyone who's ever dealt with lawyers knows that the bills can sometimes be rather big.

• 32:31Speaker 01

  And you never know it until you open the bill. And so this has happened to me before where I'm with my family or something and I make the mistake of opening up an email, clicking on the link, seeing a very large number and then suddenly like not even being the slightest bit present with my people anymore because I'm thinking about them. They just started calling their people or leaving a voice note saying, hey, your bill is going to go out tomorrow. It's a big one. Open it when you're ready to open it and I'm here to talk about it. But I just want to make sure it doesn't catch you off, off balance or if you weren't expecting it. I do think setting expectations is a beautiful expression of hospitality and that's such

• 33:15Speaker 01

  a small thing that they did, but I think it actually shows that they care, that they're not just flippant about putting this giant bill in, in your inbox, that they recognize that money is real, it's important, and they care about how you receive information like that.

• 33:33Hala Taha?

  As I was thinking through like, what do we do in my business? Something that we did a few years ago, so I have two parts of my business. I have a social media podcast agency that's like a retainer business where people have monthly services. Then I have a podcast network, which is a rev share. So the rev share one's really nice because I'm paying people. So they're getting more money than we are. So they're totally happy. That's never an issue because we're paying people, right? But on the retainer side of the business, one thing that really helped us was setting up Auto ACH. So instead of us having to send invoices every month where they're like reminded, it's just like an automatic payment and we're kind of aligned from the start. And an idea that I have after reading your book is like, well, maybe we should also, you know, every

• 34:17Hala Taha?

  month send like our wins for the month so that they just like keep, keep reiterating all the value that we created that month or anything new that we implemented. That's an additional value add because I'm always like adding new things to their services where they might not even realize that we've made these improvements.

• 34:34Speaker 01

  You know, another thing, this is also restaurants, but I think the lesson is valuable. Cornell University, I have no idea why they did this, but they ran a study. They compared a thousand diners that give a mint with the bill, you know, the little red and white mints that you get at a diner, to a thousand diners that don't. The ones that did on average had 18% higher tips than the ones that didn't, which is wild to me and proof that generosity begets generosity. And by the way, asymmetrically, the value of the tips far exceeded the cost of the mints. More often than not, if you give a little bit, you will get a lot more in return. And the reason I bring that up with you, whether this makes sense for your

• 35:17Speaker 01

  business or for someone who is listening and to their business, like when you're making the ask for someone to pay their bill, find an opportunity to give them something at the exact same moment. Mix generosity into the transaction.

• 35:33Hala Taha?

  Yeah, like giving good and bad news at the same time to kind of soften the blow a little bit. So for a lot of people tuning in, they're perfectionists. They are operators. You know, oftentimes there's a person in the business who's more of like the operator and then there's the visionary. The operator folks can get really obsessed with excellence and doing everything perfect and following every step in the process. And sometimes that can really You know, contrast with being super hospitable, right? Can you talk to us about the tension between excellence and hospitality?

• 36:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, they're they're not friends.

• 36:12Speaker 01

  There is tension between them, and yet I would argue that the most successful among us, our success comes because of that tension, not in spite of it. The way I talk about it is like, listen, I am about as controlling and OCD and obsessive about details as anyone that you need to be in order to to get three Michelin stars and to thrive in that environment. And yet, I also understand very, very deeply that

• 36:43Speaker 01

  no team will ever rise to its most fully realized potential unless the people on that team are genuinely empowered. Those two things don't go to well, go that well together, empowerment and control, right? They're opposites. And yet, if you can make the choice to hold both of them, to decide what absolutely needs to be consistent and systemized and done the exact same way every single time, and where there are opportunities to let your team run, recognizing that they are the ones that actually know the people you're serving in a way that you never can. There's too many customers as opposed to one leader at the top.

• 37:25Speaker 01

  Now, in empowering, you create cultures of hospitality, but in relinquishing control, you are giving up a little bit on excellence. Yet, it is the winning formula. My favorite quote is by Maya Angelou. It's one that I'd imagine many people have heard. It is, "People will forget what you said, they'll forget what you did, but they will never forget how you made them feel." And by the way, I believe that to be so very true. When I think about the experiences that linger with me, it's never about some technical element of the product or service. It's about something that a human being did for me that made me feel seen or gave me a sense of belonging.

• 38:09Speaker 01

  And yet with the idea, or I believe most people would agree with that, just to be clear. Like, most people, when I talk to them, I think that's pretty true.

• 38:19Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 38:20Speaker 01

  And yet, in spite of how true it is, so many people reserve their best efforts for consistency and excellence and don't invest nearly enough into those things that actually will lead to the kind of memories that, that people can hold on to. And so for those who are operators who are so concerned with excellence, they, they rebuke hospitality, I, I just think you're, you're leaving way too much opportunity on the table.

• 38:43Hala Taha?

  One of the questions that you repeatedly ask in your field guide is, how do you want to make people feel, right? How do you want to make people feel? So what do you suggest are the feelings we should try to create with our customers and our employees as well?

• 38:59Speaker 01

  I mean, the reason I ask it a lot in the field guide, and the whole idea of the field guide is that I think that nothing can be great unless it's an authentic representation of the person behind it. And so I want people to answer that question themselves, so that what they're serving is sincere. And so I can tell you my answers, and I will, but I think that the better approach is, whether you are a customer of your own business, we are all customers of other people's businesses every single day. We know what bad service feels like. We know what bad hospitality feels like. It's so easy for us to judge how other people approach their work, and it's also easy for

• 39:43Speaker 01

  us to know how we want them to make us feel. And yet, so few of us actually pause to articulate that enough that we can ensure we are making other people feel that way. And so I think one of the best approaches is to say, how do you want other businesses to make you feel? And are you being intentional enough in how you run your business to make sure that you're making your customers feel that way? But my answers to the question?

• 40:12Speaker 01

  I mean, I want to feel heard with a business. Like, how many times have I called to complain? And I feel like the person I'm complaining to, not only do they not care, but it doesn't even feel like they're listening. I want to feel seen. I want to know that I'm not just another customer, but I am Will. And the people who I am giving a lot of money to actually recognize me as an individual. I want to feel cared for. I want to know that people are going to try a little bit harder to make sure that I'm leaving that experience happy.

• 40:53Speaker 01

  And I want to feel welcomed.

• 40:56Speaker 01

  And if I can do those things for everyone that walks through the doors of my business, I'm pretty sure I'll win.

• 41:03Hala Taha?

  So let's move on to talk about how to really rally our teams and our employees to also have this shared motive of being more hospitable with our clients. One of the things that you talk about often is having a shared language. And you come up with like a lot of like catchphrases and phrases to identify ways to make change and impact on your team. Talk to us about just first, the importance of a shared language with a team.

• 41:31Speaker 01

  I think it's important just to pause for a moment and talk about the importance of communication, just more globally. You know, actions speak louder than words. Yes, and also words matter. And one of the most powerful things a leader can do to evolve a culture is to, with frequency, speak with every ounce of their passion about the things that matter to them. And we had a meeting in our restaurant called pre-meal. It's the 30-minute meeting we have every day before we open the doors and go into service. Other businesses would call that meeting their daily huddle. Many businesses have it, most approach it incorrectly, where they spend the entire

• 42:16Speaker 01

  meeting talking about operational concerns, ideas that could easily be communicated via an email. And yet, listen, it does not matter how well-trained your team is. If they're not inspired to want to do the job well, they're never going to do it at the highest level possible.

• 42:36Speaker 01

  The reality is, is that we all need inspiration. We crave it. I think the reason TED Talks are so popular is because a lot of people out there have no one in their life who's answered the call to inspire them. So they literally are farming it out to the internet. I think one of the most powerful things a leader can do is decide what their non-negotiables are, decide what they want to stand for as a business, decide what their why is. And then every day, if possible, speak with passion about those ideas because passion is contagious. And the more passionate you are, the more passionate the people around you will become. What gets talked about is what gets thought about.

• 43:20Speaker 01

  And I think we grossly underestimate the power of words. Now, as it pertains to an internal shared language, this is something I learned from my longtime boss, Danny Meyer. When I graduated from school, a lot of my friends went to work with big hotel chains or consulting groups. And they always said that I worked for a cult. Because Danny was really good with the is like ism. The one and true, the swan, charitable assumption, all these little phrases that he came up with and we learned and would say over and over and over again. So they thought I worked for a cult. I've come to believe that if you call another company a cult,

• 44:05Speaker 01

  it probably means that you just don't work in an environment that has a well-established culture.

• 44:12Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 44:12Speaker 01

  Isms, this internal language, I think is a powerful thing to do, to decide what matters to you. Articulate these ideas in short, succinct ways and make them a part of the fabric of your organization. Because when you have this language that only you and your colleagues speak, it brings a closeness. And as a leader, every time you create one, it's you saying very clearly to the people on your team, this matters to me. And so by definition, it needs to matter to you as well.

• 44:45Hala Taha?

  Yeah, I feel like it's those isms that are really going to create a movement because they're memorable. Everyone can align to them there. It's clear, you know, what's important to the business. And especially in difficult moments, they kind of have a guiding star of like what they're supposed to do. So I thought we could do something fun with this. You've got lots of awesome catchphrases in your book, whether you made them up or you learned them from somebody. So I'm gonna rattle them off and then I'd love for you to tell me like, what does this mean? Why is it important? And hopefully it inspires people of how to make changes in their business. Okay, first one, the name of your book, Unreasonable Hospitality.

• 45:19Speaker 01

  Unreasonable Hospitality means that

• 45:23Speaker 01

  everyone who has achieved anything of significance, whether you're looking at engineers or designers or athletes or directors, they are all unreasonable in pursuit of bringing the most fully realized version of their product to life. Unreasonable hospitality is bringing that same level of relentlessness, but simply focusing it in pursuit of other people.

• 45:49Hala Taha?

  Constant gentle pressure.

• 45:52Speaker 01

  That one's from Danny Meyer. This idea that

• 45:58Speaker 01

  gosh, it doesn't matter where you are within a hierarchy. You can affect change through constant gentle pressure, through deciding this matters enough for me to push the issue. But change only happens when you're pushing constantly and gently. The consistency, meaning that sometimes just persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. And the gentleness so that you're not just annoying everyone around you and you can actually invite them to believe in what you believe.

• 46:32Hala Taha?

  Be the swan.

• 46:34Speaker 01

  Hmm. That is especially true in restaurants, but I think it can find its way into so many other environments. When you watch a swan on top of the water, they're just gliding. But underneath their feet are kicking like crazy. It's about this idea that we need to walk through life with composure and grace, but never at the expense of working our tails off to continue moving in the right direction.

• 47:03Hala Taha?

  Athletic hospitality.

• 47:05Speaker 01

  There's this idea.

• 47:08Speaker 01

  We used to say, and this was back in the George W. Bush era, we came up with like almost as a humorous ism or riff on it. No guest left behind. That no matter what, if we messed up with someone, we were going to fight to turn them around before they left. I like to gamify everything and I look at hospitality as a passion, but also a game that you can win. And if someone comes in and they're in a bad mood, or they're not looking to love us, or they're just that difficult customer that everyone who's ever run a business has experience with. Let's make it a game.

• 47:49Speaker 01

  And let's try to make sure that we are the one group of people that can make them happy.

• 47:55Hala Taha?

  Make the charitable assumption.

• 47:58Speaker 01

  That's another Danny one.

• 48:02Speaker 01

  And I think it's so powerful.

• 48:05Speaker 01

  The charitable assumption is another way of saying, give people the benefit of the doubt. And by the way, this applies to leadership and service, but let's use service as an example. If someone comes into the restaurant and they're acting like a jerk, it's totally reasonable to decide that they no longer deserve our best hospitality, our most gracious service. The charitable assumption, though, would have you lead from this place. Maybe they're acting like a jerk because on their way to the restaurant today, they found out that a loved one died, or that their spouse just filed for divorce. Maybe the person acting like a jerk is actually the person that needs our love more than anyone else in the room.

• 48:52Speaker 01

  Now, sometimes the person actually just is a jerk, right? But I'd always rather err in assuming the best in someone and be proven wrong than than the other way around.

• 49:07Hala Taha?

  Okay, last one, find the legend.

• 49:11Speaker 01

  That was the word that we used to describe the crazy, over the top things that we would do for people. These one size fits one gestures we would bestow on our guests when we'd really listen hard.

• 49:26Speaker 01

  Not just the things that they were saying, but looking at their body language, everything that they were giving us. And collect all that information and try to come up with.

• 49:37Speaker 01

  Improvise improvised things that would just that they would talk about forever. And whenever we were able to do one of those things, that was a legend.

• 49:48Hala Taha?

  Let's tell a story related to this that I think that our listeners will find really interesting. You have a story about a hot dog. I'd love to hear that one.

• 49:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, so this was like the first legend that gave away to many more.

• 50:03Speaker 01

  This was after coming in last place, after doing that whole interrogation of the experience, making a lot of changes, but

• 50:14Speaker 01

  I still didn't think we'd figured out what it meant to be unreasonable. Until one day I was in the dining room on a busier than normal lunch service and I was doing what I always did when I was helping out the team. I was clearing dirty plates. By the way, that's a reminder to leaders, the further up in the hierarchy you find yourselves, the the more important it is that when you make the decision to help, do the most menial task as often as possible. Because it's a great way to just remind your people, you're never going to ask them to do something you are either unwilling or incapable of doing yourself.

• 50:48Hala Taha?

  I love that.

• 50:50Speaker 01

  And I found myself clearing appetizers from a table of four. They were Europeans on vacation to New York just to eat at restaurants. In fact, this was their last meal. They were headed straight to the airport from the restaurant to head back home. And by the way, before I tell the story, if it reminds you of a scene from the show The Bear, it's because they got it for me, not the other way around. And while I was at the table, I overheard them talking and they were raving about their trip. They'd been to all the fanciest restaurants and now 11 Madison Park. It was the trip of a lifetime, but then a woman at the table jumped in and said, yeah, but we never got to have a New York City hot dog. And it was like one of those light bulb moments in a cartoon where you know, the characters had a good idea.

• 51:31Speaker 01

  I went back into the kitchen, dropped off the plates, ran outside of the hot dog cart, bought a hot dog, ran back inside. Then came the hard part, convincing my fancy chef to serve it in our fancy restaurant. But I got him to trust me and eventually he cut it up into four perfect pieces. Put one on each of the plates, put a little swish of ketchup, a swish of mustard, a little scoop of sauerkraut, one of relish. Topped it off with a micro herb or something to make it look fancy. And then before their final savory course, which at the time was our honey lavender glazed Muscovy duck that had been dry aged for two weeks. I brought out what we in New York call a dirty water dog to the table. And I explained it, I said, hey, I overheard you talking.

• 52:14Speaker 01

  I did not want you to go home with regrets. Here's that hot dog. And they freaked out. Like at that point, I'd served over the course of my career, tens of millions of dollars of caviar and lobster, whatever. I'd never seen anyone react the way they did to that hot dog. And really, all that went into it happening were three things. One, being present at the table, which I define as caring so much about the one person in front of you that you just stop caring about everything else you need to do and everyone else in the room. And that's hard for a lot of people to do. Two, to take what you do seriously, but to stop taking yourself so seriously.

• 52:59Speaker 01

  I think too many people are so focused on perfecting their brands and not nearly focused enough on just pursuing people. A hot dog could not be more off brand, but who cares when you look at how it made them feel? And three, hospitality is about making other people feel seen and the best way to do it is not to treat them like a commodity, but like unique individuals. And I really think one size fits all. That approach will only ever take you so far. And so those three things became the roadmap for us. And it was about going to every table, being more present, taking ourselves less seriously,

• 53:39Speaker 01

  and finding these one size fits one ideas, these gestures that we could convey.

• 53:45Hala Taha?

  I really, really love this and I'd love to understand how we can make this more scalable, repeatable, and just like roll this out to our teams more tactically. So like, what are some of the things that we can do to make it more accessible to our teams to be able to implement this, especially people who are like working directly with clients?

• 54:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, there's a couple of ways. So, and I write about, this is a big part of the field guide, the new book, is where I've really kind of walked people through this, but.

• 54:15Speaker 01

  I mean, the first thing is about resource, right? Like even people with the best of intentions, most high capacity people don't have a ton of margin. And we have all these great ideas, but if it's too hard to deploy an idea, we get overwhelmed and we move on in life. And we had a position on our team called the dream weaver, someone who was with us every single night, but they had no responsibilities. They were just there as a resource to help everyone else bring their ideas to life. What's wild is if you're not the person that has to execute an idea, you are inclined to come up with more of them. If I have a resource for you, so you're like, oh my gosh, I need sleds.

• 55:00Speaker 01

  Go find sleds in the city right now, right? Like more of this stuff would happen. So simply investing so that people have a resource to bring ideas to life is one significant way to scale. But still, it can only scale so far when you're coming up with original ideas every single time. And so that led us to a different exercise that we did with our entire team called pattern recognition of recurring moments. And by the way, this one, I think is transformative. This time we got the team together, not asking them to identify a list of touchpoints, the things that happen always for everyone, but a list of the things that happen sometimes

• 55:42Speaker 01

  for some people, as often as once a night, or as rarely as once every few weeks, because every business has these recurring moments, the good ones and the hard ones. And if you can identify them in advance, decide what is the most awesome way to respond every time that thing happens? Develop whatever assets you need for those responses. You can create magic all the time. Like if I think about your business. I mean, the good recurring moments, all the different podcasters you work with, what's a big milestone in the life of a podcast?

• 56:19Hala Taha?

  Launching your podcast, hitting, let's say, 100K downloads a month, getting your first sponsorship, getting your first payout.

• 56:28Speaker 01

  There you go. Okay, so right there, now you and your team say, okay, what do we want to do every single time someone gets their first sponsorship? What do we want to do every time someone hits 100,000, right? And by the way, those meetings are so fun. And then, once you have like a room filled with stuff, so that when someone hits 100,000, it's not like a whole thing. You just go, you get it, you send it, you make the impact you're trying to make, and you have a good time doing it. That's what I'm talking about. And it's wild, once you see this stuff out in the world, to realize how impactful it can be. If anyone's ever been to like a fast casual restaurant with a kid, and they give you the placemat and a little box of crayons, that's effectively what this is.

• 57:14Speaker 01

  I'm just talking about taking it much, much, much further. I think Chewy is a great example. Chewy, the online pet supply company. If you have a dog, you can go on Chewy, you set up the automatic dog food subscription. You never forget to buy dog food again. I'm not a dog person. I'm pretty OCD. That doesn't really work with dogs. But then I got married and was informed that I am actually a dog person. And so like seven years ago, we got our first dog. And God, I love this dog, like genuinely so much. I'm really a dog person now. And I love her so much that it sometimes hurts because I know I'm going to lose her before I'm ready to.

• 57:59Speaker 01

  And when that day comes, I guarantee you, the first thing I'm going to do is not go on Chewy and cancel the subscription, which means that a couple of weeks later, another bag of food's going to arrive and going to rip open the scab. And then I'm going to reach out. This is a recurring moment for them.

• 58:15Speaker 01

  This is how they respond every time it happens. They obviously apologize for your loss. They cancel the subscription. They can't take the last bag back for health code reasons, but they credit it to your account. They encourage you to give it to someone else. And then two days later, a bouquet of flowers arrives at your house saying, we're sorry for your loss. I mean, what does that cost? 15 bucks?

• 58:39Speaker 01

  Dog people are very likely to get another dog. And you're never going to get dog food from anyone else ever again. I think, by the way, I've seen so many of these, I've seen like examples of this on airplanes now.

• 58:53Hala Taha?

  I'd love to hear more examples. That's so interesting and I think inspiring for people.

• 58:58Speaker 01

  I'm gonna send this one. I didn't see this myself, but this was the newest one. I just got a text today.

• 59:05Speaker 01

  I was just on a United flight to Vegas. The wifi didn't work, which made things, which made things uncomfortable or whatever. In the thick of my disconnection frustration, the most amazing thing happened. The flight attendant started walking up and down the aisle with a handwritten trivia game she spontaneously started in the cabin, written on the back of the cardboard with trivia about our destination. She walked up and down the aisle and engaged with anyone that just that wanted to join in, making a six hour black hole into a bright fun experience that ironically, amidst a total loss of wifi, made us feel more connected, unreasonable hospitality, magic. That one, what's, what I think is actually

• 59:49Speaker 01

  kind of inspiring about that. That's not a systemized thing. That was that flight attendant. But I'm also inspired by it because I think in many businesses, especially the big ones, there's already amazing things happening. Someone just needs to figure out what those things are and put the kind of systems behind them to make sure that they happen more consistently.

• 1:00:12Hala Taha?

  How do you actually empower your employees, especially when there's some sort of financial component? Like, how do you actually embed this process financially within your company as well?

• 1:00:22Speaker 01

  In terms of empowering them, well, A, just tell them they're allowed to do it.

• 1:00:28Speaker 01

  Say, hey, this is important to me. This is why it's awesome. And now you're allowed to do it. That's step one. Step two is praising the hell out of the people that do it. That's yet another reason why there's so much impact in a daily huddle. Getting people together and be like, okay, I want to celebrate. Holla did this thing yesterday that was just unbelievable. Like, da, da, da, da, da. Holla, you want to tell the story? And then everyone gives you a round of applause. Here's the thing, even the too cool for school kids on our teams, we all crave affirmation. The more you get, the more you want to get. Or if you see other people getting it, you want to work hard to get some of it yourself. Like it becomes a beautiful thing.

• 1:01:12Speaker 01

  And also every time I praise something, it's me saying very clearly to everyone on the team, this is what right looks like. It also is about not just praise, but criticism. And when I say criticism, I mean thoughtful criticism, giving people feedback constructively on when they do something imperfectly, what they can learn from it so that they can do a better job next time. And I think there's two things that are important in that. One, doing it, because if you empower people and you don't tell them when and how they fell short, the empowerment is going to lead to problems, not successes. But the other thing that's important is the thoughtfulness in which, through which you approach it.

• 1:01:57Speaker 01

  Because if someone tries to do something once and they fail and you get really angry at them, they're very unlikely to try again. So those are the moments where you celebrate failure and use it as an opportunity to learn. Then the last thing as it pertains to money is, well, you need to tell them where the the guardrails are. Um, there's a, one of the ways in which I manage my business, it was called the rule of 95/5, which meant we managed our money like maniacs 95% of the time. And when I say managed our money, I meant like no expense too small to be poured over

• 1:02:41Speaker 01

  in a pretty crazy way. But we did that so that we could earn the right to spend the last 5% foolishly. So how much can you afford to invest in hospitality? And then tell the people on your team, what piece of that investment do they have control over? I mean, Ritz Carlton had a thing for years, I think they still have it, where every one of the team was able to spend, I think up to $2,000 a day on guest recovery. So if they messed up, the team wasn't empowered, like, you know, do whatever it takes to make this right. I think when people understand, when they have an invitation,

• 1:03:27Speaker 01

  To do something when they are celebrated for doing it. And when they understand the lions within which they can freely roam.

• 1:03:42Speaker 01

  That's when powerful things happen.

• 1:03:44Hala Taha?

  This reminds me of something that we've done in our company. Where every holiday season for our sales reps that we work with for our podcasters, like all the brand representatives, we actually give them a Christmas gift and we give them a Christmas gift that they can go on a website and we give them like, you know, a hundred dollar budget or a hundred fifty dollar budget, they can pick out what they want. And it's something repeatable that they use every day. And so they get to pick out this gift and we got so much feedback from people that it was a bigger gift than their own company gives them. These are people that we don't work with very often, like necessarily they're not daily contacts, but like we might do a deal with them where they bring in fifty K or a hundred

• 1:04:26Hala Taha?

  K or even a million dollars a year. So like depending on how much they usually bring in, we're giving them like a bigger gift. And oftentimes it's a bigger gift than their own company is giving them. So they get so much loyalty towards us and it's something that they totally didn't expect, especially if they've never worked with us before, because we just surprised them. Whereas our clients, we give them like our monthly clients, we give them a Christmas gift, but we don't even get thank yous. It's just, to them maybe it's just, you know, we don't even get a thank you because maybe they're expecting it as not a special. So I'm wondering like, is there like, is the element of surprise like a really important piece of this? And like, if we're allocating budget for gifts, should we not do it on

• 1:05:10Hala Taha?

  expected times like birthdays and holidays?

• 1:05:13Speaker 01

  There's a few things here.

• 1:05:15Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, I always encourage people to give outside of the gifting cycle.

• 1:05:21Speaker 01

  Less like for the need to receive the thank you. I think you need to give the gift because it's the right thing to give. B, find joy in the giving itself.

• 1:05:34Speaker 01

  And not.

• 1:05:36Speaker 01

  Base how good you feel about giving it on how appreciative the other person is. Now that said, you don't want to be wasting money on something that's not making an impact.

• 1:05:49Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:49Speaker 01

  And I, and I think when, I mean, I don't know about you, I, I would imagine this is true for you. How many holiday gifts do you get right around Christmas from not your family, but from your work universe?

• 1:06:03Hala Taha?

  Yeah, plenty of them, like I'll get gift baskets and like all different stuff. Yeah.

• 1:06:07Speaker 01

  So when you give a gift during Christmas, your gift is one of a lot of gifts.

• 1:06:16Speaker 01

  I think it's kind of an issue in how we give gifts and kind of just how culturally we live life. There's so much magic that happens in December and then like the rest of the year is kind of magicless. Um, so I encourage people to like, pick your own holidays. Like for every one of those people, you can give them that gift during the holidays or on the anniversary that they started. Or what is yap day on an annual basis?

• 1:06:45Hala Taha?

  Season or something like that.

• 1:06:46Speaker 01

  Just pick a day and like make meaning and bring magic to. My wife has a, a chain of bakeries called Milk Bar. And her big thing is like birthday cakes are not just for birthdays. Like, there's no reason you can't turn a random Wednesday into an exciting moment simply by cutting a cake. And I think the same is true about gifts and also has the added benefit of yours being the only gift they received that day. Not one of many.

• 1:07:15Hala Taha?

  Oh, I didn't know your wife was the founder of Milk Bar. We gotta have her on the show too. That's amazing.

• 1:07:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, she's amazing. She's the cool, she's the cooler one in the family for sure. I, I think that's a big part of it. The, the other thing is like.

• 1:07:31Speaker 01

  Recognizing that you don't need the thank you all the time, but if no one is saying thank you, then maybe it means that somehow the gift just isn't meeting the moment.

• 1:07:44Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:45Speaker 01

  Because it's easy and I've been in that position to be like, well, they're awesome. They're like super appreciative. These people like, they just are not appreciative. As opposed to holding up the mirror and being like, okay. Why are they not saying thank you?

• 1:07:59Hala Taha?

  Maybe they don't want this thing.

• 1:08:01Speaker 01

  Maybe this gift sucks.

• 1:08:04Hala Taha?

  I remember, uh, cause we, we, we love to do stuff like this at my company and we've gotten like creative over the years and, uh, we were giving a gift when we sign new podcasters. And one of the podcasters we signed is this legendary podcaster Jenna Kutcher, who's been my client for a really long time.

• 1:08:19Speaker 01

  Oh, I know Jenna.

• 1:08:20Hala Taha?

  Yeah, she's in my podcast network. Uh, she actually just like retired her show, but we still saw her, her back catalog. But so one of the things that we did is like, my team decided on their own, they were going to send her this like neon sign that said gold digger or something like that. And they shifted to her and they're like, oh, she never said thank you. I was like, I was like, because she probably doesn't want a neon sign in her house. So we just gave her a bunch of junk.

• 1:08:45Hala Taha?

  I'm like, of course you didn't say thank you.

• 1:08:47Speaker 01

  By the way, you gotta be really careful when you give someone something to hang on their wall. But you better really know them well to know that that's going to be what they want.

• 1:08:58Hala Taha?

  And she's so like, all her stuff is like aesthetically pleasing. We sent her a neon sign, but it's the thought that counts, right? So we talked about athletic hospitality and we talked a lot about offense, right? How do we like go through every touch point, make it as good as possible, you know, be unreasonable with our hospitality. But let's talk about when things go wrong. Let's talk about when we have to play defense. If we're having trouble with a client, with a customer, if somebody went through a bad experience, what are the things that we should do to fix that incident? And then also to make sure that like, we've got a process to fix it systematically.

• 1:09:37Speaker 01

  And I don't want to like obsess over words and I'm not even sure I fully believe what I'm about to say, but like, I actually think you still play offense then. There's all this data around this idea that if you come into my business and you have a good time, you're going to talk about it a bit. If you come in and you have a bad time, you're going to talk about it a lot more.

• 1:09:58Speaker 01

  If you come in and you have a bad time, though, and I do whatever it takes to turn it around, that's the experience you're going to talk about the most. In fact, I know this to be true because my biggest regulars over the years were people that we messed up with the first time they came in. But because I was willing to do whatever it took to make things right, they felt such an investment from me that they rewarded it with their loyalty. There's almost a business case to be made that someone should start a business that intentionally messes up with every single customer they have just so that they have the opportunity to turn it around. And so I think in those moments, that's when you've got to go big.

• 1:10:41Speaker 01

  I think a lot of businesses could spend a little bit less on traditional marketing and a lot more on customer recovery. And the ones that do it well, I think are pretty remarkable.

• 1:10:55Hala Taha?

  How do you suggest that we find out just how happy our customers are? I know there's like NPS surveys that people talk about, but like, what is, how can we like, understand like if our customers are actually really happy enough where they're going to stay and refer people or if they're like just okay?

• 1:11:13Speaker 01

  Well, I think part of it, I mean, listen, this is so, the answer to this question is so different based on the business and the size of the business. Though I've spent a lot of time with a lot of like small to medium businesses who, at the end of the day, like someone on their team is interacting, whether it's on the phone or in person or through a screen with their customers. And there's just no system through which that person is actually taking note of how that person feels. Right, like, I can, and most people are the same, you can read pretty quickly without even saying, hey, are you enjoying our business? You can tell whether or not they are. And yet we have no communication process in place to actually raise a flag if they're

• 1:11:58Speaker 01

  not, or identify that they are so we can tell whether something changes in a negative direction. So I think step one is just, what is the system through which you are keeping track of the things that all of the different people in your team already know and centralizing that information into one place? With the bigger, bigger companies, yeah, you do need to rely on MPS and surveys, but then actually do something with it. I mean, the number of companies that have surveys or whatever.

• 1:12:29Speaker 01

  Don't ask for information if you're not going to do anything with it. It's just annoying.

• 1:12:34Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:34Speaker 01

  And honestly, it's disrespectful.

• 1:12:37Hala Taha?

  Yeah, you're wasting people's time.

• 1:12:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:39Hala Taha?

  So how about if a team member does something wrong? I know we were talking a little bit about praise and affirmation as well as criticism. And you've got like cer- a certain process around which you give feedback to your team and how you handle giving criticism. So can you?

• 1:12:58Speaker 01

  Criticism is an investment, but only when done thoughtfully. And I have a bunch of rules, like criticize in private, never in public, because the moment you criticize someone in front of their peers, a wall of shame goes up. They're never going to be able to receive the message you're trying to deliver. You're criticizing the behavior, not the person. If you are late to work three times in a row, you are not a terrible person. You just need to stop being late. And in that same vein, like you can praise with all the emotion you want, but criticism should be unemotional. Like, I'm just saying, hey, like, you're great. Love you. Stop being late. Um, the charitable assumption, though, is a part of that, like, hey, is everything okay?

• 1:13:43Speaker 01

  You know, asking the question before you say the thing.

• 1:13:47Speaker 01

  Um, never use sarcasm. I think a lot of leaders do this when they're young or insecure. They make a joke out of criticism because they're so uncomfortable delivering it. But gosh, joking about something as beautiful as investing in someone else's growth makes you and them look bad. Um, perhaps most importantly, be willing to receive criticism from others. Because we've all worked with that person that gets really defensive every time you try to invest in their growth. And if you're the person that's always getting too defensive, guess what? People are going to stop giving you the criticism that you need in order to grow. And if they stop giving it to you, you're going to stop growing.

• 1:14:27Speaker 01

  You are not investing in yourself if you get too defensive every time other people try to.

• 1:14:34Hala Taha?

  Another idea from your work that I really resonated with was this idea that a 30-minute stand-up every day can really actually create a team. I noticed this with my company. We have a lot of daily huddles through various teams. And I actually run our sales team. That's like my main responsibility is to recruit podcasters for the network and then I help run our sales team and then I have lots of leaders that do other things in my business. But for us, I implemented a meeting called Deal Desk where every morning, our team, even though we're all over the world, we have this meeting called Deal Desk and every salesperson is just rattling off their deals and any problem and we kind of just discuss it and just make sure that everything's unblocked. And in this meeting, we started off with like, what's your one word

• 1:15:19Hala Taha?

  open? What's your personal high or recognition? And we kind of get warmed up and then we go into this Deal Desk meeting. And it's honestly like, we've like tripled our sales since doing this. Like it's just, and it's something that everybody looks forward to every day. Like, we love having this meeting. So I'd love to understand from you, like, what is the, how do you open up your meetings? Like if you have a format that you'd like to recommend to the folks listening in? And then also like, why you think this meeting creates such like a positive culture, this daily huddle?

• 1:15:52Speaker 01

  I mean, I think it's, I mean, a little bit to the point I was making before about people just needing to be inspired, right? And like, part of a leader's role is to get their team fired up, or to like, bring them ideas that help them look at their world a little bit differently.

• 1:16:14Speaker 01

  And when you do that, the people you work with cease being a collection of individuals and they come together as a trusting team, which unlocks the capacity and chemistry required to do great things. My approach...

• 1:16:31Speaker 01

  I would always start out with some housekeeping, like what are the things I just need to get through? I need everyone to know is that we're aligned and on the same page. And then I dive into whatever was the thing I was thinking about that week. I have a newsletter called premale that I still write. It comes out every two weeks now, which people can sign up for at unreasonable hospitality.com, which is basically what I'd be talking about with my team. And where those things come from, I believe that finding inspiration, you get good at it. And if you walk through the world with your eyes open wide enough, you can see as on little things and bring them back home and use them to inspire your team.

• 1:17:10Speaker 01

  And so, um, every week I would have seen something. I'd come back, I'd tell a story and then articulate the lesson I got from that story. And I would tell that story every single day for a week and then probably never again. I think the stories are important because stories make ideas stick. If you just jump to the lesson and skip the story, half of the people in the room are not even going to receive it. But if you can give a story behind an idea, it makes it that much more memorable. Maybe a premale this week would have been the story about that flight attendant

• 1:17:51Speaker 01

  doing the trivia when the wifi was down and celebrating the creativity, the empowerment, and how she created community among the team and alleviated boredom and frustration by virtue of doing it. And so what is something that's happening in our world? That is like losing wifi on a plane? And what's a way that we can work together to react in a more creative way?

• 1:18:19Hala Taha?

  That in itself is just like so inspiring. Like I'm thinking about all my best days and my best weeks. Like I naturally do stuff like that. I'll think of like something that happened in the business and every meeting that I'm on, it's like a little tour and I tell the story and the lesson. But it's so powerful if like you make that part of your routine, like every Friday, thinking through what happened this week and what can I kind of take as a lesson? And communicate to my team next week so that they remember.

• 1:18:47Hala Taha?

  This value that we have, you know, like, I just think it's such a, it's, it would be so cool to do that more as a routine as a leader.

• 1:18:54Speaker 01

  And by the way, you yourself will be more inspired because if you have that as a deliverable, you are going to train yourself to find inspiration more frequently as you walk through life. So you're just going to inherently be more inspired and therefore more inspiring.

• 1:19:12Hala Taha?

  This has been such an incredible conversation. Unreasonable Hospitality is such a great book. I know you just came out more recently with the field guide, but this was one of the best books that I've read lately in terms of like business value, so much so that I had the idea with my business partner Kate, I was like, let's start a book club and like make everybody read, read, like all of our leaders read a book and then discuss it and think about how we'll implement some of the ideas in our business. And so you are going to be our first book read in our company book club. So thank you for writing this and sharing your wisdom. I end my show with two questions that I ask all of my guests. The first one

• 1:19:52Hala Taha?

  is out of everything we talked about today, what is one actionable thing that our young improfitters can do today to become more profitable tomorrow?

• 1:20:03Speaker 01

  I mean, the thing that you can do today is like what we just talked about, like seize on the power of a daily huddle today. It doesn't need to be 30 minutes like mine was. Don't let perfect be the enemy of the good. Like going to work and say, hey, everyone, just circle up and just tell them about something you're inspired by. And by the way, if Hollis said something inspiring today, just use that to inspire them. But like just start. Don't wait to have it all figured out before you start.

• 1:20:35Hala Taha?

  Yeah, I think meetings are, some people are so like anti-meeting and they think that that's being more productive is removing the meetings. But I really think that syncing the team together and getting everybody to talk and feel connected will make you so much more productive than just everybody being in their own silos.

• 1:20:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, we should be anti ineffective meetings, but don't like get carried away that we remove an entire format that can be unbelievably impactful just because there's been so many bad versions.

• 1:21:04Hala Taha?

  And what would you say your secret to profiting in life is?

• 1:21:08Speaker 01

  I work very, very hard. I really love working.

• 1:21:13Speaker 01

  And yet I have, and this is not something that comes naturally to me. It's like I've worked at very, very hard for a very long time. Developed the ability to, when I am at home, I am at home. And when I'm at work, I'm at work. And being able to turn each one on and off appropriately has just made life so much better. It's maybe a better husband, a better dad, a much better friend. And honestly, when I'm able to turn work off for a couple of days each weekend, it makes me so much better at it when it's time to turn it back on.

• 1:21:58Hala Taha?

  What kind of boundaries have you put in place? Like, is it just I don't work weekends? Or have you put other boundaries in place?

• 1:22:05Speaker 01

  No, I mean, the only two, the real thing, because I travel a ton for work. So there's plenty of weeks where I'm just gone Monday through Friday. So yeah, with very, very few exceptions, I never work on the weekends. And I also really take summer seriously with the kids. Like, no talks, no travel, like July and August, I'm with my family. I will wake up on the weekends in the morning. I'm always the first person to wake up and I will go downstairs and I'll have a coffee and I'll start doing emails. But the moment my first kid walks into the room, the phone goes down. That's it.

• 1:22:46Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:46Speaker 01

  Just those things.

• 1:22:48Hala Taha?

  I love that. And where can our listeners learn more about you and everything that you do?

• 1:22:53Speaker 01

  Hey, first of all, this was such a fun conversation.

• 1:22:55Hala Taha?

  Thank you for having me. I loved this conversation.

• 1:22:59Speaker 01

  No, in terms of me, I mean, I'm on the social media, mostly LinkedIn and Instagram. Unreasonablehospitality.com, that's where you can sign up for my newsletter and like, learn about all the various things that we do. And I'm particularly excited about the field guide, which just came out. And I think like, for people who read Unreasonable Hospitality, there's a lot of other companies have done a book club around that book. I think book clubs around the field guide are going to be very, very impactful because it's really walking through these ideas. In a very actionable way. And I'm really proud of how it turned out.

• 1:23:36Hala Taha?

  I got a hard copy of the field guide and I'm actually in the process of writing book and I pulled it up with my editors and I was like, this book is awesome and it looks so cool. And I was like, we need to do a book like this. And they're like, well, Holla, he has a different book that came first. This is the second book. That's more of the tactical thing. But it looks awesome. And like, my, it really just makes you want to work in it because it's just like an engaging format.

• 1:24:01Speaker 01

  I appreciate that.

• 1:24:02Hala Taha?

  Great job on it. Yeah, great job. Well, thank you again for coming on Young and Profiting Podcast. It was such a pleasure.

• 1:24:08Speaker 01

  Thank you so much.

• 1:24:10Hala Taha?

  I loved this conversation. It was so much fun to speak with Will and learn more about unreasonable hospitality. I think it's one of those ideas that sounds like it only belongs in restaurants and hotels, but really it has so much to offer entrepreneurs and anybody building a business. Because as Will said, every business is in the hospitality business, because every business is the people business. Whether you sell a product, a service, a course, a podcast, or a client experience, you are still serving human beings at the end of the day. And in a world where AI is making everything faster and more automated, the businesses that win are going to be the ones that make people feel seen, valued, and cared for. Here are some

• 1:24:52Hala Taha?

  of my favorite pieces of wisdom that Will shared today. First, service and hospitality are not the same thing. Service is what you do. Hospitality is how you make people feel. You can deliver the right product, hit the deadlines, and check every box. But if the customer feels like just another transaction, you are missing the real opportunity. Hospitality is what turns a transaction into a memory. Next, look for the overlooked moments. Will talked about interrogating the customer experience and identifying every single touch point, not just the obvious ones. For entrepreneurs, that might be the onboarding email, the invoice, the follow-up, the handoff, the way you handle a mistake, or the last interaction someone has with your brand. Those

• 1:25:36Hala Taha?

  tiny moments are where you can stand out because most people are not paying attention to them. Empower your team to care. One of the biggest lessons from Will is that hospitality cannot just live with the founder. It has to become a part of the culture. Give your team the language, the permission, the guardrails to create magic for your customers. Celebrate the people who go above and beyond, praise them in public because when your team feels trusted to make people feel special, your customers can feel it too. All right, Yap fam, if you love this conversation with Will, make sure you grab his book, Unreasonable Hospitality: The Field Guide is his brand new version of the book, which gets really tactical and helps you put these ideas into practice.

• 1:26:19Hala Taha?

  As always, if you learned something valuable today, please follow and subscribe Young and Profiting on your favorite podcast app. Leave us a five star review and hit like if you're watching on YouTube or Spotify video. All these small gestures and interactions, comments and reviews, this is what helps us reach more people who need these conversations. This is the number one way you can support our show. You can also follow me on Instagram at Yap with Hala or LinkedIn, just search my name, it's Hala Taha. And today I want to give a big, big shout out to Nina, our lead digital producer at Yap. She manages the whole team, she edits every episode, picks every clip. She is working so hard to put out this amazing content each and every week.

• 1:27:04Hala Taha?

  And without Nina, this ship is not sailing. So shout out to Nina for doing such a great job. And shout out to our guest outreach team for getting Will on the show and getting such a great guest and conversation happening this week on the podcast and each and every week on Young and Profiting Podcast. This is your host, Hala Taha, AKA The Podcast Princess, signing off.