The Hospitality Principles That Build Billion-Dollar Startups

alright this episode is with will gu will is the author of a book called unreasonable hospitality he also is one of the writers for a tv show called the bear which is very popular and there's an episode in the bear it's called forks i think it's in season two and it's an amazing episode so you guys have to watch it and it's basically all about excellence so how to have unreasonable hospitality there's a lot of people listening to this a lot of the m audience you guys run internet companies and so this book that he wrote it's about his restaurant called eleven madison avenue and how they went above and beyond to treat their customers amazingly and how it actually helped their customers and help their business maybe this book hasn't come across your table because it's not about the internet stuff and that's one of the reasons why i wanted to have will on so give the episode of listen i loved recording this and one of the big takeaways other than going above and beyond for your customers it's about being excellent being excellent in life in business and fitness and family i hope it inspires you i loved it i loved recording this episode inspires me so give a listen i feel like i could rude where i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on a less travel never i i'm i'm happy to talk to you i read a lot and there's probably two books that are not meant to be business or at least my type of internet business books one of them is the game of tennis a book about how to be great at tennis but it's it's sort of like how to be good at sports psychology but life psychology how to handle stress and not be down on yourself and then the other one is unreasonable hospitality because when i read the book i sort of wanted to become unreasonable at the rest of my life i remember reading the book and i was like this guy guy's an animal like he's he's he's really up tight about things that i am not up tight about and to be the best that i can be i need to be relentless it's interesting i think that the dichotomy of what's in there is to accomplish what we did there require this relentless pursuit of excellence right i mean that's that's kind of an in when you're trying to become the best at anything but what's wild was it wasn't the pursuit of excellence that actually took the restaurant over the top it was the relentless unreasonable pursuit of right like you push everything to get every details so unbelievably perfect and then you do these messy things at the end to make people feel so very seen whether that's ob over every single garnish on a plate of crazy uber fine dining food and then recognizing that the thing that people will actually remember is a hotdog dog or whatever other random thing we did for people and so it's this quest for perfection and the acknowledgement that the most human moments are perfectly imperfect and those are the stick of all and what what what's that story again exactly so it was a busier on than normal lunch service i was clearing tables to help out the team and i was at a table of four there were foodie is from europe in new york just to eat a fancy restaurants hence they've been to like you know and danielle and jean george and per s and for anyone listening who does not know what those restaurants are just trust in how fancy the name sound the very and and this was their last meal they're going straight to the airport from the restaurant to go back home and and you just overheard that and while i was at the table they were raving about the trip and then one woman said yeah but we never had in new york city hot dog and there was just one of those light bulb moments and i ran to the hotdog cart bought a hotdog dog brought in then came the hard part convincing my fancy chef to actually serve it in our in our restaurant but he cut up the hotdog dog put one little piece on each playable sw of ketchup up one of mustard a canal sour crowd one of re ish he like topped it off of the micro or or something to make it look all cool yeah and then before their final savory course which at the time was our honey lavender glazed musk duck i brought out well we in new york called the dirty water dog and i explained it i just said hey i ever overheard you before we didn't wanna let you go home with any culinary regrets here's that new york city hot dog and that they freaked out like i've been working in restaurants my entire life i'd to that point served tens of millions of dollars worth of wagyu beef and lobster and caviar i'd never seen anyone react to anything i'd served them like they did to that and this was at eleven madison this was this is at eleven madison okay and for the the non new york non foodie audience eleven madison i think you guys wanted award that was like the world's world's best restaurant was that what the title was yeah yeah which is just that's that's that's a crazy thing that that even exists but you don't want it you won that such a ridiculous award and the book i think got a huge bump in the in the tv show of the bear because of the episode forks where the kinda loser cousin goes to one of your restaurants and he learns how to be great and he he learns how to be great in the most strange way when you're watching the show which is you polish the forks and if you polish the forks really well you're gonna be great at this other thing which means if it's gonna lead to this other thing and this other thing and then eventually it goes to when you're talking to a customer and you over here them i'm saying i love this restaurant and my visiting york has been amazing but i would really just love a hotdog hot dog i still haven't gotten one those yet and if you over hear a customer say that you run outside and you get them a hotdog hot dog and you present them in such a way that brings memories yeah and that's that that's the the point of the book and also a little bit about your background were you at eleven madison as up tight as or as like hardcore as the show the bear kinda of made it seem like do you do you have to perform and sort of be a dick to your staff in order to make them buy into this stuff listen i think to succeed in a restaurant as a leader the same lessons are true when it comes to succeeding in any other business i think the greatest leaders are those that when they walk into the room the people that work for them like check themselves a little bit they wanna make sure that everything is as it's meant to be and they smiled because they're happy that person's there right like when you when you're a leader that acts like a dick people are just scared of getting yelled at when you're an attentive leader that is thoughtful in holding people accountable people don't wanna make a mistake because they don't wanna let you down but can you walk me through a scenario because as a leader i have a bunch of employees i have this weird feeling of like i wanna be like dislike too much and i i don't know if i should call this person out on this particular thing i don't know if i wanna pick that battle right now and so for all the listeners who i think i'm pretty average in terms of a lot of people feel that how i feel yeah can you walk through like a conversation as to like a productive leader conversation that relates to holding people accountable know first of all yeah i i think too many leaders focus on wanting to be liked the people that work for us don't need another friend they need actually someone who's willing to step up and lead them and if you focus on doing that consistently they will invariably like you dissimilar to when you try to build any sort of business if you focus so much on making money you're probably gonna introducing mediocre whereas if you focus on building something great you're gonna end up making money yeah i i believe that the great cultures are those where feedback is normalized and when i talk about feedback obviously i'm talking about praise when you set crazy expectations for people on your team you better be there to celebrate them when they meet or exceed those expectations a well because it's the right thing to do but b because praise is addictive and when you receive some you wanna receive more but sometimes i fear that we focus so much on praise and think that that's the only way to build a great culture that we forget about how powerful criticism can be because if praise is affirmation criticism is investment the people that work for you definitively are there because they want to grow and become better versions of themselves and that means that if you aren't there to hold them accountable when they are not being the best versions of themselves you're not actually doing right by them i i don't think there are many things a leader can do that are more beautiful than being willing to step outside of your comfort zone for long enough to invest in someone else's growth now the only way it's an investment if it's done thoughtfully and i i have rules of criticism before you you said those rules just so understand how many how much staff did you have in in some of across all the restaurants oh eighteen hundred wow okay and was your retention better than industry standards dramatically so yeah do you you killed it there yeah we did well okay and what are the rules for criticism isn't and by the way any of these individually they're they're pretty simple right a criticize and private you can praise in public but criticize in private the the moment you criticize someone in front of their peers a wall of shame goes up they're not gonna receive the information you're delivering them two criticize the behavior not the person people inadvertently end up talking about the person's shortcomings as opposed to just focusing on the behavior itself that they're trying to correct three criticized consistently two often we're we don't we don't have the energy to call someone out for having done something and so we wait until the moments that we do but when that's the case two things become true one people aren't sure what right looks like because you only call them out every other time they do that thing or perhaps even worse people think you only criticized them when you're in a bad mood which brings a negative stigma to the exchange never use sarcasm and criticism a lot of younger leaders do that they think that if they make a joke out of it it'll be easier to swallow but joking around about sling as beautiful as investing in someone else's growth i think makes a fool of both of you i so like like what's like what's an example you know like when people are like hey maybe stop being so late like d like whatever trying to like yeah so what would you say said they said i you don't we said we were gonna be here eight you weren't i don't like that can you please be here at eight tomorrow exactly without a emotion yeah which brings you an role there's no there's no place for emotion and criticism it's une emotional the moment you bring emotion into it you're listening emotion in the other and the more someone is emotional when receiving criticism the more they shut down and then finally you better be praising everyone on your team more than you are criticizing them because if you're not one of two things is happening one you you are just the person that has tendency to see all the things that are wrong more than you have the ability to see the things that are right or you have someone in your team that's just not doing enough things well to praise and in that case you failed as a leader by letting them stay there as long as they have alright so a lot of people will talk about how you need a million dollars and three years of experience to start of business nonsense if you listen to at least one episode on this podcast you know that is completely not true my last company the hustle we grew it to something like seventeen dollars or eighteen million dollars in revenue i started it with like three hundred dollars my current company han does over ten million dollars in revenue started it with actually no money maybe twenty nine dollars or something like that nothing and so you don't actually need investors to start a company you don't need a fancy business plan but what you do need is systems that actually work and so my old company the hustle they put together five proven business models that you could start right now today with under a thousand dollars these are models that if you do it correctly it can make money this week you can get it right now you can scan the qr code or click the link in the description now back to the show what were some early stories when you were figuring out unreasonable hospitality and then you implemented it and you're like oh man actually something is here not only does it make them feel good it actually might make me more money yeah i mean the hot dog was the origin story you know you always hear of athletes go to the tapes when they've made a mistake to see what they did wrong to make sure they don't continue to do that thing what i don't think anyone does often enough is go to the tapes when they've done something right to make sure that they continue to do that thing that's how you put intention to intuition and in the hot dog we we did something as silly and simple as it was that was significant and it required being present enough to actually pick up on that it required realizing that we should stop taking ourselves so seriously because sometimes the sol things can be the most connective and it required acknowledging this idea that the gestures that are specific to an individual will always have the greatest impact and i i say one size fits one and and with that we put a system behind it so we hired an additional person to our team someone who was in the dining room with only one responsibility to be there as a resource to help everyone else bring their ideas to life and what was the what was their budget tell me everything this is where this is what i'm what i wanna know is the operations and in particular a lot of people listening we own internet companies or some type of a digitally company not necessarily traditional like a restaurant or traditional service industry so that this is where actually what i really really wanna know is operational this so tell me yeah so listen in the beginning we didn't put a budget to it it was just like hey guys just start doing it and like be reasonable don't like get like be unreasonable with the thoughtful but like we're not spending a thousand dollars on an idea for someone and what was this person's title the dream waiver the dream waiver okay and when were they making i don't know what restaurant salaries are they were probably making twenty five dollars an hour okay and their whole goal you said you said i don't know if you wrote out in a memo in the job description you said help everyone you're just there because okay so here's the thing having nothing to do with unreasonable hospitality like everyone has great ideas the difference between like the people that i think crush it in life and those that don't are the ones that actually decide to bring their great ideas to life right now the reality is is in the workplace in most high functioning organizations people don't have a ton of bandwidth this is this simply true in a restaurant it's not like people have an extra thirty minutes in the middle of saturday night service to go work on a little art project this person was just there to create bandwidth so they were there anyone on the team had an idea they could go to the dream waiver and be like hey i need you to go out to the store and get a dvd for the movie seven on the fly or hey we need to find sled immediately or hey we need to go get the cotton candy machine from downstairs or hey does the toys to sell super soak can we get any of those right now whatever it was and that person was just there to execute now over time we started hiring the dream waivers from art schools so they could actually like do see their own craft work in the moment and we just let it fly there was one dream waiver the dream waiver was responsible for execution everyone on the team though was in their own way a dream waiver because they were the one responsible for idea yeah right it's the people on the front line that are actually connecting with the customers they're the ones that are picking up and the little things that you can run with the dream waivers were never given a set budget although every once in a while like one two months a year i would look at the dream weaver line item in the p and l and i'd say to the team hey guys let's rain in in a little bit what was the supposed to expensive thing gosh the most expensive thing we ever did i don't know like we had these pictures of miles davis these giant photographs of miles davis in the kitchen one time a guy who actually worked for us because i always wanted to spend the most money on our own people because if they received this stuff at the highest level possible they were gonna be more inclined to turn around and come up with these things for other people right like until you know how good it feels to receive something you're not necessarily as inclined to wanna put in the work to to give it to others and he loved notorious b g so we like reprinted all these giant framed photos in our kitchen a biggie which i mean that was probably six hundred bucks or something okay so it's not that much money no okay and how and what was the average i i don't i don't remember what it costs what was the average table spending two grand yeah i was like four hundred a person okay and how many a night were you doing or how many per customer maybe well so here's the thing i just still unreasonable hospitality the gestures of the the philosophy into three categories one size fits all one size fits some and then one size fits one and i think it's important just to explain this because we'll fit in the conversation one size fits all man that we looked at the entire experience every single touch point and identified how we could make as many of them as possible just a little bit more awesome so i'll give you an example the check write the check millions of restaurants in the world at the end of every one of those meals someone is bringing you a bill and yet spite of the fact that everyone shares that touch point i've never seen a approach with any creativity or intention yeah and it's a hard part of the meal to get right because a everyone gets really impatient the moment they ask for the check if it takes you too long to give it to them you've ruined the meal at the same time i can't drop it on your table but free ask for it otherwise you think a really you out it's especially hard to find dining restaurant because those are big checks the moment you realize how much it cost it's a little bit harder to just still love what you just had for that reason no innovation that we saw that as an opportunity to do something an overlooked touch point so when i knew you were done with your meal you hadn't asked the check but i knew you were done i'd go over to your table with a glass for each person at the table and a bottle of cognac we pour just a splash of cognac and to each class and i'd say this is with my compliments in fact i'm gonna 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's a small change with a profound impact one no one ever had to wait for the check again b no one could ever think we were trying to rush them out i just gave you an entire bottle of free booze it didn't cost very much rarely did people drink more than that splash and yet at the moment where we brought over that big bill we matched it with a gesture of profound generosity and by the way i've talked to people who dine with us back then we're serving some of the best food in the planet they don't remember a single thing they ate but they'll never forget how we made them feel when we give them that bottle of cognac there was have you read the book influenced by robert cha no oh man it's like in this podcast with like a an entire reading list it's like considered the the the gospel when it comes to like influence which is related to marketing but like i read it as like a fourteen year old try to make girls but like and in that book robert chow he tells a story where he he's basically like says like a a variety of principles for persuasion and he has studies and experiments to verify or or or or tell the story of each one and one of the stories is basically he had a waitress give someone the bill he had waitress b give someone the bill and a piece of chocolate and he had waitress c go here's your bill walk away five stuff goes oh i almost forgot i got this chocolate for you and option c got more tips by a significant amount wow a huge amount and you know frankly i don't even remember which principal this this falls under i read this like fifteen years ago but i remember that one thing and so when you did that i this may not apply because i don't think you accepted but did you you if you if you did did you notice ra maturity for the weight weights out went up to the roof because of this just for sure for sure and by the way that's well documented cornell did a study they did one where they had they compared a thousand diners that give that little mint with the check to a thousand diners that didn't and the ones that did on average had eighteen percent higher tips i i just think general a city biggest generosity that is the rule of reciprocity by the way it's called the rule of reciprocity and and here's and here's how it states it basically to if i do a favor for you you will do a favor for me and it can be significantly out proportion but because you now feel like you owe me and humans hate owing someone and so i remember reading about this and i went and bought a motorcycle back then it was a very cheap motorcycle think it was they wanted three thousand dollars or twenty five hundred dollars and i showed up a two cans of coke and i go hey yeah i'm ready to here at motorcycle i i met the guy on craigslist by the way like i was i just there's was a gas station here i got myself a coke you want one thought you might want one and and i we had he had basically said like it's it's three thousand dollars that's the firm you know and i was like look the best i could do is twenty five hundred what do you say and he's like well here in nice guy you got me a coke you got my i'll do twenty five hundred dollars so that four hundred and ninety nine dollar win on the yeah yeah yeah yeah and that's sort of what it appears as though you did the cognac and and that's why i was asking about if it went up because of of that gesture do know i was just on the on a zoom with do gina rory sutherland do you know who that is the marketing yeah yeah add add ad agency executive yeah we were talking about this exact thing earlier today he he was talking about how he ordered a new mattress and pillows from some company and got they they just included like a duvet set or something and he's like honestly i'd feel guilty if i ever ordered a mattress from anyone else again but we're j that against had that same company said if you order a mattress and two pillows we will give you a duvet set because then now he thinks he'd had earned it by virtue of having done what they said he needed to do and it's the i think it's reciprocity combined with surprise and delight you need to do it without saying you are going to do it in advance for it to have the impact you wanted to have did you call unreasonable hospitality back then what was like your mantra within the company unreasonable hospitality yeah did you notice that profits and revenue went up and do you think that was because of that yeah i think this is the okay yes profits and revenues went way up i think the everyone i've ever seen embraced these philosophies have seen financial benefit and yet there are some that are re to because it's that old adage what gets measured gets managed and it's hard to measure the impact of these things in the short term right you need to be willing to commit to ideas for long enough to see them really truly come to life because a the more of an emotional connection people have to what you're doing the more likely they are to return b whether it's the hotdog dog or sled or all these different things we did you are giving people stories to tell and every dollar i ever spent on unreasonable hospitality was far more impactful than any dollar i ever spent on traditional marketing because when you give them those stories to tell what do you think they're gonna they're gonna tell them over and over and over again well what did were you guys seeding those i mean like i the hotdog dog story like it got out were you the one who told everyone because if i am i gonna if i'm gonna do this i'm telling everyone i i've done it no we never we never told anyone we did the things in the moment the hotdog story got out when i wrote the book got it but i think if you do these things you can be pretty sure that people are gonna tell the stories themselves listen up the old playbook is slowing you down ai broke the funnel loop marketing fixes it it's a new era for marketers ai is capturing search traffic channels are fragmented and generating leads feels less predictable than ever before hubspot loop marketing playbook will guide you through this unprecedented disruption it's the system your marketing teams should use to move faster connect deeper and gross smarter the modern growth playbook for the ai era built by hubspot designed for today's marketer get the loop marketing playbook at hubspot dot com slash loop dash marketing to find out more and leave your competition behind alright back to the pod okay so that's one size fits one one size fits some is effectively using simple pattern recognition and the reality is in every single business there are things that happen over and over again they're not touch points they don't happen always for everyone mh but they happen sometimes for some people if you've ever gone to a casual dining restaurant with a kid and they give you the little pack of crayon and the coloring matt that is effectively pattern recognition they've realized kids come in if we have these on hand it will result in a better experience for the families as well as the children did you have a unique twist on that particular that think we did so many different things we had lego sets for a while we had like sketches for a while we we just cycled through different things but we did like full proper exercises where alongside the entire team we'd come up with list of these recurring moments and then get creative on how to make our reactions to them more awesome and by the way you you can't do these things effectively unless you do indeed involve the entire team there's the i call it famous because i think it's famous but the quote by david mark that in most organizations the people at the top have all the authority and none of the information while the people on the front have all the information and none of the authority in order to brainstorm like truly significant things within this space especially you need to bridge that gap between authority and information so were you holding like weekly all hands with all eighteen hundred people or sending emails no so eighteen hundred people was across the company we would we would do strategic planning restaurant by restaurant quarterly we did one big one a year but then there were all sorts of little meetings that would kinda be scattered through the but at the end of the day the number of ideas that came out of one day long strategic planning at the beginning of the year would generally take us about a year to implement all those ideas so you could get enough out of one day to really keep you going for a year and so you did well and and so one size fits some that is that that's the second one i'll give you an example of that there's my favorite a lot of people got engaged at a restaurant if anyone's ever got engaged at a re reasonable restaurant they poured you free champagne mh if they didn't you got engaged at the wrong restaurant but that's reasonable hospitality now that we'd had identified this we had an opportunity to make it as well more awesome this where we came up with tiffany and c had their offices across the park oh my god one day whenever over there knocked on doors until i found the chief marketing officer convinced her to give us one thousand of those iconic tiffany blue boxes yeah each with two champagne flute in and put him the back next time so gonna engage we poured them free champagne and like we always would have but they wouldn't notice that their glasses looked a little bit different from everyone else's and at the end we'd give them the glasses they toasted that's awesome that's awesome again three things on that one was it less special for them because we had a much more in the back no two i have talked to people who got engaged with us who don't remember a single thing they ate but they will never forget that and three that one didn't even cost us anything i mean it cost tiffany a reasonable amount of money but i guarantee they've more than made up on that investment with all the tiffany things that have ended up on regis dude that's so good and then of course there's one size fits one which is the dream weaver stuff the reason i say all of them is because at eleven madison we would serve a hundred and ten people a night i couldn't do a dream weaver thing for every single person that came in there but between one size fits one one size fits some and one size fits all you better believe that everyone was walking out of there having had an experience that well i felt at least a little bit magical i used to run this company called the hustle it was the first company that i sold and it and and it was a pretty amazing company and i'm a self taught copywriter that's my that was my passion and the company was built on copyright and one of my philosophies was to alter what i called the forgotten text and what that means in practice is of a very specific example is when you would sign up like for your your conference website when you enter your email more often than not and ninety nine percent of cases a customer will get an email from mailchimp or bee hive or convertkit whatever and it's gonna tell you thanks for subscribing click here to confirm and that's it it's just like the stock email yes i wrote the world's greatest welcome email and i'll have to remember it but it said the subject was look what you did you a little jerk and and the body it said i don't think you realized what just happened you just signed up for the best business newsletter on earth and immediately after doing that a bell went off in our office in say in in in san francisco and when that bell went off sarah went and did twenty five push ups because she was so excited david went and took a shot for some reason and kevin is outside right now hugging an old lady because he's so excited look the i gotta go stop kevin but i just let you know how excited i am that you gave us your email we are tirelessly working on tomorrow's edition i hope you love it and just know that we are working really hard to please you and it went viral that that went viral and then we took it a step further so when you unsubscribe from an email you often just see you are now unsubscribe and i stole this one from group po i'll tell you what group coupons was but group po which was an emailed letter company there was the intern sitting right there and it says here's what just happened when you unsubscribe and it was the ceo fake throwing coffee in the in the entrance face that said and it said like our intern kevin must have done something bad to make you unsubscribe i'm punishing him don't worry i'm on it if you wanna res subscribe and give us another chance that would mean a lot click here and so the point being is that we worked really hard so our pop ups set oh no not another pop up well look while you're here this situation is this this this company it's called the hustle it's my company i run it and we did this we did this newsletter give us your email if you wanna get the next day and so the whole website forgotten text i worked really hard to you forgotten text and we got so much backlinks or you know press because of it do first of one that's brilliant and in my like the way i see the world there's two reasons why i think it's especially brilliant one is obvious the one is well they're probably both obvious one is i believe the smallest enhancements to the most overlooked touch points and a guest experience can have the greatest impact on the experience as a whole because it is you saying very clearly to the people you serve we're are willing to care about things that no one has ever paused for long enough to consider i spent time with a an auto dealer group in california right when the book was coming out and i was talking to them about touch points and they thought i was you know when you think about like a classic car dealer and then i'm talking about unreasonable hospitality it was like oil and water in the beginning and i was like alright hey here i have question what happens a week after someone buys a new car when they open the glove open for the first time what's happening oh my god and they're like nothing i was like it's a touch point that's a part of the experience they did something link super small they started after that putting a starbucks gift card in the glove compartment of every car that just said thank you so much your business you ever need anything give me a call and then whatever kevin the my gosh that's great they call me a year later they're like we have never seen a return as big on any marketing investment in the history of our of our or with it just like five dollars it was a fifteen dollar gift card tim but oh my gosh so the oh like the the smallest things to the parts that no one has ever thought about really make a difference and then b what i said about the hotdog dog like so many companies have become so focused on perfect brands that they've stopped pursuing people everyone is taking themselves too seriously and the moment you just let yourself be a little ci a little more human a little more connective it never fails that's so good i think you guys like this podcast for two reasons one is if you are building a business it's lonely and listening to sean and i we're sort of like your friends and the second reason is you know that we are builders we love building companies it's kind of our life's vocation so if you have a business that does at least three million dollars in revenue i think i know exactly what you're experiencing you've built a great business it's working and you finally have a second to look up you're young you probably run an internet company in your town there's potential that you're a freak that you have no one else to talk to about growing your company in fact when you even go out in public you probably don't even like telling people what you do for a living because you don't feel like explaining it if you fall in this category that means you're making the biggest decisions of your life ten twenty million dollars decisions all by yourself alone and without that push in my opinion that risk is not blowing up it's drifting into good enough territory into becoming mediocre and the worst thing that can happen to you is ten years from now you look back and you realized i missed this amazing opportunity i didn't grow i plateau in life and in business my company hampton we change that if you're running a company that does at least three million in revenue you can apply at join hampton dot com we vet you we curate you and we give you eight handpicked founders who have similar businesses similar sizes as you who will challenge you who will hold you accountable and who will give you perspectives that you cannot get anywhere else and this all happens in real life so check it out join hampton dot com slash network what are some other interesting stories of people who have implemented this and had almost like a turnaround because you're telling me these stories i'm i'm sitting here taking notes on and i'm not taking notes for this podcast i'm taking notes and what i needed to tell my team because i'm like i'm so bought it like i get fired up whenever i hear about this but the discipline of following through and and making it part of our culture that's it's quite challenging because you said you don't see results necessarily right away it might take a minute you're taking a little bit of a leap of faith mean here's another one that i heard recently and this has been one of the one of the most fun things for me over the past two years is getting notes from like people that run funeral homes and prison systems and insurance companies and banks and nfl teams and everything in between about all the various ways in which they've manifested the ideas but i think this one's quite brilliant and it and it focuses on the beauty of making things mandatory just like the word criticism has been given a bad rep and i think it should be des so has mandatory we feel like if we make something mandatory for our people to do that it's a bad thing but i think when you make sling mandatory it's just a meta signal to everyone that works for you that this matters so there's a guy who owns two ups stories in sara soda and he read the book really fell in love that tried to figure out how to bring it to life in his space and i don't think anyone's ever woken up saying you know we're the most hospitable people in the world work ups stores right but he a big that's a big opportunity right exactly exactly so he made a rule he mandated that everyone on his team all the people that worked the register at the ups store had to one time per shift comp a customer up to call it forty dollars worth they had to and they had to write it when they were clocking out who they comp him why it was like a win win win in the most profound of ways a your customer you go to ups store and randomly you get comp for like shipping something you're copying something it's gonna blow your mind right you're gonna tell that story a bunch b it ended up being really good for the people that worked there like when you're working at a place like that you are not accustomed to being on the receiving end of profound appreciation and enthusiasm and yet we are all human beings those feelings energize all of us and when you get them it makes your day better full stop i don't care how too cool for school you present yourself as being but third and this is what i thought was so fascinating and when he explained it it made sense because it was good for the team they went from having to do it to getting to do it mh but only got to do it once so now they started engaging and getting to know everyone that came into the store so much more deeply to decide who deserved it the most who was having a hard day and needed something to go right who was having a great day and needed a cherry on top so even all the customers that did not receive the comp started having genuinely enjoyable experiences in those stores and i'm hearing about things like this all the time and it it's just it's just awesome that's great do you have a lot of the people who listen to this maybe they own an e com store so they run like a shopify site or they have a a a small software company it's only two or three guys do you have any examples of in particular website that you've gone to and you're like they nail it i mean i think the story of chewy and what they do is is just my favorite do you know do you know what i'm about to say yeah so like chewy you know it's funny ryan cohen and the founder of chewy he's now more famous right now because of games and he's being there he's that's crazy the investor but third chewy and the premise was like amazing customer service and i think an example would be like if they heard that your dog died they would send you flowers or something like that yeah well certain i mean this is how it works you go into chewy you subscribe for your dog food right you set it up recurring order you never have to think about it again but eventually your dog is gonna die and the first thing you think to do is not to go on chewy dot com and cancel your dog food order so invariably a couple weeks later as you're mourning the loss of of your dog and now another bag of food comes yeah the worst the worst so now you call chewy then you cancel it and this is what they do every single time they obviously apologize for your loss they credit your account for that last bag of dog food they can't take it back for health code reasons they encourage you to give it to someone else who needs it and then two days later you get a bo k of flowers saying sorry fear your loss now that's pattern recognition which would be what one size fits most some some some and maybe those flowers cost them fifteen bucks think about dog people when they lose a dog is normally just a matter of time before they get another one and the same way that rory is never gonna buy a mattress for anyone else i'd be hard pressed to imagine anyone ever buying dog food from anyone else ever again listen i think that unreasonable hospitality it happens at the intersection of creativity and intention it's being intentional enough to pursue relationships to seek out opportunities and to well care enough to find them and then to do something with them once you do and then creativity to just to try to figure out what is the most awesome way you can possibly come up with to respond i think it's just as much about creating an environment where your team feels energized and rewarded and appreciated as well because it's a two way street i at least for me anyway there is nothing that energizes me more than when i get to see the look on someone else's face when they receive a gift i am responsible for giving them and when you create a culture like this you're giving everyone on your team the gift of just being able to give gifts and they don't always need to be lavish or expensive they just need to be thoughtful are there any other digital brands that i can go to and and and document or become a customer up and see how this is implemented well i consistently drawn to the in person examples but you asking me this makes me hey i feel like you're asking me what is a good movie that i've seen recently i never have the ability to remember them off the cuff but yeah i'm putting you on the spot and i can give you an easy out if you wanna needs easy yeah let me think are there any that i have the fact that we can't come up with any off the top of my head is kind of insane i think yeah which if i'm listening to this i'm like oh so the bar is low because by the way i will i'm gonna like i would call you out actually i would say so you run the thing called the welcome conference okay i'm gonna go to the welcome conference dot com i'm gonna go to your website i feel like we can make this un unexpectedly hospitable and make this even funny we're like we're like two weeks away unreasonable hospitality dot com the welcome conference dot com of releasing an entire new website for both of them because our website website's is kinda suck right now i'm not gonna lie it's it knew when i'm thinking about all this i'm like alright i gotta go implement into all this stuff but it's like shoot i gotta like go and like design the side and write it's it's it's hard it's a marathon seems a lot more fun to give someone for ups no but this is what i'll tell you like hey i i use the word magic a lot because i do believe when you do these things you're you're creating magic and there's this quote you know penn and teller my my favorite quote about magic comes from teller he says sometimes magic is just being willing to invest more energy into an idea than anyone else would deem reasonable nothing about this stuff is hard it does however require being willing to work harder i i was talking to a a buddy mind who's a magician and he was doing training for like the greatest friend ever to hang out with dude i have a lot of magician friends i got really yeah i dude they must have read the pickup up artist books that i used to because back that all those pickup artists books they tell you learn magic tricks their everyone says that works but i don't think for many of these guys have worked until more recently but he he was hired to go train paul rudd magic i think for ant and so it goes to the director's house hey and his assistant code to hang out for a day with paul rudd and and the director and they go through a bunch of magic tricks they're showing him teaching him about to do it the whole thing and at the end they're about to leave the directors like come on show me your best trick he's like well i kinda just showed you all my stuff and the guy's like no come on your best trick and he's like alright do you have a backyard and go on the backyard and he says to paul he goes hey can you just point into the yard any direction in this yard kinda like ge behind the house and name a card ace two three four five six seven eight nine ten jack queen king and the suit so like paul said like eight of hearts and pointed so they walk out that direction they says to his assistant hey give me the shovel the assistant reaches into his bag gives him the shovel he digs into the ground pulls out the ada hearts out of the ground oh my god now he's not just there to do magic tricks for paul ready there to show him how to do magic so he shows him a video of them at the guy's house the night before digging holes and bearing all fifty two cards in the the law no shit and he did it as a grid so no matter where paul pointed he could figure it out that was a lot of work that paul's reaction when he pulled an eight of hearts out of the ground made all that work worth it that's what magic is and that's what i think hospitality when pursued unreasonable has the capacity to be man that's awesome do you love being an author significantly more than running a restaurant because one sounds way easier than the other it's interesting i i don't know i mean i loved what i did like i loved it like i love working like a man act to build a world and then getting to stand at the front door of that world and welcome people into it it's one of my favorite things i don't get the gratification now of like sitting in someone's living room and watching them read the book like there i got the gratification of watching people experience the thing that i'd built but i bet you it's it's been a nice seasonal of life i mean i don't know the finances i bet you it's made a really good living and it's been nice to so that's my point end i love this it's hard for me to compare which one i love more but i certainly don't miss it like i don't miss what i did because i'm so loving what i'm doing now i and what are you doing now you're you're you you wrote the book you i mentioned you're speaking and you had the conference so i have welcome conference in new york we do an unreasonable hospitality summit and nashville i write a newsletter called prem that comes out every other week so you you own a media company kind of yeah i'm also a writer and a producer on the bear now which is fun i didn't know i thought it was just for that one episode was i started riding and producing the following season is that awesome man that's sounds awesome dude so fun and that whole team is just the best and what's that mean what's the actor saying jeremy ellen white i mean he seems awesome he is a awesome then just be wildly talented and exceptionally humble so do you get to hang out with all these guys and do you see how it's made we might think of when john i'm in chicago on set with them and maddie madison i think he's fan fantastic he's the best he is a ridiculous and incredible human being that's so cool there's a whole in there's all these instagram there's this idea in men's fashion or men wear and the idea is like for certain people if you try too hard it's like the clothes are wearing you you're not wearing the clothes yeah yeah yeah and there's all and it it's called sp yes spritz and then there's manny math in who's always wearing in the club like he's and there's and and he's the example so press spreads i've talked about this pod it's a italian where it basically just means efforts effortlessly cool which is like it's like two thousand dollar beautiful soup but you're wearing like dirty boots and because of that you're cool i'm not i don't have that by the way i'd like i'm not i don't have that grasp on men wear i wear like a two shirt jeans at this clinton yeah but yeah yeah yeah you you kinda had it in a way because of because of your company and and maddie madison already when listening in the bear he's i don't what's his name the bear fact and he is kinda they kinda portray him is this kinda silly goofy doo guy but in reality he is like a like a very quick area guy and he's huge she's a he's a big person but he's got tattoos all of his face he wears the coolest is clothes on instagram yeah but it doesn't look like clothes that he went and bought from a thrift shop it looks like clothes that he's own for twenty years and they got this beautiful like wear on it and it looks like he just wakes up and magically a new outfit was like draped upon him in the middle of the night by some theory yeah he's got it so he he he's like that in real life no yeah he's he's amazing he's so he's so sweet well and what's crazy is i'm sure you could speak to this and i like to hear some stories in this but people in the restaurant industry if you own a restaurant it seems like most of them who are quote successful they're actually still kinda broke and they're working their asses is off yeah i mean here's here's the problem i think there's a couple problems a lot of people that open restaurants didn't like work their way up through the business in a way to make sure they really understood the business side of restaurants it's like anything i don't think you can succeed financially unless you are willing to be as creative in pursuit of making money as you are in pursuit of the experience you're building for people i think a lot of restaurants are just too small and the economics of a small restaurant are just hard to really make work until you start opening so many restaurants that you're running around like crazy and you're so distracted that the quality of the restaurants start to suffer now there are some people that have done it extraordinarily well and have figured out how to balance art and commerce and who who do you put in that bucket i mean kevin va and rob cad they have a company out of chicago called the boca restaurant group i think they have like thirty six restaurants or something right because here's the reality okay you need a good general manager to run a restaurant right like you need someone that's great at taking care of the guest and managing the team and honestly the skills that are required to do that well are not that different whether you're working at a forty d seat bi row or a sixty seat three michelin star restaurant and yet and then the cost of that person these days is is somewhere between depending on what market you're in ninety thousand dollars to a hundred and eighty thousand dollars it's not that biggest swing and so you can be doing five million dollars a year paying that or twenty million dollars a year paying that right and the margins just become really really really hard when you're not doing a volume and so like you can do volume if you're doing fast casual chick f a mcdonald's over the course well what do you say volume do you mean like the number of seats at take like literally just the number of customers number of seats and times in average check gotcha so just the the we we to a ao so like the the average customer yeah yeah a value and so and like it doesn't take that much more work to run a fifteen million dollar year restaurant than it does a five million dollar a year restaurant and so like what's the difference so like you're just saying it doesn't take that much work to get the average customer order to be a hundred dollars versus or the difference between running a hundred dollar head restaurant versus a twenty dollar head restaurant is not significant the amount of work that goes into it is not that different nor is the amount of work that goes into running a twenty seat restaurant versus an abc seat restaurant you need the same number of general managers the same number of chefs do you need some more obviously your variable expenses are gonna be higher but most of the fixed costs are relatively the same your rents gonna be higher on a bigger restaurant but these are all such small percentages compared to the top line that i always encourage people when they say they wanna open a restaurant to work in one for long enough to actually make mistakes on someone else's time before they go to open one and then to open one that's big enough that it actually is worthwhile doing if i had to guess you have a notes on your iphone where you have all of these interesting restaurant concepts or angles or sound bites that are interesting to you and you don't wanna do them now and you may never do them but they they fasten you is there any is that true and if yes is there anything on that list that you could talk about i mean listen i i think that the fashion of restaurants is not dissimilar to the fashion of jeans right like we want skinny jeans then fat jeans then skinny jeans then fat jeans and it kind of the pendulum shifts back and forth i think for a little while their restaurants started getting way too complicated and i'm excited about the return to simplicity that's happening right now where people are realizing that with everything going out of the world the human moments need to be as human as humanly possible and the places i'm drawn to like there's a restaurant in new york city called res and it's just unbelievable pasta in a beautiful room served delight well i'm i'm drawn to more the kind of restaurant that creates the conditions for genuine connection i was just with my wife and six friends and we we rented a house in meekness greece last week and the people that own the house every morning we'd wake up and they'd set this long table for us with breakfast so there's greek yogurt and fruit and some bacon and eggs and a fresh loaf for bread every morning and we'd sit down and no one had to order anything and it was like this beautiful moment i feel like that's a restaurant that doesn't exist yet and i would love to see it exist like where you just sit down with the people you love and the food just there and just get into it i i want i'm drawn to go to and perhaps and my imagination when have to deal with the realities of actually doing it dream about building restaurants that are less about impress people by what you can do and more just extending an invitation for them to reconnect with one another last couple of questions did you i've heard stories and i am i respect the food industry but like i that's not my passion you know i i'm a very i'm a much simpler eater and what little i do know is like i've read stories about like the the michelin and star thing and and how like some chefs will like end up giving it back because they play to the critics sometimes and it kinda becomes overwhelmed overwhelming for a variety of reasons did you ever feel when you're when you were building a restaurants did you ever feel the tension of playing for critics and awards and playing for customers and also doing things that you just think because they're dope yeah yeah it was attention that i felt more acutely earlier in my career and and our journey towards success than i did later i think in the beginning listen you have to play the game a little bit of course i think is the same no matter what industry and the you can't get people to pay attention to you unless you've achieved some level of critical success and that means doing the things that you aren't necessarily inclined to want to do in order to get to where you need to get so like give you an example i my first big goal was i wanted four stars in the new york times there's only seven restaurants in new york with four stars we needed to get that that was the starting point once you're a four star restaurant then you're gonna be full all the time and if you wanna be the best at something that's the first stop along the way especially if you it well not especially if you are in new york now when i looked to the forest star restaurants at the time they were all like the upper east side they're were all in midtown they were like fancy places and so i don't believe there should be a dress code in a restaurant i think that you're there to invite people as they are but we had to have a dress code we had to have we never were jackets required but there was like a proper dress code no hats no t shirts whatever it was the day we got four stars the dress code went away like there were certain things we had to do in order to get a seat at the table and them once we were there we had the freedom and the confidence to start doing things our own way over time what i learned was that if i consistently was delivering the thing i wanted to receive it was always gonna resonate more with the world and so playing the game got us to a pretty good level but starting to just do what i wanted to do and not what i thought other people wanted us to do was the thing that ultimately got us to the top one of my kinda joys of this podcast is finding people who our listeners don't already know and we kinda like you know we we we said like this this we we put our stamp like this person's is amazing and and hopefully we're hopefully in some way we're like a little bit of a pacemaker because we have we have shown them something new yeah you're already a huge deal and you are you've been circling around the business and everything for for a while we definitely haven't discovered you but it it would give me so much joy if someone listens to this and feels inspired because they hadn't previously heard about you and and and and now know about unreasonable hospitality just for the sake of excellence of pursuing excellence and that's something that i'm very passionate about right now i wasn't always passionate about that and now i i don't think that comes naturally to me for for a long time my attitude was it's good enough move forward aggressively move forward and i'm trying to fight that and i'm trying to be more excellent and i hope that the listener because i know i feel this way yeah whenever i talk to you whenever i read about you whenever i listening to a podcast with you i feel that i feel the need to be more excellent than i currently than i've currently been behaving thank you ma'am thank you and i and i hope we've given that to to our audience well anyone out there listening who this is the first time we've run into one another it's good to meet you could i do yeah what do you what do you wanna promote do you have anything where what do what did you what's your social media platform of preference if any yeah the two the two things i'm excited to promote are a the newsletter prem which is one of my favorite things to do like it is the stories that i shared today it's me sharing one of these stories every couple weeks just things i'm seeing out the world that inspire me you can sign up for that at unreasonable hospitality dot com and then second my next book unreasonable hospitality the field guide which is like my version of a workbook to really like go through with a team and bring these ideas to life comes out april of next year but is available for pre order now and i'm so excited about it i just sent it up to prem and i'm absolutely gonna buy that i would love that that seems to be the thing now and the book industry is having like a workbook to a accompany the book we made much harder and ourselves than we needed it's like this four color it's almost like a graphic novel version of a workbook i did it with this design firm called invisible creature they've done work with like nasa and pixar and i love the i love workbook i i fall for it every time and by the way i just had it for prem you're welcome email i'm actually not i don't even wanna say what it is because hopefully you'll get more subscribers you're welcome email fantastic thank you like i've i've only obviously doing this i can't read whole thing but like i'm seeing like the i've i've read the first sentence i'm hooked and i'm scrolling i'm like oh this is a whole story here's the background this is awesome there we go dude that's that's high is yeah the website sucks but the welcome is okay but the website absolutely does not suck i would just i just messing in with you and this is awesome we appreciate you thank you so much that's it that's the pod i feel like i could rude world to know i could be what i want to put all in it like a day's off on a less let's take a quick break because as you know we are on the hubspot podcast network but we're not the only ones there's other podcast podcasts on this network too and maybe you liked them maybe you should check them out one of them that i wanna draw your attention to is called nudge by phil ag and whether you're a marketer or a salesperson and you're looking for the small changes you could make the new habits you could do the the small decisions you could make that will make a big difference that's what that podcast is all about check it out it's called nudge and you can get it wherever you get your podcast