Will Guidara was one of the two men who led fine dining restaurant Eleven Madison Park (EMP) to the top of the Best Restaurants in the World list in 2017. In 2019, Guidara left EMP, parting ways with chef Daniel Humm, his business partner of 13 years. In 2022 he published Unreasonable Hospitality, his book about operating in the highest echelons of the restaurant industry.
One of the messages that Guidara outlines in the book is something he calls ‘the hospitality solution’. He explains this like so:
The very end of the meal is always precarious from a hospitality perspective. First of all, it’s time to pay, and that’s never fun. The cold, hard reality of those numbers on a check can throw cold water on the magical vibe you’ve built over the course of the evening.
And the timing is hard to get right. When some guests are ready to leave, they’re ready to leave. People get impatient (I get impatient!) if the process of getting the check, paying it, and getting out the door takes too long. But at the same time, you can never put the check down before the guest has asked for it, because that gives them the feeling you’re trying to rush them out.
At EMP, we used hospitality to solve both potential problems. We didn’t wait for the guest to ask for the check. Instead, at the end of their meal, we’d bring the bill over and drop it off — along with an entire bottle of cognac.
We’d pour everyone at the table a splash and leave the full bottle on the table: “Please, help yourself to as much as you like, with our compliments. And when you’re ready, your check is right here.”
People were delighted by this. The ability to pour for themselves felt even more luxurious and surprising to them after a three-hour meal where they hadn’t had to lift a finger, and that was the feeling I was trying to replicate: the moment, at the end of a dinner party, when a guest leans forward, grabs the mostly empty bottle of wine left on the table, and tops off everyone’s glass.
But more important, there’s no way a person who has just been given a full bottle of free booze can feel like they’re being rushed out. And yet, at the same time, the check was right there whenever they were ready for it. We no longer had to “drop the check” on one of our guests, and they would never have to ask for it again.
This is a hospitality solution: a problem that we solved not by sneakily chipping away at the service we were offering but by blowing it out in the opposite direction—by giving more, not less.
There is some solid business thinking behind this practice; EMP wasn’t just giving out free cognac just because they could. Guidara continues:
Too often, when we’re faced with a pernicious problem in our businesses, we fall back on the tried-and-true: push harder, be more efficient, cut back. Especially when the problems are nagging ones that erode the bottom line or those that persist because our organizations rely on humans and all their wonderful and fallible ways.
Imagine, though, that instead of resorting to one of these fallback positions, you asked yourself: What is the hospitality solution? What if you forced yourself to be creative, to develop a solution that worked because of—not in spite of—your dedication to generosity and extraordinary service? (emphasis added)
These are almost always harder to execute, and coming up with them will definitely call on your creative side. But they’re almost always a win. If a stumble at the end of a meal can undo all the goodwill a restaurant has earned in the three hours preceding it, then a gorgeous, gracious gesture at the end can have the opposite effect. (This is true in every service industry.)
And while dropping off a full bottle of expensive booze at every table seemed like an unreasonably extravagant gesture, it was actually cost-effective. After an elaborate multicourse dinner (and usually plenty of wine), few people were interesting in drinking more than a sip of that cognac. Yet the feeling of abundance was there. (emphasis added)
This sort of thinking permeates Guidara’s book, and you get the sense that one of the reasons he wrote it is to push readers to think about coming up with ‘hospitality solutions’ in their own contexts — no matter what the business. This comes easy for him, but not for most business operators.
Guidara writes:
One of my close friends runs one of the big realty firms in New York and has asked me on a couple of occasions to talk to her team about hospitality. The first thing I ask the real estate agents is what gift they leave to welcome a new homeowner. Ninety-nine percent of the time, they tell me, “A bottle of sparkling wine in the fridge.”
Now, a bottle of bubbles is nothing to complain about. But there’s also nothing personal, nothing inspiring or memorable, about it—and there should be!
You’re selling someone a home or helping them to sell the one they’ve lived in. That’s one of the most intimate transactions there is. For the amount of time that an agent spends with people, listening to their hopes and dreams for the future (incidentally, much longer than I’ve ever spent with a table), and the size of the average commission, a real estate professional should absolutely be able to figure out a bespoke gift for everyone they work with.
So: if your buyer is into music, leave them their favorite album on vinyl—and, depending on the size of your commission, spring for a turntable as well. If a client dreamed out loud about doing yoga in that nook off the hallway with the sunlight streaming through, then buy a mat and roll it out there, so it’s the first thing to greet them when they walk into their new home.
A yoga mat doesn’t take any more time, energy, or resources to secure than a bottle of Prosecco, just a bit more thoughtfulness.
The trap that most businesspeople make is to conflate expense (or luxury) with hospitality. Guidara makes a distinction between the two: “luxury means just giving more; hospitality means being more thoughtful.”
To wit:
Many good businesspeople make these gestures instinctively. A real estate agent I spoke to told me about a Legend she’d pulled, long before she knew the term. Since she knew the new owners were planning a gut renovation, she got permission to remove the doorjamb where her client, the seller, had marked her kids’ heights every year as they grew. To anyone else, it would have been a worthless piece of splintered wood, headed for the dumpster—but not to her client, who wept when she realized what it was. (Total cost: $0.)
The next step, of course, is to systematise this. Guidara systematised the creation of Legends at EMP; he didn’t want staff coming up with unique hospitality solutions for common classes of customer interactions. Similarly, for a realty business:
If you’re selling an apartment to a couple having a baby, get a pack of those protective plastic outlet covers and leave them in a drawer with a little note: “You’ve got big adventures coming up, so I took this off your to-do list.” And because so many people move when they find out they’re expecting, keep a case of those outlet covers in your office so you don’t have to scramble. For newcomers to the area you specialize in, put together a guidebook of all your favorite spots—the best stroll, the best rigorous hike, the best apple cider donut. Print a dozen at a time.
Another agent I spoke with mentioned she’d sold eight pied-à-terres to suburban empty nesters in a single year. Do those people want yet another basic bottle of sparkling wine, available at every corner liquor store? Or would they prefer a behind-the-scenes tour of the art restoration facilities at the Met? Or tickets to the Village Vanguard? Or a membership to an art house movie theater in Brooklyn?
And if you can’t or don’t want to go that far, then take a minute to focus on making your back-pocket gift more thoughtful. Leave a Chemex coffeepot, with a box of filters and a bag of locally roasted ground coffee — because that’s what most people really need on their first morning in a new house before they’ve found the moving box with the espresso machine in it. I guarantee they’ll think of you and your thoughtfulness every time they use it.
The next bit of resistance that Guidara gets is that “oh, these ideas work for service businesses like restaurants and real estate, but my business doesn’t have that many opportunities to delight customers.”
Guidara, of course, doesn’t buy it. The general principle he uses is that there are inflection points — patterns — in every business, and you just have to look closely to notice them. These opportunities exist when you want to turn customers into repeat buyers; most businesses have stakeholders who can choose to return. Guidara’s core skill seems to be coming up with these little things to nudge the stakeholder — in most cases, the customer — just a little in the direction of loyalty.
He writes:
People tend to buy cars at specific points in their lives. Maybe they’re starting a family and need a bigger vehicle, or their teenager has gotten a license and they’re buying their child their first car. Or the kids are off to college, and it’s time to get something a little sportier than the beat-up family boat they’ve been using to go back and forth from ballet and soccer practice.
If you know that people are going to come in, looking to buy a car for their teenager, why wouldn’t you be prepared with an act of hospitality that will strengthen their connection to your brand? How would you feel about a car salesperson who pulled you aside and said, “Look, I know what it’s like to have a newly licensed teenager on the road, so I got Frankie a year of Triple A. That way you know she’s not going to get stranded out there.”
A Triple A membership costs $119 at the time of this writing—a hundred and nineteen dollars that pretty much guarantees those parents will never buy a car from anyone else.
(A Triple A membership can be yet another example of a systematised hospitality solution — have it written into your sales playbook!)
Alternatively, set a budget aside for each salesperson’s discretion:
Or can you imagine the look a harried dad, struggling to install a booster seat, would give you if you sent him off your lot with a bag of Pepperidge Farm Goldfish, so his toddler doesn’t get hangry on the way home — and a little DustBuster vacuum, so Dad can vacuum up all those orange crumbs and keep his brand-new car looking brand-new?
When people have the resources and autonomy to imbue these transactions with their own thoughtfulness, salespeople become product designers. That car didn’t come outfitted with a DustBuster, but that salesperson decided that for this specific customer, it would be better if it did. And they are going to feel a sense of pride in selling a product that they helped create.
Creating such moments is — of course — not just a matter of giving salespeople the autonomy and budget to decide. Guidara came up with a set of interlocking processes to enable such interactions. Some of these things have been covered in the Systematising Legends case, as well as with Guidara’s former boss’s business, in Repeatable Success in the Restaurant Business: Union Square Hospitality Group.
And you should always—always—be on the lookout for the Legend. Let’s say a guy has come back to your dealership every couple of years for a new car, and you’ve gotten to know him well. When his kids go off to college, he starts looking at vans; with a little more time on his hands, he’s rediscovered his adolescent passion for surfing.
Why wouldn’t you have a freshly waxed board waiting for him in the roof rack when he comes to pick up his new car? Obviously, this is a big gift, but it’s also one with the potential to turn a faithful customer into a lifelong relationship. And if a surfboard’s outside your budget, a can of surf wax on the dash with a bow and a note will do much the same thing.
In businesses with the opportunity for repeat patronage, a little thoughtfulness can go a long way.