The Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business

Danny Meyer is one of America’s most innovative restaurateur’s. Currently the owner of eleven uber-successful restaurants in the greater New York area, Meyer is truly a master of his craft. The following are some key highlights and notes from his book, “Setting the Table – The Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business.”

“Setting the Table” Information from Amazon

• “Hospitality is the foundation of my business philosophy. Virtually nothing else is as important as how one is made to feel in any business transaction. Hospitality exists when you believe the other person is on your side. The converse is just as true. Hospitality is present when something happens for you. It is absent when something happens to you. Those two simple prepositions – for and to – express it all.”
• “Hospitality is a team sport.”
• Core business lesson taken from success of Union Square Cafe is that “willingness to overcome difficult circumstances is a crucial character trait in my employees, partners, and restaurants.
• You can’t sacrifice hospitality for volume
• Providing maximum value meant not just for the guest’s money, but also for their time.
• Understanding the distinction between service and hospitality has been at the foundation of our success. Service is the technical delivery of a product. Hospitality is how the delivery of that product makes its recipient feel. Service is a monologue — we decide how we want to do things and set our own standards for service. Hospitality, on the other hand, is a dialogue. To be on a guest’s side requires listening to that person with every sense, and following up with a thoughtful, gracious, appropriate response. It takes both great service and great hospitality to rise to the top.
• ABCD – Always be connecting dots – take interest in people and create relationships at every opportunity.
• Actively encourage feedback from customers
• “Excellence is a journey rather than a destination”
• “Context is everything. What has guided me most as an entrepreneur is the confluence of passion and opportunity (and sometimes serendipity) that leads to the right context for the right idea at the right time in the right place and for the right value.
• Hospitality first with one another, then guests, then community, then suppliers, and finally investors
• A business that understands how important it is to create wealth for the community stands a much higher chance of creating wealth for its own investors.
• It’s important for guests to enjoy your products, but it is imperative that they enjoy the people. A company can only grow and remain successful if it attracts, hires, and keeps great people.
• Ideal candidate score on a 100% suitability test = 49% technical experience & 51% emotional skills for hospitality
• You stand a much better chance of ending up with the best customers if you have the best employers
• Effective businesses remain true to their core, but also know how to hear, respond, and adjust to constructive feedback.
• The most successful business is not the one that eliminates the most problems: it’s the one that becomes most expert at finding imagnative solutions to address those problems.What are some companies that you have had experiences with that excel at hospitality? What are some that are horrible? What could they have done to change their image in your mind?