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Capital Allocators – Inside the Institutional Investment Industry
Will Guidara – Unreasonable Hospitality (EP.492)
00:57:52
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- [00:00]
Will Guidara
So many companies, regardless of how successful they are, reserve their best efforts only to invest in the thing that they sell. Don't invest that same amount of energy into how they make people feel, which to me feels counterintuitive. These companies, they are unreasonable in pursuit of bringing the most fully realized version of the product or service to life. They are relentless. They're willing to do whatever it takes to make that thing as close to perfect as possible. Unreasonable Hospitality is just willing to do the same when it comes to people. If it is the stickiest thing you can do in giving people a lasting impression of you, then why not give all of yourself to doing it well.
- [00:49]
Ted Seides
I'm Ted Seides and this is Capital Allocators. My guest on today's show is Will Guidera, the author of Unreasonable Hospitality and the soon to release Unreasonable the Field Guide. Unreasonable Hospitality has become a New York Times bestseller and a business bible for elevating customer experiences. Will was co owner of eleven Madison park alongside Danny Meyer when the restaurant ascended to number one in the world, the co producer of Emmy Award winning streaming series the Bear, host of the welcome Conference, and advisor to business leaders ranging from professional sports to financial services on the delivery of hospitality as a primary business strategy. Our conversation explores the operating principles of Unreasonable Hospitality across the identification and enhancement of customer experiences. Will describes operationalizing exceptional service, finding magic in repeated touch points, building teams that embrace hospitality, and leading others through vulnerability. Once in a while I get a chance to share a conversation outside of managers and allocators designed to help you level up your performance and business. From the day I met Will several years ago ago, I knew he could do just that from his valuable insights and colorful stories. Before we get going, I recently returned from a week's ski vacation to Switzerland with my son Eric, the same son who shared his serendipitous encounter with the podcast last week. Snow conditions have been challenging almost everywhere this season, but we were excited to travel to Europe for the first time to ski. Our trip there back was full on trains, planes and automobiles. We got a taste of the beauty, food and culture that everyone raves about in Zermatt. As for skiing, between snow conditions we're accustomed to in Vermont and a white out blizzard our last two days. We only got two full days of skiing, but we certainly left the mountain better off than we found it for skiers. The next week it would be safe to question my sanity for making the long trip to ski only two days, but the truth is the number of full weeks I have left one on one with my 16 year old son are numbered. So I took in every mom even when our plans for an active week were shot. What we did have was plenty of time to listen to podcasts. Although, as you may have heard last week, Eric wasn't about to listen to Capital Allocators.
- [03:21]
Will Guidara
But that's okay.
- [03:22]
Ted Seides
He's happy to encourage you to listen and to tell your friends and their friends to listen. What he doesn't know is that process will inevitably get back to him through his friend's parents, offering another opportunity for him to think twice.
- [03:35]
Interviewer
And one day, one day, just maybe, he'll listen too.
- [03:39]
Ted Seides
Thanks so much for starting a butterfly effect by spreading the word about Capital Allocators. That butterfly may be flapping its wings in the winter in Switzerland and one day find its way to Eric. Capital Allocators is brought to you by AlphaSense. Expert calls have always been one of the most powerful ways to build conviction. But today investors are asked to cover more companies and move faster with leaner teams. With AlphaSense's AI led expert calls, the their Tigus call service team sources experts based on your research criteria and lets the AI interviewer get to work. Then they take it one step further. Your call transcripts flow natively into your AlphaSense experience and become searchable and comparable, so your primary insights plug directly into your earnings diligence and pitchbook workflows with no tool switching AI for coverage and efficiency, humans for complexity and conviction. Sounds like just the right mix to create a scalable institutional edge without growing hedge count. For hedge funds, this means validating thesis assumptions before earnings across dozens of experts instead of a handful. For private equity, it means faster pre IOI scans and deeper commercial diligence. And for asset managers, it means pulling real operators perspectives straight into models without disconnected tools or manual handoffs. All of this lives inside the AlphaSense platform, turning raw conversations into comparable auditable insights. The first to see wins the rest. Follow Learn more at alpha-sense.com Capital Capital Allocators is also brought to you by Morningstar. What if data wasn't just a bunch of raw numbers, but a clear and decisive language to help connect investment strategies with long term investor needs in a constantly evolving market landscape? Morningstar created that language bringing order and utility to insight rich data so you can prepare for your next opportunity, no matter the asset class or Market? Visit wheredataspeaks.com to see what Morningstar Data can do for you. Please enjoy my conversation with Will Guidera.
- [05:56]
Interviewer
Will, thanks so much for joining me.
- [05:58]
Will Guidara
I've Been looking forward to this for a long time.
- [06:01]
Interviewer
One thing I've never asked you about is your path to where hospitality became a thing. Would love to hear your journey to that point in time.
- [06:12]
Will Guidara
It's a bunch of little experiences and moments in my life that got me here. I'll tackle hospitality in a moment. And first, just start with restaurants. I bifurcate them only because I believe hospitality is more than restaurants. Restaurants is simply the medium through which I fell in love with hospitality. I went into restaurants because I wanted to be like my dad. My dad was my hero growing up, my best friend, my greatest mentor, all wrapped up in one. He was that for a bunch of different reasons. Chief on the list was my mom was sick when I was a kid, became a quadriplegic watching my dad work restaurant hours, which are long hours. Take care of her. When I say take care of her, I mean get her out of bed, put her in the shower, get her dressed, set her up for the day, and still somehow find time to be an engaged and active dad to me. He was truly a superhero in my eyes. Since I was a little kid, I just wanted to be like him. It didn't matter what he did for a living. That would have been the thing I wanted to do. Just so happened, I fell in love with the thing he did. One of the ways that I was able to get time with him is he worked crazy hours Monday through Friday, but would always go in for a half day on Saturday when it worked around my mom's stuff. Monday through Friday were restaurant days for him. Saturday was the office day. He'd go into the office and get caught up on stuff. I'd go in and set up another desk in the office, pretend to be an executive. Or he would drop me off at one of the restaurants to help. In hindsight, I was more of an imposition than I was any assistants. Being in those restaurants, I was struck by the magic of a dining room. The orchestrated frenzy, the choreographed chaos. You could bear witness to all of life's experiences happening simultaneously within the same room. Then you go back into the kitchen. There's people cooking food, the sommelier is going crazy about wine. And then back at the office, watching my dad obsess over whether it was graphic design or marketing plans, it felt like a career where no two days would ever be the same. So I loved restaurants. And when I was 12, I knew I wanted to go to Cornell. I knew I wanted my own restaurant in New York City. The hospitality side came from the experience with my mom. Initially in two ways. First, looking at her through the eyes of my dad. Of course, if we could go back in time and change whatever we wanted, she would still be alive and would be healthy. And yet, I fell in love with caring for other people simply by watching the joy he felt in getting to care for her. So many men in his position would have been lamenting their circumstances, likely would have put their wife in a home to be cared for. He never once felt bad for himself. In fact, to the contrary, he derived pleasure in caring for her by virtue of that. So did I, because I then, as I got older, had to start cooking for her and caring for her. And that was something I felt grateful for. The other side was looking at me through her eyes because this was someone who could not talk or move. I have never felt more loved by anyone in my entire life than I felt by her. The way that she smiled, the way that her eyes lit up when I'd walk into a room, all of those things. For me, hospitality is love. I learned at first through that situation. It was supercharged. Once I started working for Danny Meyer and I got a taste of what that level of love operationalized could look like, it was then up to me to say, okay, how do I take this to a level that can only be described as unreasonable?
- [10:00]
Interviewer
A lot that you described in your dad, caring for your mom, that sounds very much like unreasonable. Hospitality, what does that mean to you?
- [10:08]
Will Guidara
That concept, My favorite quote about hospitality is one that many have heard comes from Maya Angelou. She said, people will forget what you say, they will forget what you do, but they will never forget how you made them feel. And I believe that to be so very true. When I think back on the experiences that linger with me to this day, those memories are not marked by some detail of the product or service. They're marked by something, whether big or small, that a human being did to make me feel seen, to give me a sense of belonging, to make me feel welcome. A story that they gave me to share, a memory that has lasted. I believe that to be pretty objectively true. Everyone I have ever talked to would agree with me about that. So many companies, regardless of how successful they are, reserve their best efforts only to invest in the thing that they sell. Don't invest that same amount of energy into how they make people feel, which to me, feels counterintuitive. These companies, they are unreasonable in pursuit of bringing the most fully realized version of the product or service to life. They are relentless. They're willing to do whatever it takes to make that thing as close to perfect as possible. Unreasonable hospitality is just willing to do the same when it comes to people. If it is the stickiest thing you can do in giving people a lasting impression of you, then why not give all of yourself to doing it?
- [11:38]
Interviewer
Well, how did you bring that concept into the restaurant?
- [11:43]
Will Guidara
The foundation of it came from Danny. So much of what I have done started with the foundation that he built. I really tried to build on top of that. Where it started in my restaurant was when we came in last place at the 50 Best Awards, I wanted to be number one. Like many people, when you set out to achieve a seemingly audacious goal, I looked at those who had been number one before to try to learn lessons from them and figure out how I could make those lessons my own. I talked a lot about the importance of knowing your own superpower so that you can fully capitalize on it. When I looked around that room, everyone else in it were chefs. I was the only dining room guy. Each one of those chefs, they were unreasonable in pursuit of the food they were serving their product, relentless in pursuit of innovation. What new ingredients could they cook with? What new techniques could they develop? And each of them, in their own way, has influenced how restaurants around the world approach cooking. That night, I decided we were going to be number one, and we were going to do it by being just as unreasonable, but in pursuit of the thing that I stood for, how we made people feel, that's when I wrote unreasonable hospitality down on a cocktail napkin. What came next was figuring out what that actually meant. It took pursuing it to fully discover it. That was alongside the entire team. I love this quote by David Marquet, the retired naval captain who says, in most organizations, the people at the top have all the authority, yet none of the information, while the people on the front line have all the information and none of the authority. When it comes to brainstorming truly innovative ideas about the customer experience, you need to bridge that gap between authority and information. This was the entire team working together. And in the beginning, we did what felt obvious. We looked at the experience we were serving and tried to figure out ways to make it more hospitable. We did some pretty cool innovations around how we welcomed people through the front door, how we delivered their food, and each of them started moving us in the right direction. One day, I had a moment of realization that we were focusing only on the most obvious touch points in the guest experience, which, by definition, were the same touchpoints our competitors were focusing on. It's one thing I've come to realize, not just in my time owning and operating the restaurants, but in the years since. As I've worked with companies across pretty much every industry, very few know what all the touch points in their experience are because they never slowed down for long enough to genuinely understand the experience as a whole. We did this exercise as a team. I called it the Interrogation of the Customer Journey. We mapped out with excruciating detail every single touchpoint in the entire experience, ultimately getting that list up to about 130. Once we had isolated all of them, we started elevating as many of them as possible. What I found through that process is changes conceived at the intersection of creativity and intention can be remarkably profound in their impact, especially if you focus on parts of the experience that no one else has paused for long enough to think about. We did that for a while.
- [14:49]
Interviewer
When you go through that, elevating 130 different potential touch points, what are examples along the way of a couple of the things that you did?
- [15:00]
Will Guidara
Coat check. There's this rule that I love. It's how people normally remember experiences. It's called the peak and rule. People remember the peak of the experience, whatever the furthest deviation is from zero, and then the end, you need to stick the landing. If you go to a restaurant during the winter season in New York City, you end up checking your coat. The last part of what is hopefully an amazing experience is you rummaging through your pockets, trying to find the coat check ticket that invariably you can't find right away, and then giving it to someone, and then standing cold near the drafty door, waiting for them to bring you your coat, and then you leave. Everything is perfectly choreographed right until the end. We saw that as an opportunity. I said, I want it instead to be such that people walk from their table to the front door, and we're just standing there holding their coats. I've worked with magicians a lot over the years. One of my favorite things about working with them is they'll come up with an idea for a trick. And if you ask them, how do you do that? They're like, oh, we don't know yet. But if we like that as an outcome, now we're going to back up and figure it out. Same thing with the code check. We came up with that idea and then figured out how to make it happen. And it's not that exciting a tale. But what would happen is, rather than people going through what they always went through, they'd walk up to the front door, they'd start to look through their Pockets realize that there was already someone standing right in front of them, holding their coats. It took an overlooked, seemingly painful part of the experience and turned it into, effectively, a magic trick. When you do enough of those, the culmination of all of them starts to become transformational. The one I like to talk about the most often is the check. Every single restaurant in the world ends with someone bringing you a bill. And yet, in spite of the fact that every restaurant has that touch point in common, I've never seen it approached with any creativity or any intention. That's in part because it's transactional. We don't think that the transactional can be connective. It's also challenging from a timing perspective. Every diner has this in common. Whether or not they realize it, they get very impatient the moment they ask for the bill. I can't drop a check on a table before someone's asked, otherwise they think I'm trying to rush them out. It's also 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 costs, it's a little bit harder to still love that meal you've just had. For those reasons, no innovation. But once we'd written it down, once we'd isolated it, we had an opportunity to make it awesome. What we came up with was if you were dining with us and it was clear you were done, I'd go over to your table with a glass for you and your guest and a bottle of cognac, and I'd pour just a splash of cognac into each glass. And I'd say, thank you for coming. This was my compliments. I'm going to leave the entire bottle here. Please help yourself to as much as you'd like. And then I'd put the check done. So your check is here, ready whenever you are. Small change, profound impact. First, no one ever had to wait for the check again. Second, no one could ever think we were trying to rush them out. We just gave them an entire bottle of free booze. It didn't cost us very much. Rarely did they drink more than that splash. At the moment where we brought over a big bill, we matched it with a gesture of profound generosity, keeping the value proposition intact. By the way, I've talked to people who dined with us then. We were serving some of the best food on the planet. They don't remember a single thing they ate. They will never forget how we made them feel when we brought over that bottle of cognac.
- [18:17]
Interviewer
In a restaurant business, notoriously low margins. Maybe they're a little bit higher in fine dining. How do you go about adding these things to the experience? Some of which a bottle of cognac, I'm sure it's a good bottle, costs money.
- [18:32]
Will Guidara
The way I've always managed my businesses is through something that I call the rule of 95. 5, which is my way of saying you manage every single dollar like a maniac 95% of the time. No expense is too small to be poured over. Every penny counts. But you do that so that you can earn the right to spend the last 5% foolishly. And I'm putting foolishly in air quotes because it's not foolish spending. In fact, that is some of the best spending you can engage in. It's the spending that does most of the heavy lifting in transforming a business. But I say you need to earn it for two reasons. One, you do need to earn it. You need to be frugal enough with your money that you have money to spend. I'm also saying you need to earn it because if you are not spending that last 5%, you're being financially reckless. I believe you're focused so much on today dollars that you're not thinking enough about tomorrow dollars. Because when you invest in relationships with that 5%, the loyalty you earn takes a very long time to erode.
- [19:36]
Interviewer
What's your favorite story that you came through in all these little experiences that you created?
- [19:43]
Will Guidara
It's more fun recently for me to talk about my favorite stories as ones that have happened for me in the years since I was staying in Palm beach with my wife and my then 2 year old daughter. At Four Seasons, my wife is a pastry chef, and the breakers is right down the street. And the breakers is renowned for their key lime pie. In my family, we travel for dessert. One night we left the Four Seasons, went to the breakers for dinner so we could have the key lime pie. As we're pulling up, I was still a new dad at the time. My daughter speaking to the building that the breakers is in because it looks like a Disney castle, she goes, dad, does Elsa live here? In a moment of idiocy, I said, well, yeah, of course she does. Not realizing that the moment we walked into the hotel, she'd be like, all right, dad, let's go meet Elsa. Uh oh. We go to the restaurant as we're being seated at Cheetah Head with maitre d, and I say, hey, bud, I need you to do me a favor. 30 minutes into the meal, can you just Come back to the table and say, hey, Ms. Frankie. That's my daughter's name. We just realized Elsa's away on vacation right now. She heard you were here, and she just wanted to say hi and let you know that she's sorry to miss you. So he goes, of course. I got you. 30 minutes later, he does come back. He has a little bag with him, and he says everything I asked him to say. But then he also hands her a bag with a little plastic magic wand and a plastic tiara and said, elsa wanted me to give you these gifts. The reason I say that one is one of my favorites is because it reinforces two lessons that I believe to be true. One, that was not that hard for him. It did not cost that much money. I don't know where he got that stuff, but it was relatively cheap. Yet the impact it had was significant. And I've talked about the breakers about a million times since then. Not because of the meal, not because of the service, not because of the beauty of the building, but because of that single gesture. But two, the reason why it was so impactful for me was because I got to look at her face when she received it. When you play at a certain level, the people you're trying to impress have a lot of people trying to impress them with a lot of frequency. Sometimes the best way to love on someone is to love on the people they love. If we could turn our attention to the people alongside the people, we can have a greater impact.
- [22:00]
Interviewer
In the context of bringing this into a business, how did you go about creating repeat experiences like that to structure these special moments?
- [22:12]
Will Guidara
What I just described, I consider to be one size fits one. The coat check and the check. I bucket that into one size fits all. You can do a lot of the heavy lifting is with one size fit sum, that is through simple pattern recognition of recurring moments. And I believe every business should go through this exercise. It can be transformational. What it requires is looking at the things that happen, not always for every one of your customers, but sometimes for some people, as often as once a day or as rarely as once every few weeks. Because every business out there has these recurring moments, the good ones and the challenging ones, if you can name them in advance. Decide what is the coolest way to respond every time that thing happens. Invest in whatever's required for that reaction so you have resources at hand. You can create magic all the time. I was on a plane, we pulled away from the jet bridge. As we're taxiing out to the Runway, that dreaded Announcement came over the intercom. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm so sorry. We have an issue with the plane. We're going to be delayed here for a little bit. Those are the worst delays for two reasons. One, now you can't even go up and grab a Starbucks coffee. But two, there's always some dude three rows back that lets out that groan of exasperation and the morale on the plane starts to spiral downwards. This time, something different happened. The captain came out of the cockpit. There were three families on board, parents with kids. He goes up to the first one and goes, hey, kids, do you guys want a tour of the cockpit? The kids got so excited, which made the people sitting around them excited. Went to the next family, did it. Went to the next family, did it. Now he's out of families, we're still delayed. So he just says really loud in the cabin, do any adults want to tour the cockpit? A bunch of adults started taking tours, the cockpit. Eventually, we took off. As someone who studies this stuff, I asked the flight attendant, what was that? She goes, oh, he's the best. Every time we're delayed in the tarmac, that's what he does. He took a pain point and turned it into something magical. He identified a recurring pattern and came up with a better way to respond when it happened. I see that all the time in so many different places now. You know what Chewy does when someone's dog passes? This one's powerful. Chewy, the online pet supply company. If you have a dog, you go on there, do a dog food subscription. It comes at the beginning of every month. You never have to forget to buy dog food. You don't get three Michelin Stars without having a healthy dose of obsessive compulsive disorder in you. And that does not go well with dogs. So I'm not a dog person. I got married almost 10 years ago and was informed that, yes, indeed, I am a dog person. Six years ago, we got our first dog. Her name is Butter Swiss Mountain Dog. Now, I am definitively, genuinely a dog person. I love this dog so much, to the point that sometimes it breaks my heart that I will lose her before I'm ready to. I guarantee you, the day that happens, I will not think to go online and cancel my dog food subscription, which means a couple weeks later, I'm going to get another bag of dog food, going to rip open the scab, then I'm going to reach out to them. This is a recurring moment for them. This is what they do every time that happens. They apologize for Your loss, they cancel the subscription. They obviously can't take that last bag back for health code reasons, but they credit it to your account. And then two days later, a bouquet of flowers arrives at your house saying, we are so sorry for your loss. Think about dog people. Eventually they're going to get another dog. And if you ever buy dog food from anyone else after having gotten those flowers from them, you're a serial killer as far as I'm concerned. It's so beautiful when people understand that with thoughtfulness you can systemize graciousness. Every time you do it, you start to build momentum. The momentum through which people on your team start finding more and more creative ways to bring things like this to life.
- [26:21]
Interviewer
You did this in the context of the restaurants, and then a little while ago, the book comes out, becomes a bestseller. What happens from there?
- [26:32]
Will Guidara
Watching the different industries that have adopted these ideas and start to run with them has been wild. Seeing people do with the book things that I never could have conceived, that's the most fun part. I've seen prison systems use it. Navy seals use it with their teams. I've seen education systems use it. I've seen hospital systems use it. I've seen NFL teams employ the ideas and everything in between. So that's been wild. The number of Dreamweavers, that position that I had in my restaurant, that exist in the most random of companies all over the world now, is mind blowing.
- [27:10]
Interviewer
Describe what that means. The Dreamweaver position.
- [27:13]
Will Guidara
The Dreamweaver was a position that we added to our team. We did all those touchpoint things, we did the check coat check and all these different things. We were making a ton of momentum. I still wasn't sure I'd figured out what it meant to be unreasonable. One day I was in the restaurant helping out the team on a busier than normal lunch service. I found myself clearing appetizers from a table of four. They were foodies, Europeans on vacation in New York City just to eat at our best restaurants. This was their last meal. They were going straight to the airport to head back home from the restaurant. Afterwards, while I was there, I overheard them talking and they were raving about their trip. They'd been to every four star restaurant now. Eleven Madison. The only thing they never got to have was a New York City hot dog. It was that light bulb moment. I ran 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 actually serve it. I got him to Trust me. And eventually, he cut the hot dog up into four perfect pieces, put one on each plate, added a little swish of mustard, one of ketchup, little scoop of sauerkraut, one of relish, topped it off with a micro herb or something to make it look fancy. Then, before their final savory course, which at the time was a honey lavender glazed muscovy duck that had been dry aged for two weeks, I brought out what we in New York call the dirty water dog. And I explained it. I said, hey, we couldn't let you go home with any regrets. Here's that hot dog. They freaked out. And it was one of those moments where you have to look at the tapes to see what you did. Well, to make sure that you keep on doing it. I'd served at that point tens of millions of dollars worth of wagyu beef and lobster over the course of my career. Yet I'd never seen anyone react the way they did to the hot dog. We started to build momentum around this, with the team talking about being more present, picking up on this stuff, not taking ourselves too seriously, delivering gestures. Everyone was fired up about it, except I made a mistake. A mistake that's too often made. I had a big idea. I invited the team to get on board with it. And I gave them exactly zero in the way of resources to bring it to life, but something I see often. Every CEO says they want better hospitality. While almost all of them are willing to invest whatever is required to make the product better, they are reticent to do the same when it comes to how they make people feel. Yet nothing will take root in the absence of resource. I added a position to our team, someone who is in the dining room with us every single night with no operational responsibility there as a resource to help everyone else bring their ideas to life. We called the position the Dreamweaver. Once we added that position, it changed everything. We were doing things like that. Cooler things than the hot dog for countless people every night. I've seen Dreamweavers at car dealerships, hospitals, football teams. It's wildly cool. That's something I've seen out in the world. At the very beginning of the conversation, I talked about how restaurants and hospitality are not the same, how I fell in love with hospitality through restaurants, but that was simply a medium. What I've gotten to do is play in so many different sandboxes and figure out what hospitality looks like across industries. I'm writing books, I'm producing the Bear and all this different stuff. We get to work with some really cool companies to figure out how to bring these ideas to life in the most unlikely of places.
- [30:36]
Interviewer
What are some of your favorite applications that you've seen across different businesses over the last year?
- [30:43]
Will Guidara
This is wildly simple and unbelievably impactful. I heard from a guy who owns two UPS stores in Sarasota, not necessarily the first person I would have written on a list of those I'd expect to hear from about unreasonable hospitality. And he goes, I love your book. I've been trying to figure out how to implement the ideas into my stores and it's a little bit harder. It's different in my world. I came up with something and it's changed our entire culture. He created a rule where everyone that works the register at the UPS stores has to. They are required to once a day comp someone's purchase up to 30 bucks. That one thing changed everything first. If you were the recipient of the comp, obviously it made your day. Imagine going into a UPS store, shipping something or printing something, and they're like, ted, it's on me today. It would blow your mind. This is about exceeding expectations that would definitively exceed any expectation you ever had. The second one is it changed the employees entire perspective around the work. For the first time, they were on the receiving end of actual appreciation. We undervalue how important it is to feel validation through appreciation and how important that is to do a good job in your work. There are places where they don't receive it as much. When I heard the story, I started thinking back to am I as grateful to the people that work at a UPS store as I should be? Everyone deserves gratitude for their work. But now they were. And it made them more happy to be there with it. Something changed. They no longer were required to comp someone. They went from having to. To getting to. But only one person. Which is why every single customer's experience was elevated. Now they had to more deeply get to know every single customer that walked into the store to decide who deserved it the most. Was it someone who was having a really good day that needed a cherry on top? Was it someone that was having a really hard day that needed something to go right? Every customer was on the receiving end. An employee who was genuinely investing in getting to know them. This one simple change, elevating every single stakeholder in the operation. It's just fascinating. It shows how none of this stuff is easy, but it's also not hard. It does require trying a little bit harder. Any business can do it.
- [33:12]
Ted Seides
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- [34:05]
Interviewer
I'd love to pick your brain on what you've heard of the application of the concepts to my world of asset management and financial services, where it's a very different touch point than the UPS service person or someone inside a restaurant.
- [34:20]
Will Guidara
In so many ways, the opportunity is so much bigger. It's a lot easier. You go to a UPS store, you're in there for three minutes, you get to know someone the tiniest bit. There's very few things you have to work with and then they're gone. In your world, you get to walk down the road of life alongside someone. You are there during their biggest moments of celebration. You are there during some of the most high anxiety tormenting moments of their lives. You get to watch them grow. You get to deal with generational transitions. There's so much to work with and the fees are pretty good. So you have some budget to work with. One of my favorites, Deveshma Khan. Iconic. Unbelievable. He told me a story. One of the families they work with, parents of the person they worked with, lived in Florida during one of the really bad hurricanes and everyone was nervous. They were able to get a plane down there to get the parents out and to safety. The guy who received this gesture, whose parents it was a couple years later. They were in a meeting and he was telling someone about how much he loved Iconic and going on and on and on. The returns that they've delivered to this guy year after year are pretty extraordinary. The guy doesn't even know what the returns are. The only thing he ever thinks about or talks about is that one time they went above and beyond to help his family in a moment of need. Everyone's looking for their competitive advantage, the thing that will prevent someone else from coming in and stealing their customers. Often people only focus on either the product or the brand metrics. How well are they performing if I can deliver a high enough return. That's my competitive advantage. There's no getting around the fact that there are going to be difficult years. There are going to be times that things aren't going really well. In those moments, the thing that is the greatest competitive advantage is how much loyalty you have from the people you serve. And that happens when you are as relentless, creative, and generous in investing in the relationship as you are the product you sell them. That person that he sent the plane for, they could have a few bad years. That person's not going anywhere. It's finding as many creative opportunities to build loyalty through slowing down, being present, not taking yourself too seriously, giving people these things that make them feel seen, heard, loved and valued.
- [36:48]
Interviewer
You've taken these experiences and what's in your head and now put it into a new book to help people work through it. I'd love to hear how you encapsulated what you've seen and experienced into the
- [37:01]
Will Guidara
structure of this field guide, Unreasonable Hospitality. The field guide is coming in April, and if Unreasonable Hospitality is the why, the field guide is the how. I've done a lot of speaking over the last few years. One of the most persistent questions I get asked is, okay, now what? What do we do? We're in. We believe. Let's go. I've tried to write Unreasonable Hospitality in such a way where it left people with actionable things they could start running with. It became clear that I needed something that made it even more actionable. The field guide is me over the course of a couple years, spending time with hundreds of companies, collecting all the questions and trying to address them through this book. If the first book is structured in a narrative arc around my life and the lessons I learned along the way, this is through a series of building blocks. How to build a team, how to create a culture of hospitality through focusing on communication, collaboration, repair, feedback, communication, and then how to create magic. It's meant to be something we at the end of someone having gone through it, co author together. It's a lot of my questions, but I ask people to do a lot of thinking. Where do they want to go? The book is really there to help them get there through the lens of hospitality. It was really fun to work on. We tried to create a workbook that didn't feel like work, a field guide about hospitality that was inherently hospitable and I'm so proud to see it in people's hands in the not too distant future.
- [38:32]
Interviewer
So if you break down those three core components, everybody's always thinking about building a team. What are the things that you've learned about how to build an effective team?
- [38:42]
Will Guidara
There's a lot in there about how to hire. One of the biggest things I've learned there is we over index on how much we need people to bring to the table and in doing so, filter out the people that might be best for the role. When I was coming up, I had these long lists of things I needed people to have done in order to even be eligible for the job. And what I found more and more was if I'm willing to invest the time, I can teach people a lot of what they need to know. And if I'm willing to invest in my people, it opens up the people I can actually consider such that there are a lot more amazing people to choose from. Interrogate the list of what people need to have done in order to be eligible such that it is short as humanly possible. Some things are required. If it's not required, get it off the list. Open up the filter. It's also a lot about who to fire. One thing I found over and over again is there's this adage higher slow fire fast, which intuitively makes sense. Be very slow before you allow someone to join your team. But if someone is not working out and they are running the risk of poisoning your culture, get them out as quickly as possible. I've caveated that too. Hire slow fire fast, but not too fast over and over again. If you're a sports fan, how many times has your team cut someone and then they go on to thrive on another team? I see people getting rid of people and then watching those same people thrive elsewhere. And the Field guide goes through how to think about firing someone. A what is the right way to do it if you end up making that choice? But B why are they struggling? Oftentimes there's a way to fix that before cutting ties. That's just not the right thing to do for that individual. But if you treat people in that way, everyone else will be inclined to give more to you and invest more in you and trust you more. Then there's a lot about feedback. Now you have your people. How do you do right by them and call them to greatness? Whether it's creating systems of praise, when you set really high expectations and people meet or exceed them, you better praise them. Not just because it's the right thing to do, because the more praise you receive, the more praise you want to receive. And it's the right way to ensure that people continue to do the right thing Also criticism, because if praise is affirmation, criticism is investment. We need to create cultures where people are not only receiving criticism well, but seeking it out, because that's the only way to grow. And the field guide goes through all the best ways to do that and rules around which it's done thoughtfully.
- [41:14]
Interviewer
In the aspects of building a culture you mentioned as one of those tenets, repair, there's an implication something's broken, you got to repair it. What's the thought around repair?
- [41:25]
Will Guidara
That one is the final culture in creating a culture of hospitality, the way I've organized it in the field guide, because it's the only one that starts to turn outward as well as it pertains to leading your team. Repair means knowing when, as a leader, it's time to say I'm sorry to the people that work for you. You see this all the time. Some of the greatest leaders feel like they need to be perfect and feel like if they've made a mistake and don't apologize for having made it, people won't notice that they made it. Everyone notices you're hiring great people. They're not stupid. They know when you've done something wrong. When a leader is willing to step up in front of their entire crew and say, I made a mistake, I am sorry, not only does it immediately reverse whatever downward trajectory the morale is taking, if you're willing to criticize yourself, the people on your team are going to be that much more willing to receive criticism from you. That level of vulnerability earns you trust. The other form of repair is with the people you serve. There's all this data. If someone has a good experience with a business, they're going to talk about it so much. If they have a bad experience, they're going to talk about it even more. If they have a bad experience but you put in the work to turn it around, they're going to talk about that experience the absolute most. I'm fully convinced that 95% of companies recklessly under invest in turning around negative situations in customer recovery. They spend so much on marketing. Look at any company that you see with ads in the super bowl and call their customer service hotline when you've had a terrible experience and compare the difference between those two situations. If they were willing to do whatever it took to make you happy when they let you down, that's some of the best marketing dollars they could ever spend. I don't think we should intentionally mess up in order to have an opportunity to repair. Relationships are always better after a moment of repair than they are when no repair was ever needed.
- [43:30]
Interviewer
How about effective forms of collaboration?
- [43:33]
Will Guidara
Collaboration with the people on your team is essential. Not because of the fact that absent the collaboration, you're never going to have the information required to do the most innovative things, but also because there is so much data around the idea that when people feel a genuine sense of ownership in something, they will inherently give that much more of themselves to helping it succeed. When you tell the people on your team, I want to know what you think we are going to do this together, they feel trusted by you. And when you feel trusted by someone, you are more inclined to trust them in return. The more responsibility you give them, the more responsible they become. The more trust you give them, the more trustworthy they become. Engaging the people around you in the creative process is always a win win. When you talk about engaging different perspectives and recognizing that the collective brain power of many will always be that much better than that of one or two, the ideas will also just be better. Doesn't just feel better for the people on the team, it produces greater results. That's collaborating internally. I also believe in finding as many opportunities to collaborate externally as possible. I'm not sure what this looks like in your world. The idea of brand collaborations and engaging as many people as possible to bring different communities together. When you do that, everyone wins.
- [44:57]
Interviewer
Are there any additional ways of making magic from what you discussed in the original book?
- [45:04]
Will Guidara
The more time I spend studying this, the more I'm convinced that the systemized stuff does more heavy lifting than I ever realized. When I was writing the book. I'd been creating this culture to love Madison park iteratively, over the course of many years. Now, when I work with a new company to build it into their culture more quickly than over the course of several years, it's the systemized stuff that infects everyone on the team. In 2023, I spoke at Sundance Film Festival. There were so many flight delays that year, and this one was particularly bad. My flight was delayed seven hours. I didn't get to the hotel until 4 in the morning. I was pulling up in the car, exhausted, desperate to go to bed, gearing up for a long conversation. It's one of my pet peeves with hotels these days is how long the check in process has become. But when I walked in, there was just one guy in there. His name was Oscar. He was the overnight manager. He's standing there with his arm outstretched, holding my room key and he goes, Mr. Gudera, you must be exhausted. Here's your key. Go get Some sleep. We can check in tomorrow. Smallest gesture, so profound because it was exactly what I needed in that moment. Went upstairs, fell right to sleep. Next morning. I've never been more excited in my life to check into a hotel. Ran downstairs, ran around the lobby, found the gm. I was like, dude, Oscar is unbelievable. You'll never believe what he did. He goes, yeah, Oscar's great. That had nothing to do with Oscar. I said, what are you talking about? He said, a couple months ago, we sat down with the team. The delays here have been dreadful. We said, how can we systemize graciousness? That's what they came up with. If you got there after two in the morning, they gave you the key to let you check in the following day. He goes on to say, oscar is actually not very hospitable. I was like, wait, what are you talking about? He goes, sorry, sorry. Oscar was not very hospitable when we started this. When Oscar did that for me, he was not going above and beyond for me. He was simply doing his job, following a system they had designed. Same as if he had run my credit card. Every time he did it, he bore witness to looks of profound appreciation on people's faces, like the one he bore witness to on mine. Over time, he got addicted to the way that made him feel and started finding more and more creative ways to feel it again. The systemized stuff just puts points on the board. It gives everyone in the organization a taste of how good it can feel when you do this thing well and compels people to start doing it more and more. That's something I didn't realize until more recently as I've been working to quickly install it into other people's cultures.
- [47:41]
Interviewer
What are some of the other newer realizations you've had from working with a bunch of different companies in different industries?
- [47:47]
Will Guidara
A ton of stuff around AI. One of the questions I get asked frequently centers around this belief system that AI is antithetical to hospitality. I don't believe that to be true. It's how you use it that dictates its impact. When used effectively, it can be one of the greatest tools in our collective toolbox that we use to make people feel. All the ways that I try to get people to feel it is how it's employed. And I see some companies using it purely for efficiency right now, which is the greatest waste of the technology yet. It makes sense. They're using it to reduce expenses as much as humanly possible. There are other companies that I see using it for some levels of efficiency. Let's say they're saving $10 a year. I'm using obviously a ridiculous number to make it easy. They're putting five of those dollars to their bottom line and they're reinvesting $5 to make the human experience as human as humanly possible. The more time I spent talking to those leaders is because it's becoming very clear whether it's two years, three years, four years that you're going to pick up the phone and call someone and you're not going to be sure whether you're on the phone with a human being or not. The only moments we're going to be able to trust as being genuinely human are the ones where there is a human in front of you. Which means, in my view, that the companies that make those moments feel as human as humanly possible are going to win in the long term. That means right now starting to make those investments that you get ahead of other people. The people that are taking some of what they're saving through the efficiencies of the AI tools they're already employing and reinvesting it in human experience. It's remarkable to see the impact they're already having.
- [49:30]
Interviewer
What's the breadth of the portfolio of what you're doing now?
- [49:35]
Will Guidara
We're working on sports stadiums with the airlines and tech with financial services. That's the scope of our Creative Studio. The Creative Studio is what I call the group that goes in and figures out how to bring these ideas to life in other industries. And we have our gatherings. We do the welcome conference, which is our big event in New York City, which is more of a TED Talk style thing, but centered around hospitality. It's become the biggest hospitality symposium in the world. It's at Lincoln Center. We have the Unreasonable Hospitality Summit, which is a two day workshop, training, community gathering and party effectively in Nashville. That's been fascinating to see the different industries represented in that small room. Then we have training workshops. I have a couple people on my team that travel the country doing training workshops for car companies, travel associations. Then there's me doing some speaking, hanging out with people like you, writing some new books and everything in between.
- [50:35]
Interviewer
Where do you hope all this goes?
- [50:37]
Will Guidara
When I was 12, my dad asked me to write a to do list for life. My dad was very intentional. When you hear that, you might want to argue that he was a little bit too intentional. From that point forward, I knew I wanted to go to Cornell. I knew I wanted my own restaurant. As soon as I had my own restaurant, I knew I wanted four stars as soon as I had four stars, I knew I wanted to be number one in the world. I'm grateful for that relentless focus because it was the reason why I accomplished all that stuff. Yet I'm making a very active choice to be less linear in my focus now. I did that so that now I can be not entirely reactive. That's just not how I'm wired, but a little more reactive. When I wrote the book, it was because I had just sold the company. I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do next, and I figured that if I re walked the road I'd just been down, it would help me figure out where I wanted to go next. That book ended up becoming the road that I was going to go down next. I didn't expect it to be. I just see things as they come. I didn't expect the book to go where it was. I didn't expect to start producing the Bear. I didn't expect all this stuff to happen. I call it the rule of three now. With each opportunity that comes in, it needs to sound fun. It needs to be around people that I can imagine genuinely enjoying time with. Two, I need to feel like I'm going to learn something. My one fear when you write a book and you spend a lot of time talking about the book is if you're not careful how you do it. You spend all your time teaching people what you've learned and not enough time learning from other people. You can stagnate if you're not careful. And three, it needs to make some money. If a new opportunity or idea checks all three of those boxes, then it's something that I'm genuinely going to consider every single time. I just like to celebrate the restaurants I'm at and to connect with the people I'm with.
- [52:30]
Interviewer
Well, I want to make sure before we wrap up I get a chance to ask you a couple of fun closing questions.
- [52:35]
Ted Seides
Before we get to the closing questions, I want to tell you about one of our strategic investments. We've made a few and each are working on a product or service we
- [52:44]
Interviewer
think will be valuable to our community.
- [52:47]
Ted Seides
One is Ascension Data. Ascension provides workflow software for compensation that allows you to track, plan and take
- [52:54]
Interviewer
care of your team.
- [52:56]
Ted Seides
We're excited for you to check out how they can help solve the sticky pain.
- [52:59]
Interviewer
Point of compensation.
- [53:01]
Ted Seides
There's a link in the show notes so you can learn more. And here are those closing questions.
- [53:06]
Interviewer
What was your first paid job and what'd you learn from it?
- [53:10]
Will Guidara
My first paid job was Baskin Robbins in Tarrytown, New York. That was the best. Mrs. Chan, my friend's mom owned the Baskin Robbins. I got my job there right before the winter, and when you work at a Baskin Robbins during the winter, it's a very interesting experience. You end up just hanging out a lot of the time. I remember people would come in and buy a birthday cake and I had to write Happy Birthday Ted on the birthday cake. It was not at all easy. I remember having to hide some cakes that I messed up in the first couple weeks of that job because I didn't want to get in trouble for ruining too many cakes when I just gotten the job. I learned two things from that one. From a leadership perspective. It was hard because no one ever taught me how to write on the fricking cake. You can never assume that people know how to do the little things that need to be done well to make something succeed. If you're buying a birthday cake, that's much more important than a scoop of ice cream now, you're a central part of a big memory in someone's year. Make sure the people that work there know how to make it perfect. 2. On the customer side, way too often we take for granted that even the smallest things are not necessarily easy to execute at a high level. Back to the UPS guy. Things like that have made me, over time, pause for just a little bit longer at every transaction to make sure that I'm saying thank you.
- [54:31]
Interviewer
Which two people have had the biggest impact on your professional life?
- [54:35]
Will Guidara
Without question, my dad and Danny Meyer. My dad is my greatest mentor. He's taught me so many different things. Of his quotes that I carry with me, one is adversity is a terrible thing to waste. I look at my relationship with him, which would not exist at the level it does absent if my mom had not gotten sick. He's reinforced that in me over and over again, and now I can look back with gratitude at some of the most adverse moments of my career because had they not happened, I would not have done what I went on to do next. Coming in last place is what generated the idea of unreasonable hospitality. When my business partner and I fell out of love and I ended up selling my company, that felt like a pretty devastating moment. And thank God that happened. Otherwise I would not have written this book and I would not be getting to do all the exciting things I'm doing now. He gave me this paperweight when I was a kid. What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail? I love this question. It can call you to greatness if you let it. He's challenged me over and over again. Ask myself this question whenever the most honest answer is try to do that. My dad's entire thing was be audacious in what you try to achieve and patient in your pursuit of those things. From Danny. The foundation of everything I've built as it pertains to hospitality, but also the power of language to articulate a culture. People under invest in language in the words that articulate what right looks like and send a very clear message to the people on their team, what's important to them such that everyone can rally around those ideas. And Danny was amazing. Master at that.
- [56:21]
Interviewer
What's your biggest pet peeve?
- [56:23]
Will Guidara
The hoops they make you jump through to log on to wi Fi in a hotel these days, that is a giant pet peeve. Every time people want your loyalty and push you out of your comfort zone in order to get your loyalty. The way in which people try to get you to join their loyalty programs almost always makes me feel less loyal to those companies. What's happening to you always? Not for you. My biggest pet peeve these days is how the words I'm sorry have fallen out of favor not just in business, but in life and in politics. We need to collectively re embrace the words I'm sorry. Saying I'm sorry when you've done something wrong is not a sign of weakness. It's not an admission of guilt. It's recognizing that's what the person who you're talking to needs to hear in order to take a deep breath and re engage.
- [57:26]
Interviewer
How's your life turned out differently from how you expected it to.
- [57:30]
Will Guidara
Years ago, my wife, I think we were in Seattle, and we were walking down the water, and she saw these houseboats, and she's like, wouldn't it be amazing to live in a houseboat in Seattle one day? I said, that sounds romantic, but we live in New York. We will always live in New York. And she's like, oh, wish you'd told me that before we got married. I thought I would be running restaurants in New York my entire life. That's not what I'm doing now. I live in Nashville. I'm doing this whole different thing. Covid gave us all gifts. In spite of how challenging and damaging it was for many. The gift I got from COVID was that it gave me the space to. To rather than running back and doing what I'd always done, deciding what I wanted to do next. When Covid hit, I just sold the company a few months earlier. And I was one week away from signing three restaurant leases in New York City. Had Covid been a month later, my life would be very different than it is now. It's a whole different life, and I'm grateful that I get to have a different second chapter that's rooted in all of the same things that made me successful in my first, last one.
- [58:39]
Interviewer
What life lesson have you learned that you wish you knew a lot earlier in life?
- [58:44]
Will Guidara
My dad. Three years ago, I was going through something and he goes, hey, this is going to be a difficult few months for you. With every decision you need to make, ask yourself what right looks like and do that. It sounds like simple advice, but gosh, it was powerful. The reason I love it so much is because if you can just make that decision, I'm just going to do the right thing. You almost never need to make a difficult decision again. While so much of life exists in the gray, when it comes to right and wrong, it's normally pretty black and white. Not always, but normally, if you make a commitment, I'm always just going to do what right looks like. Decisions are much easier to make. Sometimes doing what right looks like, it costs you money. Sometimes doing what right looks like is harder in the short term. I am now convinced that over the long term, if you always do what right looks like, you will always ultimately be on the winning side. I didn't get that advice from him until later in life, and I'm not saying I didn't do what right looked like earlier, but gosh, it would have felt a whole lot easier to navigate through life 25 years ago with that as a life hack.
- [60:04]
Interviewer
Well, thanks so much as always for sharing your incredible wisdom on how to
- [60:08]
Will Guidara
make people feel great, man. I loved this. Thank you so much for having me.
- [60:13]
Ted Seides
Thanks for listening to the show. If you like what you heard, hop on our website@capitalallocators.com where you can access past shows, join our mailing list and sign up for premium content. Have a good one and then and see you next time.
- [60:28]
Podcast Disclaimer Voice
All opinions expressed by TED and Podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Capital Allocators or their firms. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of Capital Allocators or Podcast guests may maintain positions in securities discussed on this podcast.