682: Will Guidara - Obsession, Adversity, Learning From Danny Meyer, and The Only Competitive Advantage That Lasts... Unreasonable Hospitality

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My Guest: Will Guidara is the former co-owner of Eleven Madison Park, the restaurant he took from a struggling two-star establishment to become the number one restaurant in the world. He's the author of the New York Times bestseller Unreasonable Hospitality, the host of the Welcome Conference, and a co-producer on the Emmy award-winning series The Bear.

Notes:

Key Learnings

"Obsession is a beautiful thing when you can grab it by the tail." This quote is from chef Sean Brock when he opened his pizza place in Nashville. For Will, obsession is when you care so much about something that you give all of yourself to bring its most fully realized version to life.

What obsession means to Will: "Loving with every ounce of my being the pursuit of something." He can't imagine a life where he doesn't have something to be obsessed about.

When you lose yourself in the pursuit of something, that's when it gets ugly. Obsession is a beautiful thing if you can grab it by the tail. For those that can't, it becomes ugly. You need to hold onto yourself while obsessively pursuing whatever it is.

Find a hobby to be obsessed with before you retire. Will is 46 and has seen people he's long looked up to finally retire in their late seventies without a hobby they're obsessed with. They're feeling listless and without purpose. He's thinking about this now for his future: start to become obsessed with a hobby so that when you do one day retire, there's something else to fall into.

"Adversity is a terrible thing to waste." You cannot always control what life throws at you, but you can always control how you react to those things, what you choose to learn from them, how you allow them to fuel your competitive spirit, the perspective you glean from those moments.

Allow yourself and your team to feel the weight of the disappointment. When there's a moment of adversity, leaders hear "adversity is a terrible thing to waste" and immediately shift into cheerleader mode. That is not the right thing to do. You need to allow yourself to be as human as humanly possible, and give your team the grace to fully feel the weight of that disappointment.

Sometimes adversity sucks, and you just need to be able to say, "This sucks. I don't feel good. I feel bad. Let's feel bad for a moment."

Suffer together. When your team is going through adversity, you want to know that your leader thinks it sucks, too. It's good to feel bad alongside a community, but then after a measure of time, that's when you say, okay, now how do we grow from this? How do we use this to compel us forward?

Be thankful for the tough moments. Will can look back at every tough moment with gratitude. The girl who broke his heart two years before he met his now wife, he's so grateful that she did. Breaking up with his business partner and selling his restaurant company felt like the worst thing ever, but he wouldn't have written Unreasonable Hospitality had that not happened.

"Who is a restaurateur without restaurants?" COVID forced Will to find the space to decide what he wanted to do next. When he sold the company, two days later, he had a full-blown identity crisis. COVID gave him the gift of forcing him to find the space to decide what he wanted to do next, as opposed to running back to do the thing he'd always done.

Team first. "The best way to make sure that you are taking care of your customers is to start by taking care of your team." This is what Will learned from Danny Meyer.

The power of language to define a culture. How beautiful and impactful it is when you take the time to clearly and succinctly articulate your values through language. Danny spoke in "isms." Every time he gave them an ism, it was clear that thing mattered to him, so it needed to matter to the team as well.

Cult is short for culture. Will's friends from college joked that he worked for a cult, but cult is short for culture. The funny thing is, they worked for companies that lacked a culture. Every great team feels a little cultish, and that's because of the leader.

Hospitality is the advantage. The only competitive advantage that exists over the long term comes through hospitality. Every company is trying to identify its competitive advantage: what is the thing about the business that will prevent someone else from coming in and taking away its customers? Those conversations almost always center around the quality of the product or the strength of the brand. Here's the thing: it does not just matter how good the product is, and it does not just matter how strong the brand is, because eventually someone's going to come around and build a better product or create a stronger brand.

Relationships matter. Hospitality comes through consistently, generously, and creatively investing in relationships. Those take a long time to build, and if you build them in the right way, the loyalty you will earn takes a very long time to erode.

McDonald's vs. Chick-fil-A. The hospitality difference. McDonald's does some of the coolest marketing things in the world. Their product is consistent, and there was probably a season for a very long time where they were the best burger chain out there. Compare that to Chick-fil-A: if you ask 10 people who makes a better chicken sandwich, a lot of people would say other people make better chicken sandwiches than Chick-fil-A. But people are still loyal to Chick-fil-A, not because of the brand, not because of the product, but because of the way that they make people feel.

Little gestures go a long way. Chick-fil-A does things like "my pleasure" and refilling your drinks in the dining room. These little gestures go a long way because we are much less likely to leave one company and go to another, even if the other company is better priced and the product is a little bit better.

Food is just a conduit through which to express hospitality. As many stories as you hear about Chick-fil-A doing little and big things to make people feel seen, you don't hear those stories about McDonald's. And that's not an accident. One company has chosen to invest all of itself in pursuit of that. The other one has not. If you're in the business of serving other people, these opportunities exist for you in an endless way.

Find the smallest touchpoints. Every experience you're serving is filled with lots of big and little touchpoints. The problem is so many companies focus on only the most obvious touchpoints without realizing that there is impact to be made with each one of them.

Hospitality is a craft, a muscle that you can strengthen. Will created the Welcome Conference because he wanted someone who was a server at a restaurant who had dreams to own their own restaurant to have a place where they could learn about the craft of hospitality.

What you can't afford to do with money, you can afford to do with time. Will can't afford the kind of speaking fees that people who inspire others on stage at his conference deserve, so he came up with a more creative way to show appreciation: a dinner the night before. It's about community, because the people who take that stage have the responsibility to create the conditions through which attendees can come together and form community. And it's impossible to form a community for others until you first feel a sense of community amongst yourselves.

There needs to be a good reason for the event to exist. Will created the Welcome Conference years ago because there were chef conferences all over the world, and he was always the only dining room person speaking at them. He wanted a place for the dining room people to have community.

Gift bags are a terrible idea. People think the more they put in the bag, the more hospitable they are. It's usually junk.

"I look at something, design the version of that I wish existed, work obsessively to bring that vision to life, and then welcome others into my imagination."

What makes a great conference is meeting the people at those events. The best events are about the people in between the meetings. That time matters.

Energy in a room is so important. Will is one of the most extroverted people in the world, but if he walks into a cocktail party and he doesn't know anyone, he seizes up. He doesn't like it. He likes to be around people he knows.

Be a connector. A month before Will's event, he realized many people were coming alone, which he wasn't expecting. They sent an email to all of them and said, "We saw that you're coming alone. We have an idea. If you'd like to meet some people, let us know." They set up dinner reservations at Will's favorite restaurants in Nashville and did some matchmaking. Those 40 people ended up coming into the beginning of the conference the next day already like this one big, awesome community.

Make the "yes" as easy as possible. Will gets Emmy screeners, and some people send DVDs (which he doesn't have a player for), while others send QR codes, which make it very easy to watch. The lesson: make it easy for people to say yes to what you're offering.

Shop your own business. Stay in your own hotel. Until you've actually been on the receiving end of whatever you're serving, you have an inability to see all the things you're doing wrong or the opportunities you have to do more things right.