WILL GUIDARA: The Magic of Excellence & Hospitality

0:00Everyone listening to this right now is relentlessly passionate in pursuit of something. I'm just here to say that you should just be as relentlessly passionate in your pursuit of relationships, too.

0:16I'm Michael Hyatt. And I'm Megan Hyatt Miller. And this is The Double Win, a show about winning at work and succeeding at life. And, you know, here at our company, Full Focus, we have identified nine life domains that you can cultivate to help you be the person that you want to be and live the life you want to live. Those are body, mind, spirit, love, family, community, money, work, and hobbies. So today's guest is Will Gadara. He's the former co-owner of 11 Madison Park, which was one of the top restaurants in New York City when he was running it, which received four stars from the New York Times, three Michelin stars, and was named number one on the world's 50 best restaurants list in 2017.

1:00He co-founded another successful New York restaurant, Nomad. He's a co-author of four cookbooks and one of the best books on customer service ever, which is called Unreasonable Hospitality. And get this subtitle, The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect. New York Times bestseller for multiple months in a row. Great book. And hospitality is one of those things that whether you know it or not, it applies to every area of your life. How you show up for your family, how you show up at work, how you treat your customers and clients and friends and children, everything in between.

1:36So without further ado, here's Will Gadara.

1:43Will, welcome to the show. Thank you so much. We are so excited to have this conversation because we love this book. We love this book. Unreasonable Hospitality. We love it. We love I read this book last year and then I got obnoxiously pushy with everybody I know. And I just said, you've got to read this book. All my private coaching clients, I told them you got to read this book because this applies to everything. It really does. And you were obnoxious. I'm just going to confirm that because he kept asking me, have you read this book? Have you read this book? Did you get it yet? Have you read it?

2:19Have you downloaded it? I'm like, okay, I'll read this book. I didn't know anything about it except that you were really excited. Usually your recommendations are really good. And I was so excited when you got into the book that it had to do with food. So I totally missed that part on the beginning because I love great restaurants. We are huge fans of food and hospitality. Our absolute favorite place to go on the planet is Blackberry Farm in East Tennessee. I don't know if you've been there, Will, but if you haven't, you must go. No, I've been to BlackBerry a few different times. I was actually at BlackBerry Mountain 10 days ago.

2:55Oh, well, we just love it. And so anyway, I think it helped me understand why I love it so much. And it inspired me to want to give that same gift in our context to our audience, our community of people, you know, just really elevated what I thought was possible. So I'm selfishly thrilled to have this conversation and get to talk to you. I am so excited to be with you guys and can't wait to get into it. Well, I want to talk about the restaurant business because, you know, one of the things that we try to stand against is kind of this burnout culture, this hustle culture that we have where people are working unbelievable hours.

3:36And to the extent that they're often sacrificing their best life for the sake of, you know, just doing all business all the time. and so they have no margin for anything else. But I just thought for you to talk about what it's like to be in the restaurant business because we've given all this in your bio, but you're a world-renowned restaurateur. And so just talk about that for a minute. I mean, it's interesting. One of the things that I hear people say all the time, those in and out of the restaurant business is, it's so hard, it's so hard, it's so hard. And gosh, I hate that. I hate that because for those inside the restaurant business if you continually say something is hard then maybe do something else sincerely like what's the point if you don't like it don't do it I think the restaurant business is I mean it's the only thing I've ever done in my life up until the point that I wrote this book and started to do all the things I'm doing now but you see all these tv shows or movies where the restaurant is such a sole focus in the chef or restaurateur's life that they either suffer depression or imbalance i think the restaurant business is like any business that the culture you build is the culture you decide to build and any business has seasons where you do need to work all the time right no one becomes ultra successful without knowing when you just need to put your head down and give all of yourself in pursuit of some finite goal along the way but i think the restaurant business can have just as much balance as any business if you set things up in the right way and if like anything you decide that balance is a non-negotiable.

5:34Is there ever a point in your history where you were out of balance and then suddenly you had a realization and said, something's got to change in my life and in the way I'm running my business? Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, just 11 Madison Park, I'll stick with that time horizon. I got there in 2006. I sold the business in 2019. and it was a big big lift what we did there we took a two star brasserie and turned it into the number one restaurant in the world there were a few pretty intense pushes there along the way and I think when you become so obsessed with those finite goals along the way you can lose yourself in pursuit of them and I remember one season I definitely lost myself in it and I write about this in the book there was this moment where one of our cooks like ran into the kitchen in the middle of dinner service she worked the lunch shift and she ran into the kitchen in the middle of dinner service thinking that she was late to her shift the next day and it was just one of those like like oh shoot moments where it just became clear that we had our foot all the way down on the gas for so long that the train was starting to come off the tracks.

6:53And I think when you're a leader, sometimes you need to not think about your own bandwidth and your own capacity and your own burnout point, because different people are built differently. I can push really, really hard for a really long time. But if I just expect that everyone else can do what I can do, I'm going to leave the team behind. And the entire role of a leader is to, at every possible opportunity, bring everyone along with you on that ride. You know, when I read this book, I think the thing that stuck out to me more than any other was the beautiful obsession with excellence. And what I love about it was it wasn't a narcissistic obsession with excellence.

7:45It felt like a very other-centered, humanizing, honoring way of seeing the people that you serve, in your case, literally. And that pursuit of excellence and quality and care of people, how do you balance the tension between that and doing that at such a high level and also creating a culture and an environment for the people who you as the business owner or the leader are serving who work for you so that they have a similarly excellent experience providing that experience to others, if that makes sense. Like, how do you balance those two things? So it's interesting how I would actually articulate what you just said is that you were inspired by our pursuit of hospitality yeah and and i and i say that with intention because i talk often about how excellence and hospitality are conflicting goals they actually don't they're not friends with one another it's easy to to run an excellent organization it's easy to run a hospitable organization it's much harder to do this the two at the same time right um you can run an excellent organization if you scare the the crap out of the people that work for you such that they're going to get in so much trouble if they ever make a mistake and they're going to be less likely to make mistakes but if they're living in a constant state of fear they're never going to be able to bring their most fully realized selves to the table similarly you can create an amazingly hospitable organization if you're just you know high-fiving your team and give them back rubs, but never holding them accountable to any standard of excellence.

9:28It's going to be a really friendly organization, but you're going to go into that restaurant, you're never going to get a plate of food served to you. Pursuing them both at the same time is difficult. Now, to actually answer your question, hospitality is a team sport. It doesn't matter how hospitable I am as the leader of the organization. It's the extent to which everyone on the team is inspired and engaged and driven to be hospitable, the extent to which they are bought into the spirit of the collective endeavor that defines the experience as a whole. So the only way to actually bring what we did to life in any organization is through a culture of true empowerment where everyone on the team feels a great sense of agency.

10:17Now, how did I make sure that what I was trying to extend to the guest was embraced by the team? Which, by the way, it's a great question because you can't expect people to treat your customers in a way that they are not treated. Yeah. Oh, say that again. You can't expect your people to treat your customers in a way that they themselves are not treated. This is powerful if you lead a business. And so there's two sides of it. okay, A, yeah, I took care of the team. We had good benefits. We had great parties. We had things to look forward to. I love reading about the parties. I mean, by the way, I really do think that in any culture, my dad always says the secret to happiness is always having something to look forward to.

10:59If your team doesn't have a few inflection points over the course of the year, moments where they can play just as hard, if not harder than they work, I think you're leaving a beautiful cultural opportunity on the table. Wow. That's a great takeaway. way. But also empowering the team to be hospitable, giving them the permission and the resources to do so is on its own a gesture of hospitality to them. So many people in so many businesses complain that it's hard to recruit and retain good people. But yeah, of course, it's hard to recruit and retain good people if they feel zero control over their own destiny, if they have no ability to bring other people joy.

11:44Because, by the way, I don't think there's anything more energizing than when you get to see the look on someone else's face when they receive a gift, you are responsible for giving them. If you can create a culture where everyone in your team is empowered to give other people gifts, that on its own is a gesture of hospitality to the gift givers as much as it is to the gift receivers. I love that. Okay, so I'm now remembering. It's been a while since I read this book, but I'm remembering a story about... Hot dogs? No, not hot dogs, although that's great too. That's a great story. What I was thinking of was, didn't you promote someone internally who was very young to become the head of your beverage program?

12:24Can you tell that story a little bit? Because I think it's a great example. I do want to get the hot dog story to me. Okay. Hold your horses just for a second. So Simon Sinek, who is my publisher on this book, is his book, The Infinite Game, which I just, I love, love, love, love that book. And one of the things he talks about in it is the importance of having a worthy rival, right? Like picking a competitor and using them to drive you. And our competitor for many, many years in New York City was a restaurant called Per Se. And I would go there every year. And for the first few years, I'd leave deflated and frustrated by how much better they were than us.

13:04And the each passing year, I'd leave saying, all right, we actually do this better than them, but they still do this better than us. And yet at the same time, I'd look for things they didn't do well. Because if they weren't doing something well, I probably also wasn't doing it well, but maybe this was the thing I could invest in because strategically now I would, by definition, be better than them at that. And one night I went there, I had an amazing meal. And when I say perfect, I mean perfect, perfect until the very end of the meal when I ordered a cup of coffee and they poured me coffee and it was just fine I like to journal every night I journal for a few different reasons one because my dad long ago told me that perspective has an expiration date and journaling is the best way to hold on to your perspective so you can tap back into it later in life I journal because I'm an intense person and I think I'm a pretty good, kind man, but I let my emotions get away from me once in a while.

14:08And at the end of the day, once the sea is calm, I can identify the moments I need to apologize for the next day. But I also journal because that's when I can put intention to intuition and actually review the experiences of the day and come up with a game plan for tomorrow. And I was journaling after that meal and reflecting on it said the coffee why wasn't the coffee good and with a bit of consideration it was clear in in most fine dining restaurants especially then it's changed a little bit now all the beverage programs the wine beer cocktails coffee tea are run by a wine director who by definition is passionate about wine and yet they're saddled with these other responsibilities when at the same time in most fine dining restaurants there's a bunch of people in the restaurant desperately craving more responsibility i found and i've done this exercise a lot of people in different companies if you put all of your people like open up an excel sheet put all your people across the top and then list their responsibilities down very often it's a it goes up and down up and down responsibilities rarely are equally distributed which means a lot of people don't feel empowered and a lot of people feel overwhelmed in this case there's one director dealing with a bunch of programs he had no passion for while there were other people on my team that were so passionate about those exact things and at the time the average age of my team was like 24 years old and i had a bus boy who was so excited about coffee a food runner that was so passionate about tea you get the gist and so the next day in premio i just said hey we are no longer following the rule that you need to be a manager to have responsibility who wants to run these programs and i i hand-picked coffee tea whatever it was very very difficult in the short term extraordinarily difficult these people had never run a beverage program before it took much more of our time in the short term in the long term, a few different things happened.

16:19One, the coffee list, the beer list, the tea list, all of them within a year, and this is not bombastic, were rated one of the best of their kind in America because they had one person uniquely focused on that thing. Two, all of them were much more engaged in every other detail of the restaurant because now they felt a sense of ownership and what we were doing and where we were going. Three, everyone on the team was more passionate about those programs because now they're supporting one of their peers and their passions. And four, the wine list got better because the person running it was no longer distracted with things they cared so much less about.

16:57I really do believe that if everyone did an ownership interrogation where they looked at all of the things close to the bottom of one person's list and tried to move them to the top of someone else's list, someone who perhaps doesn't even have a list yet. More equally distribute ownership is the most effective way to more equally dole out opportunities for passion.

17:34I'm curious, Will, you know, the subtitle of your is the remarkable power of giving people more than they expect. Where did that come from? I mean, that's not common. That's funny. I say this a lot. We're in this really unfortunate cultural season where we're just not used to people going above and beyond for us that often anymore. And I'm always sensitive that I'm not glorifying the past as always being better than the present, but I really do think that's true right now. It feels like there's less of a motivation to do that now. But my gosh, when it happens, it feels good. You know, I don't know exactly where it came from.

18:19I mean, when I was a kid, and I write about this in the book, people often tell me that they cried when they read the book, and it's most often because of this story, which is that my mom was diagnosed with brain cancer, ultimately became a quadriplegic, And my dad and I were a team. We were a two-person team charged with him having a job, me going to school, and then together taking care of my mom. My dad moved us, moved our house so that it was within walking distance of my school. Because he was always very concerned about me growing up with a lack of confidence and never wanted me to be too overly reliant on other people's parents to drive me around.

19:02And so he purposefully bought a home close to school, which had a really big hangout room upstairs so that we became the place that everyone went. And I never needed someone to give me a ride. Wow. I'm telling the story because I think there's two parts of this that perhaps answer that question. One, my dad is unbelievable. And he is the most inspiring person in the world to me. And that started because through that entire experience with my mom, he never felt bad for himself. In fact, to the contrary, I saw him derive pleasure out of being called to serve her. And so I did too. I grew up loving having had the opportunity to serve my mom.

19:48And if I could go back in time, obviously I would have changed it had I had a magic wand and she could be healthy and alive with us today. But I looked at my other friends and said, wow, they never get to take care of their mom like I do. Like, we wore it as a badge of honor. Wow, that's amazing. But then also, since everyone always came over to my house, I was the host. I was the entertainer. And I just got really into creating awesome experiences for my friends when they came over. And so I think it was just embedded in me as a kid. And then I went on to work for Danny Meyer, who was an unbelievable restaurateur.

20:21And his book, Set in the Table, is the other great hospitality book that's been written, and I consider mine to be a sequel to his. But it's just a part of who I am and what I'm driven by, what I drive pleasure from. I do want to illustrate this, not from my life, but from your story in the book about the hot dogs. Because I think this demonstrates what it's like to create delight in other people. but you have to go outside of your comfort zone and do something that's sort of out of the norm yeah so the hot dog story has become a big one most notably because if anyone out there has seen the show the bear um they use this story as the central thesis for one of their episodes um i had written down these words unreasonable hospitality a couple years before this happened and I didn't actually understand what they meant when I wrote them down.

21:19I simply just knew that they represented the impact I wanted to make in my industry. By the way, I think it's okay to pursue something you don't fully understand. I think a lot of people spend so much time trying to perfectly articulate an idea, they never start pursuing it. But I really do believe if you feel enough of a connection to something, just start running towards it and trust in the fact that it will reveal itself to you along the way. and then one day i was in the dining room on a busier than normal lunch service um the servers were just getting killed right you know on those days everyone's been to a restaurant when they're in the weeds and everyone's running around and that's when if you're a good owner or a good leader you step in to help and when you do when i did i would always just bust tables i think that's also important the higher up in the hierarchy you get the more important it is that when you chip in, you do the most menial task, A, to remind your team that you're good at that stuff, and B, to show them very clearly that you'll never ask them to do something you're not willing to do yourself.

22:18Love that. So true. And I was clearing dirty plates from this table of four. There were four foodies on vacation to New York from Europe just to eat at restaurants. That was the whole point of their trip. And this was their last meal. They were going to the airport right afterwards to head back home. And while I was at the table, I overheard them talking and And they were going on and on about the trip they'd had. They'd been to La Bernadette and Danielle and Jean-Georges and Per Se and now I live in Madison Park. And if you're listening and you have no idea what those restaurants are, trust in the fanciness of the names that they're really good ones.

22:48But then one woman jumped in and said, yeah, but you know what? I never got to have a New York City hot dog. It's such an iconic part of the city. I'm kind of sad. I never got one. It was like one of those light bulb moments in a cartoon. and I calmly walked back into the kitchen, dropped off the place, then ran outside, bought a hot dog from the cart, ran back inside, then came the hard part, which was convincing my fancy chef to serve it in our fancy restaurant. But I told him it was important to me. And he cut the hot dog up into four perfect pieces and we put one of the pieces on each plate, put a little swish of ketchup, mustard, a little scoop of sauerkraut and relic, made them all look really, really fancy.

23:27And then before their final savory course, which was our signature, honey lavender glazed muscovy duck that had been dry aged for two weeks using a technique that had taken us years to perfect i'll take one i brought out what we in new york call a dirty water dog to the table and they freaked out you know i'd served like millions of dollars worth of food in my career to that point and the fancy stuff too right like wagyu beef and lobster and caviar and all this stuff. And yet I had never seen anyone react to anything I served them like they did to that hot dog. And that moment, that experience, reflecting on it, systemizing that approach is ultimately what opened the doors to us doing everything we went on to do.

24:17That's an amazing story. So I should have asked you this at the beginning, but how do you define hospitality? What does that mean to you? And how do you know you've achieved it? You know, sometimes the best way to understand what something is, is to first start by understanding what it's not. I think way too many people conflate service and hospitality as being the same thing. They're undeniably very, very different things. Service is a part of the product. In my world, service is giving the right plate of food to the right person within the right amount of time and charging them the right amount of money for that plate of food.

24:53service is just keeping the baseline promise you've made hospitality is how you make people feel when you do that thing do they feel seen do they feel a sense of belonging do they feel genuinely welcome do they feel a sense of connection to you do they feel like you are pursuing them with creativity and intention but of the many ones i just ripped through I think one of the best like ones in its ability to help people understand it is do they feel seen I was in a conversation with a buddy of mine and you know when you have your your friends that try to just poke holes and everything so you're like is this service or hospitality is this service or hospitality just like ripping through a bunch of stuff and one of the things like so if they see that I'm on a first date and it's not going well.

25:50And so they speed up the meal. Is that service or hospitality? I said, you said it in the question. He said, if they see that, right, it's people like being present enough with you, paying enough attention, trying hard enough to understand you such that they contour what they're doing in a way that it happens for you, not to you. that's hospitality that first of all is brilliant but how in the world do you teach that or build that into a culture and i get that probably as a leader you've got to set the pace and be the example but how do you get that all the way down so that you know the person who's refilling the water is observant and present and all the things you said so first of all you can systemize it i I believe you can create systems within your organization that are inherently hospitable.

26:46And the story that I love to tell that I think most perfectly illustrates this happened to me last year. I was speaking at Sundance at the film festival. And anyone who flew anywhere in 2023 can relate to the fact that flights were delayed constantly. This one was particularly bad. It was like delayed seven hours or something. and I got to the hotel at four in the morning. One of my pet peeves is how it's becoming more and more time-consuming to check into a hotel these days. I'm exhausted. I'd just woken up having slept for the hour drive from the airport and walked in gearing up for a lengthy check-in, but there's just one person in the hotel.

27:29It's four in the morning, the overnight manager, the guy named Oscar, and he's just standing in the hotel holding my room key. He didn't know who I was. This was not special for me. He only knew I was because I was the last person, literally, to get there. And he said, Mr. Gadara, you must be exhausted. Here's your room key. Just go get some sleep. We can check you in in the morning. Wow. You know, sometimes these little things, the smallest gestures are the most profound when they hit that hard in that moment. And I went up to my room, fell asleep immediately. And the next morning, I've never been more excited to check into a hotel.

28:05I ran downstairs, checked in, and then ran around trying to find the general manager. found him. I said, hey, dude, Oscar, he's unbelievable. He must be the most hospitable person on your team. You'll never believe what he did for me. And he goes, Oscar is amazing. And I can tell you exactly what he did for you because it had nothing to do with Oscar. And I said, what? He goes, a few months ago, we had a meeting. The delays into Utah have been terrible. And so he said, how do we systemize hospitality? And that's what they came up with. Have you checked into that hotel after one or two in the morning?

28:40I forget what it was. They gave you the key, let you go to sleep. They check in in the morning. That's cool. What's cooler is that he went on to say that, in fact, Oscar was not hospitable at all. Amazing. When they started the program. But they gave Oscar a system to follow. They asked him to color within the lines. and every time he did that he saw the looks on people's faces like the one he saw online and ultimately became addicted to those looks and over time started to come up with more and more creative displays of hospitality because they got him addicted so what i'm saying is two things one you can systemize it if any business just does some simple pattern recognition looks for some recurring moments and then decides how they want to respond every time those moments occur and just makes it a part of the system no differently than you've never been to a hotel and wondered whether or not the person at the front desk was going to remember to run your credit card right they've just decided that that's normal at that hotel they decided that what oscar did for me was now normal it was not going above and beyond for for me anywhere it was normal If you normalize the stuff, it can get people addicted to it.

30:00And then suddenly the culture takes root in a pretty viral and amazing way.

30:12Can you give us some examples that are like outside of the restaurant or general hospitality space, like a service-based business or, you know, you work at a bank or I don't know, just something where it's not as natural. Oh my gosh, yeah. I mean, so I do this on my Instagram now, where people send me these stories all the time, and then I read these letters, and I call it unreasonable hospitality out in the world. And gosh, these stories are so beautiful and so inspiring. And this one, this is the one that I think I just read. I'm not sure if I posted it yet, but I love this one so much. So a guy wrote in that he is like 21 years old.

30:55He still goes to his pediatric dentist, which I didn't realize. That's a thing. People like develop such an emotional connection to their pediatric dentist that they just stay with them for as long as they can. and he's been going there since he was a little kid and over the years you know like when he didn't have a cavity they'd take a Polaroid of him and they'd put it on the no cavity wall for the next month and that was like a thing there anyway he went to the dentist not too long ago and on his way out he goes to make his next appointment they're like oh my gosh you must not have gotten our letter like you're too old for the pediatric dentist now this was your last appointment with us but they had it all figured out to give him recommendations for where to go next and whatever.

31:38But he was sad, right? This was like a thing that he'd really loved or a person that he really loved. Anyway, he goes home, goes back to his life. Two weeks later, a package comes from that dentist, from the pediatric dentist. And he assumes that he forgot to pay the bill or something and it's the invoice. But he opens it up and it is every single Polaroid that they took of him since he was a little kid for the no cavity wall. all put together in a little book for him to have for the rest of his life they give him gave him the ability to walk down memory lane and relive so many beautiful moments and by the way that's not hard they must have a file cabinet somewhere they do it and they it's like a you know it's like a long game right they play the long game but the beautiful thing about these gestures of hospitality is when you give people stories like this to tell guess what they're gonna do they're going to tell them over and over and over again.