505: “The Bear” Inspired Restaurant Owner on Anger as Fuel | Will Guidara

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0:39Just head to omnisend.com forward slash founder without the E to get started. All right, now let's jump back into the show. We were relentless in our pursuit of excellence. We went from two stars in the New York Times to three stars in the New York Times to four stars. And it became the first restaurant in the history of the Michelin Guide to go from one to three stars in a single year. We were on top of New York. Number one in the world's 50 best restaurants list from New York, it's 11 ,000. We became number one because we made the choice to be as unreasonable in pursuit of how we made people feel as every other restaurant on the list was in pursuit of simply food they were serving.

1:23And so our journey was a ton of trial and error around investing as much intention and creativity into making people feel seen as we had historically into the product we were selling them.

1:42Before we dive in, I want to extend a warm invitation to join our thriving founder community. It's the perfect place to discover more insightful interviews aimed at helping you build, grow and scale your business. So don't forget to hit subscribe. Your support means the absolute world to us. Thank you so much for subscribing. Let's get stuck in today's discussion. Hear the stories, learn the proven methods, and accelerate your growth and future through entrepreneurship. Welcome to the Founder Podcast with Nathan Chan. All right. So, Will, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today.

2:24the first question that I want to ask you is what did the first 60 days look like when you started Thank You? Oh, when I started Thank You?

2:38That's a less linear answer than I would give for some of the other things I've started. I sold my last company Make It Nice the company that included Madison Park and the Nomad and our restaurant at Claridge about three months before COVID hit and I'd imagine many people out there, and by the way that was extraordinary timing, not due to some sort of knowledge of the world's pending collapse it just happened to work out that way Um, and like anyone out there who has spent their life building something and then sold it, I think many people can relate to this. I immediately had an identity crisis where I wasn't sure who I was.

3:30if I was not a restaurateur in that moment. Who I was without restaurants was hard to wrap my head around. And so manically, quickly, aggressively, I started to put together a team, raise a ton of capital, and get ready to open a bunch more restaurants. And I was literally, this is not an exaggeration, one week away from signing three restaurant leases and a corporate office lease when COVID hit.

3:59moved with my family from our apartment in the city to our place up in the country for what we thought was going to be a few weeks. Obviously, as anyone who's been alive the last few years can attest to, it ended up becoming a few months and then much longer than that. And in the beginning, I worked intensely to keep everything that I had just started launching alive. and then one day realized I didn't want to anymore. I think that anyone who has looked back with real vulnerability or honesty at what transpired during COVID, listen, many people lost either money or people. We all suffered in some way, shape, or form.

4:48But if you look at it in the right way, we all learned something or benefited some way from that moment of adversity. The gift that COVID gave me was the grace and the space to decide that I didn't need to go back to doing what I had always done. Instead, it gave me the grace to decide what I wanted to do next. And with that time, I decided to write my book. and that book has just kind of slowly led to so much more whether stuff in media or the growth of my conference or the advent of thank you where we're working with big companies but it was not like thank you is not a company that i raised a bunch of money for and launched one day it's been a slow evolution over the past couple years um and so i don't even know what i would recall the first 60 days of this one.

5:47So you got me really curious. What happened when you realized you didn't want to do those things that you were doing and starting new restaurants? Where did that come from? What happened? Was it just time to reflect? Well, now to be clear, I've not decided that I don't want to open new restaurants. I think we have a tendency when we're used to doing something to run back and continue to do that. It's not often that people have the wherewithal to really just stop doing everything for long enough that they have the space to choose what they want to do next. That was the big decision I made, was to recognize that who I am is not what I do, and I could actually accomplish more in the long term if I did a bit less in the short term.

6:39And so, yeah, it was the choice to actually think about what I wanted life to look like as opposed to just allowing life to always look the same as it had. and was this because the hospitality industry is so intense that you it's hard to take a holiday and you didn't have much time to think and and disconnect is that part of it or no no i mean listen i've talked to so many people who sell their company and before they're even out of their company they've already decided what they wanted to do next when you're when you're a high performer when you're an overachiever, the idea of just not doing anything for any measure of time is not even something that very many people consider.

7:31Has anything to do with restaurants. I think anyone across disciplines can relate to the story I'm telling. And sometimes I never would have made the choice to stop doing something. I needed COVID to stop the world for long enough that I had no choice but to. Yeah. Okay. So I guess the reason I asked that question around what the first 60 days looked like with Thank You was our community really struggles with what that first 60 days looks like. So it's always really powerful to hear from someone or founders that we interviewed that have made it out the other side and have built something of true worth and significance.

8:10Maybe we could talk about 11 Madison Park. like what are the first 60 days look like there? I mean, the first 60 days of any new restaurant I've opened. I mean, there's some of the most electrifying, exhausting, energizing, exciting and frustrating days imaginable.

8:34You spend all this time developing a plan. You have a very clear idea of exactly what things are going to look like and how they're going to work. and then invariably nothing goes the way you thought it would. There are more struggles to cope with than there are wins to celebrate.

8:56And I've opened a lot of restaurants in my life, and so whether it's analogous to childbirth, where you only remember how good it felt to hold the baby in your arms and you forget about all the pain that preceded that moment, or whether it's because, I mean, there are few things that feel better than how bonded the team is after an opening. In restaurants, we have turnover, right? We employ a lot of people. And invariably, six months after a restaurant's opened, the team looks different than it did when it opened, right? Some people don't make it. It's too intense. Some people didn't opt out on their own accord.

9:40They just didn't have the chops to deliver what was required. But there's no team vibe as powerfully connective as the one that exists when you go through an opening together. Because I believe all of the adversity that comes in those early days just brings people closer together. um i love it i mean i love every opening i've ever been a part of then i mean we could also talk about the 60 days after i was given the opportunity to buy 11 madison park before i started opening restaurants when i actually started my company let's talk about that here's the thing i've come to learn that no one actually knows what they're doing until they actually do it um and i think that's an incredibly liberating thing right i think so many people don't start their own company because they don't think they're ready to do it.

10:37And then once you actually spend enough time talking to people who have started their own companies, it becomes pretty evident pretty quickly that no one had a clue what they were doing when they started the first time. I had been an employee my entire life. And now I had to figure out how to raise a bunch of capital and source a bunch of debt and start an entire accounting department, a finance team and an HR department. I have an optimist memory so I rarely remember the struggles I think that goes back to the whole childbirth metaphor um but I liken experiences like that to being at the top of a diet like a double diamond um ski slope where the biggest decision you make doesn't happen when you're already going down the mountain it happens the moment you press your poles into the snow and do that last push that begins the descent.

11:37That's the biggest decision. So once you've made that, when you're not walking back up the mountain, you're skiing the rest of the way down and you may be battered and bruised by the time you get down there, but you will get down. Yeah. One way or another. And so I think actually the first day is the most important day. The other 59 are just, well, those are just a bunch of roadblocks and speed bumps. Tell me about transforming 11 Madison Park. Like what did that look like? Any, any stories, any like crazy things that you could share? Yeah. Listen, when I got to 11 Madison Park in 2006, it was a middling brasserie.

12:19Um, my dude, I worked there for a while before I bought the restaurant. The food was good, but not great. The service was friendly, but not very precise. But our dining room, our dining room was truly one of the most beautiful in the world. And I was brought in as a part of the team that was charged with elevating the restaurant experience that it could live up to the room itself. At first, like anyone, when charged with making something better, I doubled down in our pursuit of excellence. In the kitchen, we hired cooks that worked in some of the best restaurants in America. We started sourcing better ingredients, introducing new techniques.

12:57We went from a tasting menu or an a la carte menu to a tasting menu so that we could focus more effort on fewer plates of food. In the dining room, we did a lot of the same. Hired some of the best servers, removed tables, bought fancier plates and glasses and silverware. We were relentless in our pursuit of excellence. And within a few years, it started to work. We went from two stars in the New York Times to three stars in the New York Times to four stars, which is the most stars. We went from zero Michelin stars to one Michelin star that became the first restaurant in the history of the Michelin Guide to go from one to three stars in a single year.

13:35We were on top of New York. We were feeling ourselves. And then one day I went into the restaurant to go through my normal morning routine, said hi to the cooks, said hi to the servers, made a mess of a coffee, went to the back, started checking mail, and I stumbled on a letter and on the upper left hand corner it said the world's 50 best restaurants and this is a moment anyone is out there has had these moments that you can recall like every part of it so vividly because it was that impactful to you in your career and this is one of those for me because that list has become very important um it's the first of its kind the first to rank every restaurant on the planet against one another, which for restaurants like ours that achieved every accolade in our region gave us something more to aspire towards.

14:25So I ripped open the letter and it said, congratulations, you've been adding to the list of the 50 best restaurants in the world, come to London and gin for the ceremony. And obviously we went. Now the 50 best are a lot like the Oscars, right? You go, it's this larger than life auditorium. You're in a room filled with your heroes. You're wearing your nicest tuxedo, but they're different from the Oscars in one significant way. At the Oscars, if you're nominated for an award, when they get to your category, you really want them to call your name. Here, if you're in the room, you know you're one of the 50 best in the world.

14:57You just don't know where on the list you fall until you get there. There's sort of 50, they count down to one. Here, you're desperate that they don't call your name for as long as possible. I remember we had a science seating and something about me, I like to gamify pretty much everything in life. I think it's one of my superpowers as a leader. Because I don't care how much you like your job, it will always be more fun to play than it will be to work. People have asked me how I challenge my team to get better and better with each passing year. I always say very simply, I didn't. I just made as many elements of the work as possible feel like a game.

15:31Anyone who's ever played a game, they like playing it. The more you play, the better you get. But I do like to game a five-er thing. And so I looked at where we were sitting relative to where the people would come in number one through five the year before we're sitting to try to guess where on the list we were going to fall. and I think I guess number 35 now listen I'm sure because there must have been some of like the normal preambles the welcomes the thank you for coming from the big debonair British MC at the front of the room before they started but I don't remember any of them all I remember was him saying let's kick it off at number 50 a new restaurant from New York City 11 Madison Park and I was like fuck we'd come in dead last turns out the assigned seating has nothing to do with where you fall on the list by the way it's it's so that they can have a camera trained on you so they can project the image of your reaction in front of the entire room it's what everyone else would pretend to be happy and you're like i was looking like i'd just gotten kicked in the groin um we were mortified just so embarrassed we left the party early went back to the hotel started going through the stages of grief first anger and I do like to dwell on anger for a moment because I think we're in a cultural season where people are so focused on optimism and positivity that we forget about the fueling power of anger I quote my dad often one of my favorites of his quotes is that adversity is a terrible thing to waste.

17:02You can't control what life throws at you, but you can control how you react to it. I'm grateful in hindsight that we came in last place that year because had it not been for the frustration we felt, then I don't think we would have pushed as hard as we did after that. But then ultimately got to acceptance because, okay, listen, here's the deal. It's patently absurd to say that one restaurant is the best restaurant in the world. There's too many restaurants. It's too subjective. When you earn the top spot on that list, what it actually means is that you are having the greatest impact on the world of restaurants.

17:44And so that night I thought about the chefs that had topped that list before us. And they were all unreasonable in pursuit of their food, their product, and relentless in pursuit of how it needed to change. innovating techniques, ingredients, sourcing, all of it, such that they can move the craft of cooking forward. That night on a cocktail napkin, I wrote, we will be number one in the world, but I needed to identify our impact. And what we decided was, listen, if they became number one by being unreasonable in pursuit of product, we were going to be unreasonable in pursuit of people and relentless in pursuit of the one thing that will never change, which is the human desire to feel seen, to feel cared for, or just our collective need to feel loved.

18:34And so that's when I wrote the two words, the title of my book on that napkin, Unreasonable Hospitality. Got back to the restaurant and then spent the next two years with the team trying to figure out what the heck that meant. But about two years after London, I found myself in the dining room at a busier-than-normal lunch service, and I was helping out the team. And I found myself clearing appetizers from a table of four. There were Europeans on vacation to New York just to eat at restaurants. In fact, this was their last meal. They were going to the airport to head back home straight afterwards.

19:12They'd been to the best restaurants in New York. They'd been to like Danielle and Le Bernardin and Jean-Georges and Perse and now 11 Madison. But then one woman jumped in and said, yeah, you know what? We never had a hot dog from one of the street carts. and it was like one of those light bulb moments from a cartoon where you know the character has a good idea so I walked back into the kitchen, dropped off the hot dog or the plates, ran outside bought a hot dog, ran back inside then came the hard part which was convincing my fancy chef to serve it in our fancy restaurant but I got him too and we cut the hot dog up into four perfect pieces out a little swish of ketchup and a swish of mustard a little sauerkraut relish.

19:56And 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 a dirty water dog and explained it. I said, hey, I want to make sure you don't go home with any culinary regrets. Here's your New York City hot dog. And I'd never seen anyone react to anything I'd served them the way that they reacted to that.

20:25Athletes always go to the tapes and they've had a bad game to see what they did wrong. They don't often enough go to the tapes and they've had a good game to see what they did well to make sure they keep on doing that thing. And so I did with the hot dog. And it required three things. I needed to be present. Like basically stop thinking about everything else I needed to do and fully focus on those people. I needed to, yes, take what I did seriously, but also stop taking myself so seriously. Like too many companies are so focused on their brand that they don't do things that feel off-brand. But sometimes it's the off-brand things that will bring your stakeholders the most joy.

21:08And three, the whole thing recognized that with unreasonable hospitality, It's not about creating one-size-fits-all experiences. What made that special was that it was one-size-fits-one. And in those three things, we now had our roadmap. And our trajectory from that point forward, yeah, we were excellent. And our food was best in class. And our service was as close to technically perfect and all of that. But we became number one because we made the choice to be as unreasonable in pursuit of how we made people feel as every other restaurant on the list was in pursuit of simply the food they were serving.

21:57And so our journey was a ton of trial and error around investing as much intention and creativity into making people feel seen as we had historically into the product we were selling them. So that was a crazy story. Thank you for sharing. So much to unpack there. I'm curious, you know, for our community that are typically early stage founders, how can they stay present in the moment with their customers? What can they learn from that? I think the lesson there is that the more you pursue your customers rather than just talk at them, the more you can get to know them and the more you learn from them, the better equipped you are to serve them in a way that they actually want to be served.

22:56I think a lot of early stage founders make the mistake of only investing time and energy into things that are scalable. I think if you limit your efforts into scalable ideas, you're selling yourself short and holding yourself back. I think we need to invest energy into unscalable things. Then once we've figured out how impactful those things can be, then invest some time and energy into figuring out how to scale at least a part of what made them work. Are you hesitating to take the next step in your e-commerce journey? Founder Plus has you covered. With proven frameworks tailored to your business needs for fast results, a supportive community of over 30 ,000 like-minded entrepreneurs, and weekly live mentorship sessions, Founder Plus is your key to success.

23:44Try Founder Plus today for just$1 for seven days and start building your dream business with confidence. You can visit founder.com forward slash start dollar trial or click the link in the description to claim your trial. yeah i uh there's a great quote that i love by paul graham he he talks about in the early stages do things that don't scale and i'm sure you're familiar with that um and uh you bring me back to like when we interviewed joe jebbia the founder of airbnb and you know when they first started something along the lines of um they had like a like some sort of um conference that was in san fran and uh what they did was they actually put their own place up that was like the first air b &b and they like got to know the person that stayed there and they kept doing that they they just did like they just they just put up places themselves and they got to know every single customer in the early days and they did things that didn't scale so i can really resonate with that and i mean a lot of people would say that investing in people is not scalable but it is maybe you start it with things that aren't scalable but the underlying idea very much is scalable you know a lot of people talk about like what is their moat every business is trying to create their mode and everyone does it or talks about it at the very least around the idea of product and brand what is it about the product how good it is or what is it about the brand how strong it is that will prevent someone else from coming in and taking their lunch.

25:30The reality is, and this is not a theory, it's a time-tested fact, that no matter how good your product is, no matter how strong your brand is, eventually, it's just a matter of time, someone will come around and build a better product or create a stronger brand. It may be because they have more money or they're just smarter or more creative, or maybe they're just younger and so they see a part of the world that you no longer have the ability to see. I believe the only true competitive advantage, the only real moat that exists comes with investing consistently and generously into relationships.

26:10Because relationships take a long time to build and if you build them in the right way, the loyalty you earn takes a long time for someone else to a road. And so if there's anything that a founder of a new company can learn from our story, it's you can't focus on the product at the expense of the people. And because I believe we're we're in a place where excellence is merely table stakes. I don't think you can get to the top. We're not doubling down on hospitality. So how can you do that in a digital sense? That's the full question. Yeah. I mean, you need to give me a lot more than that, man. I mean, it looks different depending on what the product is.

27:04Okay. I reject that question. I'm going to tell you to do a better job on that question. Okay. So let me explain. How can you do that in the digital sense when you have an e-commerce business, when you're selling a physical product? Like how can you really take your lessons from hospitality and connection and building relationships at scale or building relationships even like when it comes to people? I mean, there's plenty of examples of people that already do. You look at Chewy. Do you know what Chewy is? Chewy is the dog food company or maybe just pet stuff company. But a lot of people will go to Chewy and they'll order their dog food on automatic reorder.

27:47So it just comes at a relative clip and you can get toys for your pets, all this different stuff, whatever you need to care for a pet. When you have a recurring dog food order, that means that when your dog passes away, you need to call and cancel them and let them know why. and often times when someone's pet dies they don't immediately think to cancel the food order so a lot of the time the call that Chewy is getting is hey I just got this bag of dog food I don't have a dog anymore can I send it back to you and get a refund Chewy has systemized into their product a couple things one they can't take dog food back so they let you keep it and they encourage you to go drop it off at a place locally where they can give it to someone in need and they give you the idea of where to go.

28:43And then everyone on the receiving end of those calls, because listen, in most digital companies, there is a call center. Those call centers are their dining rooms. They are empowered to go above and beyond to make people feel good in those moments. The automatic thing that happens unless a human being overrides it with a more creative idea, is you get flowers sent to your house automatically saying we are so sorry for your loss. That's unbelievable and connective and the people who hear that story tell about it or talk about it nonstop when that's happened to people. And yeah, that costs money.

29:22It costs chewy money.