The StoryBrand Podcast

#69: Will Guidara—Why Great Service Is Never an Accident

34 min
Apr 27, 2026about 1 month ago
Listen to Episode
Summary

Will Guidara, author of 'Unreasonable Hospitality,' discusses how systematizing graciousness creates competitive advantage across industries. He shares how his book has sold millions of copies and been applied in unexpected sectors like prisons and sports venues, and introduces a new field guide for implementing hospitality principles in any business.

Insights
  • Systemizing graciousness doesn't undermine authenticity—it ensures consistent execution and allows employees to build habits around making customers feel seen and valued
  • Customer recovery and retention strategies are more cost-effective than acquisition marketing; getting customers to return 4+ times creates lifetime loyalty at a fraction of ad spend
  • Great service requires mapping every touchpoint in an experience and deliberately improving the non-fun parts while amplifying memorable moments
  • Leaders who admit mistakes and apologize strengthen relationships rather than diminish authority; apologies signal that customers matter more than ego
  • Culture-building through daily huddles, constructive feedback systems, and repair protocols creates the foundation for exceptional service delivery
Trends
Hospitality principles are expanding beyond restaurants into prisons, hospitals, sports venues, and corporate environments as universal business strategyCompanies are shifting budget allocation from marketing acquisition to customer experience and recovery programs for better ROIExperience design and journey mapping are becoming standard practice across industries to identify and optimize micro-momentsEmployee empowerment through systems and cultural frameworks is replacing command-and-control management in service-oriented businessesWorkbook-style business books with exercises and design elements are outperforming traditional business writing in engagement and implementationDream Weaver roles (dedicated experience designers) are being adopted by NFL teams and government organizations beyond hospitalityGraciousness and dignity in customer interactions are being recognized as competitive advantages, not just nice-to-haves
Topics
Systemizing Graciousness and HospitalityCustomer Experience Design and Journey MappingService Recovery and Complaint ResolutionTeam Building and Culture DevelopmentDaily Huddles and Internal CommunicationConstructive Feedback SystemsEmployee Empowerment and AutonomyCost-Effective Customer Retention StrategiesExperience Touchpoint OptimizationDream Weaver Program ImplementationLeadership and VulnerabilityScaling Hospitality Across IndustriesBook Publishing and Author Platform BuildingWorkplace Dignity and Human ConnectionMarketing ROI vs. Customer Lifetime Value
Companies
11 Madison Park
Will Guidara's flagship restaurant in New York City that he built to number one in the world, foundational to his hos...
Chick-fil-A
Referenced as example of company that systemizes graciousness through operational systems while empowering employees ...
Oakland Athletics
Will's creative studio is designing the entire fan experience at the new A's stadium in Las Vegas, reimagining baseba...
StoryBrand
Host Donald Miller's company; framework discussed as parallel to hospitality work—both require understanding how huma...
Land Rover
Company that conducted day-long unreasonable hospitality training workshops with Will's team
People
Will Guidara
Guest discussing his bestselling book, field guide, and implementation of hospitality principles across industries in...
Donald Miller
Podcast host and author of Building a StoryBrand; discusses parallels between messaging frameworks and hospitality ex...
Brian Canlis
Heads the creative studio designing the Oakland A's stadium experience in Las Vegas
Don Clark
Designer of the Unreasonable Hospitality field guide; previously worked with Lego, Pixar, and NASA
Rory Sutherland
Referenced for his thinking on how great ideas require their opposites to also be good ideas; influenced book title s...
Quotes
"You're listening to the StoryBrand podcast based on Donald Miller's best-selling book, Building a StoryBrand. The StoryBrand framework is made up of seven key elements, all of them anchored in one powerful idea. Your customer is the hero and you are their guide."
Podcast introduction
"Being unreasonable in pursuit of all the little and big things we can do to make someone feel seen, to give them a sense of belonging. That truly is not just the right way to live, but truly a competitive advantage."
Will Guidara
"When someone does this, they feel this. And what if we were to do this to make that part of this experience just a little bit more awesome? That is the most scalable approach you can take to building a culture like this."
Will Guidara
"I'm sorry actually is, is you matter more than me or you matter more than my ego. And that's an affirmation. That's a way of saying I love you."
Will Guidara
"You guys are wasting your money on advertising. Yeah, just get down in the weeds and go, okay, if we give the person this and treat them this way and this way, they'll come back."
Will Guidara
Full Transcript
You guys are wasting your money on advertising. Yeah, just get down in the weeds and go, okay, if we give the person this and treat them this way and this way, they'll come back. And it's also just rooted in graciousness. Sometimes when I talk about systemizing graciousness, people think it undermines the authenticity. I just think it ensures that it happens more consistently. A world where people are more consistently gracious is a pretty cool world that I want to live in. Being unreasonable in pursuit of all the little and big things we can do to make someone feel seen, to give them a sense of belonging. That truly is not just the right way to live, but truly a competitive advantage. You're listening to the StoryBrand podcast based on Donald Miller's best-selling book, Building a StoryBrand. The StoryBrand framework is made up of seven key elements, all of them anchored in one powerful idea. Your customer is the hero and you are their guide. Each week on the podcast, you'll get exactly what you need to craft clear messaging that connects with more customers and grows your business. Now let's dive in with your host, Donald Miller. My friend Will Gaddair is back on the StoryBrand podcast this week. You know his book, Unreasonable Hospitality. Will really started, built the restaurant, 11 Madison Park in New York City, took it to number one in the world. If you've not read Unreasonable Hospitality, the best business book I have ever read. It's riveting. if you're the only person who hasn't read it, go grab it. Since last time you were here, which is less than a year ago, you have sold 7 million more books on Reasonable Hospitality. Dude, it is wild. Yeah, tell me about that journey for a second. We're talking about a new release that you're releasing that has to do with the Reasonable Hospitality. But tell me, give us some stories. What has been really exciting? I've thought about releasing a book and how that compares to opening a new restaurant. because in many ways they're similar except for one notable one. In each case, you spend one, two, three years working on an idea. Launching a restaurant would take that three months, three years. The kind of restaurants we used to open were big restaurants. They took a long time. And then there's this moment, which is always a little bittersweet. I'm not sure if you feel this with your books, where it's finally ready to put into the world that's cool because you wrote it for exactly that reason. But there's also a sadness because it's not yours anymore. And you like kind of give it away to the world. That's how I feel about restaurants as well. The difference is that a restaurant, you can tweak on day two, three, four, five. It's this living, breathing thing. Whereas a book, the moment it's released, that's it, right? You can't change it. And so the past few years has been wild because on one hand, you know i'm traveling i'm learning and there's things about the book i would change on the other hand i don't know that i felt it was ready to release and yet the way that the world has reacted to it makes me really grateful i let it go when i did um because i think i would have just butchered it to death had i had endless time you know what i mean i agree with you i think that you know your your sort of personality is gonna be somewhat perfectionistic. Yeah. And you would have edited, I'm speaking from experience, you would have edited that into too much perfection. Yeah, I think the soul would have been removed from it. Yeah, the soul would have been gone. It's one of the reasons I don't have any of my previous books. I don't own them. You don't even own, there's not even a copy in your house? I don't believe so. Huh. I've seen one in the house. I've written 15. Yeah, I don't have them. They're all on your wife's bedside table? I have the foreign translation, so my wife doesn't know I'm a writer yet. I'll break that to her soon. The wild thing, listen, when I put it out, I was pretty confident that people in restaurants and hotels, some of them would read it. Are you serious? Be honest with me. You did not know that was a bestseller. I did not know. Well, there's no way. I'd never written a book book before. I'd written cook books. It's the best business book I've ever read. I used to say one of, and now it's been a couple years. I would actually say best business book I've ever read. Man, thank you. Unreasonable hospitality. I told you I got up at two in the morning and used the bathroom. Yeah, no, you told me that. And was like, I got to find out what happened. And I just got up and went into the kitchen and finished the book. But I'll tell you, the worlds in which it's popped up, and I don't take those words for granted, so thank you. Yeah, yeah. I've gotten notes from people who run prisons saying that all the inmates are new in book club around unreasonable hospitality. And they've actually implemented programs within the prison to bring the ideas to life. I've gotten notes from public. How does that make you feel? Are you disconnected from it or it's got its own life or are you proud of that? I'm proud. I don't know. You receive that and it feels great. and even the way I just said when you just said you just gave me praise a moment ago I don't take it for granted it feels really good every single time I feel like I've seen other people whether they're writers or restaurateurs or producer whatever who they no longer are gracious when they receive praise because they actually believe it all to be true ah this is like a burden that they have to live with yeah i was i was that guy after my first book took off wait really oh yeah it got to your head i don't know if it got to my head it i was just in the victim mentality of like you know i'm trying to buy some ice cream here at the at the supermarket yeah would you please and now that some of that has been scaled back because you know you write a few more books that don't do well and then you write one that does well again yes and that's when i realized oh this is an incredible blessing that not everybody gets. Now if somebody comes up to me, I'm, I stop. I mean, I just, you know, happens once every couple of weeks, the perfect amount. Yeah, no, that's it. We're not. It is the perfect once every couple of weeks. Someone, someone came up to me the other day in the airport and they're like, Hey, I'm so sorry to bother you, but would you take a picture? Where's the restroom? So sorry to bother you, but like, do you, can you work here? The table's dirty over there. If you wouldn't mind cleaning up. And I said like, Hey, don't apologize. If I ever become the kind of person that doesn't think this is awesome, then that's not the person I want to be. Like it's, it's, it's crazy, but that's a different kind of thing. Like the, the idea that I wrote a book about restaurants and it's obviously more than that, but that it is in some small way enhancing the life of a student or an inmate or a patient or any other person in between. I mean, gosh, that's cool. And by the way, it has the added benefit of being something I really, really believe in. Yeah. That being unreasonable in pursuit of all the little and big things we can do to make someone feel seen, to give them a sense of belonging, that that truly is not just the right way to live, but truly a competitive advantage. And then to watch that proliferate across industries. I mean, it's been the most wild few years of my life. are you loving it i love every moment of it yeah you've got some great fun gigs too that's my favorite part of this work is you get to go meet people who are building something cool like an archaeological dig or occasionally you get to do something like that will you tell us some of the i know you've done some sports arenas yeah coming up tell us some of the fun projects that you've gotten to get involved with well so the team and i i mean there's kind of like three buckets to our world now there's a couple of people on my team that just go around the country and do training workshops they'll do like day-long unreasonable hospitality workshops and they've done everything from minor league baseball to land rover to hospital systems so like just that idea that those companies are not just bringing me in for an hour but yeah they're carving out an entire day to do a deep dive that crazy then we have our gatherings so we do the welcome conference in York where you crushed the unreasonable hospitality summit here Then the last one is the creative studio that Brian Canlis heads up And there, I mean, we're getting to design the entire experience at the new A's stadium in Vegas. So fun. Not just the food and beverage, but like the moment someone walks in through the moment they leave. and just reimagining what going to a baseball stadium is like it's so cool can you give us some things that you i mean i realize you probably can't talk too much but what's going to be different about going to an a's game and we can't get into the weeds just yet we're like we're a few months shy of that but what i'd say is in the same way we think about any experience which is like mapping out every single little touch point in the experience and trying to figure out how to make as many of them just a little more awesome. We've uncovered some pretty fun touch points in getting a baseball game. And I mean, I think back to some baseball games I went to as a kid. And I don't remember many of the details of the games, right? But there's these little things that stick out. And so we're trying to take the parts of the game that are not fun and make them a little bit less unfun. but the really memorable parts and just crank them all the way up. It's been really fun. I can't wait to tell you more. I know a few because I think Brian told me one of the two things that's going to happen at that stadium. That was pretty freaking cool. Some of the, like there's a couple things that I'm really excited about that I can't wait to announce. Some of this stuff, we're going to get into your field guide here in a second because you've released a field guide for unreasonable hospitality. It's a gorgeous book that looks bigger than, you've got a copy here, it looks bigger than the book itself. Yeah, yeah. And I want to get into what that is, how it can be employed for those of us who own businesses. Most everybody listening right now owns a business. So here's my question. Yeah. When I read Unreasonable Hospitality, of course, I'm enthralled by this book, but I'm also just like, this seems really hard. Like I would imagine you would be very high on the social aspect. For a guy like me to apply Unreasonable Hospitality is different than a guy like you. in 2023 i did a talk at sundance and do you remember flying that year was particularly bad the delays were rampant 23 yeah okay like following covid we were coming out of it for whatever reason that flight was particularly bad my flight was delayed seven hours i didn't get to the hotel until four in the morning and when i got there i was like gearing up for this lengthy check-in process. I walk in, there's just one guy in the lobby, the overnight manager. His name is Oscar. He's there, arm outstretched, holding my room key. And he goes, Mr. Gadara, you must be exhausted. Just go get some sleep. We can check you in tomorrow. Go upstairs, fall right to sleep. The next day, I've never been more excited to check into a hotel in my entire life. I run downstairs, check in, run around the lobby, find the general manager. I'm like, dude, Oscar is amazing. Like, you're never going to believe what he did. He goes, yeah, Oscar's great. That had nothing to do with Oscar. And I was like, what are you talking about? He goes, the delays here have been really bad. A couple months ago, we got together with the team. We said, how do we, how do we systemize some graciousness into this moment? That's what they came up with. He got there after two, they gave you the room key that they check in the following day. He goes on to say, Oscar is actually not very hospitable. So you say there's a chance for me. Well, no, but listen. And so I said, what are you talking about? He goes, sorry, Oscar was not that hospitable when we started it. See, here's the thing. When Oscar did that for me, he was not going above and beyond for me. He was simply doing his job. In the same way they run your credit card on check-in, he was following a system that someone had designed and given to him. But every time he did it, he bore witness to looks of profound appreciation on people's faces, like the one he saw in mine. Over time, he got addicted to how good that made him feel and started finding more and more creative ways to feel it again. So he followed a system, and then apparently Oscar was doing all sorts of cool stuff. If you listen to people tell stories about Chick-fil-A, they'll talk about that stuff, but they'll tell you other stories as well. Just the other day, I was in Atlanta doing a talk and someone came up to me, they're like, I experienced unreasonable hospitality at a Chick-fil-A once. I was like, go on. She had just had her second kid. She was having some pretty serious postpartum depression. Goes to Chick-fil-A, orders food, realizes she doesn't have her credit card, she's having a meltdown. And the cashier, just the hourly employee is like, ma'am, it's on us. Like, just don't worry about it. Enjoy your food. And she'll never forget that. I get choked up just hearing that story. Right? Like you think about it. The systems Chick-fil-A has put in place are part of the reason why people love them. But what they've really done with those systems is they've shown the people on their team what right looks like. And it's all the little improvisational things that their team does on top of those systems that, in my view, is really why the company has the reputation they have. You, I think, are more well-suited to install a culture of unreasonable hospitality than most anyone. Maybe you don't thrive in like hanging out in the hotel lobby, talking to people as they walk through the door, but you are a student of human behavior and experience beyond what most people I know are. And all it takes is someone saying, hey, when someone does this, they feel this. And what if we were to do this to make that part of this experience just a little bit more awesome? That is the most scalable approach you can take to building a culture like this because any service industry company, which by the way, I think everyone's in the service industry, invariably is a human organization. so the extent to which we can create systems that reinforce for the people on our teams how good it feels to do right by another human being so that they get addicted to that feeling and start finding more autonomous and improvisational ways to feel it again I think those are the companies that thrive yeah we've had fun executing and being creative around around what you started. We did a thing, one of my favorite things we did recently, we had a lot, our first live workshop came back to Nashville. We took a break for COVID and like most introverts, we just kept taking a break. You're like, this is kind of fun to just do this on the other end of a screen. Eight years later, we don't want to get anybody sick. We don't want to get anybody sick. My aunt has a cold, so we're canceling all live. human interactions. No, but we, we all came back and it was a blast. It was just so much fun. But one of the things we did, I know when I travel, I have a four and a half year old, so I've set this precedent, which is actually sort of a fun challenge. I don't mind it, but I have to come back with some sort of gift for my four and a half year old. She just expects it when I walk through the door. I think a lot of parents have found themselves in this conundrum. And it's also like, you can never, like I was at a thing, I was at a conference, I was speaking at a conference and the theme was let's build it so they had legos oh freaking everywhere they had hundreds of thousands of legos and they were like don we're going to send you home with the greatest gift for emin line and i had to explain to them i'm i'm very very grateful but let me explain to something this sets a precedent 100 so let me take this one little box of legos this is perfect anyway um We ended up buying 100 or 150 little bears that have a T-shirt on, say, Nashville. And so to the audience, we said, raise your hand if you've got a kid. Raise your hand if you have to bring a gift home. Well, we got it for you. You don't have to go searching around the airport for something like that. All 100 of them, gone. By the way, that's just systemized, right? That's just systemized. People are coming to our conference. It was amazing how much it meant. What is a pattern that's likely to be persistent? they have left kids behind. They're gonna need to find a gift. What can we do to make their lives a little bit better just by the gift for them, right? Like with story Brent like this is what you great at You great at helping a company tell their story because you understand how humans think And so you are going to help them write their story in a way that it will be easy for people to receive that Right. We do the exact same thing. I'm just focused on what are we doing for people as opposed to how are we communicating an idea to them. Yeah. And they both require the same intuitive understanding of how someone, like what makes people tick. So actually, I reject your idea that hospitality doesn't come naturally to you. I appreciate that. I mean, well, obviously we have over probably 200 overnight guests a year at our place. We do a lot of hospitality. I'm on the receiving end of your hotel hospitality. Wait, the other thing real quick about gifts. My wife was getting really mad at me because I would bring home a gift every time I traveled. And obviously like you, I travel a lot. And she kept on saying, stop it. She's going to expect this. You have to stop. And I was like, babe, I've been wanting to be the guy. There's not what dads do. Like don't. And then one time I walked in with my bag and I pull and my bag is like five feet away from me over here. And I'm here and Frankie is running and I have my arms out and Frankie runs right over to my bag and not to me and opens my bag. It says, where's my present? My wife's like, see. so that I had to stop bringing Frankie Gips. I brought Emmeline something once and she was dissatisfied. You know, like this isn't... You got like a bad review on Yelp. Absolutely. And far from what I should have done, I was like, hon, you know, not everything's going to be good and you have to be disappointed sometimes. I'm like, I'll do better next time. I'm so sorry. I swear I'll do better next time. Sir, sir, sir, sir. I am so sorry. In fact, let's go to the store. Let me make it right. There have been multiple times that my wife has pulled me aside to say, this will not become a good cop, bad cop situation. I will not be the bad cop. I'm sorry, I wanted to get you something better. Your mom said I couldn't. That's exactly it. That's exactly it. Okay, we'll do marriage counseling next. You know, the opposite of unreasonable hospitality, the opposite of making people feel seen, honoring their dignity, is what to you? And I only say that to say, I remember once during COVID, I bought 15 acres and I needed a, um, like a rhino or a Kawasaki mule, like a UTV. And I didn't realize that when COVID hit sales on those machines went skyrocketed. And, um, I walk into a place I have now, I still find this shocking to be even able to tell, tell this story. I'm not somebody who like bad mouths, bad customer service. I've never done that my life. But I walk in, place is empty. Uh, there's a guy sitting behind a desk and he's looking at his computer. He's typing in his computer. This guy's a middle-aged man. He's clearly a sales rep. And I just walk up to the desk and I wait for him to kind of see me. And he kind of looks up and keeps going and he just keeps working. He doesn't acknowledge that up there. And so after a minute, I, uh, I said, Hey, can I, is it okay if I ask you a question? And I think I probably had a little bit of like, Hey dude. Yeah. In my voice. Um, and he was literally like what do you want and i go well i'm interested in picking up a utv so sorry to disturb you at work that's exactly it i'm interested in picking up a utv then he goes who isn't interested in picking up a utv buddy and i'm literally like are we gonna fight are we gonna actually throw down yeah i mean i was like i think this guy wants to fight me i think he wants of a physical altercation. And I, and I literally said, are you being serious right now? And he, and he, he mouthed off something else and I'm like, Hey, I'm just going to go. Yeah. And for the first time in my entire life and the only time since pulled over on the way home, called the store and said, I want to talk to your manager and said, Hey, I own a small business. You own a small business. I just want you to know, I've never been treated with that. What really ticked me off about that interaction was the statement of you are worthy of being dismissed as a human being. Like you are. And the real test of whether or not we care about people is when we don't need their money. Like how do you treat them when I don't need your money? Exactly. I don't need your review. As opposed to when that business was really struggling, what would have. The real you comes out, right? The real you comes out. I mean, interestingly, so you said the opposite of unreasonable hospitality. Do you know Rory Sutherland? Did you meet him? I did not meet him. You guys spoke at different welcomes. I love Rory Sutherland. Rory is one of the greats. Yes, he is. And I actually used his thinking to get the publishers to agree to the name unreasonable hospitality because they didn't like the name. They really pushed back on it. What did they want to call it? They wanted it to, they didn't like the word unreasonable because they thought it had negative connotations and they didn't want the word hospitality because they didn't want the book to be pigeonholed to restaurants. Obviously, they didn't get the point. My whole view is everything is hospitality and unreasonable makes it good. But his thing, and I'm not going to articulate it as well as he would, is the opposite of a great idea also needs to be a good idea. So like if I were to be like, hey, I want to offer good, I want to offer hospitality. It's not a great idea because the opposite is you're just not offering hospitality. That's objectively a bad approach. The opposite of unreasonable hospitality is reasonable hospitality. It's a perfectly fine way of doing things. And that's what makes unreasonable hospitality the right approach because you don't need to do it and you can still get by. Unreasonable hospitality is like, no, we're going all in. I think what you're describing, it's not the opposite of what I talk about. It's just bad service and no hospitality at all. I'm curious about whether the call to the manager did anything because often, like when you talk about this guy somehow felt it was okay to dismiss another human being, probably means that he himself felt dismissed every day that he walked into work. And that was the lead that he was following. Right. And I think it's like you can't. how do we know what right looks like until we're first on the receiving end of it? Yeah. But the other thing that story shows is, and I think we're in a bit of an epidemic with it, like the fact that people no longer feel comfortable saying, I'm sorry when a business has made a mistake, like they, those two words, I find them uttered less and less frequently or the frequency with which you walk into a business and yeah, yeah, you feel like you are annoying the person for trying to patronize that business. Like there's a problem here. And that's why I love this work because it is more fulfilling on the serving side to actually take pride in serving. It's more fulfilling on the receiving side to be in the receiving end of graciousness. And I think businesses do better when they choose that path? Well, you've got millions of people who've read this book and they want to execute it. They want to install it for lack of a better term into their business. And maybe I think one of the challenges when I read the book and just interacting with you and knowing you personally was, wow, you guys are creative. Like you come up with ideas that I don't, I don't seem to come up with. Is the field guide something that helps us do that? What is, explain to me this new field guide. Yeah. So it's been, I mean, I've, I've gotten to speak to companies across pretty much every industry and it's been so cool to see people connect with the ideas. But one thing that's come up over and over is that people want a little bit more help bringing those ideas to life. And that's what encouraged us to, to put this book together. Um, you do everything like to the highest degree. That's an, I'm looking at it. That is not a grasp at dollars. No. I think you probably had to pay a lot of money to get that thing made. We made this much harder on ourselves than we needed to. Yeah, looks like it. I mean, the coolest compliment I ever got about the first book was that it was a great beach read. And that because I wanted a business book about hospitality to itself be hospitable You nailed that I wanted a workbook to not feel like work And so we brought in Don Clark who I think is just one of the greatest graphic designers He done stuff for Lego and Pixar and NASA And he did the design. So like he breathed life into the ideas. Like it's a fun book to go through. But what it is, is it's building blocks. So the first third of the book is how to build a team. Second third is how to create a culture of hospitality through focusing on excellence, communication, collaboration, feedback, and repair. And then the third book, the third part, once you've done those first two parts, is how to create magic. How to, in a very deliberate, systemized way, turn an ordinary transaction into a truly magical experience for the people you work with and those that you serve. And we have a lot of exercises in there that are literally step by step understand the experience that you are offering the product that you are selling in excruciating detail such that you can take as many little moments within that experience and just make them more awesome and i'm convinced if teams go through this together it can transform their business how do we how do we do it do we do you buy one for every member of your customer service team? If you're a small business, do you buy one for everybody? Yeah. I mean, like walk me through the process of actually, because people listening want, they want to install this in their business. I mean, so many people have done book clubs with the first book and they have all their different things they've done around conversations or exercises they've made for themselves. I think this as a book club within a company can be pretty impactful. We buy a case of them. I think you buy a case for them and you like meet with your team and you go through chunks at a time and everyone kind of shares their work a little bit because you do that even with the first part where you're building the team yeah for sure so like it starts it was beautiful by the way thank you so much man no i mean like the whole thing is effectively centering yourself within the idea of hospitality like what does that actually mean to you and then identifying how you hire how you fire how then you maximize the impact of everyone on your team and then it goes into the culture stuff which i i just think is really powerful like i believe so strongly in the power of a well-run daily huddle this goes through that i believe so strongly in creating a culture of feedback both praise and criticism but it's only constructive when done thoughtfully so there's literally rules of criticism here I believe so much in the power of repair internally and externally and this walks through right ways to approach that Repair meaning like you've made a When as a leader I mess up or when I mess up with a customer You know this, I'm sure There's all this data When someone comes into your business if you do a good job, they'll talk about it a bit If you do a bad job, they'll talk about it a lot more If you do a bad job and then you put in the work to make it right they're going to talk about that the most. I think too many leaders think they need to come off as being perfect when in reality we are inherently imperfect. And we think if we admit to having made a mistake, people will think less of us when in reality that the opposite is objectively true. What I'm sorry actually is, is you matter more than me or you matter more than my ego. And that's an affirmation. That's a way of saying I love you. I mean, when we apologize to our spouse, right, after doing something stupid or whatever, that is an I love you. That's a, hey, you're more important than me. Yeah. And I'm willing to be wrong in pursuit of this relationship. That's right. That's right. In pursuit of the relationship is the right way to say it. It's right. And everything is relationships. Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, like with customers, I'm convinced that if you opened a business where you intentionally messed up with every single customer, just, but also add a program in place to then turn every single customer around, I think it'd be the most successful business on earth. I think it's a terrible idea. If it's a fast food place, just forget the fries every time. Every single time. Yeah, and then call them and literally hire someone to speed down the highway and meet them and give them the fries. You're actually right. That would become... That'd be very expensive, but that would create ridiculous brand advantage. And I'm also convinced that people overspend on marketing and underspend on customer recovery. That's part of it. There was a guy I saw on Instagram. He was a restaurateur. And he talked about how the average restaurant on meta ads will spend, I'm going to butcher the numbers, but like $150. I don't know if you've seen this. But he had shown that if somebody comes back to your restaurant a fourth time, they're lifers. And they have, by the way, and they have really good experiences. so he talked about well he gives them like a free thing for a free slice of cheesecake if they come back so like i'm so glad you like to have you tried your cheesecake he didn't try this time you got to come back here it's on me next time and that's how he gets in the second time and then he has a strategy for all four times and his cost on that is eight bucks like it's eight bucks instead of 150 bucks to get them and he's just like you guys are wasting your money on on advertising. Yeah. Yeah. Just, just literally get down in the weeds and go, okay, if we give the person this and treat them this way and this way, they'll come back. And it's also just rooted in graciousness, right? Like there's this, that's where I think sometimes when I talk about systemizing graciousness, people think it undermines the authenticity of, of the idea. I don't think that. I just think it ensures that it happens more consistently and I think that a world where people are more consistently gracious is a pretty cool world that I want to live in yeah anyway then it gets the third section of the book which is just experience design so like okay now you have the foundation you have a good team you have a culture of hospitality now let's level up the experience to from black and white to color all the way to Technicolor and there's exercises that we run people through interrogating the customer journey, pattern recognition of recurring moments, even the whole idea of a dream weaver, which is that job that I had that became pretty famous in the first book. I've seen like NFL teams and like local governments that now have employed dream weavers. And I realized that in the book, I never explained exactly how that should work. And a lot of people are doing it incorrectly. So here I actually say, okay, here's a step-by-step process on how to structure a Dreamweaver program. And yeah, it's really fun. Well, congratulations on the success. Do we get this on Amazon? Do we get this? This is wherever you buy books. So Amazon or local bookstores and Barnes and Noble. And you mentioned a couple of things. You do some conferences here in Nashville. Yeah. Of course the welcome conference sells out in a half a second every year. where can people find out about where they can go to learn more about unreasonable hospitality? Everything's on unreasonable hospitality.com, which is also how you can sign up for my newsletter, premium, which I'll tell you before I wrote the first book, I never would have imagined that I would derive so much joy from writing on a weekly basis. And the newsletter is my outlet for that. Yeah. So it's pretty fun when you turn that into a book. Yeah. Right. Yeah. I think that'll be great. Will, always a pleasure to have you. Thanks, bro. Thanks for listening to the StoryBrand podcast. No matter where you are in your marketing and messaging journey, get the tools, the training, and the support you need to start clarifying that message at storybrand.com. And don't forget to follow and subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts so you never miss an episode. And if you're watching on YouTube, hit that subscribe button and then leave a comment letting us know what resonated with you and what we can unpack to help your business grow in a future episode. Thanks again for listening and we'll see you next week.