Danny Meyer has few equals when it comes to understanding and unleashing the power of hospitality in restaurants, business and life. He’s grown his foodservice empire from his initial single restaurant (Union Square Café) to now also include Gramercy Tavern, Blue Smoke, Jazz Standard, The Modern, Maialino, Untitled, North End Grill, Marta, and Porchlight. He also operates Union Square Events and a consulting company. Meyer, his restaurants and his chefs have earned an unprecedented 25 James Beard Awards.
Meyer is also the creator of the global burger chain Shake Shack, which started as a pushcart in Union Square and went on to become the largest part of his company’s portfolio prior to its own wildly successful IPO earlier this year as NYSE: SHAK.
I spent some time with Meyer recently. Here’s what he had to say about hospitality (the term he prefers to “customer service”), service style, and why it’s important to put investors subordinate to employees, customers, and the community–no matter what Adam Smith may have thought.
Micah Solomon: If I were to write, "Danny Meyer says, 'Hospitality will not succeed unless...,'" how would you finish the sentence?
Danny Meyer: I’d finish the sentence this way: "Hospitality will not succeed unless the person on the receiving end knows all the way to the bottom of their kishkes [Yiddish for guts] that you're on their side." If you know I've got your back and I'm on your side, I guarantee you hospitality's happening.
Of course, we all have experiences that are the opposite of that, where you could actually argue that the service, technically speaking, was quite good. The provider did all the things they were supposed to do. It just didn't feel great. Sadly, this happens all the time, whether it's getting a cup of coffee or going to a department store.
Or consider the experience I generally have flying on an airplane: I arrive alive and on time. I get the drink I asked for. So, the transaction is, you could argue, “perfect”: I get exactly what I paid for. But the problem is that I don’t get anything more.When they are wheeling the cart down the aisle, not one person looks me in the eye or smiles or makes me feel that I am anything more than somebody occupying a seat.
Danny Meyer – Photo Credit: Union Square Hospitality Group
Solomon: You have a diverse group of restaurants, yet you’re renowned for service in all of them. What is different and what is the same in, say, a fast casual Shake Shack and one of your fine dining establishments?
Meyer: Our service style is different in every single one of our restaurants. Service style should fit whatever the business ... It's the business' job to teach that. You can write service style in a manual. You cannot write hospitality style in a manual.
Service should be one size fits all, whereas style is one size fits one. If you go to Blue Smoke our barbecue restaurant, you will be handed a menu by the person who seated you. If you go to the Modern at the Museum of Modern Art, you will not see a menu perhaps, until your Captain has already taken an order for your aperitif. If you go to Shake Shack you're going to stand in line and order from and pay a cashier. Then you'll be handed a buzzer which will let you know when your food is ready.
Completely different everywhere, but it should be appropriately designed for what that dining experience is supposed to be, just like you wouldn't play the same music at every restaurant. You wouldn't have the same art on the walls at every restaurant, or the same waiter uniforms. Neither should you have the same service style at every restaurant.
What you should do is do what you said you were going to do. I think that the one consistent aspect of service is that there should be a level of expectation both on the part of management and on the part of your guests that you're going to do what you said you were going to do, timing wise, delivery wise, et cetera.
Solomon: One part of the service style discussion these days it the idea that what guests want today is authenticity. It’s a word we’re using a lot today, yet defining it is hard—and if we don’t define it, it’s going to become the next “artisanal” or “curated”—a word completely without meaning. Is authenticity something that you aim for and if so, or if not, do you have a definition of it that you use?
Meyer: I think if hospitality is not genuine, it's not hospitality. You cannot "act" the part of hospitality. You can't pretend that you're on my side. You can't pretend that you care about making me feel better than I would have felt if I had never met you. That's genuine or it's not. So, for me authenticity means did somebody do something that was genuinely thoughtful? The word thoughtful always exists when true hospitality is present, because it's somebody who is both thinking and feeling. That's what thoughtful means. It's thinking and feeling. You have to use your brain and your heart. If you're not using your heart, it's probably not genuine and therefore it's not authentic.
So it's not something to pursue, it’s something that ensues: Authentic hospitality ensues when the human acts actually come from a true sense of thoughtfulness. It's basically me ... All my service is what you expect me to do all the time. When I'm adding hospitality to that service, it means that I am using every ounce of my being to ask myself, "If I were the other person, how would I want to be treated right now."
That takes thoughtfulness and that's genuine. You cannot do that without being genuine. So for me what lacks genuineness is the traditional, "How was everything?" That's an inauthentic question. When was the last time everything was either good or everything was bad. It's begging for a dishonest answer.
Solomon: I heard you once say "There’s no rule in capitalism that says you have to be a greedy jerk. Can you talk to me about that--about how you try to treat your people, how you try to treat your community, and how this fits with being a successful leader in a capitalist system?
Meyer: My feeling is that capitalism does work, in the sense that it says that companies that have a compelling product that's properly priced and therefore create enough demand, can make money and they can keep doing it. So that part is great and totally works. The part of capitalism that doesn’t work for me is when capitalists make decisions in the way that Adam Smith suggested, which is that as long as you do everything in the interest of the investor, you're going to actually make the best decisions for all other stakeholders. I don't happen to agree with that. We find that if you make the investor's interest subsidiary to the interests of the employees and the customers and the community and the suppliers, you're actually in a long-term way, in my opinion, creating more sustainable value for your investors than if you put the investor's interests first.
If you're constantly making business decisions on behalf of your investors first, ultimately you're going to wear down your other stakeholders. It's going to be potentially hurtful for your employees and your customers and the community you do business with. Then ultimately, you'll put yourself out of business which won't be good for your suppliers either.
I just think the best way for me to be greedy is long-term greedy.
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Micah Solomon is a customer experience consultant, customer service keynote speaker and bestselling business author, most recently of High-Tech, High-Touch Customer Service
