Welcome back to our monthly series where we review books that offer the best advice for those new (and not-so-new) to the world of VC and startups! Our co-founder and managing partner, John Vrionis, is book-obsessed. If you ever visit our offices, you’ll find plenty of reading material to take home with you!

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We are a mission-driven team, and for plenty of us, this is our first foray into venture capital. We often look for advice from business experts, experienced founders, and startup operators to help us learn about building great companies. 

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This month, we are reviewing Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara, published in 2022.

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It's not unusual (pun intended) for John to send us book recommendations from time to time, so when he emailed us about Will Guidara's Unreasonable Hospitality recently, we ordered the book. When we learned that the recommendation originally came from Abhi Sharma, co-founder and CEO of Relyance (a UV portfolio company), we knew we wanted to review it immediately. 

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Unreasonable Hospitality is a detailed account of Guidara’s experiences as the General Manager (GM) of Eleven Madison Park (EMP), a storied New York City restaurant located a few feet from Madison Square Park. Guidara took over as GM at EMP in 2006. During his decade-long tenure, he built a culture of hospitality excellence where the kitchen and service teams worked together to create a seamless customer experience.

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Unreasonable Hospitality is an honest look at what it means to be a “hospitality-first culture.” When you are intentionally hospitable and put all your effort into making your customers feel seen and taken care of, everything about your business improves. Guidara writes that his lessons in the hospitality industry are widely applicable even if you don’t work in restaurants. One of the enduring lessons in the book is that simply focusing on building a great product is not good enough. Organizations need to take care of their people — customers and employees — to build successful, generational businesses. 

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Below, we share five of the most memorable learnings that we took away from Unreasonable Hospitality:

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1. Customer service should be about building authentic connections

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We often stress the importance of building empathy with customers and understanding their pain points, but what does it mean to build a truly customer-centric culture? For Guidara and his team at EMP, it meant taking care of people. Fundamentally, this meant serving great food, but it also meant going above and beyond to create an incredible experience. If that meant finding out where customers had parked and feeding their meter so they could continue enjoying their meal uninterrupted, then Guidara dispatched a team member to get the task done.

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While you may not be able to feed your customers’ meters, what can you do to authentically connect with them? What is the equivalent of this level of service in your company? Perhaps it’s anticipating a question about an upcoming feature during a QBR or proactively sending a report you know will help a champion advocate for renewal. 

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2. Take care of your employees the way you want them to care for your customers

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Guidara drives home his belief that if you take care of your employees, they will in turn take great care of your business and accelerate your ability to reach your goals. A disconnected and dysfunctional culture will not help you grow; keeping talented and driven people within your organization and finding ways to promote from within will. 

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Guidara highlights how important common language is to creating and maintaining culture. For example, one of the earliest lessons he learned was from repeatedly using the phrase “be the swan” — this meant that when someone was struggling at work, customers should not be able to see it. Like a swan, all customers “should see is the gracefully curved neck and white feathers sailing across the pond’s surface — not the webbed feet churning furiously below.” This reminds employees to show their best selves to guests. 

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Another one of our favorites — whenever Guidara dealt with an employee who made a mistake or was performing poorly, he responded from a place of concern and “made the charitable assumption.” He assumes everyone wants to do a great job and when someone isn’t behaving particularly well, instead of immediately criticizing them, he starts from a place of considering that maybe they need more love and hospitality than anyone else in the room. By making charitable assumptions and extending grace to someone, whether it’s a colleague or a customer, Guidara teaches us that we end up treating ourselves with grace as well. This leads to the creation of a kinder workplace where everyone is taking care of each other and their customers. 

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3. Manage 95% of your business down to the penny; spend the last 5% foolishly

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Guidara managed his restaurants down to the penny, while still maintaining fine dining standards, but he simultaneously encouraged using 5% of operating costs “foolishly”, leaving room in your budget for creating joyous and memorable customer experiences. At MoMA, Guidara spent what seemed like an exorbitant amount of money on custom gelato spoons. While this initially raised eyebrows, the spoons had an outsized impact on the guest experience, and the “foolish expense” often brought people back to the museum. Over time, he became so committed to the idea of 95/5 that an entire team at EMP would create these experiences for diners — he called these employees “Dreamweavers.”

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As you think about your operating budget, consider how you might apply this mentality. What could you be doing with the 5% that you aren’t already? What kinds of expenses are you deciding against because they seem frivolous but in actuality might have an outsized impact on your customers’ experience?

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4. Pursue excellence, but not at the expense of your team

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Guidara is a perfectionist; for him to feel at peace, he needs everything unreasonably organized and in its proper place. At EMP, the whole team chased excellence in everything they did, knowing that precision in the smallest details translated to precision in bigger ones. They followed the “One-Inch Rule,” an instruction to not lose focus when putting the plates down gently in front of the guest, as that was the final inch in a long chain of people who invested many hours of work into the experience. It was also a reminder to stay present and follow through to the very last step, no matter what you may be doing.

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However, despite his obsession with being the best, Guidara is not unkind. He combines his passion and commitment with a willingness to help his team learn and grow. No matter how hard we try, people make mistakes. Guidara made two big mistakes in the latter part of his time at EMP: first, he did not immediately fill the general manager position at EMP while building out The NoMad; then, he required his captains to recite a script about EMP’s new New York-themed offering. In both cases, he did not trust his team to do what they were exceptionally good at, and as a result their culture took a nosedive (in the former example) and they received a scathing NYT review (in the latter). In both cases, he stood in front of his team as soon as he realized his mistakes, and he apologized. When you apologize, you validate your team’s experience of your actions, take responsibility for any impact, show that you, like your team, can always grow, and create space for trust and earnest pursuit of excellence to flourish. 

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5. Stick to the basics

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After sliding from #4 to #5 at the 50 Best in 2015, Guidara visited the best restaurants and noticed one common “bug” they all shared: they were too overwhelming. Although the service was excellent and the theatricality of the courses was impressive, he was fatigued before even finishing his meals because there was so much happening all at once. He realized that EMP’s complicated mission statement also shared this “bug.” It contained everything they wanted to embody: their commitment to one another, their love for New York, their absurd ambitions, and their desire to take care of their guests. However, a mission statement should be clear and simple. Guidara simplified EMP’s mission statement: “to be the most delicious and gracious restaurant in the world.”

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With the mission and vision newly clarified, the restaurant finally became what it was meant to be. EMP moved up to #3 in 2016. In 2017, Eleven Madison Park was named the best restaurant in the world.

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Guidara experienced his fair share of failures during his time as GM of Eleven Madison Park. And while those failures stung, he always set a new goal to win. When he decided that EMP would go from being the 50th-best restaurant in the world to #1, he set out to fulfill that dream with purpose and intention. He wanted to excel, but he wanted to do it in a way that brought his entire team along for the ride. Winning, though, is not the only goal — Guidara truly believed that when you serve people “wholeheartedly with connection and graciousness,” that is its own reward. 

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For those of us in the tech and venture world, the book offers many takeaways, but one of the key lessons is that when you obsess over the customer experience, when you commit wholeheartedly to your larger mission and goals, and build a strong, caring culture, you can do great things. You also have to be willing to break some rules, and get rid of preconceived notions, especially the idea of “we have always done things this way.” The more you forge your path by focusing on your unique strengths as a founder and as a team, the more you increase your chances of winning. 

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If you want to give Unreasonable Hospitality a read in full, we encourage you to do so! You can check out the website to find out where the book is sold. And, make sure you’re subscribed to our newsletter to ensure you don’t miss next month’s book review and plenty of other content from our team.