When Hospitality Means Finding the No - Danny Meyer

[Applause] ya know do you guys realize how often those two words come up in our lives yes and no and just how often we're not exactly sure which one of those words to apply at that moment we've taught a class that's probably rooted in my Midwestern roots I'm from st. Louis Missouri we weren't so happy with me all the last four days were you guys here in Chicago and we were always taught in the Midwest that nice wins the day and that yes wins the day most of us who got into this business in the first place did so because we like when people say yes to us we like when people are nice to us and we want to return that and we believe that the best way to get a hug is to have given one first I can't get a hug unless you give one that was always as far as I'm concerned the basis of hospitality we've taught a class at Union Square Hospitality Group for years which is actually entitled finding the yes in every situation there is a yes that can be found it always troubled me and always confuse me when I would hire people going all the way back to the very first year that I got into business 1985 with the Union Square cafe that I would have to convince people on our team to just say yes and then I learned that for some people no as a default is much easier and the reason is that yes is a commitment the minute you say yes you are committing to a future of delivery the minute you say no you're actually copping out on a future commitment so there was a really easy thing for me to understand but a less easy thing for me to teach like chef why wouldn't you substitute mashed potatoes for a vegetable why not just say yes or when mr. Shawn the 80 something-year-old former editor of The New Yorker comes in for lunch now that he's over at Ferris Treasury and he only wants to eat cereal for lunch why wouldn't you say yes we will run across the street and get your favorite cereal at the bodega that was such an easy yes to do or for example why wouldn't you transfer a drink from the bar which no restaurants were doing in 1985 for some silly reason or why wouldn't you seat me before the rest of my parties complete just say yes yes has always been the mantra of hospitality as a matter of fact in addition to teaching people to find the yes we've also gone out of our way to try to teach people to create the yes now what do I mean by that well let's say the question wasn't even asked let's say and I'll remember this too the rest of my days a couple walks into Union Square cafe at lunchtime I'm on the front door it is very very clear that they have just been having a terrible fight and my job is in the next hour and a half I got to make these people feel better than they came in not so hard the fight it turns out was that the parking space that husband found was a block and a half away from the restaurant way too far away for a walk the second part of the fight was that they had run out of quarters for the meter now this is way before we had you you know put your credit card in so I go I'm gonna I'm gonna create a yes even when there wasn't a yes and I said we've got extra quarters here at the restaurant why don't we get you two seated well we're already late for the reservation you probably giving it away no no we actually have your table still why don't you let me get you seated and I'll go put quarters in your machine for you I want to find the yes I want to create the yes they finally agree to take their table the fuming starts to subside just a little bit I walk around the corner the car is exactly where it was supposed to be no ticket I could see that from a distance but as I got closer and closer to the car I see that someone has bashed in their window and stolen the radio now how am I gonna create a yes out of this one and make sure they leave a little bit happier may we call the police for you please may we may we find a new company to install your radio for your place you get the idea sometimes it's not finding the yes it's actually creating the yes here's another example of that more modern times internet social media we're listening carefully this goes back about five years ago and we pick up that somebody is ecstatic this is all a good story guys they're ecstatic that they have come to New York and what a lot of people have done with my books setting the table is they road test it to see if it's real and they come in and they try to play a game of gotcha see you guys aren't so good after all well just for the record we never said in setting the table we're that good we said these are our ideals and here's all the times we've actually screwed up so people kind of like to see that happen so these people wrote we managed to get to every single Union Square Hospitality Group record restaurant except that when we went to Shake Shack it closed too early and so we're missing it but and this was one of these for like three tweet things the good news is we're gonna get to have that one last Shack burger at JFK the next tweet goddamnit Delta you moved our flight from terminal 4 to terminal 2 how do we create a yes right now well by listening the team at Shake Shack got in touch with these people and said what time is your flight we would love to deliver Shaq burgers from terminal 4 over to terminal 2 for you now that was not fining us that was creating yes pretty powerful stuff right and of course that led to its own several tweets thereafter I want to also talk to you about how saying yes can be incredibly dangerous and this is really where I want to go with my talk today because what I've learned is that there's an incredible tension between yes and no and that sometimes those of us who are naturally wired to find the yes to create the yes actually do the wrong thing by saying yes and no is often a much much better option I think a lot of people who are completely fascinated by the word yes suck at saying the word no we don't know how to do it we don't know how to do it quickly enough we don't know how to do it cleanly enough and we don't know why it is often the much more appropriate answer I'll tell you the times I've gotten in trouble with a yes first one goes back to the first month I was a restaurateur I couldn't find the chef or I came to learn his girlfriend the sous chef anywhere in the restaurant I open every closet every door every office nowhere and everyone said I just saw them finally the laughs of course that you always find something in the last place you look it was in the walk-in refrigerator right by the oysters and go figure yeah they had a shucking knife down there too and they were making out well I now learned that we had a thing I called my dad back in st. Louis and I said what do I do and my dad gave me some of the most empty advice I think he ever gave me in my life and he said you know generally if you hire really nice people you got two choices they're working all these hours together they're they're gonna fight or they're gonna fall no he said as far as I'm concerned that's the better option it wasn't because the next day the two of them and we had opened on October 21st the next day was November the something-or-other and hey can we take Thanksgiving weekend off we're really not that busy yet and I said yes they took off Thanksgiving in fact we had not been very busy we were not even using half of Union Square cafes seats at that point I said yes to them they went off to pepper pike Ohio so the parents could meet the son the chef and this guy decides you better put your sport coat you better put your kitchen whites on top of your sport coat because the entire kitchen was coming to its knees because for some reason New Yorkers love to dine out the Friday after Thanksgiving because they're sick of their little apartments and their family and they've got to get out of the house and the we used to have something called remand Co no one in this room is even enough to remember that but it was the for the first point-of-sale system and this thing was spitting out tickets you know like a tsunami and I put the kitchen lights on it was the worst night of service we've ever had and as a matter of fact not having eaten anything before that because I wasn't expecting to be in the kitchen expediting I get a little bit woozy and that was the night thanks to my saying yes when I should have said no that a server comes into the kitchen and they say table 38 is really upset that we won't serve them an extra cocktail and I said cut them off which is just a really helpful thing to tell a server like server comes back in 1 minute later Danny they want to see you and I go ok so I walk into the dining room and the guy is walking around the dining room with his tie tied around his forehead and a cocktail in his hand saying you can't cut me off and I said you're damn right I can and he and he said and then I said as a matter of fact I want you to pay right now and he said you can't make me pay and I said yes I can and at that point we go chest to chest through the dining room little do I know that we are being reviewed by the Daily News at that moment watching the whole thing the guy's legs me in the face and mr. hospitality slugs him back in the face you're not gonna like the next part but here we are in the Steppenwolf stage so I can say anything I want to at this point we're at the front door and this is the first time I've ever punched anyone in the face in my life and the handle of the door of the vestibule is on the vestibule side all I have is a push plate he opens the door slams my head into the door jamb and I didn't have any choice to do what some of you might have done he had two friends with him by the way they were like the those monkeys in The Wizard of Oz they're just kind of going like this and I just wound up and I did a Pete goggle ACK as hard as I possibly could right were accounted Pete goggle ACK was a was a kicker by the way he ended up on the sidewalk and I ended up realizing that I had to learn how to say no a lot better I really did I've said I have said yes in some of the most dangerous situations you can imagine most of the worst yeses that should have been noes have to do with people saying yes to someone who's applying for a job on your team when your gut knows they should not be on your team we've all done that and I would say that we're in a place right now with virtually no unemployment where the opportunity to say yes when you should say no is probably greater than ever and I would say this is a moment for all of us no matter where you work no matter what industry you're in while everybody else is settling because they need to fill that position this is the time when you can most distinguish yourself by being pickier than ever and saying no on behalf of your team because your team deserves to work with people who can bring their team up the minute you know you're settling you know you're settling stop it that's an important one so the who is is probably the biggest time that I've regretted saying yes and while we're on that topic have you ever given a raise to someone because it was too hard to say no and you know that they did not deserve a promotion you know that they are not the best at what they do and the best at who they are for your culture have you ever taken in a business partner because it was convenient you two are looking at each other are you partners have you ever taken in a business partner because the money was there have you ever done a deal with a developer because the money was there and your gut knew better from the word go it only gets harder it's going to lead to and know ultimately so why not just do it in the first place why not do it quickly and why not learn to do it in a way that actually leaves the other person respecting you even more as a result imagine next time you do get offered because I've made these mistakes many many times you get offered a deal the developer wants you because of your past success chef's you've been on TV oh my gosh look what I can do for that casino they only had my name on on the banner okay ask yourself would you do that deal if you had to pay a hundred percent of it yourself or am I just doing it as a compromise potentially to my own values because my values may not be aligned with that developer am i saying yes because as a hospitality rien I'm really really good at accommodating people I'm going to share a story with you we had a deal in another city to do one of our restaurants and we had to cancel it and by the time we cancelled it two years of saying yes and trying to find the yes had gone by two entire years we tried to make something work physically that wasn't going to work it didn't ever feel quite right to us we tried to move it engineering-wise that was hard we could have figured out that no was the right answer right off the bat instead two years went by two years of travel and dollars and people's time including the developer were completely squandered and getting out of that deal two years later was an incredibly embarrassing and costly mistake and it didn't have to happen and it was all because the wiring which works so well of saying yes in hospitality wasn't appropriately programmed to understand that yes is not always the right answer it just isn't I have another example of that when I should have said no maialino our Italian restaurant I was so proud to get a call one day from a guy named IRA still can't quite pronounce his first name yet meaning gildo Xenia wouldn't you be proud to get a call Danny I'm introducing my silk line in New York City I want to bring all of my best customers to have dinner at maialino I said that's awesome he's introducing his line he's going to bring the CEO of every major major company you can imagine we have seating for 20 people in the private dining room yes three o'clock that afternoon the PR people call guess what it's gonna be 22 people we can do it 24 people we don't have enough chairs but yes let's get two chairs from upstairs even though they don't match 26 people yes but it's gonna be really crowded 32 people showed up for dinner because we kept finding the yes everybody's sitting around the table as if they were in a straitjacket the server's come in I have no idea how they navigated to get the family-style meal in front of everybody at the table but I will never forget a slow-motion view that I saw when one of the server's was clearing a bread basket in order to make room for the pasta course and one of the guests unbeknownst to any of us had put a crude of olive oil in the bread basket and in slow motion I see the olive oil pouring down the back of the woman's suede dress two people to my right she didn't even know it I had that amazing integrity moment which is doing the right thing even when no one's looking doing the right thing even when it's not necessarily in your own self-interest and I realized this is a woman who owns an art gallery I remembered my mom had bought a piece of art from her and I said it's gonna get back to my mom somehow better do this the right way so I leaned over because there was one person between us and I said we just spilled on you I just bought that dress yesterday Calvin Klein you have no idea my heart starts pounding almost as much as it did before joining the stage today and the next thing I did was I said I said yes too many times but we said it and we are now committed what are we gonna do well obviously we had to write a gret great next chapter called over the general manager she managed to find out I have no idea to this day how to get in touch with the general manager of Calvin Klein they knew exactly what the dress was they had exactly one dress left the value of the dress was three times the value of the dinner we were serving to her in June lasagna we had a new dress at her apartment the next morning with a basket with wines and salami and a $500 gift certificate to come back and a minimum I think we minimized or at least neutralized her anger we really hoped we would win over a future regular I finally ran into this woman about three months ago we told the storage that oh I've told everybody all right and I said good keep telling it because we need to get our money's worth out of that story somehow now I want to just talk about the power of note when you say no to the right things you are actually creating more opportunities to do more of the things that you're really really good at and this is perhaps the greatest lesson I think I've ever learned so many times I say yes to something either because I don't know a nice way to say no or I'm afraid of missing out on something I've learned a great trick especially when it comes to saying no to events I remember a time when I first moved to New York if I got an invitation to a party it was like the greatest thing in the world well today the number of parties in New York and events or industry throws etc it was like 15 um you just can't do them and so what I'm now asked myself is this it's always easy by the way to say yes when you see something that's three months away from now because that's three months away from that but ask yourself am i doing this because I really want to do it am i doing it because I think I should do it do I think I'm doing it because I have to do it but I know I don't really want to do it and then I finally asked myself don't think about that event being three months from now that event is tonight if that event is tonight how do I feel do I feel like I'm really excited to go or am i rolling my eyes going what the heck did you say yes for when I polite quick no certainly would have done the trick at that point I'm gonna close with something that Seth Godin wrote many many years ago some of you got to see Seth who was at the last Welcome conference in New York City and he talks about know being one of the most essential tools we all have if we indeed care about the true yes and the true yes for all of us is when we can actually bring to the world that thing or those things that no one does as well as we do and it's an understanding that all the other yeses that we express unwittingly prevent us from sharing the true yeses that we should be sharing and here's what here's what Seth said if you believe as I do that you must keep your promises and over-deliver always and treat every commitment as though it's an opportunity for transformation then the only way you can do this is to turn down most opportunities no I cannot meet with you no I cannot sell it to you for a lower price no I cannot do this job justice if I say yes no I cannot come to your party no I cannot help you I'm really sorry but I can't that is not if I want to do the very things that people most value my work for please understand as I'm trying to learn myself right now that no is the most solid foundation upon which we can all build our truest yes thank you

Channel: The Welcome Conference

Views: 11,137

Keywords: restaurants, Restaurateur, Chicago 2019, welcome conference, setting the table, hospitality, danny meyer, leadership

Id: NUDDu1rwErY

Length: 25min 8sec (1508 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 14 2019