Brad Johnson: Welcome back to another episode of Do Business. Do Life. We have Will Guidara here with us today. Welcome to the show, Will.
Will Guidara: Thanks, Brad. Super excited to be here.
Brad Johnson: Man, I don’t even know where to begin. I was telling you before we hit record here, took Rocky, the dog, for a walk, listened to Unreasonable Hospitality, some more of it, in your own words, which is really cool, as you read the book on Audible. And where I really want to kick this thing off, you had what most would see as one of the highest honors available for a guy in the restaurant business. You were named the top 50 list in the world, and I believe this was the very first time you made the list. and it didn’t quite pan out how you were hoping. So, will you get into that because I think there’s such a lesson there?
Will Guidara: Yeah. So, I’ve been at the restaurant for, gosh, five years at that point. I worked there for a while before buying the restaurant and before selling the restaurant. And I was brought in to that restaurant as a part of the team that was charged with elevating the experience. The restaurant had been open for a while, and it was somewhat mediocre, except for the room itself, which was, and continues to be just extraordinary. And we had this collective missive to evolve the experience that it lived up to that room.
And man, we focused relentlessly on excellence. We were so passionate in our pursuit of excellence and within a few years, it started to pay off. We went from two stars in the New York Times to three stars to four stars. We got all three Michelin stars. We were kind of on top of the world in our own little world. And then one day, I got the letter, you’ve been added to the list of the 50 best restaurants. And we’re like, “Here we go. Let’s do it.” Go to London, getting all ready to go, trying to figure out where we’re going to fall in the list. I’m guessing like number 35 or one of the best restaurants in America. That must be where we kind of land in the world.
And I’m sure there was some amount of preamble, like the normal welcomes, thank you for coming at the top of it. I don’t remember any of those. I just remember them saying, “Let’s kick it off at number 50. A new entry from New York City, Eleven Madison Park.” I was like, golly, we came in last place. And honestly, even how you framed the question implies the perspective that some had at the time, which is congratulations, you’re one of the 50 best restaurants in the world and all I was able to see was that we came in last.
And even as I say it now, like one of the things I talk about all the time in leading a team is when you’re an ambitious, driven person, you are prone to often seeing what’s wrong, and we need to compel ourselves to see all the many things that are right, especially in the people around us. Otherwise, we’re not going to be great leaders. But when you’re competitive, I think it’s totally okay to go with your gut or your heart and to not talk yourself out of disappointment when you feel it. I was disappointed. I wanted to do better. We came in last place. And Honestly, in hindsight, I’m kind of grateful we did because the anger that I felt from that first year’s finish is what likely compelled the path that came next.
Brad Johnson: Which I don’t want to spoil the happy ending, but eventually, you ended up number one on the list.
Will Guidara: Yeah.
Brad Johnson: How many years later did it take you to get to one?
Will Guidara: We are number 50 in 2011. We were number 1 in 2017.
Brad Johnson: Wow. Six years later. So, I believe the story goes, at least, which you tell in the book, there was a little bit of drowning your sorrows that night, but also, it might have involved a bottle of whiskey, I’m not sure. But you started, who was it? You had a business partner out there, correct? There was somebody there.
Will Guidara: Yeah. My chef partner.
Brad Johnson: Okay, so your chef was there. You go back to the room. And I believe you start scribbling out a bit of a vision for what was going to take you all to number one. I’m curious, obviously, there was some fuel in that fire from that evening, but how much of that vision had already happened prior that got you to 50? And how much of that vision started to come out that night, which is what propelled you to eventually get to number one?
Will Guidara: So, the way I always talk about it is we went back to the room, grabbed a bottle of whiskey, went through the stages of grief, which ultimately brought us to acceptance because, I mean, listen, here’s the reality, it’s patently absurd to say one restaurant is the best restaurant in the world, right? There’s too many restaurants. It’s too subjective. And this is all stuff we’re processing through over that bottle of whiskey. Like, the reality is, is when you earn the top spot on that list, what it really means is you’re the restaurant have the greatest impact on the world of restaurants at that point in time.
And we’ve been at the restaurant for five years. We had been unbelievably disciplined, focused in our pursuit of excellence. And at that point, we’d built a pretty solid foundation. Our food was now some of the best out there. Our service was pretty close to perfect. Our room was still beautiful. And it was for those reasons that we were on the list.
But when we paused for long enough to really think about it, it became pretty clear. We hadn’t done anything impactful. Studying that night, thinking about the restaurants that had topped the list before us, they were restaurants that were run by chefs, chefs who were unreasonable in pursuit of their product, the food they were serving, relentless in pursuit of innovation, new ingredients, techniques, you name it. And each of them in their own way changed how other restaurants around the world approached food.
And that night was really the moment where I was able to identify the impact that I thought I was uniquely suited to make and that I wanted to make, which was, rather than being unreasonable in pursuit of product and relentless in pursuit of change, to be unreasonable in pursuit of people and relentless in pursuit of the one thing that will never change, which is our human desire to feel seen, to feel cared for, to feel a sense of belonging. And that night is when the words Unreasonable Hospitality came out. And so, yeah, what happened before that night, I mean, I came up as someone who was always more drawn to the dining room than the kitchen, who was always in it because I liked to be the one serving human beings and throwing a party on a nightly basis.
But it was that night that fully made the choice to lean all the way in to that idea. And then over the course of six years, which is plenty of time, some people might hear them, be like, wow, that happened quickly. The one you are investing every ounce of yourself into something, every single day, every hour, six years is a long time, and you need to really believe in the spirit of the collective endeavor to have the staying power to push for that long.
Brad Johnson: What I’m hearing you say, Will, that’s interesting, I just put together now, to make that top 50, it sounds like in the restaurant business, obviously, it’s a very high bar that many will never make. But it was kind of the blocking and tackling of we have to have incredible food. We have to have impeccable service. And it sounds like what started to be unlocked that night is, I think, you even mentioned in the book some of the pioneers in the restaurant world, which was the farm to table movement or some of the different movements that had been created before you got to the game. And it was people that had left their mark for something unique. And it sounds like what was unlocked that night is here is what’s going to make us unique and stand out among the crowd. Is that fair?
Will Guidara: Yeah, 100%. Like, you don’t get to play that game unless you’re one of the best of the best of the best. And being one of the best of the best of the best is basically what earns you the ability to start the race.
Brad Johnson: Yeah, yeah.
Will Guidara: And then it’s about, do I have something to contribute? How can I change the conversation? What can I add to the dialog? How can we leave a legacy?
Brad Johnson: Okay, so there are so many parallels in the restaurant business and the world of finance. And actually, my friend Anthony, that’s in Chicago, the one I was talking about, he calls it, how are you going to put a scratch in the record, kind of make the music stop at the party? And one of the things you mentioned, our friend Simon Sinek, who I know you have learned a lot from, but you mentioned The Infinite Game and you mentioned the concept of a Worthy Rival. And you were really clear in the book, you said, “Hey, I borrowed a lot from some of the best restaurants.” And you were in New York City. You had some of the best in your backyard.
So, what is the blend, if you’re a financial advisor, maybe just conceptually in business, of borrowing some of these best practices that elevate your game, but not being a straight-up copycat where you’re like, wow, they’re just trying to be The French Laundry here? Like, what is that balance? How did you do that in the restaurant business?
Will Guidara: I mean, I do believe there is quite a bit of creativity that comes from curation. I would go to the best restaurants in the world constantly and borrow a lot of ideas from a lot of them, but it’s which ideas you borrow from which people and how you weave them into a fabric that’s uniquely your own. That starts to actually show some creativity. It’s not that different from a museum curator, right? They’re not creating any of their own work, but how they combine other people’s work is, on its own, a work of art.
Now, again, to get to the top, you need to be more than a curator. But in the beginning, a lot of what we did was look, listen, I think that the most authentic service, and most authentic work across any industry comes when you’re creating the thing that you want to receive, when you’re serving the thing that you want to receive. And so, going to different places, looking for the things that sparked joy in me, and then bringing them home, trusting in the fact that if they spark joy in me, they will also spark joy in others. And so, at the beginning of like, when we came in last place, gosh, our restaurant was like this beautiful amalgamation of all these little nuggets from all these different places and experiences I’d had that I’d brought home. And then what came next was, okay, now, I need to start making some of my own paintings and hanging them in the museum as well.
Brad Johnson: Do you mind sharing an example or two of, hey, here was something I plucked from a worthy rival that we put right on that playlist or we curated it right in, and then here were a couple of unique twists that we then evolved and made our own?
Will Guidara: For sure. There’s a restaurant called Daniel in New York City that was famous for, its like kind of bombastic tableside services, right? So, like, you’d sit down and a cart would come over and they’d carve a duck, and it was like this, I believe, a touch of theatricality in a meal to make it less of just a meal and more of an experience. I had a table side duck course there and I was like, the next day, I’d already bought those same carts to arrive at our restaurants so we could start doing something very similar.
I went to Per Se in New York City, and this was at a time when chefs were getting excited about all sorts of different plates, and so like, they’d buy plates from a ton of different manufacturers. And everyone had its own design and went to Per Se, every plate was from the same line. And it added this consistency and this seamlessness to the experience that once I saw it there, man, what we were doing feels so dramatically wrong. And we got rid of all of our plates and picked one line of plates that they loved, and it brought a cohesiveness to the experience.
There was a cocktail bar called PDT on the Lower East Side that was making cocktails in a very specific way, and I was like, “That’s how we should be making cocktails at our bar.” You see, the list kind of goes on and on. There’s a restaurant that had a cheese cart at the end of their meal where they had 50 cheeses on it. I was like, “Man, that’s so impressive.”
And one thing in my evolution, I used to believe that more is more and slowly transitioned into, actually, less is more. And so, the curatorial process happened during the more is more phase where I just kept on grabbing things. The more stuff we do, the more likely it is that will impress people.
In terms of our own unique ideas, I mean, you can only borrow so much and then think of it like putting stuff in the trunk of a car. Eventually, the trunk is full, right? And then you need to start pivoting and figuring things out on your own. I became obsessed with this idea. All the restaurants we were borrowing from, you were going out, right? These were restaurants. This was a night-out on the town.
But I believe that hospitality across any discipline, whether you’re walking in to buy a car or a suit or a meal or whatever, if it’s a genuinely hospitable experience, it should feel even in the smallest of ways, like you’ve invited someone into your home. And so, the big breakthrough for me was, I don’t want to be a restaurant that just feels like you’re going out. I want to be a restaurant that finds balance between going out and coming home.
And so, I started thinking about what were the things about, if I invited someone over to my house for dinner, what were the things I loved the most about that? And how can I capture those things and the experience? And so, I started with the welcome, right? Because anyone who, well, serves people, if you’ve not put a ton of thoughtfulness and creativity and intention to how you welcome people into your doors, whether those are literal or metaphorical doors, I believe you’re missing out on a big opportunity.
Now, I already invite you over to my place for dinner. You get to my house. I’m throwing open the door. I’m greeting you by name, probably giving you a hug, inviting you in. You compare that to a restaurant. You’re coming in. You’re walking up to a person standing behind a literal barrier. They ask you if you have a reservation code, do you belong here? And then basked in the glow of an iPad, they stab around on the screen, eventually turn into their colleague and saying, take them to table 43 in the near, kind of cart into the room. Two very, very different experiences.
So, I said, I wonder if we can totally transform the way people are welcomed into a restaurant. And we did. It wasn’t hard, but it required trying a lot harder. We had to add a podium. Still, we had a podium, but it was around the corner. You didn’t see it when you walked in. We added another maitre d. We had one on welcoming people, one on air traffic control, created a series of sign language so that I could be talking to you when you walked into the restaurant and they could be communicating to me without breaking our conversation, whether your table is ready or not.
Brad Johnson: Wow.
Will Guidara: Stopped welcoming people every 30 minutes where like, let’s say six parties would arrive at once, and instead welcomed them every 15 minutes, such that only three would, and then googled every single person that was coming in. And if you had ever put your picture on the internet, you looked anything like that person, we made these little cheat sheets for every 15 minutes where I could look down, refresh myself. And the moment you walked in, I could be like, Mr. Johnson, we’re so excited to have you. Welcome. That was an innovation.
And it was the kind of innovation that celebrated where I believed impact could be made. Nothing about that was hard, but everything about that was unreasonable. You think about all the stuff I just talked you through, totally unnecessary, unless you’re so unbelievably committed to a goal that you’re willing to do whatever it takes to get you just a little bit closer to accomplishing it. Unreasonable Hospitality is really just being willing to do that, to work harder, to bring something to life than anyone else would deem reasonable, and to make those efforts in pursuit, not just of the product you’re selling, but also how you’re making people feel when they interact with that product.
Brad Johnson: Very cool. Thanks for getting into that real example. It goes back to human psychology a bit, too, where that first impression and I think you call it in the book, the 95/5 concept, where it’s that little 5%, 95% is everything that got you on that top 50 list, right? Now, what’s the little 5% that if we do it differently, people are going to talk about when they leave the restaurant? And it didn’t sound like anything was, I mean, you had to make an extra higher, obviously, invest into an additional training. But I’m guessing in the big scope of your annual expenses, the P&L, I’m guessing that was a very fractional cost to create that experience. Is that fair?
Will Guidara: Yeah. I mean, when I talk about the rule of 95/5, it’s metaphorical and it’s financial. So, you just give the metaphorical definition. The financial definition and different people can apply different percentages to this based on their enthusiasm or their capacity because you manage your money like a maniac 95% of the time. Like, no expense is too small to be poured over, such that you earn the right to spend your money “foolishly” 5% of the time. And it’s “foolishly” because that 5%, while on its face might sound foolish to some and may be harder to calculate a clear ROI around, in my view, is the least foolish spending in all, that is where you leave people with the kind of lasting memory is that all but guarantee a sense of loyalty to you and your business for years to come.
Brad Johnson: Do you think it’s fair to say, if you look at all of your years, let’s just maybe focus on Eleven Madison Park, because I know you’ve spent some time at other restaurants, is it fair to say that that 5% focus is what created, I don’t want to say 95% of the conversation, but a lot of the word of mouth that took you to number one? Like, you mentioned a couple examples in the book. The feed that you asked somebody how they got there when they checked in, they’re like, oh, I drove, well, and then your staff would actually feed the meter quarters so they didn’t have to get up during their meal. You mentioned coffee was such overlooked back in the day. It was all the food and the wine experience.
But you mentioned, the craft cocktails, the coffee, how you invested a lot of time at the restaurant there into taking those up to super high standards as well. Would you say, am I still talking 95/5 there? Is that part of the 5%, like the little things you were focusing on to take the experience up? And do you believe that that dramatically impacted the word of mouth because nobody else was focusing on those little things?
Will Guidara: Oh, 100%. I mean, listen, the quarters in the parking meter, that’s definitively the 5%, right? Like, wait, I wasn’t saying to the guests, hey, you want to give us your quarters so we could fill the meter? No, obviously, we’re just paying for it for them. That falls into the 5%. The coffee investing in those programs is more in the metaphorical 5%. Like, how can you? If the world is looking this way, looking that way a little bit, you can actually make an impact.
But that’s funny. I’ve never articulated it like that, nor has anyone else with me in one of these conversations. But yeah, the 5% stuff that we did definitively dominated 95% of the conversation. I mean, there’s the quote by Maya Angelou, which is just the best quote ever about hospitality. People will forget what you say, they will forget what you do, but they will never forget how you made them feel.
The 5% was when we made people feel things. The 5% was the hospitality. Way too often, people can play it, the words service and hospitality as meaning the same but different things. Service is a part of the product. Service is just doing the thing that people expect you to do. In my world, that’s given the right play to the right person within the right amount of time. But hospitality is the extent to which you are making the people you are serving feel seen. Five percent, if you invest 5% of your time into making as many people as humanly possible feel seen, gosh, that does a lot of heavy lifting for you.
Brad Johnson: I wasn’t going to share this, but we’re all over the topic right now. And you mentioned The French Laundry in the book a few times. So, I had the experience to go out there a few years ago with my wife, actually, my business partner Shawn and his wife, and then we had kind of wine royalty that was there with us as well. And so, I’m sure we got treated a little more nicely than if we were just two standard Kansas guys rolling out to The French Laundry.
But hospitality and how you just explained it, we had the typical over-the-top French Laundry, a multiple-course meal. And we had been wine tasting that day. And so, when they asked us what we would like to drink that evening, pretty lame joke, I was like, “Hey, do you have any Keystone Light?” Because growing up as a Kansas farm boy, that was kind of what was on the menu back in the day. And the response from the waitstaff was, “Would you like Keystone Light, sir?” It wasn’t yes or no. It was, would you like us? Like, no, I’m just joking. I think we have a wine pairing with this.
And about two courses in, they parade a bucket of Keystone Lights in, like orchestrated. They slapped down UFC coasters in front of us. They put the Keystone on ice in the middle, a big old bucket, and about six waitstaff in unison grabbed the Keystone Light, cracked them, placed them down in unison on the UFC coasters. And still, as I think about that entire meal and the incredible food, the incredible wine pairings, that’s what sticks out, is they were listening and they’ve sent somebody down the road to buy probably a $6 six-pack of Keystone Light. And that to me defines hospitality. They made that night special and they made us laugh, right? We were like, wow.
Will Guidara: They cared enough to listen and then to do something with what they heard. And by the way, yeah, like that restaurant French Laundry is arguably some of the best food in the world. And maybe, you remember one or two of the dishes you had. Maybe. But you will never forget what they did for you there. And anyone listening to this understands that in a very deep human way, right? No one listening to this would be like, wow, that’s weird. How does he remember that and not the foie gras course, right? It’s obvious.
And yet, so many people still aren’t doing things like that for their clients. And it’s just one of the most obvious moves in the world. They spent 95% of, not even 95, 99% of their time on whatever dishes you made, 1% of it on that random move, and that 1% dominates your entire memory of it. And so, if people out there could invest 1%, 2%, 3%, 4%, 5% on these kinds of gestures, no longer reserving their best efforts only for the product they’re selling their customers, but on these little things that make those customers feel a genuine sense of belonging. Not only is it going to make a lot of people super happy, not only does it result in what I believe is always the case, a more profitable business, but it also just feels really frickin good. It’s fun.
Brad Johnson: It’s fun, for sure. Well, let’s transition because another idea out of the book that I think is so spot on in finance. So, I believe if we use the chef in place of the founding advisor, right? So, kind of the guy that started the whole thing, that it’s their concept, their vision, and then the beautiful thing about scale is guess what? It requires people that are aligned with that vision and idea. And one of the concepts that you saw a massive disconnect in was the hospitality staff had not had the training. You think about the years that chefs go to school, culinary school, however else they came up in the world and that the food was amazing, but the hospitality was not being translated to the front of the house. So, you created a training and you said, “Hey, let’s train and teach people how to create hospitality, how to create experiences like this.”
And that is so common in finance where it’s, here’s the advisor, he’s meeting with the client, she’s meeting with the client, trying to put together a financial plan, but so many other team members are required to actually bring that to life. And there’s not this kind of connection to where here’s what we’re about, here’s how we create this cohesive experience. It’s very disconnected oftentimes, and it’s very frustrating to a lot of advisors out there. So, can you maybe riff on that a bit and apply what you learned in the restaurant business to how a financial advisor out there might be able to relate or fix it, potentially?
Will Guidara: Yes. I think taking a step back, I think the first big paradigm shift was this, in fine dining, most fine dining restaurants, the chef runs the restaurant. Everyone works for the chef. There is a general tension between the people cooking the food and those serving it. People cooking the food think the servers are lazy. The servers think people cooking the food are a-holes. And the people in the dining room, no matter how much training or education they have had, or generally, just having to try to convince the people in the kitchen that what they do matters as much as what the people in the kitchen do.
And yet, most people would agree with the following statement. If you go to a restaurant and the service is just bad, you’re never going back. But if you go to a restaurant, the service is really good, and the food’s just not great, you might go back again because they’d just made you feel great. And so, it’s just backwards. At most, it’s backwards. At least, it’s just a little bit flawed.
And so, the first thing was we said, “Hey, this is not the case.” I wouldn’t even accept the job until there is a shift in the power dynamics within the restaurant, which was the kitchen and the dining room are on equal footing. Neither matters more than the other, because it doesn’t matter how good the food is, if we’re not actually connecting with the people eating that food, the restaurant will never succeed. Or at the very least, it will never succeed on the level that I want it to. And so, that was the first thing.
Like, in the restaurant business, it’s normally called front of house, back of house. We actually banned those terms. You couldn’t say front of house, back of the house because the idea of front and back, it was just inherently divisive. It was kitchen and dining room, and neither worked for the other. They were on a team with all of the inherent tension that went along with that.
Brad Johnson: Will, was this rare at the time to actually change that whole dynamic? Or had you learned this from other restaurants that were doing it well?
Will Guidara: Unbelievably rare. I mean, there were other companies where it was flipped. Not in the fine dining world, but in a more casual restaurant. The chef was just a cook in the back to work for the people in the dining room. I would never say that no one else had ever done it before, but it was an incredibly rare thing to say, in our world, we’re on equal footing. I mean, by the way, it’s inherently more challenging. It’s easier when there’s just one person in charge. Everyone has to just do what they say. It requires an appetite for embracing tension and checking egos and all of that. So, that was the first part.
Now, the second part is that only works if the people on both sides of the wall are trained well and educated well. And yeah, it’s a much more common occurrence for cooks who have gone to culinary school than it is for servers to have gone to a hospitality program at a university. But most of the servers had graduated from amazing universities, right? So, it was just a matter of giving them the resources, the tools, the structures, and the systems, such that they could, little bit by little bit, incrementally, start not to act like gig workers anymore, but instead to embrace that this was a profession.
Brad Johnson: Was that hard to make that shift for them? Or had they just never been poured into before?
Will Guidara: So, one of the things I hear a question here is how do you sell the team on the vision? I was sad and I had tried really hard not to sell them. I’m a good salesperson. I think a lot of successful people are good at sales, right? We can convince other people to do the thing we want them to do, and that’s a superpower, but it can quickly become your villain origin story because if you sell a new idea to a group of people and you’re a good salesperson, they’re going to buy it. But if they don’t actually want it, it’s just going to prove to be problematic over time when they eventually wake up and they’re like, “Wait, why am I doing this? I don’t even want to do this.”
Rather, I always tried to varying intervals over the course of evolution when it was clear where we were going next to articulate that as well as I could to the team, and then constantly, extend new invitations for them to continue joining us on this ride. The beautiful difference between selling someone something and inviting them to be a part of something is if someone says no and you’re trying to sell them, it’s filled with conflict. But with an invitation, someone can RSVP no and all good. And so, was it hard for them to make that transition? I’ll answer this in the same way I’d answer, was it hard for them to make any of the transitions we asked them to make?
We changed dramatically. There were a lot of hard rights and hard lefts over the course of the years. It was hard for the restaurant at times because we’d extended the invitation and depending on the invitation, 80% of the people would join, 90% of the people would join, or 50% of the people would join. And so, sometimes, depending on where you were going, you had to gracefully exit a bunch of people and actively recruit a bunch more people. But like any evolution, the changes became less jarring over time, and more and more people RSVP’d yes.
Brad Johnson: I like that shift. One of the things you mention in the book is how language gives you the ability to create. It’s crazy. We talk about that inside of Triad a lot. In finance, there’s a lot of events that happen and we’re like, events, those suck. I’ve been to a lot of them. Let’s create experiences, stuff that people remember and has meaning. And it’s crazy just by shifting that one word. And we said, “This is a Triad bad word. Events is a bad word. Experiences is what we do. That’s what we’re about.”
Our team, they came back and are like, “Well, we need to change our email then because it’s right now, events at Triad Partners. So, that’s a bad word. We can’t do that anymore.” It’s crazy how just shifting the language, which is what you did with front of house, back of house, it now starts to live into that vision and what you’re about. And I just don’t think companies think about the words they use enough. And it’s crazy how just those couple shifts, I’m sure, it kind of paved the way to know, we’re going this way, not that way. What other ways have you seen language create just throughout your years of doing this?
Will Guidara: Man, I’m so passionate about this. The words we use for titles of positions, like so many people, it’s one of the big things I think a lot of people are getting wrong right now, is like older people are just complaining about the younger generations and the things they care about. They care too much about titles or they care too much about this, or they’re too entitled, all that stuff, which I think is just a huge leadership failure for older generations to just judge newer generations for being different, as opposed to recognizing that management is like love languages. You can’t only love people the way that you want to be loved. You need to figure out how to love them in the way that they want to be loved.
And it’s not like, if every single person in a generation is like that, what are you doing? Like, adapt or die, it seems pretty clear to me. But titles is important to them, more than it was to us, I think, when we were coming up. And the title of a role implies what that person is actually meant to do. So, before Eleven Madison Park, I opened all the restaurants at the Museum of Modern Art, and specifically, the cafeteria was something I was so excited about. Like, here, I had an opportunity to reinvent what a cafeteria could be.
And yeah, you’re still charging cafeteria prices. So, you’re trying to innovate within financial constraint, which I actually think is awesome. Limitation sometimes breeds the highest forms of creativity. But the cashier role, which is a role in a cafeteria, right? You go to the cashier. We were going through in the pre-opening period, and I was like, “Gosh, I have never met anyone like Grey in New York that wants to apply to be a cashier.”
And what is the role of cashier? That means you receive someone’s cash, that’s the job? I was like, I want the people at the counter of this cafeteria, I want them to really understand the food. I want them to talk to people about the menu. I want them to guide people through an experience. And so we changed the name of the role from cashier to MC, letter M, letter C, Menu Consultant, (a) just because we didn’t call it cashier, we got a lot more people curious applying for the job; (b) because the words menu consultant were in the title, we never had to work hard to convince people that they needed to actually have the appropriate level of knowledge about the food in order to thrive in the role.
My mother-in-law, I think this is more common now, but I went to her accounting office. The receptionist was amazing. I told her that. She goes, “That’s not our receptionist. That’s our Director of First Impressions.” Like, a lot of people can listen to this and be like, “This is so cheesy.” You know what? Cheesy stuff, just because it’s cheesy, doesn’t mean it doesn’t work, right? Like, -isms, these cultural lexicons I think are so important. Okay, so that’s one.
Just how you title positions, not only makes them more attractive, but also dictates very clearly what you want the behavior of the people in those positions to be. Working for Danny Meyer, he was a master of -isms, of these little cultural shorthand phrases that embodied his core values. So, something was important to Danny, he would sit down and write an arguably cheesy sometimes phrase to express it, and they became a shared internal language for all of us that worked there. There was the swan, the one-inch rule, the charitable assumption, the list went on.
And there were people that I graduated from Cornell with that worked at other restaurant companies when I worked with Danny that said, “Dude, you work for a cult,” referring to that shared language. But I’ve come to believe that when someone works for one company calls another person’s company a cult, that’s just because that other company has invested more in their culture. And so, I think those are the two best examples.
If you have a non-negotiable, a core value, something that really matters to you, give it an -ism. Give it like a little inside language thing, such that your team feels pride of ownership over that idea. And rethink every single position title in your company and see if there’s an opportunity to make it better.
Brad Johnson: Man, this time is going too fast. All right, let’s keep rolling, Will. This is fun. Okay, so you hit on a couple things. You talked about restaurant smart versus corporate smart. And I think that’s a really cool idea. Maybe if we just hit on that quickly, how would you apply that concept if I wave my magic wand and you’re now a financial advisor? And which I’m going to give you a two-part question since we’re running out of time.
You had also mentioned before we went live, I said, “Hey, you would be an ideal client for a lot of the audience listening in. You’ve done well for yourself. I’m sure you have a great Rolodex at this point. You could offer lots of great referrals.” But you said, “Hey, honestly, I’ve kind of bounced around to a few different advisors, and nobody’s kind of checked that box for me.” So, I don’t know if you want to divide those into two separate questions of like, if you were the advisor and you were looking at restaurant smart versus corporate smart, how you would start to structure the business to check both boxes and design a firm that would actually attract a guy like you, or just take it wherever you want to go. Yeah, couple of actions there.
Will Guidara: I’ll make my answers more brief now so we don’t burn too much time. Restaurant smart versus corporate smart is effectively control versus creativity. Corporate smart companies, all of the decision-making authority is in the corporate office. And the people on the front line have very little autonomy or empowerment. And the result is there are very profitable companies that aren’t that special or connective. Restaurant smart companies are those where the highest paid people are on the restaurant level, empowered to do whatever it takes to make their customers feel seen and feel cared for, but the lack of more corporate systems result in those businesses not being very financially sustainable.
When you can become a company or an individual that’s both restaurant and corporate smart, you’re finding the right balance of systems and controls and also, freedom and flexibility, such that you are working in a sustainable business that also makes your people feel seen. And when I say your people, I mean your customers and your colleagues. Now, I’m going to answer the second question, and we’ll combine them into one.
Brad Johnson: Okay. You’re doing great man.
Will Guidara: I have never worked with a financial advisor that fully made me feel seen or made me feel like they were on my team. I’ve never worked with one whose decisions, ideas, or style of communication happened for me. It always felt like it happened to me. I never worked with one who was fully curious around how to fold their approach, not to the investing, but like just relational approach into mine, rather than expecting me to fold mine into theirs.
And so, how do you take these ideas to a financial advisor? Like, if I were designing an AI-generated financial advisor, what the key is I would program in? Like, yeah, I want them to be corporate smart. I want them to have it on lock. I want them to have the entire thing figured out. I want to trust that they are going to handle my money. I also want to feel like it’s not a suck on my time, and yet, I can be a bit of a co-conspirator. I want them to get to know me. I want them to invest the time to understand what makes me tick because where we put our money is, obviously, 95% of the time in pursuit of the highest returns, we get 5% of the time because where you put your money is a bit of who you are and what you want to represent and stand for in the world.
I want people to say, “Hey, what kind of private investments are you going to be looking to make the upcoming year? And what are you going to need from me in order to feel like you’re in a great place to do that?” I want when I reach out to them, because there’s a company that I want to put a bunch of money into and ask them to free up some capital for me to do that, that I’m not an imposition to them in doing that. I mean, that’s one of the things that people get so offended when you’re taking some money out in order to put some money somewhere else. I want people to understand that it’s a long game and that, where they show flexibility and the desire to adapt their style to me, the impact is so significant that I will be that much more willing to adapt mine to theirs and invest more of my net worth in them. Do you wanna unpack any of that?
Brad Johnson: I was just letting you flow because I think that’s such great advice. I think you really married those two together well, which was corporate smart and restaurant smart. If I kind of speak my version of that language, the corporate smart side of that in finance would be like, I need all of the boxes checked. I mean, I want to make sure my money’s good, it’s safe. It’s custodied in a safe place, and all of the systems are in place to make sure we’re doing our due diligence there. That, to me, is the corporate smart side.
The restaurant smart side sounds so much like the story you shared where you reimagined somebody walking into your restaurant and feeling like they’re at home, to where it’s like, hey, let’s sit down over a coffee, over a cocktail, over a whatever, and let’s talk about the meaning behind this money to you and how we’re going to deliver on that. And not just the next year or two years or three years, but between now and whenever your final day is, because I want to be the last advisor that you’ll ever have, Will. That to me, sounds like that restaurant experience, all of the we’ll feed the meter for you. And it just sounds like most of what you’ve experienced to this point is a lot more corporate than the restaurant experience that you just described. Is that fair?
Will Guidara: 100%. And I think the thing I’d say, like even with the sit down, okay, so now it’s like sitting down with them in person and getting to know them and understanding them, such that I can really work with them and for them, that’s important. Now, how do I make that as great as possible? So, right now, I’m traveling all the time, right? And so, when I’m home with my family, let’s say this person lives in the same city that I do, I don’t want to have dinner with you. I want to be home with my family. So, if you actually know me well enough, I want it to look like this, dude, I’m so excited for us to be working together. I think it’s pretty important that we get time together at the beginning of this in order, so that I can actually play the best role for you that I possibly can.
In person is preferred because I really want to get to know you. I don’t want to take your time when you’re home with your family. So, I’d happily just jump on a plane and meet you when you’re on one of your work trips. Or if that doesn’t work for you, I’ll take the Zoom, but actually, showing radical thoughtfulness, not just in the things that you believe you should do, but exactly in the way that they need to be done for the person you’re doing them for.
With every idea, every time you have an idea, before you do it, you need to ask yourself, okay, now, how can this be better? And then come up with that idea and then say, “Okay, now, how can this be better?” And then eventually, there’s no way for it to be better, and then you do it. But until you’ve pressure tested it to the point where you’ve run out of marginal improvements, it’s not time to bring it to life.
Brad Johnson: All right, one more business-focused question, then I want to get to the do life side a bit as we wrap here. You shared a story in the book. It was, I believe, a fellow guy running another restaurant in New York named Christopher Russell, and it was the speech about putting the restaurant first. And when I think about that as an entrepreneur, that is a slippery slope because if it’s like, oh, it’s all about the business has to win, then you don’t feel like as a human, you’re empowered. But the way he phrased it and framed it was so beautiful. And I think you borrowed a piece of that as you were stepping in to running Eleven Madison Park.
Will Guidara: I was so struck by that. So Christopher Russell, he came up in the restaurant that he went on to take over. He was a server and then a manager, and then ultimately became the general manager, the big boss. And in his first day, he gave his big state of the union to the entire team talked about how excited he was, how much he loved that place and the people. He said, I believe my job as a leader, though, is to set very clear expectations for how I am going to lead because if you know what to expect from me and I am consistent in living up to those expectations, and at the very least, you’re in a safe environment, then you can trust me and the way that I think.
And what I want to let you know is as much as I care about each of you as individuals, I will never make any decisions based on what’s best for you as individuals. I will always make every decision based on what’s best for the restaurant as a whole because if I always take care of the restaurant, then I’ll be able to take care of you as individuals. But if I take care of you as individuals, I might not be able to take care of the restaurant anymore. And it was such a beautiful framing.
And man, I’ve used that so many times. And it was jarring to people when they heard it. But if you express it in the right way, and by the way, half of what you say is the words, the other half is the tone and the eye contact and the spirit with which it’s conveyed, I think it’s actually pretty easy to understand and it makes perfect sense. What he was not saying is I will always make decisions based on what’s best for the profitability of the restaurant. That’s not what he said.
Brad Johnson: I love that framing. And then you shared a little later in the book. I believe it was through your first strategic planning meeting, which was not common in the restaurant business. Definitely, very common in kind of the business world. And back to what’s best for the restaurant, you saw this disconnect between the kitchen and the dining room and kind of, it’s the Spider-Man meme where they point all the fingers at each other.
And you said, well, let’s just, if we’re going to truly figure this thing out and work as a team and do what’s best for the restaurant, we’re going to do a little role swap here. I see that so common. In finance, it’s here’s these people selling interfacing with clients. Here’s the people in the back office doing the paperwork, checking the boxes, making sure stuff, kind of cooking the order, the financial plan. So common. So, what tips would you give? Just what did you learn from swapping roles and creating some empathy there?
Will Guidara: It exists in every business, by the way, like producers and directors, editors and publishers, right? I mean, it’s like, every business has this dynamic. And it almost is trite, like walk a mile in the other person’s shoes and you get a better sense of their reality, but it’s trite because it’s true. It is so easy for us as human beings. It’s part of the human condition to convince ourselves that our work is more important, our work is harder. We do the heavy lifting. Other people have it easy. The grass is always greener, right? There’s like a million trite expressions to describe this one thing for a reason.
And if you are in an environment where you can identify two groups of people under the same umbrella that are both wildly important to the success of the business, and yet, there’s constantly tension, get each group to spend a little bit of time doing what the other person does. Yeah, empathy is everything, and it’s a beautiful shortcut to getting empathy.
Brad Johnson: Okay. We’re down to the final little section here. So, I was incredibly moved by the story of both of your parents. That was towards the front end of the book, but it was very clear to me how much each of them influenced you. As a young kid, some of the stories you told, I’m sure you’ve carried a lot of those lessons today and part of what’s led to your success today. So, if you were to go back and just share a lesson or two from your mom and your dad, I’d love to hear a little bit of the do life side of Will.
Will Guidara: Yeah.
Brad Johnson: In any way, maybe you’re now doing that with your family. How was it translated?
Will Guidara: So, my mom, when I was a kid, was diagnosed with brain cancer. They removed the tumor, but the radiation treatments that she received ultimately degraded her physical condition to the point where she was a quadriplegic. This all happened when I was four. She was not meant to live more than eight years. But man, when I tell you that she loved me recklessly, I mean, I have never felt more loved by another human being in my entire life. My dad is amazing and I have an amazing group of people around me, but she quite literally lived for me. She had a really hard childhood. Her mom died when she was a kid. Her dad left, like, she always, her entire life, just wanted to have a family. And she was only able to have me.
And this woman, wheelchair bound, unable to move or speak, had clearly decided in her head that she was going to see me graduate from college. She was meant to pass away by the time I was 12. She died 16 hours after I graduated college. I talk about how persistence and determination are everything. I talk about how you can talk things into existence, say, here’s this paperweight my dad gave me when I was a kid. What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail? All various ways of talking about the power of manifestation and committing yourself to big ideas, being willing to put in the work, and your most wild and audacious dreams can come true. But I think what she showed me was that that is actually only true when it’s in pursuit of something you really love, that you are really committed to, that you’re ready to live for.
My dad, we could spend a seven-hour podcast going through all the little quotes and lessons I’ve learned from my dad. He’s the most incredible dad, best friend, mentor. The one I’ll share appropriately because I shared about my mom, and he was working restaurant hours raising a kid when his wife became a quadriplegic, and yet, he never put her in a home, like he would work restaurant hours. Before he did that, he’d get her out of bed, shower her, put her in the wheelchair, get her ready for the day, go work 14 hours, come back, do the whole thing in reverse for her, still manage to be a good dad to me. He taught me about the beautiful things that happen when you combine intention and integrity, when you ask yourself what you stand for, and then live with intention to make sure that you embody that on a daily basis.
What he was able to do was only possible because he woke up every single day and lived every single day with intention, and he lost a lot because of that, right? Like, there’s something beautiful about a carefree Saturday where you don’t need to have any intention at all. He didn’t get that for a good chunk of his life. But when you ask yourself what right looks like when you make the choice to live with integrity, that’s a pretty easy trade to make.
And then how is that spilling over into what I want to be as a dad? I’m trying to be as good as they were for me. I think relationships are relationships, the lessons you learned from those in life could be applied to those at work and vice versa. I’ve always thought that to be true. Too often, we complicate how we engage our customers when most of the answers are right there and how we engage our friends.
But in some cases, it’s not true. And as much as raising kids is a form of leadership, raising kids is a whole different animal. And it is the most fun and the most challenging thing I’ve ever done in my life. And the pursuit of being great at it is, it’s something that I wake up every day choosing to try to get better at.
Brad Johnson: That’s beautiful, man. I’ve got a friend who says kids were sent here to teach us. The older I get, the more I realize how true that is. How old are yours now?
Will Guidara: One and three.
Brad Johnson: Okay. Yeah, 14, almost 13, and 8. So, their seasons and they evolve and change, you just soak them all in. You’re in the one where you can’t turn your back for five minutes or they’ll take a sprint for the stairs, but take lots of videos. My wife and I were just watching one of our little girl the other day and man it goes. It’s all of the cliches become true. It goes in the blink of an eye. It’s so true. So, that’s a fun season. And the days are long in, the years are short, as they say. So, soak them all in.
Well, Will, my final question for you as we wrap up here, this is the intention behind Triad, the intention behind the show, we say Do Business. Do Life, and we mean that as build a business that blesses your life, that doesn’t become your life. And you hit all over a lot of that in kind of the stories about your parents there. But if I was to hear Will’s definition of what Do Business. Do Life means to you, how would you define that?
Will Guidara: When I bought Eleven Madison Park and started a company, a guy named Chris Canlis, a second-generation owner/operator of a restaurant called Canlis in Seattle, he was a mentor of mine, he sat me down and he goes, “Hey, one of the things people always said to me coming up was make sure you keep life and work separate.” You have your work and you have your life and don’t allow them to– I don’t know, I just want to share what I’ve learned and how it works for me is that’s not the winning formula for me. Because whenever I pursue work, I feel guilty that I’m not pursuing life. When I pursue life, I feel guilty that I’m not pursuing work. If you can create a balanced way in which they flow together just enough and approach both with the same sense of virtue and morality and discipline and intention, I think there’s a lot of happiness to be found in that approach, and a lot of success.
Brad Johnson: I think that’s damn good advice. Yeah, sounds like you followed quite a bit of it, too, with how you built the team and how you delivered on that experience. Well, Will, I know you’ve got plenty going on on the business trip, so thanks for carving out some time with myself, and I cannot wait to get this out to the world. Loved every minute of it. So, thank you so much for…
Will Guidara: Thank you, man. This was a blast. This was a blast.
Brad Johnson: All right, my man, well, next time, let’s do it in person. So, I’ll track John Ruhlin down, and we’ll find out where you’re going to be and we’ll throw a three-person podcast.
Will Guidara: I think we should just show up at John’s house with a six-pack of Keystone Light.
Brad Johnson: There we go. I love it. All right, my man, till next time.
Will Guidara: That was awesome. I appreciate you. More soon.
