Hello team
Last week started the way most weeks do for us – all packed into the Monday team meeting – but this one had that December edge to it.
You know the one. Everyone juggling rotas, holidays, family plans, customers in full festive panic, and the great annual debate of how to keep the wheels turning and the lights on when the rest of the world is eating mince pies.
And of course the usual panic questions rolled in:
Are wages getting paid before everyone disappears for the holidays?
Yes. Absolutely.
What’s happening with overtime?
Who’s locking up?
Who’s available for emergency callout?
Who’s responsible for what?
I try to get them to sort all this out on their own, but sometimes they need my stamp of approval across the whole thing. So we walk through it, steady the ship, and all is well again.
I closed the meeting with something I’d lifted straight out of a fabulous book I’ve just read – “Unreasonable Hospitality” by Will Guidara – and I swiped and deployed a little analogy from it.
What’s the difference between service and hospitality?
Service is black and white.
Hospitality is in multicolour.
And it’s true.
Service gets you from A to B.
Hospitality fills the space between with warmth, personality, the extra mile, the step forward nobody asked for but everybody feels.
If you do something wrong, you’ll get two wrongs thrown back at you.
But when you do something fabulously great, you’ll get fabulously great things returned twice over.
That’s simple maths even I can do.
Stack up the good actions. Daily. Quietly. Consistently.
That’s where opportunity breeds.
And that’s how you build a company that survives the 10 year itch and keeps going.
It’s the repetition.
The weekly meeting.
The checking in.
The minor corrections.
The culture that forms the same way church forms its congregation – not through a single sermon but through the rhythm of showing up.
Because customers aren’t daft. They can smell fake from a hundred yards. Authenticity is the engine of every shining business. And if you want your company to run when you’re not there, you’d better build a team who think like a family, not a factory.
Last week we also had our quarterly mastermind at Baddow Park House, where Mark Creaser and I spent two full days with a group of serious entrepreneurs, pulling apart challenges, tweaking models, and spotting the opportunities they’re often too close to see on their own.
Sometimes you need someone who has been battered by the same storms to say, quietly,
No, you’re not mad.
Yes, that idea will work.
Here’s how.
In the middle of all that learning came my birthday, which naturally meant a plunge into the blue lagoon. Two very brave souls followed me in – Davina and Martin – and we had a chilly dip that would wake the dead. Then straight out, towel off, back into work. A glorious start to the day.
Building a masterclass, building a team, building a business – it’s all the same thing really.
Relationships.
Storytelling.
Creating opportunities for one another.
And if my ramblings each week do anything at all, I hope they give you a breath. A pause. A tiny shove in the right direction to repeat the things that work and drop the things that don’t.
Perhaps that cold water dip in the blue lagoon rattled my brain a bit, because the next morning I woke up convinced I’d been swimming in orange soda!
Turned out…
it was just a fanta-sy.
If I’m lucky, I’ll see you again.