Organic Growth Through Hospitality

 

Many business owners chase growth through creating or adding new services and products.  However, there is a form of organic growth that results from long term client retention and a constant atmosphere of hospitality that creates the value perceived in the pricing.

 

This organic growth comes from more and more clients loving the experience that they receive at or from your business.  This "loving the experience" is one way of defining hospitality and doesn't even have to be associated with a positive outcome, although a positive outcome certainly helps.  Clients can only love the experience they had if they've gotten great hospitality in some fashion.  So that begs the question, what do you do to teach great hospitality to your staff?

 

If you (or your managers) are not having discussions about what constitutes great hospitality and how to deliver it, then the chances of it happening in your busines become random and dependent upon the right combination of people in the right moods on the right day.  That's not a recipe to take to the bank.

 

Check out the article "Hospitality Sweet" on pages 29 & 30 in the September 2006 issue of FastCompany Magazine.  The article is about a restauranteur who has figured out the mastery of providing great customer experiences.  He's written a book Setting the Table: The Power of Hospitality in Restaurants, Business and Life.  Here are a couple of good quotes:

 

"Virtually nothing else is as important as how one is made to feel in any transaction."

 

"Service is how well something is done technically; hospitality is how good something feels emotionally."

 

So, what systems do you have in place to hire, train, and develop your staff into "hospitalitarians"?  Whose job is it to talk about the quality of the emotional experiences that your clients are receiving?  Whose job is it to teach the staff the meaning of great service, great hospitality, who their internal and external clients are?  Do you give the same levels of service and hospitality to your internal and external clients, by way of example to your staff?