CHAPTER 18

IMPROVISATIONAL HOSPITALITY

One afternoon, I was clearing the appetizer plates from a fourtop of Europeans headed straight to the airport after their meal.

A quick aside: there's nothing more flattering than a guest walking into the restaurant with luggage. It means they've chosen you to be either their first or last meal in New York-their first or last memory of the city. It's an enormous compliment, and a responsibility I don't take lightly.

Another aside: I bussed a lot of tables when I was general manager. At that point, it didn't make sense for me to take an order; the captains and sommeliers were more qualified to walk guests through the food on the menu and to offer suggestions for wine. Bussing tables showed the team I was there to help and gave me a way to check in with tables without worrying they'd ask a question I didn't have a good answer for.

Anyway! As I was clearing this particular table, I overheard the four guests crowing about the culinary adventures they'd had in New York: 'We've been everywhere! Daniel, Per Se, Momofuku, now Eleven Madison Park. The only thing we didn't eat was a street hot dog.'

If you'd been in the dining room that day, you'd have seen an animated bulb appear over my head, like in a cartoon. I dropped the dirty dishes off in the kitchen and ran out to buy a hot dog from Abraham, who manned the Sabrett's cart on our corner.

Then the hard part: I brought the hot dog back to the kitchen and asked Daniel to plate it.

He looked at me like I'd gone crazy. I was always trying to push the boundaries, but serving what New Yorkers call a dirty-water dog at a four-star restaurant? I held my ground and told him to trust me-that it was important to me-and he finally agreed to cut the hot dog into four perfect pieces, adding a swoosh of mustard, a swoosh of ketchup, and perfect quenelles of sauerkraut and relish to each plate.

Before we brought out their final savory course, I admitted to the guests that I'd been eavesdropping: 'We're thrilled you chose us for your last meal in New York, but we didn't want you to go home with any culinary regrets,' I said, as the kitchen servers set the artistically plated hot dog sections down at each place.

They freaked out.

I had given away thousands of dishes, and many, many (many) thousands of dollars' worth of food by that point in my career, and yet I can confidently say that nobody had ever responded the way that table responded to that hot dog. In fact, before they left, each person at the table told me it was the highlight not only of the meal, but of their trip to New York. They'd be telling the story for the rest of their lives.

Athletes go to the tape when they've had a bad game, to see what they can fix. They don't often go to the tape when they've had a great game-but that's how you celebrate and hold on to what you did well. So I started talking to the staff in pre-meal about the hot dog: What had made the gift so good? And what about it could we systemize?

Find the Legend

One of Spago's best regulars ate lunch there five days a week. Physically, he was a huge man, and ordinary restaurant chairs can be uncomfortable for someone that big. So when they opened the new Spago in Beverly Hills, Barbara Lazaroff, Wolfgang Puck's wife at the time and a tremendous creative force in the company, asked the regular's wife to secretly photograph and measure his favorite chair at home. She then had a furniture maker replicate it and upholster the new chair in the house fabric.

This gesture made an impression on me-and not just because it was my job to move this enormous custom-made chair from the

back of the restaurant to the regular's table every single morning the summer I worked there. Though I wasn't using this language at the time, I can say now that I loved that gesture because it was unreasonable. I still get a kick out of imagining the look on the regular's face the first time he saw his chair.

It's fun to hear a band play the songs you already love, but it's even more wonderful when they start improvising and you know that only the people in this room, on this night, will ever hear this particular version. (This is why Grateful Dead fans trade bootleg copies of their favorite Red Rocks shows; no two are alike.)

Having a piece of furniture custom-made for a regular goes way above and beyond ordinary service; it is extreme thoughtfulness and inclusion and generosity. More important, though, it's one-off hospitality-the same reason the hot dog was a hit.

And I wanted to improvise, one guest at a time. Everyone at our restaurant on a given night was sharing a unique experience-but what if everyone in the restaurant could have their own unique experience? With the new menu, we'd given our guests the gift of choice. Now, I wanted to give as many of them as possible the gift of delight-the surprise that comes from being truly seen and heard.

Over the next month or so, we started to play around with ways we could make some of these magical moments happen. When a table spent the better part of their meal talking about a movie they'd loved and forgotten about, we dropped off a DVD of it (remember those?) with their check. A couple celebrating an anniversary mentioned they were staying at a nearby hotel; we made sure there was a bottle of champagne waiting for them in their room when they got back, along with a handwritten note thanking them for trusting us with such an important occasion.

The chair at Spago, which probably cost Barbara a few thousand dollars, may have been inspiring, but it wasn't scalable; we couldn't do that for everyone who came in, or even for a select few. But the hot dog was proof that we didn't have to call in a furniture maker to blow someone's mind. All we had to do was pay attention.

A four-top of parents debating the ethics of the Tooth Fairy found a quarter under their folded napkins every time one of them

returned from the bathroom. We finished a meal for someone who told us they loved Manhattans with a flight of variations on that cocktail-the Perfect Manhattan, so-called not because it improves on the original but because it uses equal amounts of both sweet and dry vermouths; the Brooklyn, made with the French aperitif Amer Picon; the Distrito Federal, which substitutes aged tequila for the bourbon.

If we were going to commit to this, we needed to create a position.

We were getting real traction with the guests as a result of these little gestures, and the staff was on fire coming up with ever-cooler tricks we could pull. We'd unlocked something important, and we wanted to do it all the time. The only problem was a big one: we didn't have the personnel. There isn't a group of people standing around behind the scenes at a busy restaurant twiddling their thumbs and waiting for an errand to run, and we certainly couldn't risk compromising the impeccable service we were known for by pulling necessary people off the floor.

Christine McGrath was a host and reservationist, as well as a skilled calligrapher. Since handwritten notes were a big part of what we were doing in those early days, we were already stealing her from her duties on a regular basis. She was the obvious person to step into the role full-time. I hired an additional host to free her up, and just like that, we had a designated person in place to execute our ideas-Eleven Madison Park's first official Dreamweaver.

Sure enough, appointing Christine meant we were able to make these moments happen more frequently and more consistently. Meanwhile, I was still wondering how we could do more. Then one night, I was dining at Danny Meyer's pizza place Marta. Our server was a woman named Emily Parkinson, who confessed that she was fangirling extra hard over our table because she'd had such a wonderful solo meal at Eleven Madison Park.

I named the position after the iconic song by Gary Wright, which has always had a special place in my heart because it was playing the first time I kissed a girl. (It will now be in your head for the rest of the day-sorry.)

Then she mentioned she'd painted her meal.

At first, I thought I'd misheard her. But while most people take pictures of their food, Emily paints hers. Actually, she made preliminary pencil sketches of each course while she was at the restaurant; later, she finished the drawings with a watercolor wash.

Charmed, I asked her to send me some photos, and the next morning, her illustrations were in my inbox. (You can see them, too; Grub Street did a piece on Emily, featuring the paintings she made of her meal at EMP.) I'd barely opened the email before I'd picked up the phone to call my friend Terry Coughlin, the GM of Marta: 'Tell me right away if this is a nonstarter, but I'm working on something pretty cool over here and I want to poach Emily to help me with it. . . .'

Emily's artistic talent supercharged the program. She'd run with whatever wild idea you brought her. A watercolor portrait of their new home in the country for a couple leaving New York to start a family? Done. A three-foot-tall AT-AT wine decanter for a Star Wars superfan who also happened to be a wine geek? No problem. And her flawless execution of these ideas made the team even more ambitious.

In the years to come, Emily and the team would paint a pastoral scene, complete with cows and ducks, so a visiting chef known for hunting much of the protein at his restaurant could choose his entrée by shooting it with a Nerf gun during his kitchen tour.

Before long, we had multiple Dreamweavers on staff, working in their own fully equipped studio. (We set them up in the reservationist's office-I told you everything gets stashed in there!) It was Santa's workshop, complete with leather punching and metalworking tools, a sewing machine, and every art supply you can imagine. And we weren't shy about putting it all to good use.

A captain overheard one of our out-of-town regulars regretting he hadn't gotten his daughter a stuffed animal as he'd promised, so Emily fashioned a perfect little teddy bear for him out of kitchen towels.

A couple came in, splurging on dinner to console themselves after their vacation flight was canceled. We turned the private dining room into a private beach, complete with beach chairs, sand

on the ground, and a kiddie pool filled with water they could stick their toes into, and they drowned their disappointment in tropical daiquiris decorated with little umbrellas.

We were already Googling guests so we could greet them by name. That preliminary research became an important pipeline. A gentleman coming in for his birthday had a popular Instagram account devoted to his love of bacon; I asked the pastry chef to create a bacon granola for him instead of our customary coconutpistachio. We created an ice-cream course with every outrageous sundae topping you can imagine (and some only a brigade of highly skilled cooks could bring to life) for a guest who had an Instagram account dedicated to her love of the cone.

When a couple who'd gotten married at EMP came to celebrate their anniversary, we invited them to eat dessert at a table we'd set up in the private dining room where they were married. The room was set with flowers, candles, a champagne bucket-the whole nine -and as they were finishing their dessert, we turned the lights even lower and hit play on 'Lovely Day' by Bill Withers-their wedding song, a detail we'd found in our notes. Then we turned the lights a little lower and closed the door behind us.

These people were having experiences they couldn't have anywhere else-and many of them were having experiences no other table in the restaurant was having. It was like the Dead giving every fan their own show; at EMP, you would have needed forty bootleg cassettes to capture a single night.

When he was done laughing, he told us his night at the restaurant had been 'legendary.' I told the story in pre-meal, and the term 'Legend' became shorthand within the restaurant for these special touches-as in, 'I did the best Legend for a table last night.'

One night, a banker hustling to fund a new company teased his captain: sure, an after-dinner drink would be great, but what he really needed was a million dollars to finish his raise. Alas, our budget only stretched to a bag filled with ten 100 Grand chocolate bars, which we tucked under his chair.

The name took on even greater significance as we realized what made these Legends so legendary. Namely, they gave people a story -a Legend-to tell.

Why do people put so much time and effort into a marriage proposal? Because they know it's a story they'll tell for the rest of their lives. The best of those stories do two things: First, they put you right back in the moment, so that you're not just recounting the experience, but reliving it. Second, the story itself tells you that while you were having the experience, you were seen and heard.

That changes when you leave with a story that's good enough to put you back in the moment, as if you were living it all over again. That's why we took the Legends so seriously. If people were coming to us to add to their collection of experiences, then we saw these not as extra flourishes but as a responsibility: to give people a memory so good it enabled them to relive their experience with us.

These days, people, especially younger people, are more interested in collecting experiences than in getting more stuff. But restaurant meals, like many service experiences, are ephemeral. You can take a copy of the menu home, and pictures of your plate, but you can't relive that bite of foie gras.

The true gift, then, wasn't the street hot dog or the bag full of candy bars; it was the story that made a Legend a legend.

Giving More Is Addictive

The energy around these extra grace notes-these Legends-was phenomenal.

In restaurants, it's usually the people in the kitchen who get to explore their creativity-whether collaborating with the chef on a new dish or feeding their colleagues at family meal (trust me, you will hear about it if the family meal you put up is no good). With the Legends, everyone in the dining room had an outlet, too-they weren't just serving plates of other people's creativity; they had the opportunity to infuse the experience with their own.

The dining room team was magnificent at what they did, and they were passionate about what they were doing. But no matter how much you love your job, the same thing night after night gets stale.

The Legends-whether you were watching other people do one

or doing them yourself-made coming to work fun, and we were working way too hard not to have fun. I even started a private Instagram account to catalog them, so that if you'd missed one on your day off, you could still be encouraged and inspired. And we celebrated every single one in pre-meal.

The guests weren't the only ones to benefit, either, because when one of our own came in to dine, we pulled out all the stops.

If you were the person behind a Legend, you immediately wanted to find a way to do another. Seeing that look of wonder and delight cross a guest's face as they realized what they were seeing was a transformational moment; as soon as you'd had that feeling, you wanted it again.

It's worth mentioning that at the time some famous, old-school fine-dining restaurants didn't permit staff to dine in at their restaurants at all. The rationale was that if a guest sat next to someone who had previously served them, it would degrade the experience somehow. After all, nobody wants to sit next to the help -right?

We went hard in the other direction. Eliazar Cervantes loved mariachi-so of course a band of musicians emerged from the walkin and serenaded him during his tour. When Jeff Tascarella, the general manager at the NoMad, warned us in advance that his dad was more of a Budweiser steak-and-potatoes guy than Sauternes and foie, we transformed our champagne cart into a Budweiser cart.

This makes me furious. The only thing a rule like this does is tell the people who work so tirelessly for you that's all they are: the help.

One of our senior dining room captains, Natasha McIrvin (who would later go on to be our creative director) is completely obsessed with Christmas. The first year she didn't go home for the holiday, her parents came to New York to surprise her; we hid them in the walk-in. When the family had reunited and returned to their table, they found a snowy, holiday-themed train on a tiny track circling golden reindeer, pine garlands, and a giant pile of beautifully wrapped gifts. This was our caviar course-everything bagels balanced on top of the train cars, and a tin of caviar and all the trimmings hidden in the presents beneath the wrapping and

bows.

I often wonder why more companies don't invest in their own people this way. Major banks have private wealth managers, who deliver a heightened level of service to their wealthiest clients. How much would it cost to give every teller a similarly attentive private banking experience? Wouldn't that make sense from a retention standpoint? And perhaps more important, how can you even quantify the improvement in the kind of service someone will deliver to their customers when they have themselves received the very best the bank has to offer?

Over the top? You bet. Not only did we want our people to come in for dinner; we wanted them to have a better experience than anyone else in the room. It was a way to say thank you for all that the team gave us-their creativity, good humor, and hard work. But it was also to show them the same graciousness they delivered every day. What better way to get fired up about giving Unreasonable Hospitality than to spend an evening receiving it?

For us, it was an ideal investment. The Dreamweaver idea may have originated with me, but it was the team who breathed life into it every day. The best part for me was scrolling through that private Instagram account and seeing idea after idea I'd had nothing to do with . I hadn't conceived of the concepts; I hadn't approved them. The team had come up with them independently and executed them so brilliantly that even I was inspired by them.

It was the perfect marriage of ownership and improvisational hospitality.

Create a Tool Kit

I hear this a lot: 'Well, of course you could afford to pull those tricks at an expensive restaurant.'

It's true-these gifts cost money, in labor if nothing else. But I'm my dad's son, and I reviewed the Dreamweaver line item in the P&L every month with an eagle eye. There was never any question: given the word-of-mouth marketing this bought us with our guests

And I always think: Are you sure you can afford not to?

and the excitement this kind of gift-giving created among the team, the program was worth every penny.

In many ways, it was the perfect example of the Rule of 95/5 in action: we could afford to splurge on Legends because we were managing our money so closely the rest of the time. But most of the time, we didn't have to break the bank to blow someone's mind: we'd put ten drugstore candy bars in a bag, and a guest had called us legendary for it!

Anyway, as a leader, you can't rely solely on your spreadsheets. You have to trust your gut-and what you feel when you're in the room with people, giving and receiving these gifts. Is there a traditional return on investment with a program like this? No. Am I confident that each dollar I spent here did as much or more than the ones I spent on traditional marketing? Absolutely.

It isn't the lavishness of the gift that counts, but its pricelessness.

I'd learned the importance of this in high school, when I worked as a busser and host at the Ruth's Chris Steak House in the Westchester Marriott. That Ruth's Chris was a franchise, and so it had to closely follow the guidelines of the parent company: the same signage, uniforms, china, glass, silver; the same menu.

But the one I worked for had a secret: a fried calamari dish that wasn't on the menu.

Every piece of fried calamari I'd ever had before had been cut into rings. This calamari was cut into strips. And I have no idea what they breaded it with, but it was flipping delicious . (Yes, I ate the leftovers off the tables I bussed. Absolutely disgusting. I have no regrets.)

You couldn't order this calamari; you could only get it if they sent it out to you. Often, when you're a regular (or if a restaurant messes up your order and wants to get back into your good graces), they'll send you an extra appetizer, or a dessert, or a glass of champagne. The problem is that you know exactly how much that dessert cost: 'Oh, they love me fourteen dollars' worth.' But you could only get the fried calamari if you were part of the club-or if someone wanted you to feel like you were. The cost to the restaurant was insignificant; its impact was not.

That calamari was, by definition, priceless, just like the twodollar street hot dog I'd sent to that table. But it was also right there, every night-a gift waiting to be given. Sending this priceless calamari didn't require planning or strategy; all it took was an impulse and the press of a button.

But, as oxymoronic as it may seem, you can also be proactive about improvisational hospitality. This is simple pattern recognition: identify moments that recur in your business, and build a tool kit your team can deploy without too much effort.

This is an important strategy for every business. Improvisational hospitality is fundamentally reactive. You're always respondingeither to the information that you've gathered in advance (a guest telling the reservationist they're coming in to celebrate his wife's fortieth) or to a tidbit you've overheard at the table.

Brainstorm materials it would be useful to have on hand, organize those materials on-site so that staff can readily access them, and empower the people who work for you to use them. Do that, and you've systemized improvisational hospitality.

We called them Plus One because they were a little extra. Unnecessary, but nice to have. Guest expectations for us were high by that point, and this was a way for us to overdeliver-to give a little bit more, even, than what they were expecting. And because they were printed up, filed neatly, and ready to go, it took little effort for the staff to take advantage of them.

We had done this for years at EMP with what we called the Plus One cards. (We did these for so long I genuinely can't remember if we started them or if they predated me.) Plus One cards were answers to questions we were frequently asked-Who does your floral arrangements? Can you tell me more about the farm that made this cheese?-printed on simple index cards we kept in a card catalog box in the back. If a server saw a guest flip a plate to see who'd made it, they brought the card that explained who Jono Pandolfi was and where you could see more of his work.

There are two kinds of people: the kind who love to receive gifts, and the kind who love to give them. To be clear, both are equally selfish, because people who love to give gifts get their own reward when they see the amazed look that tells them they've nailed it.

By the time the Dreamweaver program was in full swing, the people who were working for us tended to fall into the camp of people who loved to give gifts, and they were great at delivering Legends. But we wanted to make sure they had the opportunity to give all the time, not just when they had a moment of inspiration, so we created a tool kit.

As our focus on Unreasonable Hospitality grew, we were always looking for a way to 'plus one' the experience-to give people a little more than they expected-by staying alert to recurring situations.

Since people visiting from out of town often asked about our own favorite haunts in the city, we printed little maps, marked with some of our secret spots: the best pizza slice, the best bagel, the best place to get Sunday brunch, along with lesser-known New York City treasures like the Rubin Museum. We bought tickets to the observation deck of the Empire State Building we could give out to tourists who were super excited to be in New York. (I know tons of born-and-bred New Yorkers who have never gone up there because it seems cheesy-and it is, but it's also an amazing way to see the city. Smuggle a flask.)

People often slipped outside for a cigarette during their meal; while they were out there, we'd bring them a splash of booze in a little to-go cup we'd special-ordered for the purpose.

And it was a lovely win for us.

Another, and probably my favorite: when a couple got engaged at the restaurant, we would pour them complimentary glasses of champagne, like every restaurant does. But their champagne flutes were different than all the others in the dining room-they were crystal flutes I'd partnered with Tiffany to provide. At the end of their meal, we'd send the couple home with a gift box in that iconic robin's-egg blue, containing the glasses they'd used for their engagement toast. The partnership was an easy win for Tiffany; I guarantee most of those couples put a full set of flutes onto their registries.

As the Dreamweavers built up some steam, many of the items they created as bespoke presents or Legends became part of our tool kit.

One afternoon, a table laughed with their captain about overdoing it with the wine and wished out loud that instead of going back to the office, they could head home for a tipsy nap. So the Dreamweaver sent them out with a wink-a fake doctor's note excusing them for the afternoon, and a pack of aspirin.

And because the Dreamweavers were standing by, a captain might say, 'I loved that impromptu snack box you put together for the woman who was catching the red-eye to Seattle. I would love to be able to give those out on a more frequent basis; could we make a bunch?'

But people often made a similar joke: 'Oof, we went hard tonight; tomorrow's gonna hurt!' So the Dreamweavers put together a little morning rescue kit-a bag of strong ground coffee, some Alka-Seltzer tablets, and a muffin-for the captains to hand out whenever a guest anticipated their hangover out loud.

Then those airplane snack boxes were just there , waiting for a traveler to check bags because they'd be leaving straight from lunch to the airport. At the end of their meal, we'd hand them their coat, roll out their luggage-oh, and when you get hungry again on the plane, here's a nicer nosh than a pack of stale pretzels.

You might be wondering: Once you've systemized it, is it still hospitable? Does that airplane snack box carry the same warmth and generosity the thirtieth time you hand one to a guest as it did the first? After all, we're talking about bespoke hospitality-is something lost if the gift isn't specific to you?

The fresh elements had to be baked and restocked daily, but the thinking-the idea, the plan, the basic execution-had to happen only once. Prepare for these recurring moments in advance, and your staff doesn't have to reinvent the wheel every night-they just have to listen and make it happen.

Without hesitation, I can say no, because the value of a gift isn't about what went into giving it, but how the person receiving it feels . Maybe it was the thirtieth time we'd handed a traveling guest a snack box, but it was the first time for them -and their delight wasn't dimmed in the slightest because they hadn't been the only ones.

We were always looking for ways to scale what was unique-and

working-about what we were offering, and counterbalancing those gestures with one-off, improvisational hospitality.

It was important to keep checking in with the systems we had put in place to make sure they hadn't started to feel expected or formulaic or outgrown their usefulness. But in general, systemizing these gestures made it possible to make more people happy. And the team could use the leftover bandwidth to focus on the more singular moments-to create those Legends.

Opportunities for Hospitality Exist in Every Business

One of my close friends runs one of the big realty firms in New York and has asked me on a couple of occasions to talk to her team about hospitality. The first thing I ask the real estate agents is what gift they leave to welcome a new homeowner. Ninety-nine percent of the time, they tell me, 'A bottle of sparkling wine in the fridge.'

You're selling someone a home or helping them to sell the one they've lived in. That's one of the most intimate transactions there is. For the amount of time that an agent spends with people, listening to their hopes and dreams for the future (incidentally, much longer than I've ever spent with a table), and the size of the average commission, a real estate professional should absolutely be able to figure out a bespoke gift for everyone they work with.

Now, a bottle of bubbles is nothing to complain about. But there's also nothing personal, nothing inspiring or memorable, about it-and there should be!

Again: not expensive, necessarily, but personalized. That hot dog cost two dollars, but there was probably only one table in the history of the restaurant that I could have presented it to. People often confuse hospitality with luxury, but I could have given that table a bottle of vintage Krug and a kilo of caviar, and it wouldn't have had anywhere near the same impact. Luxury means just giving more; hospitality means being more thoughtful .

So: if your buyer is into music, leave them their favorite album on vinyl-and, depending on the size of your commission, spring for a turntable as well. If a client dreamed out loud about doing

yoga in that nook off the hallway with the sunlight streaming through, then buy a mat and roll it out there, so it's the first thing to greet them when they walk into their new home.

Many good businesspeople make these gestures instinctively. A real estate agent I spoke to told me about a Legend she'd pulled, long before she knew the term. Since she knew the new owners were planning a gut renovation, she got permission to remove the doorjamb where her client, the seller, had marked her kids' heights every year as they grew. To anyone else, it would have been a worthless piece of splintered wood, headed for the dumpster-but not to her client, who wept when she realized what it was. (Total cost: $0.)

A yoga mat doesn't take any more time, energy, or resources to secure than a bottle of Prosecco, just a bit more thoughtfulness.

I sincerely believe that this kind of gift is the goal, especially given how much time real estate agents spend with clients, and the size of the transactions. But it may not be logistically possible for everyone to receive an experience that requires improvisation and bespoke, in-the-moment creation. Building a tool kit is a way to scale those extraordinary experiences, so that as many people as possible can experience these small, special touches.

Another agent I spoke with mentioned she'd sold eight pied-àterres to suburban empty nesters in a single year. Do those people want yet another basic bottle of sparkling wine, available at every corner liquor store? Or would they prefer a behind-the-scenes tour of the art restoration facilities at the Met? Or tickets to the Village Vanguard? Or a membership to an art house movie theater in Brooklyn?

If you're selling an apartment to a couple having a baby, get a pack of those protective plastic outlet covers and leave them in a drawer with a little note: 'You've got big adventures coming up, so I took this off your to-do list.' And because so many people move when they find out they're expecting, keep a case of those outlet covers in your office so you don't have to scramble. For newcomers to the area you specialize in, put together a guidebook of all your favorite spots-the best stroll, the best rigorous hike, the best apple cider donut. Print a dozen at a time.

And if you can't or don't want to go that far, then take a minute to focus on making your back-pocket gift more thoughtful. Leave a Chemex coffeepot, with a box of filters and a bag of locally roasted ground coffee-because that's what people really need on their first morning in a new house before they've found the moving box with the espresso machine in it. I guarantee they'll think of you and your thoughtfulness every time they use it.

Another example: People tend to buy cars at specific points in their lives. Maybe they're starting a family and need a bigger vehicle, or their teenager has gotten a license and they're buying their child their first car. Or the kids are off to college, and it's time to get something a little sportier than the beat-up family boat they've been using to go back and forth from ballet and soccer practice.

Fine , you're thinking, except that restaurants and real estate are filled with opportunities, unlike my business. I don't buy it. There are inflection points-patterns-in every business. Look closely, and you'll find them. And when you do, make sure you do something about it.

If you know that people are going to come in, looking to buy a car for their teenager, why wouldn't you be prepared with an act of hospitality that will strengthen their connection to your brand? How would you feel about a car salesperson who pulled you aside and said, 'Look, I know what it's like to have a newly licensed teenager on the road, so I got Frankie a year of Triple A. That way you know she's not going to get stranded out there.'

Or can you imagine the look a harried dad, struggling to install a booster seat, would give you if you sent him off your lot with a bag of Pepperidge Farm Goldfish, so his toddler doesn't get hangry on the way home-and a little DustBuster vacuum, so Dad can vacuum up all those orange crumbs and keep his brand-new car looking brand-new?

A Triple A membership costs $119 at the time of this writing-a hundred and nineteen dollars that pretty much guarantees those parents will never buy a car from anyone else.

When people have the resources and the autonomy to imbue these transactions with their own thoughtfulness, salespeople

become product designers. That car didn't come outfitted with a DustBuster, but that salesperson decided that for this specific customer, it would be better if it did. And they are going to feel a sense of pride in selling a product that they helped create.

Why wouldn't you have a freshly waxed board waiting for him in the roof rack when he comes to pick up his new car? Obviously, this is a big gift, but it's also one with the potential to turn a faithful customer into a lifelong relationship. And if a surfboard's outside your budget, a can of surf wax on the dash with a bow and a note will do much the same thing.

And you should alwaysalways -be on the lookout for the Legend. Let's say a guy has come back to your dealership every couple of years for a new car, and you've gotten to know him well. When his kids go off to college, he starts looking at vans; with a little more time on his hands, he's rediscovered his adolescent passion for surfing.

Gifts, to me, are deeply meaningful, which is why I get so mad when a business gives me a cheap tote with a branded USB drive. Try harder! Do better! Gifts are a way to tell people you saw, heard, and recognized them-that you cared enough to listen, and to do something with what you heard. A gift transforms an interaction, taking it from transactional to relational; there is no better way than a gift to demonstrate that someone is more than a customer or a line item on a spreadsheet. And the right one can help you to extend your hospitality all the way into someone's life.