You know I love books, right? In fact, I host an entire podcast about books and reading.

So, when my colleague, Maggie Munki, recommended a new business book to me, I jumped right on it.The book is Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara and, the moment I read it, I knew I wanted to share it with my staff and to share it with all of you.

The concept is this: to raise the bar in any business, we can look not only to profit and loss sheets and margins, but also at the ways we can raise the bar on how we make our customers feeeeel.

Author Will Guidara’s claim is that, if we blow our client’s minds with what he terms “unreasonable hospitality”, they’ll come back over and over, or book the venue for their event, or be advertisers for life. Any business can do it, but it especially lends itself to the wedding and event business.

If you think over your own personal shopping/buying experiences, I’ll bet you can remember just a few that really stand out. Times when a business did something so cool or unique or bespoke for you that you couldn’t wait to tell others about it. That’s unreasonable hospitality.

And Guidara’s ethos tells us that it doesn’t need to be anything huge, expensive or time-consuming. It just needs to see each customer as an individual and then to treat them like you are so happy to interact with them. To listen to people and take the time to see them. In fact, sometimes really small things make the biggest impact.

And here’s the thing: not only are customers wowed and contracts signed because of this extra attention, but Guidara shows us that thinking is these ways actually benefits the employees themselves. We all enjoy being creative and helpful – Unreasonable Hospitality proves it can move the bottom line, too.

At Here Comes The Guide a few of us are reading the book as a group and spending time coming up with ways we can expand these concepts in our business

I’d boldly suggest that a buddy read within your company might pay big benefits, too.

Here’s how you can get some of this “unreasonable” goodness:

For a brief overview:

Will does a fantastic Ted Talk. This is a perfect way to get a quick understanding of his concepts.

See it in action:

The author, Will Guidara, has a Tiktok that has real-life examples of Unreasonable Hospitality in action in the real world.

Read the book:

You can find it here.

A full list of resources:

Here is Will’s website: https://www.unreasonablehospitality.com/

PS: this all reminded me of THE BEAR Season 2 Episode 7 and I’m pretty sure it was based on what Will’s restaurant was doing. If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it. It’s on Hulu.