How to 'Disneyfy' Your Hospitality Business to Delight Guests and Drive Revenue - Vance Morris

Josiah: You might recall a few months ago I ran a state of the hotel industry survey and driving revenue and making sure that that revenue flowed to the bottom line was mentioned as the number one challenge. But what my survey respondents also said is that they're really focused on improving the guest experience. Well, our guest today, Vance Morris, is a former leader at Walt Disney World who now advises businesses across industries around the globe on these two factors, on guest experience, but also how to make money from a better guest experience. Today in this episode, we're going to get into the importance of creating magic for guests and customers. We talk about how to practically implement systems and strategies for doing that. And we're going to explore what you need to do to create more pricing power for your hotel or hospitality business. So if you care about increasing revenue and profits this year, as you delight your guests, this is a conversation you won't want to miss. Let's get into it.

[intro]

Josiah: I like to kind of start out with setting the stage on why does this all matter? And I would love your take. Why does magic matter in the world of hospitality?

Vince: Well, I mean, that's a great question. And magic is in and of itself, I hate to break it to you and the listeners, it's not real. If you think about, if you look at the world of business, I mean, it's not amortized or depreciated. You're not going to find it on a balance sheet or anything like that. So how then does a multi-billion dollar a year company like Disney make so much stinking money off of magic? Well, if you think about it, if you've been to a magic show and you're sitting in the audience and the guy chops the lady up into 27 pieces and mixes her around on the stage, slaps her back together, and she pops out all in one piece and where all the pieces are supposed to be, the audience is like, wow. You know, you're in awe. You're like, oh my God, how did he do that? But if you think about it from the magician's point of view, it is all practiced, repeatable, and replicatable systems, hand movements designed to create that illusion. And the key word, when I started working at Disney, The first thing I learned, it wasn't be nice to people, it wasn't pick up trash, which everybody at Disney is known for, it was systems. Disney has a system for everything. I mean, you want to carry a tray in a restaurant, there's a system for it. Change a bus tire, there's a system. Create a movie, there's a system. A lot of people think that systems confine you. They don't. They liberate you so that if you follow the system, here's how you carry a tray, great. Now you're free to use your personality, use yourself and what you are about in the rest of the business. That's why people come back to Disney again and again. That's the number one reason people come back to Disney is the cast member. It's not the rides. It's not the, you know, horticulture. It's the people. And so when you think of Disney magic or just magic in general when it comes to our businesses, it's the magic that the employees, the cast members, whatever you call folks that work for you, it is what they are delivering. not your widget, not your service. It is the interaction of that employee with the customer, the patient, et cetera.

Josiah: I appreciate you getting into that, Vance, because I wanted to start our conversation talking about magic because of your past experience with Disney, but now you help thousands of business owners and operators think about this inside the world of hospitality and beyond it. And I'm interested in translating that into the business world. You touched on this in saying that the number one reason people are coming to Disney is for the people. That's what I'm hearing in the world of hospitality across the board, all different types of businesses where people talk a lot about the importance of guest experience. They talk a lot about making sure that they have the right people and they've been empowering those people. But I wonder if we could spend a few more minutes talking about the importance of developing these systems that will enable a great guest experience. Because we talk a lot about it in hospitality, but I feel like we need to be a little bit more specific to bring this to life. Across all the work that you've done, what have you found, or why is it so important for our listeners to think about, improve, invest in their guest experience?

Vince: Well, the great thing about systems is that they are I don't want to sound corny, but they're living, breathing documents. I mean, it sounds cliche, but they really are. And that's one of the things that we used at Disney and a lot of the businesses that I've worked with is constant process improvement. And Walt Disney called it plussing. How do we constantly make it better? We never really sit on our laurels. Once we've plushed something, that becomes our new standard. Then maybe six months, nine months, 12 months, we'll revisit that again and say, okay, can we make that better? Let's take something as boring or mundane as answering the telephone. That's what I call, by the way, jiznifying. I've defined that as creating experiences out of the mundane. Disney's just figured out a way to take all the boring stuff they got to do and turn it into an experience. Let's take answering the telephones. So I worked with a group of insurance brokers a number of years ago. And that's a very boring, no offense to the insurance brokers listening, but you know, it's fairly sedate, boring. You get what you get. And this one guy was a rock and roll fanatic. I mean, just nuts. Gold records on the walls in his office, autographed guitars. I mean, just, he was a rock and roll nut. And we got together with his team and he was looking for a way to stand out. He was in a fairly large city and he needed to stand out from all of the other insurance agents in his town. And so we started brainstorming. And because the way he answered the phone now was, you know, thank you for calling Dave's insurance. How can I help you? The same way everybody. I mean, we've all heard that no matter who you call, the oil change or whatever. You've heard some version of that. One of his employees actually came up with the idea. Now, this took a little while, but the end result was, thank you for calling Dave's Allstate, the agency that rocks. Now, saying that the first 40 times, yes, it's a little corny, but answering the phone that way does a number of things. First, if you remember, your marketing is designed to do two things. Attract the people you want to do business with and repel people that you don't want. Just by answering the phone that way, you sift, sort, and screen out the people who would probably not be a good customer. And two, you are certainly separating yourself from everybody else. You're showing that you are fun, you're not going to be boring, because that's the worst thing you could do with your marketing is be boring. You want to separate yourself. And so that is kind of taking that, and that's really a little bit of magic, There's a deeper lesson there, though, is that an employee came up with that. It wasn't the boss. It wasn't a supervisor or a CEO. It was a line-level hourly employee that came up with that idea. So when you're doing these things, include them in the meeting. Now, can they improve on that? Maybe. So when they have their next process improvement meeting, and they took the word plusing, when they have their next plus meeting, they'll come and they'll say, OK, well, here's how we answered the phone. Can we make the experience better? And they'll brainstorm. Maybe they can, maybe they can't. And they'll also prioritize. Well, does it make sense to focus on this? Nah, probably not. We're doing a great job. Let's go find something else where we can either improve the experience or improve the profitability.

Josiah: I love that. I, when we were going back and forth before recording here today, you shared something that I've been thinking about is it's kind of, you know, from the moment of, of check-in to check-out, every opportunity is this, this, or every touch point is this opportunity to create magic. And I wonder if we can kind of stay with what you're saying there just for a moment, more kind of behind the curtain, if you will, behind the scenes. What is the process that you're taking the people that you're working with as you're thinking about, A, what touch points should we focus on or could we focus on? And then how can we create something that's authentic to us? Because it's probably going to look different for all of our listeners as they apply what you're sharing. But I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about that process of coming up with how they could operate.

Vince: Sure. It goes by different names depending on who you talk to, but customer journey, customer mapping, but you literally take little blocks on a piece of paper and wherever the customer has an interaction with your company, you label that. And it's literally from the first one. So if that's a phone call, if that's a postcard, if that's a interaction with your website, that's the first one. And then you, through the eyes of the customer, you say, what happens next? So let's say it's a postcard. Great. What happens with the postcard? Then the customer does what? Makes a phone call. Great. Then the customer does what? will come into the office, then, then, then, all the way through till the end. And then you go through and you list out what it is you do at each of those touch points. So that would become your current service. and then go through and prioritize, well, which one of these do we need to work on to either improve efficiency, improve service, or improve profitability? So you don't have to go in sequential order. You might have something in, and this is both online and offline. So, I mean, that's why even with websites and things like that, I mean, if you've got a broken link in your website, I mean, there's nothing that'll drive somebody batty and or drive them to the competition if you got a broken link, or if it just sends them in some kind of doom loop when you're trying to make a reservation. So you map it out, you prioritize it, and then you go through the whole plussing exercise. You brainstorm. No idea is a dumb idea. And you just kind of come and you work through things. Now, as management or owners, we want to put guardrails up. So we want to have some reality to it and some financial restraint to it. But that's essentially it. So I'll give you an example. I work with a lot of doctors. And doctors are notoriously late. I mean, even the first appointment of the day, they seem, they managed to be 10 minutes late. I don't get it. So it was actually an orthodontist working with him. And so we had the meeting, we had the process meeting, and we all agreed that if the doctor was late, that we would proactively intercept the patient coming in, apologize profusely, and give them a $5 Starbucks gift card. So, I mean, wouldn't that be better? You walk into the, you know, the orthodontist, you're on time, and Marge at the front desk stands up and says, you know what? Darn Dr. Smith, he's running behind again. We feel really bad. Here's a $5 gift certificate to Starbucks. We feel really bad. We value your time, but here you go. That's a heck of a lot better than just walking in and Marge, you know, looking at you, shrugging her shoulders that, sorry, Doc's late again. Suck it up. And at the end of the month, we're doing a financial review, and the doctor's looking at it, and he goes, what's this $1,700 in public relations? And we said, well, that's the number of $5 Starbucks coupons we gave out every time you were late. Freaked out. Never late again. It changed his behavior. But the point of it was that, and this is also something when you're delivering magic, is anticipatory service. You anticipate what the guest is going to want before they want it. And in this case, we were anticipating the problem before the guest or the patient encountered the problem.

Josiah: I love it. I want to go back to kind of that brainstorming exercise because I feel this tension if you have multiple people in that room brainstorming. And as you mentioned, there may be no bad ideas, but if management or the person who's running the process in the organization is putting guardrails on it, I feel like that could be a tension between thinking very expansively all the things you could do and then the guardrails pulling creativity back and maybe to the point of it being a little bit less special. So I guess my question for you as an outside person who's enabling these conversations, you have a unique perspective into these processes. Do you feel like there are common things that you've seen on where that brainstorming goes wrong, either because of guardrails that are too strong or brainstorming that's just not that creative or something else?

Vince: No, I mean, I think most people during the, actually, I don't think anybody's ever run up against one of the guardrails. And when I say that, it's usually a financial thing. And if we're talking about, okay, one of the big questions we talk about is how much should we authorize a frontline employee to compensate a guest for an issue without having to go to management? And manager usually say, all right, we're going to cap it at 500 bucks. Now, I know Ritz Carlton says 2,000, but that's Ritz Carlton. They can afford it. But we're going to cap it at 500. Most of the employees never get to the 500 mark in the discussions, in the brainstorming. We never even really get there.

Josiah: Interesting. So one thing I'd love to get your take on is sort of the impact of all of this on pricing or revenue. I just ran a state of the hotel industry survey talking about top challenges and by a significant margin, the top challenge that I picked up across the industry was this notion of, you know, we need more revenue. We need more profitability, right? Which. Might be intuitive, maybe not, but this is top of mind for listeners in the hospitality industry. You've seen at Disney, I think you were sharing something about kind of, you're calling it the Disney pricing playbook. And I wonder if you could share a little bit about that as a way for our listeners to understand some of the potential here.

Vince: Yeah, so, I mean, Disney is not like the dwarf bashful about raising prices at all. Even during recessions, they're raising the price. During COVID, they raised the price. I mean, they just, but they do it. I mean, Disney's got the opposite problem of a lot of hotels, which is good for them, is they've got a capacity issue. So they're raising prices in hopes that less people will come so that the people who are there will have a better experience. I get it. Disney, though, it's tough to say for your local Hampton Inn or a chain or a brand hotel to compete because, I mean, Disney is its own siloed. I mean, no pun intended. It's its own world. But I think with those brands, going back to systems, they have systems. So for a lot of my meetings, when I do presentations or workshops, For some reason, I like to go to a Hampton Inn. I've been to probably 20 different Hamptons in the last year and a half. I can tell you the Hampton Inn system for catering and for rooms is the same at all 20, the system. The execution of the system is 20 different ways. I mean, it's just, it's bizarre. And what I pay within a couple of dollars is about the same.

Josiah: Now. Sorry, I'd have to just jump in there, because this is interesting to me, because I have listeners that are both working at these brands like Hampton, as well as owners. And I'm curious, from your independent perspective, is it good that there's that latitude, I guess, for you as a guest? Is it nice that… No, this is bad. Oh, it's bad. Okay. This is bad. Tell me more.

Vince: Yeah, this is, this is not good comparison. This is like, They didn't check the room before they let us in and it was still dirty from the night before. Or the front desk people are not nice. I mean, it's just the level of service from one Hampton to another is, it's night and day. And it's not to bash Hampton at all. It happens with all brands that I go to. But, and I know they have their set systems, and every Hampton's got the same systems, it's just how they're being executed is completely different. Now there are some that are just off the charts amazing. The one down in Texas, where were we? I can't remember the name of the one in Texas, sorry. I was going to give a shout out to the one in Texas, but I can't remember the name of the town. They had just finished a renovation and the salesperson called me up. She says, oh my God, we just finished a reservation. I know you've had your meeting here for three years in a row. I want to have you come back down here because we've just done a renovation. The place is immaculate. It's really good. I'm like, okay. Love to. And we got there and the people had just, not only had the building been refreshed, but the people had been refreshed. And I think a lot of times when your building starts to fall apart or get old and aged and decrepit, that rubs off on your employees. I mean, not that they feel old and decrepit, but they're like, well, if the bosses don't care about this place, I'm sure not going to care about this place. passes through.

Josiah: has this kind of run-on benefit for the teams. And then the person running it, whether it's a management company or individual general manager, somebody I've had on the show was a previous Hampton Inn general manager, Eleanor Erickson. And she used to do these team dinners and lunches and all these things you could do within the parameters, but she got people kind of fired up. So I want you to carry on, but like, I think for our listeners, regardless of where they find themselves, you can start thinking about this in your context, even if you're operating within a Hampton Inn, let's say.

Vince: As to pricing, I'm not sure how the big chains or brands do their pricing. I would imagine it's regionally done and things like that. But for what I would consider a mom and pop or owner-operator resort, If you can deliver the goods, yeah, I could. One of my clients is a family entertainment center in Wisconsin, and they have kind of like a Great Wolf Lodge, if that makes sense, but they're independent. And they go through that process of plussing every quarter. And they have gone from literally no systems to the systems that they've continued to implement and improve have given them freedom to do some really cool… They've now got their own mascot, like a Mickey Mouse, but it's a I can't remember what it is. It's a monkey or a gorilla. It's a purple gorilla because their big wonk and pizza size of a football field is called the gorilla pizza. They're now doing, they took one of their suites and it's now a, like grandparents can rent it out and have all of their grandkids sleeping in there. It's like a locker room. It's got like a foosball table and little lockers where kids can hang their stuff up in there. And they're charging a premium for that room. So if you can, and that's the key with experiences, is if you can deliver an experience, you can charge a price. There's a tremendous price elasticity to creating experiences. Nobody else in The country that I know of who runs a family entertainment center that has a hotel attached to it has this room, so you can't compare it to anything else. I mean, that's what Disney does. I mean, you can't get gummy bears at Disney. Can't get them. They don't exist. And if you went to 7-Eleven or a convenience store and you bought gummy bears, it's like $5 for, I don't know, eight ounces, something like that. If you go to Disney, there's no gummy bears, but you can get Goofy Gummies. Goofy Gummies, by the way, are like $9 for two ounces. But since you can't compare Goofy Gummies to anything in the outside world, you're like, $9, okay, great. And that's the way it is. It's the choice between you, you, and you. So as much as you can brand yourself within yourself and make those choices only between you, you, and you, and make the outside world melt away. The minute you can put the word only in front of anything you do, you now have tremendous price elasticity. We are the only resort in town that offers a Popsicle hotline. Did you see this? In LA, there is this, not a dumpy hotel. I mean, it's a lower end hotel. We got to number nine on one of the ratings out of like however many thousand hotels there are in LA. Got to number nine by installing a Popsicle hotline. There's a phone by the pool. You lift up the phone. It probably goes to like room service or something. And they say, I need a Popsicle. And a waiter from room service comes out with a tray of Popsicles and walks around the pool giving them out. It's free. But somebody just thought, this is a great idea, popsicle hotline. It now has boosted their ratings to the point where on TripAdvisor or one of those has gotten them to number nine above all of these other Marriott's and the rest of them. So when you can do that, when you can, I mean, I also own home service businesses. So I own a carpet cleaning business as well. And let me tell you, if I can create an experience and Disneyfy a carpet cleaning business, anybody can do this, okay? Because carpet cleaners are not exactly thought of as highfalutin services. I mean, 2020 did an expose on us back in the 80s. It wasn't pretty. Now we still change from your sofa and drink milk from the carton and put it back in the fridge. It was ugly. but we decided to turn it into a premium service. And right now, because of the experiences we provide, we're 35% higher than our closest competitor.

Josiah: I love that. You mentioned Disneyfy. Disneyfy your business. Do things no one else does. This is so important, I think, for all of us to learn from, Vance. Just hearing you talk in the examples that you gave, it inspires me to think about, you know, kind of within the context I'm operating, you know, how do I the only, right? Create a category of one, right? And by doing something different. And with that example of that LA hotel, I actually stayed there. It's interesting. It didn't cost them a lot. It's creative thinking. It's creating your own category. You create demand for yourself. You create pricing power. And I think hospitality is unique because they do have finite constraints of the inventory they have to sell each night. And if you can be creative enough, to make enough people want to stay there, you can do amazing things with your pricing. So I think that's a very practical thing for our listeners to keep in mind. I would love to, is there another, I guess, challenge that you have as our listeners head into their day, their week, the rest of this year? What's another challenge that you would give them to think about? How do we apply some of these principles in the world of hospitality?

Vince: Well, I mean, I think the big challenge for a lot of companies is they all have good intentions, like they'll listen to this podcast and like, oh, that was a good idea. Oh, that was a good idea. They never do anything. Do something, pick one idea from this podcast that you heard and you thought, that's a good idea and go implement it. I mean, you know, and that's actually, it's one of the things, a couple of months ago, I created my first done for you product. So, I mean, I've been coaching and consultant for a number of years and I've never had a product where I've like created it so that the people who buy it, they really have nothing to do except put a stamp on it and mail it out. And that's really what a lot of people want, I found out. But people have enough information, they just don't have enough implementation. So do something. And then the other thing is, and I know this is happening with a lot of hotels, a lot of restaurants, answer your phone live. I kid you not, you will be head and shoulders above everybody else. I can't tell you how important that is because So I'm a partner in a call center for home service businesses. So plumbers, HVAC, et cetera. We called 4,000 home service businesses as part of our research. 17% answered the phone live. Now we got the phone numbers from Google pay-per-click. So these are all companies paying Google to have their phone number published. All that money wasted down the toilet. gone because they didn't answer their phone live. And if you leave a voicemail, that's it. They're going to the next number down the line. If people ask me, Vance, how can I make more money like right now? Answer the phone.

Josiah: It's easy, right there. Starts with the basics, right? I love it, I love it. You do so much, Vance, to educate people on the power and potential of improving guest experience. I'll include some links in the show notes. For people just listening to this audio, where would you point people to learn more about you and your work?

Vince: BestVet's my website, which is deliverservicenow.com. a whole bunch of free resources there, some free training you can download. Actually, I've got two new resources I just put up there, 52 ways to wow your customer and 52 ways to keep a customer all on one little sheet, one little PDF. So you have one a week for the rest of the year that you can buy one way every week to keep a customer.

Josiah: Amazing. Well, I'll link to that in the show notes, encourage people to check that out as we begin a new year. It's important to not only think about how do we improve guest experience, but actually do things, as you mentioned, do things, make change in your business. So Vance, thanks so much for taking the time to chat today.

Vince: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.