Unreasonable Excellence

Our leadership team just read Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara, the story of how Eleven Madison Park became one of the world's best restaurants by obsessing over how guests felt.

For a firm like ours, the book is not about hospitality. It is about excellence.

A restaurant can feed your parking meter or surprise you with a free course because it controls the environment. We work out in the world, across a multitude of environments we do not control, where the gesture matters less than the standard behind it.

When most firms in our industry hear the word excellence, the instinct for people is to reach for more. More review steps. More checklists. More process. Those things have value. They help guard against failure and mediocrity, and at their best they handle the routine so attention can be spent where judgment lives. Processes like these raise the floor of performance. They help guard against failures.

But no client has ever been moved by a firm's checklist. The ceiling of performance is different. It is the version of the work a client remembers, the moment someone solved a problem the contract never anticipated. No process can produce that, because no process can notice. Only a person can.

Almost everything the EMP team did well came down to two things.

They paid attention, and they were empowered to act on what they noticed.

Someone was present enough to see the opportunity, and the restaurant had already decided to back whatever its people saw. Presence is the root, and everything good about excellence grows from it. When you are present, you catch the small details. You can tell whether what you are doing still serves the outcome, or merely serves the plan.

Here is the part I believe matters most in our industry. The best work happens when attention is directed at the client's outcome rather than at the fee remaining on the job. Being paid well matters, and it is what allows a firm to keep doing work it is proud of. But the moment a firm starts watching hours instead of outcomes, holding scope instead of solving problems, the work quietly stops being excellent. Clients feel it long before anyone admits it.

So we tell our teams to care about the client's success more than the invoice. Focus on an excellent outcome, and the reward tends to follow.

Staying present is difficult when a week is filled with one fire after another. That is why presence has to be planned. Plan the work, so your attention stays on the outcome instead of the next deliverable.

Technical skill and sound process are the price of admission in our business. They set the floor. The ceiling is the experience clients feel, and it is built by people present enough to create it.

That is what we ask of everyone at TEECOM. Protect your attention. Plan the work. Focus on the client's success.

And we hold up our end. When someone acts on what they notice, even when it costs us something, we back them. Noticing only becomes excellence when it is allowed to turn into action.

Under those conditions, excellence is the natural outcome.

David Marks, CEO