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Checking In:
Hospitality-Driven Thinking, Business, and You
by Stephen J. Cloobeck
c.2018, Greenleaf Book Group
$23.95 / $30.97 Canada, 264 pages
By Terri Schlichenmeyer
The Truth Contributor
You only want to relax.
At the end of a business trip, you just want a hotel bed
with the softest pillows. You don’t want a broken coffee
maker, hair in the sink, or malfunctioning air conditioning.
No loud sounds in the hallway at midnight. No shortage of
shampoo. Just good service and helpful staff and, as you’ll
see in Checking In by Stephen J. Cloobeck,
your customers would agree. |
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When entering a hotel, you probably wouldn’t expect to see a
doctor behind the front desk. That’s what might’ve happened,
if Stephen Cloobeck had followed his original plans: he
attended medical school before he entered into the
hospitality industry and ultimately “mastered” its
principles.
Running a hotel and running your business, he indicates, are
more similar than you think.
In any business, as you may know, the first principle is to
focus on the client (or “guest”). You can do that by
empowering your employees with what Cloobeck calls “The
Meaning of Yes,” which is to “go above and beyond… without
hesitation, reserve, or calculation.” Mesh that with
Principle Two: never stop trying to improve. You can always
find better ways to let your employees please your
customers.
This doesn’t give you a pass, though.
Become for your employees the role model you always needed,
and don’t be afraid to get your hands dirty, too. If you own
the business, “it means you’re in charge of – and
accountable for – every detail, from every department.” Keep
your eye trained on your customers, not your competition.
Pay attention to even the tiniest details. Listen to your
customers and let them teach you, then teach your staff that
“no” is often an unnecessary word. Encourage fresh ideas
from your employees. Strive to “recruit the best…
train them to be your best… motivate them so they
perform at their best.” And finally, remember that
whatever “industry you’re in, what path you go down, what
career you choose, you get what you want by giving what
others need.”
If that sounds business-intuitive, you’re not very wrong. It
sometimes helps, however, to have things like that written
down in front of you but in Checking In, there’s a
lot of other to wade through to get there.
Many great campaigns are based on storytelling and this book
is no exception: author Stephen J. Cloobeck, former CEO and
chairman of Diamond Resorts International, uses personal
experiences to illustrate how to make a business
customer-centric. That’s useful information until it begins
to read like a dry script for a resort ad, complete with
slug-lines, and the book becomes more about the hospitality
industry and less about business in general. After awhile,
that single focus feels too firmly entrenched. By then, it’s
not very easy to read, either.
If you are completely at a loss as to how to laser-point
your business toward customers, or if you want to consider a
new angle on an old idea, this might be your book. For most
businesspeople, though, Checking In may not be worth
checking out.
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