Your Customers Come Second

Every cafe says the customer comes first. The most successful restaurateur of his generation built an empire by putting them second.

Danny Meyer opened Union Square Cafe in New York when he was 27. It went on to be voted the city's most popular restaurant in the Zagat survey again and again. He turned a hot dog cart in a park into Shake Shack. His restaurant group has outlasted four recessions in an industry where most places do not survive five years.

When he finally wrote down how he did it, in a book called Setting the Table, the core idea had almost nothing to do with food. It was a priority list. And customers were not at the top of it.

His order: employees first. Then guests. Then the community. Then suppliers. Then investors.

Most owners read that and flinch. Put staff ahead of the people paying the bills? But walk through the logic and it stops sounding radical and starts sounding like the only order that works.

Service Is Not Hospitality

Meyer draws a line most of us have never drawn. Service is the technical delivery of your product. The order is right, the coffee is hot, the wait is short. Service is a checklist.

Hospitality is how the delivery made the person feel.

Two cafes can pour an identical flat white. Same beans, same recipe, same 40-second pour. In one, the person at the machine catches your eye, remembers you had a job interview last week and asks how it went. In the other, you get your coffee from someone who never looks up.

The product was identical. The experience was not even close. That gap is hospitality, and it is the only part of your offer a competitor cannot copy by buying the same machine and the same beans.

Here is the uncomfortable part. You can train service. You cannot train hospitality into someone at a Tuesday staff meeting. It either walks in the door with the person you hire, or it does not.

Employees First. Customers Second.

This is why Meyer's priority list starts where it starts.

Hospitality cannot be mandated. You can force a script. You cannot force warmth. The person on your counter at 6am will treat customers roughly the way they were treated at 5:45am, and the way the roster treated them on Friday night.

Your customer's experience will never consistently exceed your team's experience. It can spike above it for a shift. It cannot live above it.

Meyer calls the full sequence a virtuous cycle. Look after the team and they look after the guests. Looked-after guests come back and talk, which looks after the community standing of the business. A thriving business pays suppliers properly and on time. And at the end of the chain, investors do better than they would have done anywhere else. Putting investors last made his investors rich.

The order is not sentiment. It is sequencing. Each group in the list is what generates the returns for the next one.

And notice what the order quietly predicts. The cafes with the lowest staff turnover in your suburb are almost always the ones with the longest queues. That is not a coincidence and it is not luck. The regulars are not just coming back for the coffee. They are coming back to see people who still want to be there.

Hiring the 51 Per Cent

Meyer puts a number on it. Every great hire is 49 per cent technical and 51 per cent emotional. He calls the people who carry that second half 51 percenters.

The 49 per cent is everything you can teach. Dialling in a grinder. Texturing milk. Running the till, plating a dish, opening wine.

The 51 per cent is what you cannot teach. Meyer names the traits: kind optimism. Curiosity. Work ethic. Empathy. Self-awareness. Integrity.

Now look at the last cafe job ad you wrote. Odds are it asked for two years of experience and latte art, which is a 49 per cent ad. It filters for the half you could have taught in a month and says nothing about the half you cannot teach at all.

Given the choice, Meyer takes the warm, curious person with no experience over the technically brilliant one who treats customers like an interruption. Every time. You can teach milk. You cannot teach caring that a stranger's morning started badly.

One more Meyer idea earns its place here: the road to success is paved with mistakes well handled. The wrong order, the forgotten booking, the spilled tray. Handled with genuine care, the recovery is remembered longer than the mistake. A 51 percenter writes a great last chapter without being told to. That is the trait doing its work, and it is why the first 100 days of every customer relationship survives its first wobble. We wrote about that side of it in The First 100 Days.

What To Do This Week

One exercise, two parts. It costs nothing.

First, rewrite your next job ad before you need it. Lead with the five traits you actually want on your counter. Put the teachable skills at the bottom, where they belong. You will get fewer applicants and better hires.

Second, run the priority list on yourself for one week. Every day, do one deliberate act of hospitality for your own team before you open. Cover the close so someone gets to their kid's assembly. Fix the wobbly mat everyone trips on. Make the first coffee of the day for the person who usually makes yours.

Then stand back and watch what walks out to the counter. Hospitality rolls downhill. You are the top of the hill.

Inspired by Setting the Table by Danny Meyer. If this hit home, the book goes deeper.

Keep reading: Nobody Remembers Good Service · Your Team Isn't the Problem. You Are.

If you want a roaster who thinks about your business the way we write about it, let's talk.