The following are excerpts from a speech first delivered as
the keynote of the AMERICAN MARKETING ASSOCIATION annual meeting in New York City in 1973.
It was published the Saturday Evening Post in 1974, October issue.
James Lavenson owned a marketing and advertising company before being invited to become a
senior management executive with Sonesta International Hotels. He was given responsibility
for the company's hotel and food interests and some non hospitality businesses, including
the famous Mad Magazine and Hartman Luggage. For the last three years of that period he
was president and chief executive officer of the chain's 'flagship', the famous Plaza
Hotel in New York City.
Unprofitable in the year before his assumption of the
hotel's direction, the Plaza was profitable each year of Lavenson's tenure until it
was sold in February 1975 to Western International Hotels.
The Speech:
"Across the street from the Plaza Hotel in New York is
a movie theatre, and they were lucky enough to be one of the early ones to get to the
movie, 'Jaws' don't know if that happened in Chicago, but in New York it was a complete
sell out. I wanted to get to see it.
I bought a ticket and went in, and I couldn't find an empty
seat. As a matter of fact, the only thing I did see was one man lying prostrate across
five seats. So I went and got the usher and said, 'You get that guy to sit up so I
can sit down'. So the usher went down and rapped the man on the feet and said 'Sir, would
you mind sitting up so that this man can sit down?' And the most terrible groan came out
of this prostate — prostate? — no, prostrate figure. He just went
'Ohhhh.' And
they couldn't get him to move, he just groaned.
So finally they got the manager, and the manager came down
— shone a flashlight in the man's face and said,'Sit up. You are occupying five
seats. You only paid for one, and this man wants to sit down.' The man went,
'Ohhhhhh.' The manager leaned close to his face and said,'Sir, how did you get here?
Where did you come from?' And he said (in a hoarse voice), 'The balcony'.
Well, that explains how I got in the hotel business,
because for ten years I was a corporate director and marketing consultant for Sonesta
International Hotels, and I had my office in a little building next door to the hotel, and
I went there every day for lunch, and I often stayed overnight, and I became in ten years
a professional guest.
I'm sure those hotel men in the audience know that there is
no one who knows more about how to run a hotel than a guest. But about five years ago, I
fell out of this corporate balcony and had to put my efforts in the restaurants where my
mouth had been and into the guest rooms, and night clubs and theatre, into which I had
been putting my two cents.
In my ten years of kibitzing about the way things were run at the Plaza, the only really
technical skills that I had developed was removing that little strip of paper without
tearing it that says, 'Sanitised for your protection'. When the Plaza Hotel staff learned
that I had spent my life as a salesman; that I was not a hotel figure; that I had
never been to a hotel school — I wasn't even the son of a waiter — they went
into shock.
Paul Sonnebaum who was then president of Sonesta Hotels, didn't help their apprehensions
much when he introduced me to my staff with the following explanation:
'The Plaza has been losing money for the past five years
and we have had the best management in the business. So we have decided to try the worst'.
I don't know if you have ever heard the definition of the
kind of hotel managers there are. If you have ever observed a manager close at hand,
you will know there is one who walks through the lobby spotting cigarette butts, and the
first time doesn't see them. The second kind of manager walks through, sees the cigarette
butts and calls the porter and asks him to pick them up. And then there's the third kind
of hotel manager who walks through the lobby, sees a cigarette butt on the carpet and
picks it up.
I am the fourth kind. I walk through the lobby and I see a cigarette butt on the carpet,
and I pick it up myself, and I smoke it. Well, that was actually all I knew anything about
when I became president, and I didn't really know how to start on the job, so I just began
wandering around the hotel looking for cigarette butts.
One day early in my career there I got a little idea what I
was up against with professional staff when, in walking through the lobby, I heard
the phone ring at the bell captain's desk, and no one was answering it. So to give a
demonstration to my staff that there was no job too demeaning for me I went over and I
picked up the phone and said, 'Bell captain's desk. May I help you ?' The voice came on
the other end. 'Pass it on, Lavenson's in the Lobby.'
Now frankly I think that the hotel business is one of the
most backward in the world. It's an antique. There has been practically no change in the
attitude of room clerks at hotels since Joseph and Mary arrived at that inn in Bethlehem
and that clerk told them that he'd lost their reservation.
One of the executives in a new organization read a speech I
gave about a year after I had been at the Plaza and the speech was called, 'Think
Strawberries'. Maybe, he thought it was some magic formula for buying strawberries out of
season. Some of you may have seen it since the Saturday Evening Post reproduced it in
their October issue. And if you did read it, you know it wasn't about buying strawberries,
or even growing strawberries. The speech was about selling strawberries.
At the Plaza Hotel, 'Think Strawberries' has become the
code words for salesmanship. Actually, a team approach to what I consider to be the most
exciting profession in the world — selling But hotel salesmanship is salesmanship at
its worst. So it is with full knowledge that I was taking the risk of inducing
cardiac arrest on the hotel guests if they heard one of our staff say a shocking thing
like 'Good morning, Sir or 'Please' or 'Thank you for coming' or 'Please come back' —
I decided to try to turn the 1400 Plaza employees into genuine hosts and hostesses who,
after all, had invited guests to our house. Secretly, I knew I didn't mean hosts and
hostesses; I meant sales-people. But before the staff was able to recognise my voice over
the phone, a few calls to the various departments in the hotel showed me how far I had to
go.
'What's the difference between your $85 suite and your $125
suite?' I asked the reservationist over the telephone.
The answer — you guessed it. 'Forty dollars.'
'What's the entertainment in your Persian Room tonight?' I
asked the bell captain.
'Some singer' was his answer.
'A man, or a woman?', I wanted to know.
'I'm not sure, ' he said.
It made me wonder if I'd even be safe going there.
Why was it, I thought, that a staff of a hotel doesn't act
like a family of hosts to the guests who have been invited, after all, to stay at their
house? And it didn't take long after becoming a member of that family myself to find out
one of the basic problems. Our 1400 family members didn't even know each other. With a
large staff working over 18 floors, a thousand guest rooms, six restaurants, a nightclub,
a theatre, three levels of sub-basement including the kitchen, a carpentry shop, a
plumbing shop, an electrical shop, and a full commercial laundry, how would they ever know
all the people working there — who were the guests? — who was just a burglar
smiling his way through the hotel while he ripped us off?
I can assure you that in the beginning if he smiled and
said 'Hello', he was a crook. He certainly wasn't one of us. Even the old time Plaza
employees who might recognize a face after a couple of years would have no idea of the
name connected to that face. It struck me, that if our people who worked with each other
every day couldn't call each other by name, smile at each other's familiar face, say good
morning to each other, how on earth could they be expected to say astonishing things like
'Good morning, Mr Jones' to a guest?
A short time after my arrival there, the prestigious Plaza
staff were subjected to uncouth blasphemy. The Plaza name tag was born, and it became part
of the staffs uniform. And the first name tag appeared on my own lapel, on the lapel of
God Himself. And it's been on the lapel of every other staff member ever since. Every one
— every one, from dishwasher to general manager at the Plaza Hotel, wears his name in
large letters where every other employee, and of course, every guest, can see it.
Believe it or not, Plaza people began saying hello to each
other by name when they passed in the hall, or in the offices. At first, of course,
our regular guests at the Plaza thought we had lost our cool and we were taking some kind
of gigantic convention there. But now the guests are also able to call the bellmen, and
the maids, and the room clerks, and the manager, by name. And we began to build an
atmosphere of welcome with the most precious commodity in the world — our names
— and our guests' names.
A number of years ago I met a man named Dr Earnest Dikter.
Maybe you know him. He was the head of a thing called the Institute for Motivational
Research. And he loved to talk about service in the restaurants, and the lack of it. He
had a theory that I just think is nuts. Dikter believed that when you go into a fine
restaurant, you are hungrier for recognition than you are for food.
Now just think about that. It's true. If a maitre d' says
to me, 'I have your table ready, Mr Lavenson', I positively float over to my chair. And
after a greeting like that, the chef can burn my rare steak for all I care.
When someone calls you by name, and you don't know his or
hers, another funny thing happens. A feeling of discomfort comes over you. If he calls you
by your name twice, and you know you're not world famous, you have to find out his name.
And this phenomenon we saw happening with the Plaza staff name tags. When a guest calls a
waiter by name — because it's there to be read — the waiter wants to call the
guest by name. Hopefully it will drive the waiter nuts if he doesn't find out the guest's
name. The waiter will ask the maitre d'. And if the maitre d' doesn't know, he can see if
they know at the front desk.
Why this urgent sense of mission? What makes calling a
guest by name so important? I am now about to tell you a secret which is known only
in the hotel industry. The secret is calling a guest by name — it is a big payoff
— it is called, and you can write this down if you want, a tip.
At first there was resistance, particularly on the part of
the executive staff to wearing name tags. I was suspected of being what the old-time hotel
managers liked, being incognito when wandering around the hotel. It avoids hearing
complaints and, of course, if you don't hear complaints, there are none. Right?
Don't ever — ever — walk up to a guest and ask,
'Is everything all right?' In the first place, he may die of shock before he answers. We
only had one staff member at the Plaza, only one out of 1400, who refused to wear a name
tag. Not only was it beneath his dignity, but for 16 years he had always worn a little
rosebud in his lapel. That was his trademark, he said, and everyone knew him by it. And he
said he would resign before he would wear a name tag. His resignation was accepted along
with that of the rosebud.
And just between you and me, there were times when I
regretted wearing a name tag myself, especially on a Plaza elevator where guests can
become a little impatient. You see, the Plaza elevators were built at the same time as the
hotel, 1907, and they are hydraulic. They are not electric. And a trip on a Plaza elevator
is roughly the equivalent of a commute from Earth to the Moon.
With my name tag on my lapel, all passengers held me
personally responsible just as they do the pilot of a plane in a two hour holding pattern
over the airport.
I soon learned I couldn't hide, so I took the offensive,
and feeling like a perfect idiot I smiled at everybody and said, 'Good Morning' to
complete strangers, and this was in New York. Those guests who didn't go into shock smiled
back. One man, with whom I had ridden all the way to the 18th floor, really caught the
spirit. He answered my 'Good morning', when we got on in the lobby, with a smiling 'Good
afternoon ' when we reached the top floor.
About 500, almost a third of the staff of the Plaza, are
Hispanic. I don't know if you know what that means in Chicago. That means they speak
Spanish. That means they understand Spanish. It also means that they don't understand
English, and they don't read English. But all our communications to the employees were in
English. The employee house magazine, with all those profound management messages, and my
picture, were in English.
It seems to me that to say we had a language barrier at the
Plaza would be an understatement. Before we could talk about strawberries, we first had to
learn Spanish and put our house magazine in both English and Spanish. We started lessons
in Spanish for our supervisors, and lessons in English for the staff. It was interesting
to me to note that the staff learned English faster than our supervisors learned Spanish.
With 1400 staff members all labelled with their name tags, and understanding why in both
Spanish and English, with all of them saying 'Good
morning', and smiling at each other, we were ready to make salespeople out of them.
There was just one more obstacle we had to overcome before we suggested that they start
selling: asking for the order. They had no idea what the product was that they were
supposed to be selling. Not only didn't they know who was playing in the Persian Room and
they didn't know that the Plaza had movies, full-length feature films without commercials,
on closed circuit TV in the guest rooms. As a matter of fact, most of them didn't know
what a Plaza room looked like unless they happened to be a maid, or a bellman who checked
in guests. The reason that registration thought that $40 was the difference between the
two suites was because he had never been in one. Of product knowledge, our future
salespeople had none, and we had our work cut out for us.
Today, if you ask a Plaza bellman who is playing in the
Persian Room, he will tell you, Jack Jones. He will tell you it's Jack Jones because he
has seen Jack Jones and heard Jack Jones, because in the contract of every performer there
is a clause requiring that performer to first play to the staff in the Employees'
Cafeteria, so that all the staff can see him, hear him and meet him. The Plaza staff now
sees the star first, before the guests. And if you ask a room clerk or a telephone
operator what is on TV closed circuit movie in the guest rooms, they will tell you because
they have seen the movies on the TV sets which run the movie continuously in the Staff
Cafeteria.
Today, all the room clerks go through a week of orientation
which includes spending a night with their husband, or their wife, or (laughter) —
just like a guest. They stay in a room in the Plaza. The orientation week includes a week
of touring all the guest rooms, a meal in the restaurants, and the reservation room clerk
gets a chance to actually look out the window of the suite and see the difference between
an $85 and a $125 suite, because the $125 suite overlooks beautiful Central Park, and the
$85 suite looks up the fanny of the A-Bomb building.
The Plaza had a sales staff of three men, professionals.
They were so professional that they never left the hotel. They were good men, but they
were really sales servicemen who took orders that came over the transom. Nobody at the
Plaza ever left the palace, crossed the moat at Fifth Avenue, and went looking for
business. No one was knocking on doors. No one was asking for the order.
The Plaza, as you may know, is a dignified institution. It
was so dignified that it was considered demeaning to admit that we needed the business, no
matter how much money we were losing. And if you didn't ask us, we wouldn't ask you. So
there! We weren't ringing our doorbell or anybody else's. You had to ring ours. And this
attitude seemed to be a philosophy shared by the entire organisation, a potentially large
sales staff of waiters, room clerks, bellmen, cashiers, doormen, maids, about 600
guest-contact employees.
If you wanted a second drink in the Plaza's famous Oak Bar,
you got it with a simple technique — tripping the waiter, and then pinning him to the
floor. You had to ask him. You'd think, wouldn't you, that it would be easy to change that
pattern of Oak Room waiters. After all, they make additional tips on additional drinks.
Simple sales training. Right? Right?
I had our general manager for the Oak Room — the
maitre d' learn my new policy. It was inspirational. When the guest's glass is down to
one-third full, the waiter is to come up to the table and ask the guest if he'd like a
second drink. Complicated, but workable. Couldn't miss, I thought.
About a month after establishing this revolutionary policy
I joined the general manager in Oak Bar for a drink. I noticed at the next table there
were four men all with empty glasses. No waiter was near them. After watching for fifteen
minutes my ulcer gave out and I asked the general manager what happened to my
second-drink programme? And the manager called over the maitre d' and asked what
happened to the second-drink programme. And the maitre d' called over to the captain,
pointed out the other table and said, 'Whatever happened to Lavenson's second drink
programme?' And the captain called over the waiter, and he broke out into a wreath of
smiles as he explained that the men at the next table had already had their second drink.
If you asked for a room reservation at the Plaza it was
very simple. You were quoted the minimum rate. If you wanted a suite, you had to ask for
it. If once there you wanted to stay at the hotel an extra night, it was simple —
beg. You were never invited, and sometimes I think there's simple pact among hotel men,
it's actually a secret oath that you swear to when you graduate from hotel school, and it
goes like this:
'I promise I will never ask for the order.'
When you are faced with as old and ingrained a tradition as
that, halfway counter measures don't work. So we started a programme of all our guest
contact people, along with all of our salespeople, using a new secret oath —
everybody sells. And we meant everybody — maids, cashiers, waiters, bellmen,
assistant manager, general manager, and me — everybody!
We talked to the maids about suggesting room service, to
the doormen about suggesting our restaurants, not the one at the Pierre, to our cashiers
about suggesting return reservations to the parting guests. And we talked to the waiters
about strawberries.
Now I don't know how it is in Chicago, but in New York the
waiter at the Plaza makes anywhere from $12,000 to $20,000 a year. The difference between
those figures, of course, is tips. I spent 18 years in the advertising agency business,
and I thought I was fast computing 15 per cent. I am a moron compared to a waiter.
Our suggestion for selling strawberries fell on very
responsive ears when we described that part of our Everybody Sells Programme to the
waiters in our Oyster Bar Restaurant. We had a smart controller, and he figured out that
if — with just the same number of customers already patronising the Oyster Bar —
the waiters would ask every customer if he'd like the second drink, wine or beer,
with his meal, and then dessert — given only one out of four takers — we would
increase the Oyster Bar Restaurant sales by $364,000 a year.
The waiters were well ahead of this lecture. They had
already figured out that was $50,000 more in tips, and since there are 10 waiters in the
Oyster Bar, I, with the aid of a pocket calculator, could figure out that that meant five
grand more in tips per waiter. And it was at this point that I had my toughest decision to
make since I'd been in the job, which was whether to stay on as president, or become a
waiter in the Oyster Bar. But while the waiters appreciated this automatic raise in
theory, they were very quick to point out the negative: 'Nobody eats dessert any more, '
they said, 'everybody is on a diet. If we served our specially, the Plaza chocolate
cheesecake to everybody in the restaurant, we'd be out of business because they'd all be
dead in a week.' 'So sell them strawberries,' we said, 'but sell them!'
Then we wheeled out our answer to the gasoline shortage. It
is called a dessert cart. It has wheels. And we widened the aisles between the table so
that the waiters could wheel the cart right up to each table at dessert time without being
asked. And not daunted by the diet protestations of the average guest, the waiter goes
into raptures about the bowl of fresh strawberries on the top of the cart. There is even a
bowl of whipped cream for the slightly wicked. And by the time the waiter finishes
extolling the virtues of luscious strawberries, flown in that morning from California or
Florida — or wherever he thinks strawberries come from — you, the guest, not
only have an abdominal orgasm, but one out of two of you orders them.
We showed the waiters every week what happened with
strawberry sales. The month I left the Plaza they doubled again, and so had the sales,
incidentally, of second martinis. And believe me, when you have a customer for a second
martini, you have a sitting duck for a strawberry sale, and that is with whipped cream.
The Plaza waiters now ask for the order. They no longer stare at your waistline and say,
'You don't look like you need dessert'.
'Think Strawberries' is becoming the Plaza's sales password. The reservationist thinks
strawberries and suggests that perhaps you would like a suite overlooking Central Park
rather than a twin-bedded room. Bellmen are thinking strawberries. Each bellman has return
reservation forms with his own name imprinted on them as the addressee, and he asks you,
in checking you out and into your cab, can he make a return reservation for you?
The room service operators were thinking strawberries. They
ask you if you'd like to watch the closed circuit TV film in your room as long as you're
going to be there. No trouble, 'We put three bucks on your bill and you never notice it
compared with the price of the sandwich'. Our telephone operators think strawberries. When
you leave a wake up call, they suggest a Flying Tray Breakfast sent up to your room. 'You
want the light breakfast, no — ham and eggs; how about strawberries?'
We figured we added about 400 salesmen to the three-man
sales staff we had before. Additional salesmen, at no extra expense, didn't exactly thrill
my Board of Directors. But I will tell you what did tickle their fancy. The Plaza sales
volume my last year there went from $27 million to a nice round $30 million. And our
controller was seen giggling in his cage where we kept him, since our profits were double
the year before's.
I'll tell you what pleased me most. The Plaza sold $250,000
worth of strawberries in the last six months alone - $250,000 worth of strawberries!
We created the Order of the Strawberry Patch. It's a little
strawberry insignia worn on the employee's name tag, and any staff member, except those,
naturally, in the Sale Department, who gives the sales manager at the Plaza a lead, just a
lead, for rooms, or banquet business, gets to wear the little strawberry patch. He has
joined the sales staff. And if that lead is converted into a sale, a savings bond is given
to the person who suggested it.
Let me tell you what happened with that strawberry patch
programme. There's a captain in the Oak Room — his name is Curt, and he likes savings
bonds. He also has a wild imagination, and he imagined that if a Plaza salesman would call
on his wife's friend's daughter, who was getting married, the wedding could be booked at
the Plaza.
Obviously he was insane — the Oak Room captain's
wife's friend's daughter, who lived in Brooklyn, with a wedding at the famous Plaza. The
Plaza salesman was persuaded to call the lady in Brooklyn. At first he didn't want to go.
But he was given a powerful incentive like keeping his job. And, of course, you can guess
the result, or, can you? Would you believe a $12,000 wedding?
And that's not all. Just before I left the Plaza, Curt told
me that his wife's friend's daughter had a sister, not yet married.
I believe I mentioned there's a laundry in the Plaza.
Thirty ladies work in that laundry, three levels below the street. When they are working,
these ladies don't exactly remind you of fashion models. They wear short white socks and
sneakers, no make-up, and I suspect, although I have never been able to prove it, that
three of them chew tobacco.
You can imagine the scepticism which greeted one of those
ladies when she asked if she could earn a strawberry patch for a lead on a luncheon of her
church group. How many members? Only 500! At least 500 showed up for lunch at the Plaza
dressed to the heavens and paying cash. That laundry lady is papering her walls with
savings bonds.
An Oak Room captain, and a laundry lady, like hundreds of
other Plaza staff members, they wear the strawberry patch on their name tag.
Everybody sells, and that includes me. I made sales calls
with the Plaza salesmen, and I have only one regret. I got so worked up myself over the
strawberry programme that I was indiscriminate about whom I called on. And one day I
called on Western International Hotels, and sold them the whole place.
And lest I forget what I have been preaching. The Plaza
staff awarded me this (indicating a strawberry patch on his tee shirt), the biggest
strawberry patch of all. They told me if I wore it, I would never go hungry, and they must
have been right, because I just had a free lunch."
The above story was contributed to us by Hospitality
Management International Lecturer, Kevin Fields, who says:
"As a hospitality lecturer, it is often difficult to
get students to understand concepts and theories which may be new to them. Perhaps that is
my fault, perhaps it is theirs. What I have learnt over the years is that a suitable
anecdote often gets the message across effectively. I can usually draw upon experience
from industry to illustrate a point but the most effective anecdote I use isn't one of my
own. It is based upon an after-dinner speech entitled 'Think Strawberries'. I read about
this a few years ago and have used it ever since to demonstrate how a few techniques and
change of attitude can massively impact upon a business's efficiency and profitability.
Please read the story - I defy anyone not to learn a lesson from at least some part of
it!"
Kevin Fields (Mr) M.Soc.Sci.
Lecturer: Hospitality & Tourism Management
Birmingham College of Food, Tourism & Creative Studies
Summer Row
Birmingham B3 1JB
England
August 8, 1999 - A tribute to Mr. James Lavenson, whom we discovered
a bit too late.....
