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| First Person |
Soul Food
Danny Meyer (as told to Constance Gustke)
08/02/2004
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To emphasize this, we identify employees who
already hold these values. If our way of doing business does not excite them,
they would be wasting their time working for me. Much of the work we do in the
community involves our staff, so we demand more than other restaurants. For
example, a member of our team generated the idea of serving food weekly at the
hospice at Beth Israel Hospital. Our philosophy focuses on caring about
people—food is just the vehicle to do that—so we hire naturally empathetic
people; they care about what is on your mind. My strategy is simple: how many
wonderful employees can I assemble who want to work hard in a collaborative way
with one another?
My motivators are excellence, consistency, hospitality and
soul. It takes time to develop soul. I am not interested in cookie-cutter
businesses, so I have not expanded quickly. A business is truly a dialog between
those offering the business and those using it. Over time, this dialog entails
feedback and listening. In the old days of business, the maxim was: “The
customer is always right.” For example, soon after I opened my first restaurant,
the Union Square Café, 19 years ago, I knew we needed comment cards. We needed
to dig deeply and collect information that I could act on.
My grandfather
gave me great advice when I opened the Union Square Café. He said, “You’ll get a
lot of awful things said about you, and a lot of great things said about you. I
wouldn’t heed any of them.” To this day, I do not set yearly goals; I would
rather continue working on being an excellent father, partner and leader. I feel
I have to do a decent job of shining the flashlight ahead for people, so they
can see where to go. I have to do a good job of shining the flashlight on me,
too, and making sure I embody those values. I want to be able to hold the
employees’ hands all the time to make sure they know I am on their side.
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