Born without a street

I'm coming up on six months in hospitality now. Before this I was in ecommerce, and before that, media. That's long enough for the new-job haze to wear off, and one thing still hasn't settled for me: how little we actually know about who walks in the door.

In media and ecommerce, knowing your customer was the floor you stood on. We built personas for every segment and argued about them in meetings, sometimes for longer than we should have. We knew who our users were, which ones were worth chasing, and which ones cost us money to acquire and never came back.

In hospitality, my honest observation so far is that we hope the right people show up at our door.

My first reaction was to call that backwards. Coming from where I came from, it felt almost careless. But the people running these places are meticulous about the food, the room, the timing and the service. So I started wondering if the gap was structural.

Some businesses were born without a street.

Ecommerce never had foot traffic. Nothing walks past a website, and nobody wanders by an article. From the first day, you have to instrument the entire thing. Where did this person come from? What did they read? Did they come back? Who are we wasting money trying to reach? You build that muscle early because demand doesn't arrive on its own.

Hospitality inherited a street. People physically walk past the window. For a very long time, the rational move was to pour everything into the plate and the room and treat the rest as weather. Discovery was free. You don't have to manufacture demand when demand strolls past at lunchtime. That's not a mistake. That's just what having a street lets you get away with.

There's another reason, and I think this one is harder to say out loud. In hospitality, asking "who is and isn't our customer?" can feel like a betrayal of the craft. The whole point is to treat everyone who walks in the same. Segmentation seems to pull in the other direction. The instinct that makes hospitality good can also stop the industry from looking too hard at who's actually coming.

I heard Bjarke, who runs a restaurant group here in Copenhagen, describe how he climbed out of that. He said he thinks of the chairs as the product. Every seat in every time slot is a unit, and getting a human into it is the job. He described a toolbox of sixteen different levers and said that, out of 550 people, twenty work on getting guests through the door. He half-jokes that he runs a tech company which happens to serve close to a million meals a year.

But the part I keep coming back to is what he doesn't do.

In his account, the floor staff treat everyone who walks in the same. They don't need to know which of the sixteen levers brought a guest in that night. The dashboards live in the back office. The data never touches the table. He kept the warmth of hospitality and put all the knowing somewhere the guest never sees it.

That separation resolved the tension for me. You can understand who you brought in and why, then give them the same welcome as everyone else once they're sitting down.

The data is already there. It's in the card taps, the covers per night, the gap between when a table books and when they arrive, the nights that fill and the nights that don't. What seems to be missing is the weekly argument about who we're pulling in, and who we're letting walk past.

The street used to have that argument for us. It doesn't anymore.