inside track

Guy Rigby, of Vancouver’s Four Seasons Hotel, explains his first rule of success: If you want happy customers, start with your employees.

Guy Rigby’s path to becoming general manager of the Four Seasons Hotel Vancouver wound around the globe. A native of England, he knew by the time he finished hotel school that he wanted to focus on the luxury segment of the business. After a stint with the Ritz Hotel in London and a country house property in Sussex, he came to the U.S. and eventually joined the Four Seasons Company in 1990, climbing the management ladder through food and beverage to general management: first in Houston, then Tokyo, Hong Kong, Toronto, Bangkok, New York and, finally, Vancouver. That’s where Executive Travel found him, as we enquired about what it’s like to manage a five-star hotel.

How does your typical day start?

A typical day has some structure, and then it has no structure at all. A typical day would always start around 7:30 when I’m walking through the hotel, talking to the concierge, the front desk, the restaurant and banquet house staff and maybe catching the night cleaning crew. So, it’s really a process of bopping around to greet everyone in the morning. We’ll start the morning meeting at 8:30, and that’s a very important meeting for any hotel. You review any activity from the previous day, and then discuss all the activity for that day. Who’s coming in, who to pay special attention to, which functions are coming in, our occupancy — that [meeting] will usually be [30] to 45 minutes. From then on, it’s whatever comes up. I have meetings structured throughout the week, but every day is different.

And your afternoon and evening?

At lunchtime, I’m circulating around the hotel to visit as guests have lunch. I’ll pop into the kitchen, the storeroom. It’s the same for the afternoon, with lots of meetings. In the evening, I’ll be walking through the bar and the restaurant. So, there’s a lot of meeting and a lot of walking around.

Do you have any interaction with guests?

If there are any guests I have said I want to meet, the front desk will call me, either as they’re arriving or as they’re leaving. I will interrupt things and go down and meet them.

Do you live in the hotel?

In this [location], I do, and that doesn’t bother me. People ask, “Don’t people disturb you after hours?” The answer is no. I’m very happy to delegate responsibility to the great managers that we have.

At what time might a typical day end?

I have to walk my dog: At about 7:30 or 8, he’s beginning to cross his legs! So, quite a lot of the time I will give him a quick walk and go back downstairs. I have two very young kids, and I don’t want to ask my wife to walk the dog with them. It’s something I enjoy, a chance to stretch my legs. Frequently, I’ll go back to the office or I’ll work from home, catch up on email.

What is surprising about what happens behind the scenes at your hotel?

I think probably the amount of opportunity that we have to affect the lives of people. That’s one of the reasons I enjoy the job so much. We’re in a hotel, and our jobs are to make people happy. I can only do that by ensuring that I have a happy staff. Our sole focus is happy staff, happy guest. If you walk the talk, it means you’re in the trenches with a lot of the employees a lot of the time. I think a lot of people view running the business of a hotel as focused on the bottom line. As a company, our focus is to be sure our employees are happy, and then our guests will be happy. And if our guests are happy, then they’ll spend a lot of money in our hotels. Our chairman, Isadore Sharp, said in a speech once, “You can’t win at tennis by watching the scoreboard.” I’ve always held that dear to my heart.

How do you get employees in all areas — from housekeeping to management — to think customer service?

It starts with the hiring process. People go through four, sometimes five, interviews to get into our hotel. We have an interviewing system [that is] called behavioral basis interviewing. We look at their behavior, not where they worked last — we try and figure out what’s in people’s heads. We put them through a very thorough training program. Once they’re trained, we make sure the way we treat them makes them want to come to work every day. It’s making sure everyone gets focused on the same goal, making sure they’re accountable. When we talk to our line employees, they get irritated when there’s poor performance that’s not corrected by their manager. It’s my job to be sure there is accountability and that if there are people who are not pulling their weight, that we address that. If all the employees find it’s OK to try hard, then they will. With our organization, it is cool to try hard, to go the extra mile. And if something goes wrong, we empower our people to fix it by themselves.

You really lead quite the life.

If someone would have said to me early on when I was looking for a career,
“You can travel around the world, get well paid to do it, be treated well by the organization you’re working for, and your job is to make people happy — not only the people you work with, but the people you work for,” then I would have said,
“Well, that’s great.”

______________________________________________________

From the manager’s mailbox

Ginger with that chocolate on your pillow?

Recently, when a housekeeper entered a guest’s room to turn it down, the guest indicated that he had a very bad cold and had lost his voice. She offered to call down to room service to order dinner for him. She also said, “I can book a wake-up call for you tomorrow morning, too. Are you leaving?” Then she went downstairs, sliced up some ginger for him, brought it back with some hot water and mixed it up for his sore throat. The happy guest wrote a glowing letter.

Four Seasons Vancouver fun facts

Pounds of lobster served each year: 1,813
Sides of salmon smoked every year in-house: 1,200
Annual number of complimentary shoe shines: 1,825
Employees’ cumulative years of Four Seasons service: 5,706
Amount of recyclables diverted from landfill last year: 3,450 cubic yards of material — the equivalent of 1,725 full-size pickup truckloads; up 150 truckloads from 2005 and 870 from 2004.