Mastering hospitality

Transform your management team right in front of your eyes with Master Trainer Mark Dickinson and the basic principles of the 70 by 7 success formula

In our industry today, there is a total disconnect between owners and employees. An owner works for their dreams to come true. It is their urgent desire to attain amazing results from their investment of time, energy and passion that drives them. The ‘best employee ever’, is, and will always remain, an employee. And at that level, no matter how much commitment they show and how hard they work, they are employed. The goals of the two entities are forever on different trajectories and ‘never the two shall meet’.

Where they differ

An owner does not need an alarm clock to get them going or to keep them focused. It is innate. This is their investment. This is their baby or their empire. They grow it and build it and pour themselves into it day after day. At no point do they allow themselves to slacken off the pace. It is fuelled by a burning desire for growth and perhaps a little narcissism. No obstacle will stop them. Employees are often either in awe of the dedication and commitment of the owner or tired out by it! They have to run to keep up and have their hands full just getting things done that have been requested. And they bring with them the baggage of organizational thinking and college educations. Worse still, they may have some degrees or letters before/after their name, or a title; and that really slows things down. These two entities live in entirely different worlds.

Bridge the gap

For a business to be the thriving success that it was meant to be, there must be a bridge that connects the two sides. The role of training is critical in bridging this gap. The secret is to inspire the people who run the business to master what they do. This is very difficult. It comes back to the clash of the two cultures. Employees’ journeys involve growing a career, even if they are senior company directors. It is incredibly difficult to get the buyin, but the Holy Grail is in having highly empowered focused individuals whose sole objective is to add massive value to the business; a group that is intensively focused on what they can contribute, rather than meeting their own needs. It’s a fabulous scenario, and when it works, you get a result the likes of which are not commonly found.

The formula: 70 by 7

Creating intense personal growth opportunities within the organization can be the powerful and effective force required for change. A very special formula can deliver this within an organization with powerful results. This formula has multiple ingredients:

Secret sauce

Up front, the personal commitment and dedication of each person is tested and refined through intensive, immersive training experiences. The objective is to get the team to aspire to be with the best in class and learn from the world’s best, modeling what the greats are doing or have already done.

The perfect meeting

Next, the team is guided into developing a perfect meeting scenario. This is where high energy interaction plays a massive role and individuals begin to meld into a harmonious group of like-minded team members. Research suggests that the most powerful group dynamics can be generated with a team of between six and 12 people (Parkinson’s Law by C Parkinson), and so we chose seven. This is a superb number with so many connotations and meanings. One of the greatest attributes is that seven provides sufficient number of members to engender good discussion, and yet ensures that every decision will always have a majority. The perfect meeting also

has a special time segment assigned, 70 minutes. There is a blueprint for the meeting that effectively dictates the activities that transpire during the allotted time, stating what must be done during each of the seventy minutes.

Seven

Seven is not a gimmick and is far more than just a theme. There are seven team members, there are seven topics that are discussed, one per week for seven weeks, and there are 70 minutes allocated. The cycle is repeated seven times per year.

The topics are carefully selected to give team members the opportunity to focus their entire abilities on one topic per week. Over the seven weeks they will cover every aspect of their business. This creates an absorbing and challenging business activity that develops strength at the core because by its nature, it drives each team member to go out and find out about every part of the business they are in. The key is Business Mastery. We are not here to dabble. We are not here to pander to ego. We are solidly devoted to mastering our business and knowing everything there is to know about it. Having understood our business, then to constantly and neverendingly improve it.

The meetings follow a cyclical plan

The business needs a map. You have to know where you are going. Appropriately, in the first week of each seven-week cycle, the meeting is focused on the business’s map. Where are you going?

Product

Here, the group focuses on product, services and delivery. What is it that we actually sell? How do we provide it and how do our customers get it?

Marketing

Massive marketing is all about being a fire-starter. Ask questions that change the way things are done. It looks at internal and external customers and asks what we do for the general public too. We ask, “What could we do for our customers?” and “What would be our best offer ever for our customers?” We look at the origins of our customers and pose the question, “What would business be like if we were to have every customer we have ever had?” and “What would our business be like if every single person were engaged in marketing?”

Numbers

Here we learn to love numbers; to feed on them and to thrive from knowing what they really say. We encourage understanding of the balance sheet, cash flow and P&L (profit and loss). We explain how they are tied together and spark some interesting thoughts on how to grow the bottom line in a short time.

People

Employees always talk about people being the capital of the company. And so they are. In this session, we look at people from multiple angles. We talk about our most valuable asset: personnel. We encourage an honest reflection of the weak links and identify new choices that could instantly revive the business.

Processes

Evaluating how or why we do something the way that we do has never been so thrilling. Value chain management is a detailed and in-depth look at our key processes. We evaluate the sequence of events in each activity and seek to discover how many handovers and receipts of information there are in any given process. The fun then is to see by how much we can reduce the number of processes involved and still get the job done to the same standard, maybe even better.

Customers

We say that we live for our customers. The truth is, customers are frequently very far from the center of an organization’s lifestyle. In 70 by 7 it is paramount that the customer is enshrined in the center of our thinking. The reason that customers are the 7th topic is so that we will have adequately prepared the groundwork for the work we do to encourage and enhance greater levels of customer service. We ask two important questions: How do we keep the customers we have? How do we get more customers?

The outcome

You may say, well that all sounds good, but does it really work? After all, we are actually busy working and we have a lot to get done. True. Why should we waste a precious hour and 10 minutes every single week doing this?

The beauty of 70 by 7 is that each member of the group will take the leadership for one week’s event, each cycle, so by the end of the year, every team member has hosted the meeting, leading on each of the seven topics. The shift that takes place is imperceptible at first. Team members start by dragging their feet and nagging about the demands of this process.

The growth, unity and intensity of intelligent ideas that burst forth from this immersive style of training are immense. Businesses that employ this process are transformed. We implemented this process in the number one hotel in Asia - Shinta Mani Hotel – with mind-blowing results. An organization that is willing to be the best is willing to invest to get there. The outcomes far outweigh the challenge of instilling the process.

When 70 by 7 is fully implemented, believed in and invested in, people work less on doing unimportant things and dedicate their time and their minds to doing powerful and important productive business that leads to organizations expanding and multiplying.

For a business to be the thriving success that it was meant to be, there must be a bridge that connects the two sides. The role of training is critical in bridging this gap.