A new face and…Today, tomorrow…

A new face and…a new challenge

A new F&B director arrives in your cherished resort account and you’re understandably concerned. He doesn’t know you and scuttlebutt says he was using your competitor in his last position. So, will he give you a fair shot at keeping the business or will he just give you the boot?

It could be nothing to worry about or it might be a serious challenge. You have pretty good relationships with the steward and maybe even the GM, so there’s that. But what you really need is an offensive plan to sell that newly minted “keeper of the keys” on retaining you.

That starts with a plan to convince that person you’re worth keeping. To accomplish that you’ll need a presentation documenting pretty much everything important you’ve done in the past year (or more) to reduce their expenses, train their employees and how you’ve delivered top notch service. Importantly you’ll want to pay particular attention to the emergencies you dealt with that would have been disastrous if you hadn’t delivered what you’d promised.

Those and more evidence are found in your stash of written (and signed for) service reports that you faithfully and diligently prepared after every call for use in exactly this kind of scenario. They can provide the grist from which to develop that list of accomplishments.

Maybe even more important is that the stack of them in your hand can alone be powerful evidence of your efforts and incontrovertible proof on what you’ve delivered.

 

Next up: Help from the old regime? Or maybe never?

How about now? Yep, you could do it tomorrow, next week or whenever, but the best time for doing almost anything is now. The problem with delay and procrastination is that they’re a path to ending up with never getting around to attacking that easy (or tough) task that you’re not all that jacked up about just now anyway.

Putting off until tomorrow what we ought to do today is more than an aphorism. It’s pretty much human nature. We may not be hard wired to delay taking action, but given the almost natural reluctance to act, abetted by that bit of laziness that resides in us all, adds up to something much the same.

Maybe the secret to avoiding that trap is to be consciously aware that unconsciously we’re biased to do less versus more, later rather than sooner and to do it more slowly than faster. Those three are powerful impediments to our success.

But if in our inner voice we can remind ourselves to recognize that tendency, we have a fighting chance of overcoming those three negatives. And while they aren’t purely natural, one thing’s certain, despite what some may say, success isn’t.