The Pressure Cooker That Is Hospitality and Its Ability to Produce Sales Diamonds

At university, I trained as an actor and have now chosen a career in sales - Clearly, I have an affinity for professions that entail a lot of rejection - But in between, I spent time working as a waiter at The Lido de Paris.

The reason that I am now reflecting upon this period of my life is that The Lido (one of the Jewels in the Parisian Cabaret Crown) has recently been acquired by The Accor Group, who have announced they would be closing the doors on its cabaret heritage and transforming the business into a playhouse for Musical theatre performances. Meaning that my friends and ex-colleagues will join a growing number of people that have been laid off.

Following conversations with several of these people who are unsure of what the next step of their career entails, a career in sales came up on numerous occasions. This led me to think about the transferable skills that I had learned during my time waiting on tables and how they have helped me throughout the tough transition into sales.?

L'Entrée (The Starter)

Working in hospitality teaches you about prioritization, swift?problem-solving, communication, humility, and how people act when they’re seriously hungry—like monsters—and how to keep a smile on your face despite that.

?It?builds your character?in a way no post-graduate degree can, in a way no C-level executive job can.

It’s about people—each and every type of person.

Working in hospitality means truly working with a team to get through a rough shift. It means interacting with customers you may never have met otherwise (throughout my time at the Lido I met & served Neymar, and would have met Johnny Depp if I hadn’t taken the day off). It’s gathering stories you would never have heard. It’s?building empathy?for people who seem rough on the surface.

In short, working in hospitality teaches you?real-life soft skills?that you will carry through your entire life. You have great experiences and you have bad ones. You’ll want to cry or have an uncontrollable desire to throw a plate at the wall mid-shift (there were times in which I was oh-so-very close). Here are a few I took away from my time sweating through a challenging weekend night shift.

Le Plat Principal (The Main Course)?

How to Prioritise (& Multi-task)

Working in the hospitality industry creates a?pressure cooker. When you’re in it, you sort of snap into motion. You intuit exactly what needs to be done, when, and in what order of importance (sometimes you get it wrong, forget a drink or to bring someone a sauce they’ve asked for & then have to deal with an unhappy customer - another valuable skill which I’ll touch on later).

I can’t really explain how you know what to do, you just do. It’s like a dance. You’re learning the moves on the fly, but you flow through it. When you come out the other side, you realise you did it.

Proactively problem-solve

Guess what happens every day at a restaurant? Problems. Whether it’s the kitchen being slow leaving hungry customers waiting, someone arriving during the show and expecting a 3-course meal (which then upsets all the customers sitting behind them because you’re blocking their view of the show), or a deeply unhappy customer (because you’ve spilled a drink on them - I never did master the art of carrying a tray of champagne flutes). Problems happen—often all at once.

An enormous life skill you learn at a restaurant is how to?solve problems on the spot. Often, you do not have the time to ask for backup or additional guidance. Instead, you need to find a solution, and quick!

Problem-solving skills will come into play no matter what career path you choose. Some problems are easier to navigate. If someone doesn’t like their food, you can offer them the chance to reorder. However, there are trickier problems.

Personally, the wait was often a trickier problem when busy and understaffed. The waitlist was a purgatorial home to some of the angriest people I’ve ever encountered (as aforementioned, hungry people have a tendency to act like monsters).

In order to squash potential problems, I always?over-communicated?the wait situation, with a smile and a little commiseration - which, while working in a foreign country, helped to drastically improve my French (when I arrived in France, I didn’t really even know what “Voulez-vous coucher avec moi?” meant, and how inappropriate it would be to say to, well anyone that you weren’t at least somewhat friendly with).?

Practice patience

That brings me to the next life skill I learned in hospitality. Patience. Classically speaking, I didn’t have much in the way of patience.

Patience occurs table-side when you have to wait for someone who claimed they were ready to order, but they are clearly still reading the entire menu.

Patience occurs when you encounter someone with?severe allergies?and you are painstakingly careful to make sure no cross-contamination occurs anywhere.

Patience happens when a toddler is running around a busy restaurant while his parents are blissfully unaware of his entire existence.?

Patience is necessary when a party of 18 walks in seven minutes before the show starts (this was a surprisingly frequent occurrence).

These are a few examples of situations that require extra care, extra work, and extra patience. This is also what separates you from a good worker and makes you a great worker.

As in Sales, when you put in the extra care and patient touch, it will often go unrecognised (internally at least). But when in the final stages of a deal, that extra effort and patience often make all the difference.

Always have empathy

Empathy is a big one. You learn a ton of empathy in hospitality. There are two kinds of empathy I think you learn—directed toward your coworkers (who become close to family) and directed towards customers.

When you’re in the middle of a busy shift with your coworkers, you might want to yell expletives at them, throw dishes at them, or just exile them from your life altogether. Once you clock out, though, it’s usually all hugs and?post-work decompression.

One of the more fascinating aspects of working in hospitality is the scope of people. On one staff, you are likely to have a diverse range of ethnicities, ages, personalities, and perspectives.

Like it or not, I learned an incredible number of life lessons from your coworkers and you truly become a team because of this.

Another target of your empathy will be customers. What might seem on the surface like a grumpy, nit-picky guy— might actually be a lonely person trying to engage in the only way he knows how—for better or worse, so you learn to read between the lines and also ask the right questions.?

… Et pour le Dessert (and for Dessert)

I guess what I’m trying to say is that, while I couldn’t wait to leave the Lido and start my career in sales, I learned a lot and developed skills that would help to ease the tough transition into sales. After all the ‘hard’ skills (learning about the product, the use cases, & identifying the ICP) can all be taught but the soft skills, which are often the differentiating factor in sales, need to be earned; and working in hospitality is a sure-fire way to do just that. So next time you’re searching for an A-player, don’t discount the candidate that has served their time in hospitality.?