Latest / The Inspired Stories Podcast / From $500 and a Firing to Running the World's Top Butler School, with Steven Ferry

Transcript

From $500 and a Firing to Running the World's Top Butler School, with Steven Ferry · The Inspired Stories Podcast

0:04
Welcome to another edition of the Inspired Stories podcast,
0:08
where leaders share their experiences so we can learn from
0:11
their successes and be inspired by how they've overcome
0:14
adversity. My name is Anthony Kotaspodi and
0:17
today's guest is Steven Ferry, Chairman of the International
0:20
Institute of Modern Butlers in Inverness, FL.
0:24
The Institute teaches 5 star service skills to private homes,
0:28
hotels and luxury resorts. Its mission is simple, raise
0:32
professional standards and create unforgettable service
0:36
moments for every guest. Students learn mindset,
0:39
etiquette and hands on technique through on site and online
0:44
training, consulting, books and lectures.
0:48
Industry peers often call the school the Ivy League of Butler
0:51
Education. Stevens work has shaped that
0:55
reputation. He has authored a series of
0:57
books on the profession, most recently Hospitality Butlers and
1:01
the two volume Serving the Wealthy.
1:04
His more than 50 published articles like The Future
1:07
Hospitality Professional have guided readers across the globe.
1:12
Over the past quarter century. He has trained 10s of thousands
1:15
of individuals and teens around the world, earning glowing
1:18
recommendations in the process. Now before we get into all that
1:22
good stuff, today's episode is brought to you by my company,
1:26
Add Back Benefits Agency. Listen, if you run a business,
1:30
you are likely stuck in the cycle of rising insurance
1:33
premiums. You're paying more, but your
1:35
team is getting less, and many people can't afford coverage at
1:39
all. We do things differently.
1:41
We offer a solution that provides your hospitality
1:44
employees with unlimited access to doctors, therapists, and
1:48
prescriptions. That's always free for them to
1:50
use. But here's where you really need
1:53
to pay attention. See, unlike every other employee
1:56
benefit out there, our program leverages different insurance
1:59
frameworks to put more money into your company's bank
2:02
account. As an example, we recently
2:05
helped the client increase net profits by $900 per employee per
2:09
year. Results vary, but the
2:11
consultation is free. See if you qualify today at AD
2:15
back benefits.com. All right, back to our guest
2:17
today, the Chairman of International Institute of
2:20
Modern Butlers, Steven Ferry. Thanks for making the time to
2:23
Share your story today. Thank you, Anthony, and thank
2:26
you for that glowing intro. My pleasure.
2:30
So, Steven, where did the idea to start the International
2:33
Institute of Modern Butlers come from?
2:36
Well, you know, the world of the Butler has been going on for
2:38
1000 years and in that time we have failed to come together to
2:44
set standards. If you compare us to the
2:48
concierge, they've been going for what, 160 years or so?
2:52
They've they're very well organized and we do not have an
2:56
organization until very recently of Butlers or Butler trainers
3:01
and we have no set standards. So we didn't.
3:06
And so it was suggested by Verna Loiter to a colleague out of
3:09
Naples in Florida in 2004 that we set up an organization to set
3:17
and raise standards in a sort of a panda determined way for the
3:23
profession. So let's take a step back.
3:28
Everyone listening will notice hints of an accent.
3:31
Where are you originally from? Guilty as charged to England.
3:36
What part? Sorry and usually when I say
3:39
sorry they repeat their question because they thought I said
3:42
sorry and. What part of the country is
3:45
that? It's this, it's southwest of
3:49
London. It's the sort of the the
3:51
commuter belt for London itself central.
3:55
OK, so I don't know if this is accurate, but myself and
3:59
probably lots of other people, when they think of butlers, they
4:02
probably think of Downton Abbey and you know, like the the
4:05
English tradition behind it. So is that some influence,
4:10
having been born and raised there, where this interest in
4:14
modern butlery has come from for you?
4:20
I would say so. An actual fact how it started
4:22
was my wife in 1986 or five was asked to help man the personnel
4:32
for a private yacht and I was involved in something completely
4:37
different then. I was actually working in a non
4:39
profit and her job was to make sure the service provided was
4:43
top notch. In her work she found out about
4:48
about the school in London, England and when she came back
4:52
from that successful project she told me about it and I thought,
4:56
you know, that's something I could do.
4:57
I might be quite good at it, but I'm busy doing something else at
5:01
the moment. And that's all I thought about
5:04
at the time. But it was something that I
5:06
naturally fell into. I never had a Butler myself and
5:12
I couldn't have afforded 1 and I didn't know of any butlers, but
5:17
it would. It very much struck me that the
5:20
British Butler had something going for him in terms of his
5:24
ability to provide service to people.
5:30
So what does the modern Butler do?
5:34
What does this look like? Like, the only image that I've
5:36
got in my head is sort of like old tiny England, you know, with
5:41
when you've got royalty and they don't know how to dress
5:43
themselves. And so they've got to have
5:45
somebody lay out their clothes and button up their gear for
5:47
them. Is is that what it looks like in
5:50
present day? I would say so, but we've sort
5:53
of advanced quite a lot beyond just that.
5:56
But you still have those exact same functions being done that
6:00
that particular job in terms of the helping the boss dress is
6:04
actually the work of a valet. Not the valet in in America who
6:09
parks cars, but the person who addresses the boss like a ladies
6:14
maid does for the for the ladies.
6:16
And so you still have that function being done sometimes
6:20
being pinch headed or double hatted by the Butler.
6:25
But the Butler generally today he's, he's running the whole
6:30
estate and has for like 150 years, something like that.
6:35
And that would be managing the staff of all the estate.
6:37
But it really depends upon what does the boss need and want.
6:42
If he's got a huge estate, the Butler will run it inside and
6:45
out. He might run multiple estates.
6:49
One time I was offered the position of a Butler responsible
6:54
for running 26 estates, mainly in California, each one of which
6:59
was probably 30,000 square feet and 10 acres on average.
7:05
And and this is 1 individual who owns all these properties.
7:09
Or is this like a company conglomerate that has them for
7:14
entertainment purposes? I'm trying to better understand
7:16
the profile of the typical client.
7:20
Well, this particular client was obviously a private one.
7:23
You've got two base 2 main areas of employment for Butlers. 1 is
7:27
private service, which is working in palaces or private
7:32
estates and the other is the hotel Butler.
7:36
They're related that 50% of what they do.
7:39
Mostly the people skills are the same pretty well, but the actual
7:44
functions that you perform are the difference between being the
7:47
CEO of a company and being, let's say, a personal assistant,
7:53
a private assistant for somebody in a hotel.
7:57
So the the profile that was working for somebody who had,
8:01
I'll tell you the background on this person.
8:03
I can't say who it was, but she married into a lot of money and
8:08
she was an interior designer before she married.
8:11
So her whole game was purchasing estates and interior designing
8:15
them. And in in addition to those 26
8:17
estates and goodness knows how many there are now, she had huge
8:21
warehouses with furniture ready for the next estate.
8:27
And in fact, when I went, we went out to lunch once.
8:30
On the way to lunch we passed an antique furniture store and she
8:35
couldn't help but go in and get $20,000 worth of furniture.
8:40
Didn't have as one does. Yeah, as one does, obviously.
8:44
Anyway, it's very interesting, very exciting.
8:46
There's so many different types of people, each with their own
8:49
peccadilloes and interests, so it's never a boring job.
8:54
So it strikes me that this profession has been around, I
8:57
think you said, you know, 1000 years and there was never like a
9:01
central institute until recently that sort of was managing the
9:06
standards. How do you think that oversight
9:09
existed for so long? Well, I think simply because it
9:12
wasn't needed until until in the last 50 years, up to the last 50
9:21
years the the apprenticeship system was in place.
9:25
So you'd have a Butler who would then have someone come in as the
9:29
hall boy. The hall boy looked after the
9:31
Butler. He was the Butler's Butler and
9:35
he was promoted to 3rd footman and then the second footman and
9:38
the first footman. The footman were the people who
9:40
served at banquets and also hung on or walked in front or behind
9:45
the coaches as they went along the roads and then became under
9:50
Butler and finally he was the Butler.
9:52
So there was this apprenticeship system.
9:53
So we always had standards being up kept, but as soon as you got
9:59
people who were not so wealthy or not so structured, then you
10:08
have people becoming butlers who weren't really butlers.
10:11
And so then when it started moving into hotels, then the the
10:19
problem began. So that you don't.
10:22
You have people saying I'm a Butler and they don't know what
10:25
a Butler is. They hadn't gone through that
10:27
apprenticeship hierarchy. Exactly.
10:29
Then you had to help start having schools and I went to the
10:32
first Butler school in London actually run by survivor Spencer
10:38
and that was like 85. That was the first Butler school
10:44
and he actually gave a fairly good education.
10:46
I mean, it was the only one that existed actually, if he wanted
10:49
to bypass the, the apprenticeship route and it, it
10:55
was good and it was bad. What was good about it was you
10:58
could have people who weren't necessarily.
11:00
I'm going to talk about class now.
11:02
In England, classes used to be quite a thing.
11:05
Most butlers came from the lower classes which meant they weren't
11:08
that well educated. But when you start opening it up
11:13
to people who are switching mid mid career from let's say an
11:23
accountant or a hotel general manager or something like that
11:28
to being a Butler, you start to have people who are a bit more
11:31
well read, a bit more intelligent on the whole.
11:35
And I'm totally generalizing here.
11:38
And that's where you could start expanding the scope of what a
11:42
Butler could do. The I've, we also do a small
11:48
amount of placement. We try not to because it's a
11:50
pain in the, you know what? But the, the job, and this was
11:55
like 20 years ago, the highest paid job that we had to find
12:00
someone for was $450,000 a year for a Butler.
12:05
But why? It was because he was required
12:08
to manage the portfolio of the boss.
12:11
So, you know, he came with extra qualifications.
12:15
I was offered 350,000 and that was 20 years ago to be to manage
12:20
these 26 estates. So and I come myself from, you
12:25
know, I was actually a teacher most of the time before becoming
12:29
a Butler. So you you are able to up the
12:34
quality of the services and the range of services that Butlers
12:37
could offer to employers. So in those situations, talking
12:43
about 20 years ago, being offered $350,000 to manage 26
12:47
estates. I I'm completely green to this
12:51
industry. So correct me here where I'm
12:53
misspeaking, but it doesn't sound to me like that's a
12:55
traditional Butler job. Like I think you just made the
12:59
comment that's more of like AI don't know like ACEO or a COO.
13:03
Yeah, exactly. We actually call him CEO Home
13:08
Inc. That was my word for it, that
13:11
that would be the sort of post title.
13:13
But you are an estates manager, estate manager, or in my case it
13:16
would have been estates plural manager, and you have to have
13:20
managerial skills, yeah. So are you also doing some of
13:29
the traditional Butler services that you know, we think about we
13:33
see on TV or you're too, you're too busy running 26 estates and
13:38
the Staffs that go with them to sort of do some of those more
13:41
traditional things, I would guess?
13:43
Exactly the range of services that a Butler can offer is very,
13:46
very wide. And that which is why I say when
13:48
people say how long does it take to become a Butler, I said it's
13:51
a lifelong. I usually say it's a lifelong
13:54
learning experience. I mean, one of the just one of
13:57
the things that you need to have, you may need to have under
13:59
your belt is everything that a sommelier does and knows.
14:05
You have to have the whole wine, the whole wine industry and
14:08
everything about it under your thumb.
14:12
And you couldn't possibly do everything for a boss.
14:15
So it really depends on what does your boss want you to do
14:17
and that's what you focus on. And if you need to bring in
14:20
people under you, for instance, as a, as a Butler running the
14:23
whole estate, I could bring in under Butler or even other
14:26
butlers to, to provide them more hands on or guest facing
14:35
experiences. So I mean, in one job as a
14:39
Butler, I was cooking, I was serving, I was running the
14:43
estate. It wasn't a very big one, but
14:46
there were two, two lovely buildings in different
14:49
locations. Driving, shopping, serving at
14:55
table. Those are things that I could
14:57
manage in one job, but if I'd also had to run a bunch of other
15:02
estates it would have been a bit rough.
15:05
So tell us, what year was the institute founded?
15:08
2004. 2004 and when did you see this transition take place where
15:14
Butler started to become a thing in hotels as well?
15:17
Actually, it's a funny story because it goes back to India
15:23
where the there's two luxury chains there.
15:27
One is the Taj and the other is the Oberoi.
15:30
And the owner of the Oberoi Hotel was losing market share to
15:35
the Taj. And this was in the 80s.
15:41
And so he thought, you know what, because most of the Oberoi
15:44
hotels are old palaces. And he of course, himself lived
15:48
in an old palace and he had butlers there.
15:50
So he said, you know what, let's try putting butlers in hotels.
15:56
And that's what he did. And his market share started
15:58
climbing again. And he didn't particularly let
16:02
on about that. But when the Lainsborough in
16:06
London in the early 90s found out about it, they, they said,
16:10
well, let's you know, butlers are British.
16:12
Let's put the British twist on this and have butlers too.
16:15
And that was very successful too.
16:17
And then the head Butler at the Lanesborough, he then started,
16:24
he then said he then went and trained all the other lanes, all
16:27
the other Rosewoods, because it was a Rosewood property at the
16:30
time Lanesborough and gave them Butler service.
16:34
And then he thought hell with this, I will start my own
16:36
company. And he did that for a bit and it
16:40
was mostly across the pond. And then around 2004 or a bit
16:48
earlier, actually 2002, we got pulled into training.
16:54
And this was before we started the institute, the Butlers at a
16:58
hotel just out or just outside DC and we trained the butlers
17:03
there. And that was one of the first to
17:05
have Butler service in America. And it's just taken off from
17:09
there. And in fact, we were working in
17:11
private service, but as soon as the hotels started to pick up on
17:17
this, most of our work started to switch to the hotel side.
17:24
Help paint a picture for me. What does Butler service in a
17:27
hotel look like? So I go to check into this fancy
17:30
hotel. My being assigned a personal
17:32
Butler. Is a Butler sort of like in
17:35
charge of a wing of rooms? How does this work?
17:39
Totally depends on the hotel and their investment.
17:42
I went to the the main hotel, Rosewood Hotel in Dallas I think
17:49
it is, and I did an assessment for them and what would it take
17:53
to do Butler service and in order to have shifts in order to
17:57
have people covering people being sick and time off.
18:00
Even though they're what, 8080 keys?
18:05
I don't know if that's the exact number.
18:06
I'm a bit rusty on it. It would take something like 100
18:10
butlers and there was no way they could make it work if you
18:15
had one Butler per per guest. And in that particular property,
18:19
it didn't make sense because the suites weren't that big.
18:24
Beautiful, but not that big. So what has happened is people
18:32
then sign on as a sort of a marketing gimmick and they say,
18:36
yeah, we got Butler service. And what does it involve?
18:39
Actually just renaming the pool attendant a Butler, for
18:43
instance. I mean, that's the very worst.
18:44
They're not butlers at all. Or it could be 1 Butler for the
18:49
whole hotel and he all he has time to do is almost nothing.
18:53
And so in order to address this particular issue, what we did,
18:57
what I did probably around 2008 is I created a Butler rating
19:02
system for hotels. And it goes from the no Butler,
19:06
which is the pool guy renamed all the way up to 5 Butler,
19:11
which is where you have your own dedicated Butler for your villa
19:14
or your suite. And that's obviously ideal
19:17
because the list of things that you can do, services you can
19:21
provide for for the guest is much greater and almost
19:27
approximates of a private service Butler.
19:30
In fact, it does. If the boss wants you to go and
19:33
play tennis with him and lose, just then you can afford to do
19:40
that. I love that.
19:45
So, OK, tell us more about the specific services that you guys
19:52
offer because as we called out in the intro, you're often
19:55
referred to as the Ivy League of butlers.
19:59
So I want to understand more specifically what you guys are
20:02
doing. What sets you apart?
20:04
OK. Well, that's a big question.
20:08
First of all, the services that we offer, we've over the years
20:11
we've narrowed it down to what we're interested in doing and
20:14
what isn't a pain in the derriere.
20:17
So we've, we've jettisoned anything to do with corporate,
20:22
corporate entities, especially where they're into DEI, which
20:29
automatically means that we, you know, we can bid and we never
20:33
get accepted. And that's happened a lot in the
20:35
past or where they got huge amount of paperwork, which is
20:40
also why we don't do government contracts.
20:44
We focus just on clients who want their staff trained because
20:50
then we don't have to bother with trying to bring students in
20:54
like we're running a bricks and mortar school.
20:59
And we could just focus on the training aspect of it, which we
21:03
do online certainly since the lockdowns, but we also mainly do
21:10
on site, which is why we try to do so much travel On site's
21:16
definitely better, but we also provide the books.
21:20
We provide online courses for people who want to take
21:22
themselves through a course in private service.
21:29
We sometimes help them with placement, but otherwise they
21:32
they're doing it on their own and they'll find a job they
21:34
usually do in private service. Why are we considered?
21:40
I mean, it's very flattering for people to say we are the
21:47
whatever it was you said. The Ivy League of butlers.
21:50
Thank you. The Ivy League, I'm not sure
21:52
that's so good anymore. How so?
21:56
The Ivy, well, the Ivy League colleges are, or universities
22:00
are going through a bit of a rough time, I think.
22:06
But anyway, I'm, I'm, I'm flattered.
22:09
In fact, I've even spoken at an Ivy League university.
22:14
I'm flattered by it, but I think the only reason we have that
22:19
isn't because we offer a wide range of services, but it's the
22:22
quality of what we we offer and the results we get.
22:29
We we focus on particularly we do all the dog and pony show
22:33
like how do you lay a table and so on.
22:35
But what we focus on is the most important is the soft skills,
22:38
the people skills, because that, when it comes to it, is the main
22:45
issue that bosses have. If a person is ethical and
22:51
fairly intelligent, it's not that hard to pick up on the
22:53
skill sets required. And they wouldn't apply for a
22:56
job where they didn't have the skill sets or where they
22:58
couldn't pick them up rather quickly.
23:02
But it's really the, I don't know if you know the expression,
23:06
I guess. Smells like a fish after three
23:08
days. No.
23:12
That doesn't necessarily apply in the hospitality industry, but
23:15
it's if you've got someone staying at your own house,
23:19
you're happy to have them there. You're very excited the first
23:21
day, the second day everything's good.
23:23
The third day you're starting to, it's starting to niggle you
23:26
a bit maybe. Or when are they leaving?
23:30
And very familiar. OK.
23:32
So is there maybe an example of one of these soft skills, the
23:36
people skills that you teach to your butlers that would be
23:40
helpful for our audience to hear just in, you know, ways to
23:45
conduct themselves better to create better relationships?
23:50
Wow, well, I mean, there's so many tools to use.
23:54
I'll give you a very simple one, but then after that I'd like to
23:57
give you 1, which I think is the most important.
24:00
A simple one is acknowledgement. Usually people don't
24:07
acknowledge, they just assume that the person heard them.
24:12
But that's actually a very bad communication practice,
24:15
especially when you're face to face.
24:18
What you did just then was very good.
24:20
I, I said acknowledgement is important and you gave a very
24:24
slight head nod, so I know you got it.
24:27
So you've got it in the bag. But so many interviewers, they,
24:32
they ask the interviewee a question and the interviewee
24:36
answers and there's no acknowledgement at all.
24:39
The interviewer simply goes on to the next question.
24:42
And if you do that forever or if you do that throughout, you
24:46
wonder if the person heard, you wonder if the person got it.
24:49
You wonder if the person cared. And it's not very satisfying
24:53
from an interviewee perspective. And if you've, you've probably
24:57
met some people who just go on and on and on talking.
25:00
Have you met people like that? A couple.
25:04
Well, in hospitality one certainly has, you know, you get
25:07
button holed by the guy who just has to tell you about his stamp
25:10
collection or the lady has to tell you about the 65
25:13
grandchildren, you know, and you know you're in for two hours of
25:16
agony unless you can. We teach people how to turn that
25:20
off. It's actually quite simple, but
25:23
you have to do it properly so they don't feel that you're not
25:26
listening and you don't care. But acknowledgement is very
25:31
important and it can either be a simple head nod like you, you
25:34
did, or a little, oh, I see, oh, that's good or something like
25:40
that. And that encourages the person
25:43
to keep talking as long as he needs to.
25:50
And it also lets you control the communication by acknowledging
25:55
when when, when they've said what they needed to say.
26:01
And that will stop. Sorry.
26:02
Go on. Yeah, that's helpful.
26:04
And so how do we get out of those conversations where we
26:08
feel like we're cornered? Somebody telling us about their
26:10
stamp collection of the 65 grandchildren.
26:12
OK, I'll tell you. What you do is you listen very
26:17
carefully to what the person is saying.
26:20
And then you think, now how can I respond to this?
26:22
You you get something that you can say about it, like the you
26:26
know, you know that your great aunt used to collect stamps and
26:33
she had a red penny or something red penny stamp.
26:39
And so you think, what can I say about that?
26:41
And OK, and then you listen for when the person pauses slightly
26:46
because they will pause most of them to take a breath.
26:49
And at that point you jump in in great enthusiasm.
26:52
You talk to her about or this person about your your aunt and
26:57
her, her red pen penny. And you just sort of keep going
27:04
until you've run out of things to say.
27:06
And then you say, well, now it's been absolutely fascinating
27:09
talking to you about this. And don't say I'd love to
27:12
continue the conversation later because they certainly will.
27:15
And you're back at square 0. But it's simply, it's been
27:18
absolutely fascinating talking to you about your stamp
27:21
connection. Now, if you excuse me, I do have
27:23
another guest to look after that's in a hotel environment.
27:27
Now if you excuse me, I do have to do exercise.
27:31
Right. So I like that what you
27:33
basically did was you took over the conversation in a gentle
27:37
way, kept it on the same topic matter that they were talking
27:41
about, but it allowed you to step in, take over the the
27:45
dialogue at this point, the monologue, and then bring it to
27:50
a natural conclusion rather than just interrupting her saying, I,
27:53
I got something else to do. Right.
27:55
Exactly. Or what they do in hospitality
27:57
or other places, they'll say, oh, excuse me, I got a phone
27:59
call. But even a dimwit can see that
28:02
can hear. There was no, there was no
28:04
vibration or there was no ringing.
28:07
The whole purpose is to make them feel very satisfied with
28:12
you listening to them. And they succeeded in getting
28:15
their message across. And that and, and the reason
28:17
that people get into that frame of mind where they just talk
28:20
non-stop is because nobody has listened to them before and
28:24
they're desperate to get their message across.
28:29
So. Going back to what we were just
28:31
talking about a couple minutes ago, it seems to me that your
28:34
client base kind of falls into two buckets.
28:37
You've got your corporate clients, right, they companies,
28:41
hotels, etcetera. They want you to come in and
28:43
train their staff and then you've got individuals that are
28:46
coming in to be trained particularly for private
28:49
service. Am I understanding that
28:51
correctly? Yes.
28:52
But again, most of the time we train on site, but we back that
28:55
up with, I mean, when we got, we were up in the East Hamptons
29:00
earlier training a house. Actually she was the chef on a
29:08
private yacht that I recommended the owner promote to their
29:15
estate manager in East Hamptons because she was loyal and she
29:20
was very competent, very competent indeed.
29:22
Actually, I went and trained her and helped put her on the job
29:27
and then we followed that up with the online course where she
29:31
would get an awful lot of information that we wouldn't
29:33
have time for face to face. That's that's a very good sort
29:38
of double whammy strategy for getting people on post.
29:43
You know, in various books that you've written, Stephen, you've
29:46
highlighted key competencies for modern service roles.
29:49
We touched on one sort of that acknowledgement factor there.
29:52
What are some of the other ones? EQ.
29:58
You know what that is? I do, but please tell our
30:00
audience. OK, EQ is actually a misnomer.
30:07
It's trying to make an art into a science by introducing
30:12
something which is actually from mathematics.
30:17
It comes from IQ, which stands for Intelligence Quotient
30:21
because it's a intelligence quotient is a number that's put
30:25
together from a person's response to questions asked,
30:29
which then gives them an IQ of 80 or 150 or whatever.
30:34
When you say emotional quotient, it sounds like IQ, but there's
30:38
no numbers involved, particularly in emotions.
30:42
So that's the first thing. But otherwise EQ is not
30:45
understood as a subject even though it is the the latest hot
30:50
button and quite rightly so in hospitality and actually in
30:56
life. If you don't know, did I mention
31:01
about if you have a walkie-talkie?
31:04
No. OK, all right.
31:07
Imagine having a walkie-talkie where you're communicating like
31:10
crazy to a person. Now imagine that you're on
31:15
wavelength 911 and they're on wavelength 90.
31:20
None of the communication arrives.
31:22
And that's exactly what happens when a person tries to
31:25
communicate to another without bearing in mind what their
31:29
emotional level is. As an example, someone's crying.
31:35
I used to do this long time ago. Oh come on man, cheer up, it's
31:39
not that bad. That's completely wrong.
31:43
Wavelength. You're being toned after the
31:46
situation. Exactly.
31:49
But the the basic on that is what is the emotional level of
31:52
the person you're talking to? In this particular case, the one
31:56
person in grief is way down the scale, the person who is saying,
32:02
come on, cheer up, they're way up the scale and they don't
32:06
meet. And so you're not effective.
32:08
And it's very important when dealing with anybody to
32:13
determine what their emotion is and to use that emotion or one
32:20
slightly higher on the scale in order to deliver the same
32:24
communication that you would normally do.
32:29
So as an example, for instance. Yeah, in hospitality they do a
32:34
lot of comping. And you know what that is?
32:37
Comping, yeah, where where they, they give you like a free drink
32:40
or maybe like an upgrade to the room or something like that.
32:45
Exactly, that actually loses something like 6% of hospitality
32:50
profits. This figures like 15 years old
32:53
goes towards uncomping. Most of which is unnecessary if
32:57
you simply used the right situation handling
33:01
communications plus the emotional scale.
33:06
Because what you can do is you get the person to the point
33:09
where actually they don't give a toss anymore about whatever it
33:12
is they were bitching about. And I can give you a small
33:18
amount example. Let's say that someone is
33:23
unhappy because the waiter spilled the wine glass, knocked
33:31
it over, and it's red wine and it's all over the white
33:33
tablecloth. And so the guest gets angry.
33:38
The wrong thing to do is to offer him the free meal.
33:44
Certainly you want to replace the glass and the wine and
33:48
apologise and do all the things that you'd normally say but you
33:53
want to want. Wouldn't want to go overboard to
33:56
make it up to him. Why not?
34:00
Because that emotion is propitiation.
34:05
Propitiation is a bit of a tough word to say for most people, but
34:09
it is where you give someone something in order to buy them
34:15
off and not harm you, not hurt you.
34:18
And that's what hotels do. Please don't shout in the lobby
34:21
so much here. Take the whole stay for free.
34:25
But please stop shouting and upsetting the other guests.
34:30
The reason that's wrong is because when the guest is angry,
34:34
there are a certain emotional level.
34:37
Propitiation is lower than that. It's actually very close to
34:41
fear. And when you go lower than
34:46
somebody's emotional level, you actually bring them down and
34:51
what, You're interesting. Yeah.
34:53
So they were angry. Now they've gone down to covert
34:56
hostility, which is a fascinating emotion.
34:59
Some people call it passive aggressive.
35:06
In Philippines they call it doggy smile, Doggy mouth doggy
35:09
smile because it looks like a dog with all his teeth in
35:13
evidence. It looks like yeah.
35:19
And so what's the right way to handle that situation?
35:22
I'll. Tell you in a moment, Kover
35:24
still here, like to define a bit, because I think it'd be
35:26
very helpful for people to recognize that this isn't
35:29
emotional. It's like a snake in the grass.
35:33
They smile at you, and because they're smiling, you'll
35:36
sometimes might be foolish enough to think they like you,
35:39
but they don't. They're just too frightened to
35:42
punch you in the nose. So they will, instead of
35:46
punching you overtly in the nose, they will go and they'll
35:51
find some way to undermine you. They'll stab you in the back in
35:54
some way, either in with you or they'll go behind your back and
36:01
make leave a comment on on the Internet about how bad you are.
36:09
That's passive aggressive. That's covert hostility.
36:13
And it they're very, they're rather dangerous if you don't.
36:16
They are dangerous if you don't recognise it because there's a
36:19
certain way to handle them emotionally too.
36:22
But to go back to your question, how do you handle somebody who
36:25
is angry or antagonistic? There's a slight difference
36:29
between the two. Antagonism is where you're going
36:32
straight in the guy's face, face to face.
36:35
Attacking anger is a bit more like a bomb going off.
36:39
You're just exploding at everything.
36:41
Neither of them are very pleasant, and guests will react
36:44
like that sometimes if they're upset.
36:47
How do you handle it? With the same basic principle,
36:52
with a different emotion, but it's an emotion which is similar
36:56
to Aikido. Do you are you familiar with
37:01
Aikido or shall I explain it further?
37:03
Please explain. OK, I can see where you're
37:05
going. OK, Aikido is where you use the
37:08
others guys force against him. Most of these martial arts
37:12
block, punch, kick, they're all attack, attack, attack like
37:18
this. Aikido simply takes that guy's
37:22
hand as he's, as he punch, tries to punch you, and you twist it
37:26
and go in the same direction so that he loses balance.
37:30
And then you can twist his wrist, for instance, so that
37:33
he's incapacitated. But there's been no blows, no,
37:37
nothing like that. You use the other guy's motion
37:40
against him. So it's the same thing with
37:44
using the emotional scale to handle someone who's upset or
37:47
angry like that. You become bored now that I have
37:55
to say that with a, with a caveat, because you could
37:58
become, people might think, oh, well, you should become bored.
38:01
And you say, oh, you're always complaining, Mr. Smith, why
38:06
don't you just let it go, you know?
38:09
And that would just make him more mad.
38:12
Is what you're talking about that you just, you don't respond
38:15
with emotion, just very even keeled?
38:17
Is that what you mean by being bored?
38:19
No, because that's the big misconception here and I need to
38:22
cut undercut a bit. Emotion.
38:24
There are about 50 emotions, 4050 emotions, one of which is
38:28
boredom. That is an emotion.
38:31
And people think that someone who's not displaying an emotion
38:34
is not displaying an emotion, but actually they are.
38:38
It's just one that doesn't seem to be too dramatic or volcanic
38:41
in some way. Boredom may may seem like no
38:45
emotion, but it actually is an attitude and emotion that a
38:48
person has towards a subject in life.
38:52
Some people may be bored at American football.
38:56
I certainly was when I first came to America because I didn't
38:58
understand it and they just seemed to huddle around talking
39:00
half the time, which is nothing like rugby.
39:06
But that's just my emotion, or was my emotion towards American
39:10
football. Other Americans, for instance,
39:12
get extremely exhilarated or enthusiastic about it or
39:16
antagonistic, depending upon how it's going for them.
39:21
All of those are different emotional levels, and so it's
39:25
the same way with boredom. I'm sure you've been bored with
39:30
things in life. I'm sure all everyone who's
39:33
listening has been bored with certain subjects.
39:36
When my wife starts going on about something, I sort of
39:39
switch off a bit. Not about everything, but she'll
39:44
go on about stuff which doesn't interest me so I'll go Sure
39:49
honey. Like that.
39:51
It's not very good thing to do unless she's being angry.
39:53
If she's actually very excited about it and I start being
39:57
bored, that brings her down and then she'll get angry and say
40:00
you never listen to a word I say or something like this.
40:05
So how do you, how do you be bored in sort of this angry
40:09
professional situation that you're talking about?
40:11
It's very easy. Your body language says boredom,
40:16
but at the same time, you know you've got the emotional level,
40:21
but you also got what you're communicating.
40:24
What you're communicating is all the usual stuff.
40:28
I'm very sorry about that. And you find out what happened
40:31
and what their upset is about it and so on and so forth in the
40:35
how is your addressing the problem?
40:38
It shows that you're concerned and caring and you're going to
40:41
handle it for them. But you do it with bored voice
40:44
tone, bored body language and tone.
40:47
I mean, body language includes voice tone.
40:50
But also when a person is bored, what do they do with their eyes?
40:54
They look over here and they look over there, and then they
40:56
look back at the guest and they may nod slowly.
41:00
You know, you have to. You have to drill it and
41:02
practice it until you can do it naturally without thinking.
41:06
And at the same time the right words are coming out of your
41:08
mouth. And it's just, I mean, if you
41:11
knew what people don't even know what emotions are, what are they
41:14
actually made of? What here I'm I want to go back
41:18
to this boredom thing though, because this is very
41:21
counterintuitive to me. If I'm talking with somebody and
41:24
I and I'm upset and I see this very disinterested body
41:26
language, isn't that going to make me more upset?
41:29
They're going to trigger me more.
41:30
Absolutely, if you if what you say is also shows a bored
41:36
attitude towards the guest complaint or the person's
41:39
whatever they're angry about. But if you are addressing the
41:43
problem at the same time as being in a bored tone of voice
41:48
and so on. The boredom.
41:50
That's why I went back to people don't know what emotions are.
41:54
Emotions are wavelengths. They're actual physical
41:57
wavelengths. And so boredom acts in the same
42:01
way that noise cancelling earphones do when you're in an
42:04
aeroplane. The the sort of scrunchy noise
42:08
or the jet engines or your next door person talking to you is
42:13
cancelled out by the boredom wavelength.
42:17
It's actually a physical thing we're talking about here.
42:20
And so, I mean, I've, I've used it hundreds of times and the
42:25
people I've trained have used it and I've been absolutely amazed
42:27
at how quickly it defuses someone's anger.
42:31
I wonder if there's a video of you doing this somewhere in a
42:34
piece of education. I want to check this out and I
42:36
want to share it with our listeners.
42:38
So if you find something later on, let me know and we'll drop
42:41
it in the show notes for folks because it'd be interesting to
42:43
see this in practice. But I want to ask you about an
42:46
article. Sorry before you go on though,
42:48
just to I'm very happy just for them to contact me or and they
42:53
can contact me and I'll train them and their staff either for
42:57
a lots of money or for no money at all, depending on the
43:01
situation because I want people to know this technology.
43:05
Otherwise there's also a website that they can go to where they
43:08
can actually see. I mean it's very brief and
43:11
basic. It won't get them up to speed,
43:14
but it'll certainly get them on the right track, yeah.
43:20
So for people to contact you, and we'll repeat this
43:22
information towards the end of the show, but Stephen Ferry at
43:26
modernbutlers.com. Stephen is with
43:29
avandferryisferrystephenferry@modernbutlers.com is how you can contact him to
43:36
get this training either at a fee or he's offering it up for
43:40
free. That's pretty generous.
43:42
Of course. So let's talk about this article
43:46
that you wrote entitled The Future Hospitality Professional
43:50
'cause I'm curious, from your decades of experience in the
43:53
industry, where do you foresee changes coming in this space?
43:59
Well, you know, there's there's two things.
44:02
There's my universe. I make postulates and decide
44:05
this is what I want and what should be.
44:07
And then there's what actually happens.
44:08
And the trick is to make them both coincide.
44:11
So I'm, I don't have a magic, what do you call the crystal
44:15
ball? But I know where I want it to go
44:18
and where I hope it will go. And that is where I, I think it
44:22
was Nesbit who talked about high, high touch long time ago,
44:33
I guess. And he, he was talking about
44:36
that as the antidote to high tech.
44:40
And right now high tech is winning over high touch.
44:43
High touch is where you really connect with the people and the,
44:48
the people. If you look at what's the main
44:51
market for hotels or for butlers, it's not robots, it's
44:56
not software, it's people. Robots and software don't go to
45:01
hotels to vacation because they don't need to.
45:04
People do. And people don't really like to
45:08
be treated by robots. Why?
45:11
Because there's no life in them. There's no actual emotion.
45:14
When they do try to emote, it's completely fake.
45:18
Oh, now I'm very excited. OK.
45:25
And So what I, what I hope will happen is that the pendulum will
45:32
swing back to away from this high tech thing.
45:36
It's not to say we abandoned technology.
45:38
You can't, it's much too useful, but it doesn't take the place of
45:43
people. And I, I, I think if we're going
45:46
to salvage the civilization as a whole, we need to put the
45:49
balance back in. Otherwise, all sorts of society
45:52
upset will happen and this civilization, like the 300 plus
45:56
that have gone before it in on planet Earth recently, will go
46:01
belly up. You've got another business,
46:08
Stephen. DNA quality Assurance.
46:10
What's this about? About well, several years ago I
46:14
teamed up with two German gentlemen who were very deep,
46:18
knee deep and had long tracks in hospitality.
46:22
And we looked at the fact that it's actually related to the
46:25
emotional thing that we talked about and also high touch.
46:31
The fact is that the the people like Forbes who go in and assess
46:43
and give rankings to hotels, their ratings are based too much
46:49
on the provenance of ratings that in in 1950s in London, the
46:58
whole idea of giving ratings to hotels was born and at that time
47:05
what was important was the facilities.
47:07
There's an area mention of the service that you'd get and I can
47:12
tell you, I mean, I can't say the 50s, but when I was going
47:15
shopping in for clothes in London in the 60s, you'd be the
47:21
the people who are meant to help you would look down their nose
47:24
at you and their attitude is what you're doing here.
47:28
And if you go and ask for assistance, you wouldn't get it,
47:32
except you get it with a sneer maybe.
47:36
So the idea of service wasn't really embedded in the way that
47:42
hotels were being judged. And so we we are judged that it
47:45
would actually be better if we rewrote all the, all the
47:50
standards, 4, five star and four-star.
47:55
We had different levels which included soft skills, people
48:00
skills and communication skills and everything like that, as
48:06
well as what is the property like.
48:09
And so that's what we've done. So we we do audits and we also
48:15
do follow up training in order for and we don't do actual
48:21
ratings. We just improve their chances of
48:24
getting a five star from the existing agencies.
48:28
We originally just tried to do that, but it was there were the
48:32
hotels and the industry was too deeply embedded with Forbes
48:35
etcetera. And so we just simply act as an
48:40
assist to get them above above what the requirements would be.
48:45
So you understand what those requirements are.
48:47
You go into these hotels that hire you and say, OK, here's
48:51
what you're doing. Well, here's what needs some
48:53
work, here's some things that you can do to fix all of that.
48:57
Next time Forbes comes in here, you guys will have a much better
49:01
shot at getting the rating that you're after.
49:03
Exactly. But our standards are higher.
49:06
I mean, some of them are the same because, you know, there's
49:08
only so much you can do to fix something.
49:10
But some of the standards are higher, so they have a bit of a
49:16
the cushion, let's say, for passing the Forbes standards.
49:20
No, Steven, it's clear that you know you've been doing this over
49:24
2 decades now. You've had a fair bit of success
49:26
in this, but we all overcome hardships in our life.
49:30
I'd be curious to hear about a particular challenge that you've
49:34
overcome, how you got through that, and what you learned in
49:37
the process. OK, well I can give you an
49:41
example. My wife and I decided we'd had
49:45
enough of Hollywood and he left with $500 in our pocket, which
49:49
doesn't last very long in London, let me tell you.
49:55
So we immediately had to just grab any job we could and we
49:59
went to an agency and got temp work.
50:05
And I come from a background where I'm actually quite a good
50:08
organiser and, you know, manager and so on.
50:11
And I hadn't adjusted my point of view.
50:15
And so when I went in as a temp, I've, I've never liked second
50:20
hand smoke. And in England they have zero
50:22
respect for this as an issue. And everybody was smoking like a
50:27
chimney. And so I thought, well, let's
50:30
handle this. And I wrote up a complaint with
50:35
a solution and I was a bit surprised to see I've been fired
50:39
the next day because the agency wasn't amused at what the the
50:45
bosses said. And The funny thing was, and if
50:48
I'd done proper research, was the managers I wrote to, they
50:52
were all smokers too, so I hadn't surveyed the environment
50:57
before. Talking.
50:57
You didn't know your audience? No.
51:00
It's pathetic. I mean, that's one example.
51:05
And what happened was my, my wife is very well trained in PR
51:09
and so she took me out to lunch the next day.
51:12
Well, actually it was during lunchtime.
51:13
We didn't have enough money for lunch.
51:16
We went to a beautiful garden and she read me the I wouldn't
51:19
say she read me the riot act, but she told me about the birds
51:22
and the bees and you have to know your audience, etcetera.
51:26
And it was from that that I got off my, I wouldn't say I was a
51:33
king of the castle, but I got off, I learnt a bit of humility
51:37
and that it really helps to know your audience as you, as you
51:40
pinpointed. I had another example too,
51:43
actually, I, this is from my time as a Butler, early days in
51:51
a private estate. And that was a, that was a time
51:54
when I also was the chef. And so I had a meal I was doing
51:59
for I think 16 people, 1618 people.
52:03
I cooked the whole thing and I served the whole thing and it
52:05
was like a six course meal and I was feeling quite, you know,
52:09
happy. I knew I was getting lots of
52:10
brownie points until I heard them say something.
52:16
Then being a bit of a smart aleck, I, I said something too,
52:21
but they weren't talking to me, they were talking to each other.
52:24
And the whole room went quiet because I'd made two errors.
52:30
I hadn't realized that a word that I had said had a double
52:34
entendre. The one not intended was one
52:38
that would seem like I'd made a racist comment.
52:42
And if a hole had opened up in the floor and I'd disappeared
52:46
down it, I would have been very happy.
52:48
But it didn't, so I lost a few brownie points on that.
52:53
How did you recover? Well, obviously I had to
52:56
apologise and I and I kept my mouth shut for the rest of the
53:00
meal because we I was clearing the main course when that
53:03
happened and I basically had to earn.
53:06
Luckily I had a lot of brownie points in credit, but I also had
53:09
to then sort of paddle twice as fast to catch up.
53:13
What I learned from that though, and that was sort of like a big
53:18
no no. What I learned from that was
53:22
that there are rules as butlers, and they're there for a reason,
53:27
and you can't overrule these rules.
53:31
And part of it was know your audience, and my audience was
53:35
the people I was serving. And there's a distinct line
53:37
between me and them. I'm there to serve them, not to
53:40
buddy buddy with them. So anyway, that brought it home
53:44
to me so I haven't made that mistake again.
53:47
There's a common thread between those two examples.
53:50
Know your audience exactly. It's speaking to, as the saying
53:54
goes, it's APR world. Yeah.
53:58
I'm curious even if you have an observation from your work that
54:01
gives you insight on the broader economy and here we are
54:05
recording in early 2026. OK, I think our economy is just
54:11
an expression of our civilization.
54:17
You can't have a good economy if people don't like each other.
54:24
Why? Because it's a sort of a 0 sum
54:26
game it seems. So you have to, you have to
54:30
crawl over everyone else's back to get ahead and so forth.
54:34
And that's not the way to build an economy.
54:36
An economy should be built based on love.
54:39
Actually. I know this is a very a long
54:42
stretch from where things are at the moment, but it depends.
54:45
It shows how do we treat each other Right now I think there's
54:49
2 problems. The social media is totally
54:55
antisocial. It turns people against each
54:59
other because you're not talking to a real person.
55:01
You're talking to your idea or what you see or what you what
55:05
you see in the text, which isn't a real person, even though it's
55:09
coming from a real person. And people start to lose their
55:12
civility and their manners and their love for others.
55:16
And so as that happens, I mean, that's what does the army do.
55:20
The army focuses on teaching you, or it used to during war
55:25
time at least, how bad the enemy is.
55:28
And if you think they're bad enough, then you'll shoot them.
55:30
And that's sort of what's going on.
55:31
Now. If people are bad, which they
55:34
tend to be, if you can't face to face and sort out disagreements,
55:40
then everything goes to hell in a bucket.
55:42
So I think if we want to improve the economy, we need to sort out
55:47
the anti social media or get people off it.
55:50
They need to stop reading the newspapers because that
55:53
basically says everything is bad over there.
55:55
Everyone else is bad. Most of the media, you know,
56:01
Democrats are bad, Republicans are bad, et cetera, et cetera.
56:03
Iranians are bad. And we also need to fix
56:10
education. I'm sort of looking at the big
56:13
picture. But what the schools and
56:15
universities particularly are turning out at the moment is
56:18
entitled people who are not ready to produce and they
56:22
haven't been trained to produce. And therefore they feel they
56:26
feel disenfranchised from society because they haven't
56:29
been allowed to contribute to it.
56:31
And that sort of starts with their, their parents, some of
56:35
them who don't let them contribute.
56:38
You know, a, a kid comes up to mum and says mum, can I make the
56:41
cake? And she says, oh, go away, stop
56:43
bothering me. You know, that sort of thing
56:46
right there. You've cut that kids reach to
56:48
contribute and if you can't contribute to something, then
56:51
you'll start attacking it. That's over time, that's the way
56:54
it'll go. And so we've got to fix
56:57
education. So it actually teaches people
57:00
tradable skills that they can use to help rebuild society.
57:04
When we've got a real civilization, society, the
57:06
economy will look after itself because everyone be looking
57:09
after each other as well as themselves.
57:12
And I don't, I don't mean to sound like this is a kumbaya
57:16
moment where we just flap jaws and and and so on.
57:21
No, it takes a lot of hard work and intelligence to make things
57:24
right. And that's what I'm talking
57:27
about. And so that's where I think the
57:31
the connection is the Nexus between economy and civilization
57:36
or there is a Nexus there and we need to fix the the basic.
57:41
Yeah, that's all really interesting.
57:42
You know, as I listen to you talk, I don't know how to pull
57:46
those big giant levers that you're talking about there.
57:49
But one of your stories, it got me thinking there's something I
57:52
can do just in my day-to-day life with my own kids.
57:55
I thinking specifically about my 9 year old who every time he
57:59
makes a peanut butter sandwich, gets peanut butter all over the
58:03
kitchen. It's on the dining room table,
58:06
which is 15 foot away. It's on the faucet, it's on the
58:09
counter. He's got it in his hair.
58:12
And I lose my mind. I'm like, just give me the
58:15
knife. Let let me finish this sandwich
58:17
for you, right? And, and I think I just, I, I
58:20
need to just let him do his thing, help coach and correct
58:23
him. And then when he's done, I, you
58:26
know, can go in and clean up the remnants of what he wasn't able
58:29
to get himself. Sorry.
58:31
So that I'm just trying to think of how it'd take sort of the big
58:33
picture advice that you're talking about and distill it
58:36
down into something that I can do in my little corner of the
58:39
world tonight. I love it.
58:41
One one thing I could add to that though is instead of you
58:44
cleaning it up, help coach him to clean it up.
58:48
Yes, and validate him when he does it.
58:51
Yes, you, you're 100% right. And so I do coach him to clean
58:54
it up. And then at some point it it is
58:57
a lost cause with diminishing returns and I've got to go in
59:01
there to sort of get the last remnants of it.
59:03
But I, I like that you threw that in there.
59:05
Yes. Don't, don't steal that part of
59:07
the clean up, the clean up part of the project from him either.
59:10
Thank you. Yeah, Yeah.
59:13
Steven, for our audience, how would you characterize what your
59:15
superpower is? You know, I'm going to say
59:18
something that might turn some people off, but in 1970 I got
59:26
into Scientology and Scientology is actually an applied
59:31
philosophy. It's something you do, it's not
59:34
something you believe. And what is it you do huge
59:37
amount of techniques or policies like business policies that you
59:41
follow that always that result in in improvement.
59:44
And so I have got a huge amount of information picked up over
59:49
what is it to 56 years on how to deal with, how to help people
59:57
and how to deal with whatever issues they're running into.
1:00:00
And so that's my secret sauce. You called it a superpower.
1:00:08
That's actually what got, I mean, how did I end up actually
1:00:13
sort of redirecting the Butler world?
1:00:16
Because I did actually. And it's not something I'm going
1:00:20
to jump up and down saying look what I did, look what I did.
1:00:23
But I have to acknowledge the fact that I was the one who
1:00:25
first started saying we need to modernize our profession.
1:00:29
And lo and behold, what has happened, It's modernized.
1:00:32
It wasn't because of my superpower as an individual,
1:00:38
it's just that I was able to spot what the truth was of the
1:00:41
situation and communicate it to people, and the truth simply
1:00:45
took over, my colleague said. You know what, you're right, We
1:00:49
can't keep looking down our noses and sneering at people for
1:00:53
being inferior as butlers because that was the basic
1:00:57
general approach. We have to modernize because
1:01:01
we've got an international audience.
1:01:04
They have different morals, they have different understandings,
1:01:08
they have different expectations.
1:01:12
And modernizing includes the digital world because when I
1:01:17
started first saying this in the early 90s, we were sort of
1:01:20
starting to go digital. And and then in those days, I
1:01:25
think we had PDAs, but they were the like the latest break.
1:01:29
Pilots. Yeah, Palm Pilots, instead of
1:01:31
having to write on a card with a pen, whatever the boss said,
1:01:35
you'd simply wait about your PDA and it was all you know,
1:01:38
etcetera. So modernization was definitely
1:01:41
the thing to do. And I ran into trouble at that
1:01:44
time because nobody else had initially believed that.
1:01:48
And in fact, one guy, I, I, I sent him a candidate from South
1:01:57
Rhodesia, or I think it's got a different name now because he
1:02:03
ran a Butler school and he was old school.
1:02:07
And he wrote back instead of engaging conversation and
1:02:12
getting this guy to come to his school, he said, when you get a
1:02:15
proper name, I will consider talking to you.
1:02:18
That's what I mean by looking down your nose or sneering at,
1:02:21
wow, what was the guy's name? Oh, well, in Rhodesia, they
1:02:28
caught the the mothers and fathers give their kids names,
1:02:31
which are called qualities graces.
1:02:38
And it was something like happy Zulu or something.
1:02:41
And. I'm working with a woman now
1:02:43
whose first name is. Gift.
1:02:44
So there you go. Exactly, exactly.
1:02:48
And I I took umbrage of this. I tried to salvage the poor guy.
1:02:54
Oh, it's clever Zulu. That was his name, delicious
1:02:58
name. And I then asked this chat, my
1:03:05
colleague, what exactly is your definition of a Butler?
1:03:10
And he said, well, one, they have to be British, 2, they have
1:03:14
to be men, and three, they have to serve royalty or nobility.
1:03:21
Well, that was his view I guess. Probably in the late 90s.
1:03:30
Fast forward 10-15 years and he used to call hotels hotel
1:03:37
butlers marketing gimmicks and it's true some of them were.
1:03:43
But then Fast forward 10-15 years and I find out he's busy
1:03:47
training butlers in Chinese hotels, so he.
1:03:54
Evolved. He evolved.
1:03:55
He even heated. I love it.
1:04:01
Steven, I've just got one more question for you today.
1:04:03
But before I ask that, I want to do 3 quick things.
1:04:06
First of all, anybody who wants to get in touch with Steven, his
1:04:09
website is Modern butlers.com, and that's plural Modern Butlers
1:04:14
with an s.com and his e-mail address, which we gave out
1:04:18
before. Stephen with a VDEVEN Ferry
1:04:22
FERRY at modernbutlers.com, stephenferry@modernbutlers.com.
1:04:27
And we'll have that in the show notes for folks.
1:04:29
Also, as a reminder, if you want to get more hospitality
1:04:32
employees access to doctors, therapists, and prescription
1:04:35
meds that, as paradoxical as it seems, actually increases your
1:04:39
company's net profits, reach out to us at adbackbenefits.com.
1:04:44
Finally, if you are enjoying the show today, a quick comment or
1:04:47
review on your favorite podcast app goes a long way towards
1:04:50
helping others discover our show.
1:04:52
So thank you for taking a quick moment to do that right now.
1:04:56
Last question for you, Steven. A year from now, you and I
1:04:58
reconnect and you're celebrating something big.
1:05:01
What's that specific thing, that big thing one year from today
1:05:05
that you hope to be celebrating? Well, I love that question
1:05:10
actually, and lots of other very good questions.
1:05:12
Thank you for the interview. This is one that some may not
1:05:16
like too. It's not a political statement,
1:05:18
but it's a statement that cause I've done a lot of study and
1:05:23
research. And in fact, I really went off
1:05:25
the deep end when I was much younger and I did a lot of
1:05:28
research and I wrote my first book, which I never published,
1:05:32
researching what has mankind done so far?
1:05:35
What technologies, what, what has he got under his belt?
1:05:39
And I realized that until we could make Man Sane, we would
1:05:43
never have any civilization succeed.
1:05:46
I think there's something like 312 civilizations that have
1:05:48
preceded us, and they're nowhere to be found found.
1:05:53
But the main problem with civilization at the moment is
1:06:00
that we're under the control of people who want to have complete
1:06:04
power over everybody, and they like to push people down.
1:06:07
So they're the only ones who are left standing.
1:06:12
What would really make me celebrate is knowing that these
1:06:16
people had been reined in and they were no longer controlling
1:06:20
things in society. So again, it's not a political
1:06:24
statement, it's more of a humanitarian statement because I
1:06:27
want to see people winning, not losing.
1:06:29
And I right now I think there's too many people who are losing
1:06:32
rather than winning. It's a good message Stephen
1:06:36
Ferry from the International Institute of Modern Butlers.
1:06:39
I wouldn't be the first to thank you for sharing both your Andrew
1:06:42
story with us today. I really appreciate you.
1:06:45
And you too. Thank you, Anthony.
1:06:48
Folks, that's a wrap on another episode of the Inspired Stories
1:06:50
podcast. Thanks for learning with us
1:06:52
today.