First Impressions: Saving Souls Begins with Clean Restrooms
By John R. LaBruzzo CHA

Known for his entrepreneurial and intuitive management style which has created value and profitability for clients and company’s alike, John LaBruzzo brings thirty plus years of leadership experience to hospitality rooms and food and beverage operations, new project development and staff training and development in his consulting practice. With a functional speciality in food and beverage concepting and development; John has opened nine notable hotels from the ground up during his career as either General Manager or Development Team member. Among them, the Waverly in Atlanta, the Ritz Carlton in Washington, DC, The Peabody in Orlando and the Walt Disney World Swan and Dolphin Hotels in Orlando, Florida..

John is an expert on the dynamics of “brand in-culturation” that takes the promise of the operating brand and translating that promise into sustainable programs and techniques at the operating level. These programs and techniques are presented in either onsite training programs for staff and management or delivered via a series of direct application consulting initiatives to return properties to former product and performance levels. John’s focus in the “brand in-culturation” segment of his consulting practice is made relevant in that his platform is one of direct experience and involvement as a General Manager charged with opening new hotels or turning ailing ones around.

John has earned the coveted CHA designation of the American Hotel and Lodging Association and has presented programs on hospitality leadership at the major hotel schools around the country.

Back in the day when Frank Borman was the President and CEO of Eastern Airlines there were abundant stories of his rampages with senior and junior managers on the never-ending quest to pursue excellence and to build the traveling public’s confidence in the then floundering airline.

Maybe it was Borman’s military background or the time he spent in the space program; either way he never was known as a leader that allowed for the integrity of the big picture to be diminished by the inconsistency of small details gone astray… witness if you will the exchange between Borman and some of his managers when he was trying to make the point that passengers needed to be able to have a sense of confidence in the quality of the airlines maintenance efforts…

Borman, using an airline cabin as a classroom, proceeded to demonstrate his point as he pulled down one of the service trays from a seat back to reveal to the astonishment of the assembled management cadre that the surface of the tray had not seen any cleaning since the plane had landed from its flight… the surface of the tray was stained with the spilled residue of coffee and meals past… Bormans’ anger and elevated tone of voice was not intended to be a lecture on the necessity for cleaning the tray surfaces between flights… it was meant to demonstrate that the lack of cleanliness in this small detail when viewed by the passenger was tantamount to an indictment of Eastern Airlines overall maintenance program… or the lack of it!

This lapse in detail was the visible breaking of an unspoken bond between passenger and airline that the airline would do everything to make sure that the passengers would be safe. Eastern Airlines made sure that its pilots were competent and their planes were well maintained. Dirty seat trays could be misconstrued by the passengers to mean that Eastern Airlines was going soft on taking care of their airplanes… the impression of not taking care of the trays could easily have said that Eastern didn’t bother to maintain the hydraulic brake lines either.

First impressions are lasting impressions… and if you take that first impression apart… whatever it might be, you would find that the composite of that first impression was gathered around a series of sometime separate impressions… individually they might tell a singular story, but when viewed on an end-to-end basis, they read like a novel. Needless to say you want those first impressions of your church to read like a classic and not a horror story.

Getting ready for Sunday service is daunting… sermon, songs, prayers and microphones, video cameras and lights… the order of service must be perfect! But what about the parking lot, the front drive, the carpet in the lobby and the area underneath the pews… and how about those restrooms? Neat, clean, supplied, everything working? Not too dissimilar from Chairman Borman’s rant about the seat trays not being clean, a church whose housekeeping and maintenance are spotty will surely give rise to faulty first impressions.

Eastern Airlines had a marvelous service tagline… ”At Eastern we earn our wings every day!” When the thousands of EAL employees saw this tagline or heard it spoken in advertising; they knew that their culture demanded that they never accept anything less than product and service excellence from themselves… this culture set a high value on creating and maintaining a solid first impression.

Doing the Lord’s work should carry with it no less stringent a demand for the delivery of a solid first impression to those who come to your church whether it is for the first or the five hundredth time. Our God is a God of order… what he created for us shows a lot of thought and execution… can we aspire as a church to do no less in the way we prepare for our guests on Sunday morning. Earning your “wings” everyday at your church begins with knowing what are the series of impressions you want to create on a consistent basis, documenting what processes you need to have in place to deliver that impression… training your staff to put it together (make sure you know what it is supposed to look like when it is done so you can communicate clearly to the staff)… and lastly inspecting what you expect.

Some years ago when I first became a hotel General Manager, a mentor of mine told me that the great GM’s knew how to do a lot of things well, but the really great GM’s knew how to do simple things well ….and often!

Making sure that all of your first impression triggers are in place this Sunday morning will speak volumes about the quality of your church and the fact that you were expecting your guest. God bless you.