The Bottle Cap Under The Bed...

Last week I wrote about what a storage room reveals about your business. This week, whether anyone in charge is actually looking.

A large supermarket chain near where I used to live spent thousands of euros landscaping the outside of its store. Planted beds, green areas, the sort of investment you make specifically because you want people to notice.

One afternoon I walked across the car park instead of driving, and the beds were full of garbage. Wrappers, cigarette packets, the ordinary residue of a busy site.

Not from that morning, and not from the day before. Some of it had been there long enough for the sun to bleach the color out of the packaging.

I want you to sit with the arithmetic for a second. Thousands of euros spent on the front of the property. Then potentially months of neglect, in plain sight, in the exact place the money was spent to attract attention.

This Is Not A Cleaning Problem

Last week I argued that the storage room tells you the truth about a business, because nobody performs for an empty room.

This is the inverse, and it is stranger.

Nobody was hiding anything here. The mess was in the most visible part of the property, in daylight, in front of every customer who arrived on foot. There was no door concealing it and no explanation involving pressure or under-staffing, because pressure does not last three months in a flowerbed.

The only conclusion available is that nobody with the authority to act had actually looked at it.

Which raises a better question than the one about litter. How does that happen, in a business with managers, supervisors, area visits and standards?

How You Arrive Decides What You Can See

Here is the mechanism, and once you see it in your own operation you will not be able to unsee it.

The manager parks in the reserved space beside the entrance or behind the building. The area manager arrives by appointment, usually with warning at the front entrance. Deliveries come to the back. Head office visits are scheduled, and everyone knows the date.

The customer walks in from the far corner of the car parking, past the flower beds, having already formed half an opinion by the time they reach the door.

Those are not the same building. They are two different businesses that happen to share an address, and the people responsible for standards are, almost without exception, experiencing the wrong one.

Nobody is being negligent. Everybody is being efficient, in the small daily way that efficiency actually works. You park close because you are carrying things and you are late. That is entirely reasonable, and over three years it produces a manager who has genuinely never seen the approach their customers take every single day.

The blind spot is not in their attention. It is in their route, and the distraction of the business running taking precedent.

Look Left, Look Right, Look Up, Look Down

When I was a child in kindergarten they taught us at the crosswalk to STOP, then look left and look right. I have carried a longer version of that into forty years of walking large sites, some of them a hundred thousand square meters.

Look left. Look right. Look up. Look down. And look in the corners.

Down in the corners for dirt, because that is where it collects and where the eye naturally skips. Up in the corners for cobwebs, because few look up, since the day it was built.

It takes no expertise and no budget. It takes the decision to look at a place you walk through every day as though you had never been there before, which is far harder than it sounds, because familiarity is a form of blindness and your brain is actively working against you.

The Only Fix I Know

Park at the furthest point of your parking area once a week and walk in.

That is the entire intervention. No program, no audit, no consultant needed.

Walk the approach your customer walks and enter through the door they enter. Wait where they wait, use the bathroom they use. Then look up, look down, and look in the corners.

You will find things within five minutes that have been there for months, and you will have the disorienting experience of realizing you have walked past them a hundred times without registering a single one.

If you want a second version of the same exercise, send someone who has never been to the site and ask them what they noticed first. Their answer will be more useful than any mystery shopper report, and it will cost you a coffee.

The restaurant version of this costs nothing at all. Sit at a different table every time. Most operators have a table, and it is almost always a good one. Sit at the one beside the kitchen door, or the one by the toilets, or the one near the front door which is usually the worst seat in the house.. You will learn more in one service than in a month of reading reviews.

Sleep In Your Own Hotel

Most general managers have never slept in their own hotel.

Think about how strange that is. They approve the refurbishment, sign off the standards, and read the guest satisfaction scores, and they have never once lain in one of those beds at two in the morning listening to the corridor door, or tried to sleep with light coming through because the so called black out curtains are not the right size, or discovered that the humming of the Air conditioning sounds like a tractor at 2 a.m.

I used to stay in the rooms. Different ones, at intervals, and not the best ones. Every single time I found something that no report had ever mentioned, because the report was written by someone standing in the room rather than living in it.

And once I was in there, I used to leave things behind.

A bottle cap under the bed. A picture tilted slightly off center on the wall. One bulb loosened in a bedside lamp so it would not come on.

Then I would wait and see whether anyone noticed.

This was not a trap and my team actually knew I did it. It was a measurement, and it was the most honest one available to me, because it tested the only thing that actually matters in housekeeping, which is whether a person is looking or merely working.

Anyone can strip a bed and replace a towel, but this is not how you prepare a room for the next guest. That is a task and it can be completed while thinking about something else entirely. Noticing that a picture is two degrees out of level and dust has settled on the top is a different act. It requires the person to be present in the room rather than processing it.

The results told me more about my operation than any audit ever did. Some people found everything, every time, without ever mentioning it. Some found nothing for months. And the ones who found things were, without exception, the same people whose guests wrote about them by name.

If you run rooms, run this. If you run anything else, find your version of it.

The principal transfers to every business that produces something a human being is supposed to experience rather than merely receive.

What Happened Next

I did something I normally would not bother with. I wrote to the company's CEO on LinkedIn.

Not a complaint and not a public post. A short message from a customer who had walked across the car park and thought someone ought to know.

He replied and he passed it down. The store manager telephoned me to say thank you, and the next time I went past, the areas had been cleared.

I have thought about that outcome more than about the garbage, because two separate failures did not occur, and both of them usually do.

The first is that most people who notice say nothing. It is not their business, they are not being paid to care, and speaking up feels faintly ridiculous. So the information never travels.

The second is that most organizations receiving that message do nothing with it. It gets acknowledged politely and filed, because acting on it would mean admitting something had been wrong.

Here, neither happened. Someone said something, and someone listened. That is rarer than it should be and worth noticing when it occurs.

The Takeaway

The storage room tells you what a business tolerates when nobody is watching.

The front yard tells you something harder. It tells you whether anyone in charge has actually looked at the place recently, or whether they have been arriving by the route that protects them from it.

Most leaders are not blind to their own business. They are simply walking a path that was designed, quite by accident, to show them the good version.

Change the route. Sit at the bad table. Sleep in the room. Leave the bottle cap.

None of it costs anything, and all of it shows you the company your customers are actually experiencing, which is usually not the one you have been managing.

Trust is the only currency that compounds without inflation.

Relationship. Not Transaction.

Georgios B.