Unreasonable Hospitality is the 2022 book by Will Guidara, the former co-owner of Eleven Madison Park, the restaurant voted the best in the world in 2017. The core idea is simple: be unreasonably generous with small, personal gestures, and customers will talk about you for the rest of their lives. For UK tradespeople, the lesson is that going five percent beyond what is expected is the cheapest marketing you will ever do.
What is unreasonable hospitality?
Guidara defines unreasonable hospitality as the deliberate choice to do the little things that nobody expects, at a scale that feels genuinely surprising. In the restaurant, that meant buying a £3 hot dog for a tourist couple who said it was the one New York food they had not tried, and serving it on a silver platter at a three-Michelin-star restaurant. The cost was trivial. The story spread for a decade.
Why this matters for tradespeople
Trades is a word-of-mouth industry. The next job almost always comes from the last customer. A plumber who does genuinely unexpected things for their customers — fixing a broken toilet seat for free while replacing a boiler, leaving a handwritten note, taking an extra five minutes to explain what went wrong and why — gets talked about in neighbourhood WhatsApp groups for months.
Remember the customer's dog's name and ask about it next visit.
Leave a small token — a fridge magnet with your number, a handwritten thank-you card.
Fix the tiny free thing while you are there, without adding it to the invoice.
Call the day after to check everything is still working.
Remember the last job and reference it by detail, not by date.
The "one percent more" principle
Guidara's team had a rule: every service should contain at least one moment where the guest notices the team gave them one percent more than they expected. That might be remembering a dietary preference from six months ago, or upgrading a drink without being asked. For a plumber, the equivalent is tightening the kitchen tap while you are in the bathroom, or hoovering the bits you left on the carpet.
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The cheapest loyalty programme
A £2 thank-you card and a two-minute follow-up call have a higher retention impact than almost any paid loyalty scheme. The reason is that they are unexpected.
Remembering customers like a Michelin-star restaurant
One of Guidara's most repeated ideas is the Dreamweaver — a team member whose full-time job was to pick up tiny signals from customers and turn them into moments. Tradespeople do not have a full-time Dreamweaver, but a CRM is a reasonable substitute. Store the dog's name, the customer's birthday if they mention it, the specific make and model of their boiler. Reference it next time. Customers are stunned when a plumber remembers their dog.
Unreasonable hospitality on the phone
For most tradespeople, the first unreasonable-hospitality moment is the phone call. Most customers expect to reach voicemail or a gruff "yeah?" from a driving tradesperson. An AI receptionist that answers politely, remembers their name, and captures the job properly is already a 90th-percentile experience in trades. It is unreasonable by the standard of the industry, which is exactly why it sticks.
The follow-up that nobody does
Ninety-five percent of UK tradespeople never follow up with a customer after a job. The five percent who do get a disproportionate share of the repeat work. A 24-hour follow-up text message asking if everything is still working costs nothing and generates more return visits than any discount offer. This is the clearest example of unreasonable hospitality in action — it is easy, cheap, and almost nobody does it.
Being unreasonable about hospitality is the single most defensible competitive advantage a small business has.
How to build it into your week
Pick three habits. First, send a thank-you message to every completed customer the evening of the job. Second, record one personal detail per customer in your CRM — a pet, a hobby, a preference — and use it on the next visit. Third, do one small unpaid thing on every job, and do not mention it on the invoice. Over a year, those three habits will generate more repeat work than any marketing spend.
Why trades underestimate this
Tradespeople often think they compete on price or technical skill. They compete on memory. Customers do not remember the pipework. They remember how you made them feel and whether you turned up on time. Unreasonable hospitality is about making that feeling deliberate rather than accidental.
The tools that help
A CRM is the memory you will never have on your own. Soteriaa stores every customer interaction, every previous job, every note you take, and the AI receptionist captures the first impression even when you cannot. Try it free for 14 days at soteriaa.com and see what unreasonable hospitality looks like when you have the infrastructure to back it up.
A practical playbook for running an entire UK sole-trader trade business from a single phone app. Reception, CRM, quotes, payments, and scheduling in one place.
