Transcript: Episode 218: Fryer Oil Boardwalk
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[00:00:00] Susan Barry: This is Top Floor episode 218. You can find the show notes at topfloorpodcast.com/episode/218.
[00:00:13] Narrator: Welcome to Top Floor with Susan Barry. This weekly podcast ride up to the top floor features tangible tips and excellent stories from the experts and characters who elevate hospitality. And now your host and elevator operator, Susan Barry.
[00:00:32] Susan Barry: Welcome to the show. Taylor Scott is a hospitality lifer turned leadership coach, a Kentucky native, and lifelong Disney kid. He started in operations with the Walt Disney World College Program. From there, he opened Gaylord Palms, went back to Disney, and later moved into loyalty marketing at Win Encore and the Cosmopolitan in Las Vegas. Taylor later led sales at Disney Vacation Club and earned his MBA from Cornell's Hotel School. But after discovering that his favorite days were the ones spent in leadership workshops, Taylor shifted into full-time leadership development. He authored Lead with Hospitality and a new leadership fable, Give Hospitality about building a values-driven resort culture. Today, we are going to talk about leading with hospitality and turning emotion into action. But before we jump in, we need to answer the call button.
Call button rings…
The emergency call button is our hotline for hospitality professionals who have burning questions. If you would like to submit a question, you can call or text me at (850) 404-9630. Today's question was submitted by Virginia, and Virginia asks, I love this question. “What is the worst piece of advice you ever got at work?” What do you think, Taylor? Can you think of a bad piece of advice that you got? I was trying to think about what my answer to this would be.
[00:02:13] Taylor Scott: Yeah. The worst piece of advice right off the top of my head here is an actual senior leader told me regarding requests and emails that I would get. I was told, you don't really have to connect. You don't really have to respond to everything. And I just always just went against every hospitality virtue and value, every leadership, every human value that I had ever been taught. So I was just like, that's probably the worst advice I've ever received.
[00:02:41] Susan Barry: Were they being serious? This is gonna explain so much of my life if this is true, that they were given this advice out at leadership school back in the day. For real?
[00:02:54] Taylor Scott: For real. Now here I am preaching the gospel of doing the exact opposite of that.
[00:03:01] Susan Barry: So, but at the time were you like, “Oh, okay. Noted.” Or did you think at the time that is some bad advice?
[00:03:08] Taylor Scott: Yeah, I thought at the time that's some bad advice.
[00:03:11] Susan Barry: Speaking of hospitality, talk about the early experiences that made you fall in love with it, and how going through the Disney College program helped shape your leadership style.
[00:03:24] Taylor Scott: It's a blessing and a curse. Having started my journey, my career at Walt Disney World at a young age, freshman year, the first summer, I did a Walt Disney World College program. And then fell in love with all of it. They had three components: living, learning, and earning. I did it each summer. And then me and my buddies, we kept going back doing it every summer. So for me, it was a couple of things. It was the living, learning, and earning, so you'd live within and around the same apartment complex you lived with an apartment with six roommates. There were six of us. A couple of Penn State guys. I was from Florida Southern College where I did my undergrad. So then you did the learning component where each week you'd go to workshops, you'd go to Disney University, and you would do a different sort of like topic where you'd learn the Disney way, whether it be how they thought about legal and marketing and finance and operations and culture and then the earning piece, you got to get some reps in, at an early age working a role in the show. So you would either be in food and beverage, you'd be in attractions, you'd be in resorts or theme parks. So, like-minded people and then also working for an organization like that, their values aligned with mine at a young age. So blessing, but then a curse 'cause then like henceforth, like when I would go and then try to branch out and work for other organizations, it was like, “What do you mean you don't like value these certain types of things?”
[00:04:56] Susan Barry: What do you mean there's no training at all?
[00:04:59] Taylor Scott: Yeah. What do you mean I'm not supposed to respond to people that were genuinely emailing me? For example, to this day, I still remember the Disney values. It spells orchid B. So openness, respect, courtesy, honesty, integrity, diversity, and then the B is balance. I'm 46 years old, I was 19, and so I still remember those things. So that's why I fell in love with this industry. And then this way of working, another Disney term, a way of working, that I've just taken with me everywhere I've gone.
[00:05:37] Susan Barry: Well, you worked in operations both front of house, back of house, you did loyalty marketing, and sales. I'm curious about the skills that you developed in all of those different jobs and which ones transferred best into leadership development.
[00:05:57] Taylor Scott: Great question. I appreciate your approach to how you do your work. I've done several of these, over this past summer in the last four or five months, and so it's refreshing when somebody like yourself has sort of taken a look at some of our work and our content. So, great question on your point, first of all. So for me, this is something that I realized from doing operations early and then transitioning to sales and marketing, and then loyalty marketing. In order to do either sales or leadership really well, you gotta do a couple things. They're the same, sales is leadership and leadership is sales in the following way. Because in order to do either one of those relatively well, you gotta do a couple things relatively quickly. One, we have to make people trust us and like us relatively quickly within the relationship there. And two, you gotta be really good and you gotta be successful at getting people, influencing people and inspiring people to change their behavior, to take a certain action, whether it's as a leader, inspiring people to change their behavior and do the processes the way that we need them to uphold our standards and deliver that great guest and customer experience, or as a salesperson or a marketer, getting them to take the actions that we would need 'em to do to come back and visit, to spend more money to tell stories about us out there in their networks. And so those skills that I found that were really sort of like that common thread between whether it's operations, sales, loyalty, marketing was really this idea of the four components, the four virtues of leading with hospitality, connecting with people on a human level, serving them before asking them to do anything for you or anything else.
[00:07:35] Susan Barry: Were there any habits, I wanna say habits instead of skills, but maybe it's skills too, that you had to unlearn when you started doing this leadership development work? I can't even think of an example of what I mean, but I'm imagining there are some.
[00:07:54] Taylor Scott: Yeah, for sure. Going from the corporate roles and then becoming an entrepreneur or even going from old school, operations leadership, front desk manager, housekeeping manager, bell services manager. Going into sales and marketing where you're more of an intrapreneur sometimes, where you had to think entrepreneurially. So the big thing I had to unlearn was more a security blanket. Those of us that come from operations, it's you always had that SOP you always resort back to, what's the process for that? What's the standard operating procedure? Well. You learn the hard way sometimes when you start branching out and you're getting away from that old school operations atmosphere where you have to do some trial and error.
[00:08:44] Susan Barry: Yes. For some reason, I don't know if this is exactly the same thing, but it reminds me of when I started my company. And at the very beginning, I set everything exactly up on my desk and in my workday. The way that I had been setting up my desks at hotels for the past 10 years. Now, was I in a hotel? No, I was not. Was I doing the same work? No. No, I was not. But for some reason, I thought I needed to have the exact same filing system and the exact same equipment in the same kind of phone, and all this stuff. And then over time, I had to deinstitutionalize myself and wait a minute, there's nobody watching, I can do it however I want to.
[00:09:28] Taylor Scott: That's right, that's right. And it's a completely different skillset and it's a completely different that they talk about the circuitry in our brains. You gotta kinda rewire new ways of thinking and different ways to get there.
[00:09:40] Susan Barry: I think when you do that as an entrepreneur, you break all the old wires because I could so never go work for somebody else. Now all those wires have been ripped out and running in garbage. So talk about grad school. What did grad school add for you that the sort of real-world life in hotels couldn't or maybe vice versa?
[00:10:02] Taylor Scott: Yeah, for sure. It was a tough decision 'cause I had it in my early twenties. I got outta undergrad and boom, went right back to Orlando and did the Disney thing and the Gaylord Palms thing. And then back to Walt Disney World Operations, and then sales and marketing. I had a great gig, had a great life. Really balanced. I was a sales manager, then a senior sales manager. And I'm just like, “Man, I kept connecting with people,” my clients when I was in sales and marketing, for example. And they were directors and VPs of sales and marketing for these other companies in hospitality, as well as other travel companies. And we'd be having a meeting or we'd be doing the lunch thing or we'd be playing golf, and they'd be like, “Man, you should go to business school.” And then that got me thinking, and I would ask them, “Why, what?” And they would tell me their experiences of what it did for them because it's a great education because it teaches you how to think. Well, I would say that about my experience going to grad school. It really helps teach you how to think. Here's what I mean, being able to compartmentalize things and assess situations and circumstances, and problems that you and your team or organization need to solve. For example, it helps you think about, is this a people thing? A process thing? A product thing? Or things like structure. Do we have the right structure? Do we have the right processes, and do we have the right accountability? And then even broader than that, sort of bigger than that is, is it an operations thing? Is it a finance thing? Is it a marketing opportunity? Is it a human resources opportunity? So as I look back now, it's been 16, 17 years since I was in graduate school, and I still go back to Cornell and give back and work with the students and leaders at the Statler Hotel. And that's what I share with them too, is just dig in and take a deep breath and open your mind because all the stuff that you're learning here, you might not see it, you might not feel it for a few years. My mom was my kindergarten teacher.
[00:12:03] Susan Barry: Are you serious? My dad was my English teacher.
[00:12:06] Taylor Scott: So your dad probably shares the same sort of mentality? My mom tells me all the time, when she was teaching, she's retired now, but when she was teaching, she said she would build shelves. She's like, I wanted to build shelves in these little people's brains. So that later in life, when they would experience things out in the wild, they would be like, “Ooh, I have a shelf for that.”
[00:12:27] Susan Barry: Oh, that's so cool.
[00:12:29] Taylor Scott: Yeah. So that's what I believe grad school will help do, is it builds shelves. Because then you get out here in the wild and you're like, Ooh, I have a shelf for that. So I really recommend both. Absolutely, there's value in going to grad school, but there's no substitute for getting out here and just taking jobs and doing jobs and getting those repetitions in because nothing can prepare you for a 1200 checkout day and you're a housekeeping manager or a bell service manager or front desk manager just to feel that. You have to go through it.
[00:12:57] Susan Barry: Yeah, absolutely. I always felt like graduate school, especially for an MBA, was also such a network builder. And I see that among my colleagues all the time. Like, oh yeah, we were in graduate school together. Oh, we did this program together which I think is another benefit that maybe doesn't get hyped because it doesn't seem as lofty as the learning part. But that's really valuable having these folks that went through a really short but intense experience with you.
[00:13:38] Taylor Scott: That's right. That's right. Yeah. And that's one thing I did leave out in my answer is the cross-cultural pollination. So you go to graduate school pretty much anywhere these days, and you're gonna have students from not only all over this country, but if you're lucky, you're gonna have students that are from other countries. And so I'm from Eastern Kentucky, and then I went to undergrad and in Florida, and then I went 40 miles away. I went to Walt Disney World, Orlando resort area, started my career. Getting away from that, just getting out of my comfort zone and meeting people from all over the world, totally opened up my mind, opened up my heart and realizing, wow, it just teaches you the value of diversity and perspective, diversity and thought, diversity and cultures.
[00:14:25] Susan Barry: And it was probably the first time you were ever cold in your life.
[00:14:28] Taylor Scott: Yeah, it's freezing. The first thing I did is I went to Target in New York. This is a big joke to this day. My buddies from grad school used to call my apartment the island. I went to Target and I bought a fake palm tree in the corner. We had the whole it looked like you were going into tiki bar in the middle of Ithaca, New York.
[00:14:48] Susan Barry: Perfect. You referred to this a little bit earlier, but I'm gonna ask you to give us a quick tour of your framework, so the connect, serve, engage, inspire, and basically what that looks like on the floor, on the front desk, in the lobby during a busy week on a hotel property.
[00:15:12] Taylor Scott: Yeah, for sure. And this whole thing started with me just trying to figure out, why is it we love our certain leaders, more so than others, why do we work harder for some leaders more than we do for others? And it came back to some of the same reasons. We love our favorite hospitality destinations, our favorite hospitality brand because it was how they make us feel, and the more I researched, the more I came up with and realized this framework. So just like in hospitality, when we have to connect with guests, customers, and clients on a human level first, and we have to serve them first and then engage with them, whether it's in person or pre-arrival, post-arrival. It's only then when they can be inspired to take these actions that we want them to take, spend more money with us, spend more time with us, tell stories about us. So I just built this framework, that is what it could look like in leadership as well. So here's what connect, serve, engage, inspires looks like and feels like out there on the floor with our people when we're leading, connecting with 'em on a human level, we can do that one-on-one. This is one of those things I remember about Disney, it was Church man. They don't miss the one-on-ones with their people. So no matter what level of leadership I was on, no matter what role I had there, whether it was at Walt Disney World or Disneyland, I would just take note, and I would realize that my leader always made sure to have our one-on-one every single week, a one-on-one meeting. So connecting with your team one-on-one, connecting with your team in team meetings or something magical that happens when your team hears the same message from you or from somebody else at the same time. And then also staying connected with your written communication or your digital communication along the way, we proved to ourselves during the pandemic that we can be emotionally connected while being physically distanced. And that's what I mean there. So that's connect. Serving looks like this: if you wake up one day and you're like, how am I gonna serve today? Well, just remember, lead it spells lead. Listen. Educate, Act, and Deliver. So listening to not only your guest customers and clients, but listening to your team, they have feedback. Kind of my bosses, the last question you asked, they know things about the guest experience that you might not because they live it every day. And then listening to your own leader as much, sometimes they might be annoying, but they're in their role for a reason. So it behooves us to listen to them, because they might have some advice. And then also don't be afraid, and don't forget to listen to your own intuition.
[00:17:42] Susan Barry: I'm so glad you said that 'cause that's the thing I was thinking about as you went, listened to yourself.
[00:17:47] Taylor Scott: The A is Act, take action, and be active and accountable out there. There's something magical that happens when your team sees you out there with them. I think back, and I put it in the book to my leaders, when I was a housekeeping manager at Gaylord Palms Resort and Convention Center down there in Kissimmee, Florida, and that was a 22 to 23-year-old version of me. And on those big checkout days or big check-in days, I would see my director of housekeeping, my executive housekeeper, they would be out there with me pushing trash carts and helping me unclog the linen chute and I would be like, man, if they're my leader's leader, they're out here doing this, I have no excuse. I gotta work just as hard as them. And the D is just delivered. Deliver the tools, information, resources that your team needs to perform and then deliver on your leadership promise. And then engage. By that, the first thing is be generous, give your time, give your talent, and give your heart to your team, and then instill a sense of purpose. That's the magic and the power of letting people know you see them in terms of how you engage with them. I call it engaging with purpose. So purposeful engagement, if you will. And then inspire just looks like tell stories of how you've learned the hard way on some lessons. Make yourself human. Be vulnerable enough to let them know some mistakes that you've made, and tell stories about it.
I love the Morgan Harper Nichols quote. She’s a contemporary Christian musician. And there's a quote I love, I've been saying it for six years is tell the stories of the mountains you've climbed. They could be a page in somebody else's survival guide. And so something magical that happened. I even right now as I'm thinking back, it was about this time of year, I think that's why I'm thinking about it. I was on the opening team of Disney's Pop Century Resort, and we had a general manager who was like, awesome. He had been at that time with Disney like 39, 40 years. This dude started selling popcorn on Main Street at Disneyland in California back when Disneyland opened in 1955. And so, it was about a month into after we opened Disney's Pop Century Resort and I was a front desk manager and I was mainly in charge of the arrival experience. So, about there as the guests were arriving, the front drive and the bags and the cars and the whole deal. And I remember Dave Remu and this dude's six and nine and he walks out, was a little old me, I'm like, 22 years old and Dave comes out and he asks me how things are going. And I did the 22-year-old thing where I'm loading on him all the things that aren't working and all the things that I need to fix. And then he looked at me, and he just looked down at 'cause 6’9”. And he's like, oh, process stuff. I think it was his way of saying, here's how you package to an executive. Is it a process thing? Is a product thing? Is it a people thing? And then, and then I said, yeah, yeah, process stuff. And then he went on to tell me a story. He told me a story about when he was doing a role similar to mine when he was on the opening team at Tokyo, Disney at Sea. And he told the story and he’s like, what you're going through, we went through, and I know what you're feeling, and he gave me some advice and then he patted me on the back. And he said, you're doing a great job, keep it up. And I just remember he walked away, and I just remember being. I could not work harder for that guy for a couple weeks. One, he took the time to come out and talk to me and tell me a story about how he's walked these same, he's gone through these same things. And then two, it felt like he was just as human as I was. So, there you go. That's what connect, serve, engage, inspire looks like out there on the floor.
[00:21:26] Susan Barry: That's pretty powerful. We like to make sure that our listeners come away from every single episode of Top Floor with a couple of really practical, specific, tangible things to try either in their businesses, in their personal lives. I think I've asked you this question before, but how do you lead high achievers without smothering them?
[00:21:49] Taylor Scott: Good question. And it could be the same way to lead all people. It speaks to what we just talked about because of the whole emotions thing where we make decisions on whether or not we're gonna change directions, change behavior based on some emotions. And then that speaks to the human needs that you talked about. So there's some research that says that people will become self-motivated, people will become self-determined when they feel 3 universally psychological needs at the same time. Edward Desi and Richard Ryan were psychologists back in the 80s, and they came up with this self-determination theory. So I believe for you and I as leaders and everybody listening and watching, it's less about what we say, it's less about what we do, but it's all about the environment we create. It just so happens that when we do this, when it clicks with those high achievers, it will click a little bit quicker. And they will go further quicker when they'll be like Ana from Frozen. They'll be like, for the first time in forever. I've gotta lead. I've got a leader that sees me as who I am, that sees me as a high achiever that I know I have been, I know I can be. And then it will just accelerate and expedite all the things you're looking to do. Here are the three needs, and I call it the 3 C's of compassionate teams. Apparently, all of us, you, me and all those people on our team have these three needs and our job as leaders is to make sure we create an environment where they feel them all three at the same time. One, we all have a need for some autonomy or what I say some choice over how the work gets done. One of the reasons you wanted to start your own business, be an entrepreneur.
[00:23:28] Susan Barry: It's my highest value.
[00:23:29] Taylor Scott: Amen to that. Same. The second one is competence, we all have this need to feel competent, to feel that we've mastered something or we're on this journey getting better and better and better at the work that we do. So choice, competence, and then you spoke to it earlier, we all have a need for a sense of relatedness or what I call community, a sense of belonging. So our roles, and especially with high achievers, can you give 'em some autonomy over how the work gets done? Give 'em some choice. Can you make sure that they see that they see that you see them, so they feel that sense of competence. And then can we make sure that we build these places where people feel they belong? And that's, we used to have a mantra at the Cosmopolitan. We build community every chance we get. So those are the 3 C's. And when we feel them at the same time, we become self-determined, we become self-motivated, which means we come in early, we stay late before and nobody has to ask us to do that. We do more. We want to become more and we give more when we feel those things versus when we don't.
[00:24:36] Susan Barry: It's absolutely true, and I could not love more. That choice is the first of the 3 Cs. What about an exercise that managers can run to sort of convert fear-based decisions into more guest-centered actions? I'm gonna give you an example. This used to happen to me when I ran an off-premise catering company. The chafing dish of X, Y, Z staff mushrooms would be low, and servers would be frantically running around. We need more mushrooms, we need more mushrooms, we need more mushrooms. And then suddenly, the program would start. Everyone would move away from the mushrooms, sit down, and nobody would touch another mushroom. But we have created all this chaos and drama about pulling mushrooms out of our ears. How can we not make that happen?
[00:25:30] Taylor Scott: Yeah, there's so much that could be said about this one. I think let's call it mindsets. So two mindsets. The first one is, I heard it at Disney a long time ago. Guest first, cast always,
[00:25:44] Susan Barry: Ooh, I've never heard that.
[00:25:46] Taylor Scott: Guest first, and then if you don't work at Disney, then you don't have a cast. You have a team.
[00:25:51] Susan Barry: Team always.
[00:25:52] Taylor Scott: So yeah, guest first, team always. So anything and everything we do is always about the customer, the guest. So if we're obsessed with guest first, then that means over-ordering mushrooms so we don't run out. That means having a backup plan. That same leader, now that I'm thinking about it. This is free, don't have to pay extra for this, everyone listening. Dave Vermeulen always used to teach 'cause it was an opening Disney.
[00:26:09] Susan Barry: Okay, fair enough. This is a real tall guy.
[00:26:26] Taylor Scott: The real tall guy, and he'd done all these openings. All around the Walt Disney Company globally. And the stakes were high because that was back in 2003. This was the first new build, the first new development opening since the tragic events of September 11th, 2001. So it was a big deal. A huge deal. I'm getting chills. You've been talking about it. All this time here, all these years later. But Dave said, expect the unexpected. Expect the unexpected. So that just as a mindset, as a heart set, as an approach, doing anything, I think speaks to what you're getting at here. The other one is not only guest first, cast always, but we had one at the Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas and it came from the top, our CEO, from pre-opening to when we opened. And I was there for four years after we opened, and they got better after I left. I went back to Disneyland at Disney Vacation Club. I had to go back. I had to get it outta my system. But we had another mantra there called purpose over policy.
[00:27:30] Susan Barry: I love that. That's so smart.
[00:27:33] Taylor Scott: Yeah. So that way, and I can even remember sitting in my office at my desk at 32 years old, and I'm on a call with the employee relations team downstairs, and HR about an employee situation that had happened. And all the moxie of a 32-year-old executive or want to be executive or blossoming executive or leader. I actually quoted John Edman right back to him, our CEO. This seems to me it's a purpose over policy opportunity. And all these people that were older than me had been in Vegas longer than me, more seasoned than me, they started going, you know what, Taylor has a point. So something as simple as that. When you can have a culture from top to bottom, bottom to top, left to right, guest first, cast always, and also purpose over policy.
[00:28:29] Susan Barry: We have reached the fortune telling portion of our show, so you have to predict the future, and then we're gonna come back and see if you got it right. What is a prediction you have about the future of hospitality leadership?
[00:28:39] Taylor Scott: I'm going out on a limb here. This is maybe risky, but I was thinking about this. I really do believe that we are gonna have an opportunity in the not-so-distant future. That we're gonna have to have some serious conversations and some serious developmental opportunities to teach and coach how to connect on a human level.
[00:29:01] Susan Barry: Interesting.
[00:29:03] Taylor Scott: I'm doing this right now, I think maybe is why I'm answering this question in this way is as I look at the landscape and not only unfortunately, the path that a lot of cultures are going, a lot of senior leaders are going, but also the Gen Zs and the millennials. So the younger millennials and the Gen Zs that are new to the party here that are gonna continue to join us, we have to remember that they missed a lot of their developmental time connecting and relating and conversations and having how to have tough conversations. They missed a lot of that because of the pandemic. So now they're students and they're starting to get out there and working. And also with the advent of AI, with the technological advances, we have so many functions that are either being outsourced to AI or they're tinkering with it right now. But we're gonna come to a point where gonna have to reteach humanness, we're gonna have to reteach connecting and conversation.
[00:30:09] Susan Barry: I think you're absolutely right, and that is so scary and weird to think about, so we're gonna just move right along. Okay folks, before we tell Taylor goodbye, we are going to head down to the loading dock where all of the best stories get told.
Elevator voice announces, “Going down.”
[00:30:30] Susan Barry: I'm so excited for this. Taylor, what is a story you would only tell me on the loading dock?
[00:30:35] Taylor Scott: 1998. I'm on my very first Walt Disney World College program at Hurricane Hannah's Bar and Grill out by the pool at Disney's Yacht and Beach Club Resort. I was so bad at the cash register every night. I'm 19 years old and I'm terrible at math as it is. Every night, end of shift, my drawer would be off. I would sort of get in trouble, and then a month into the internship I'm like, can y'all just put me in the back and let me just flip burgers and drop chicken fingers and fries and prep sandwiches and order up? They're by all means, yes. Thank you so much for volunteering. So I did that and I leaned into it. And part of that role in the show was you had to clean at the end of your shift, and part of the cleaning was you had to take every week or so, we had to redo the fryer oil, the food beverage, you know what I'm talking about? So you had to drain it, put it in a bucket, somehow get the bucket on the back of a pargo, which is a different word for a golf cart. And then drive it to the back dock's, why I chose this story. And so you had to go drive on stage and go eventually to the backstage area, the back dock of Disney, giant Beach Club Resort, pour the oil down, this very specific one drain. So one day I'm doing that with one of my fellow cast members who had been working there forever. And so this was my opportunity to learn how to change the fryer oil, and part of it was of course, to drain the old one and take it and dump it, and then re-put the new oil in. Well, we've gotten to the part where I've drained it and we put it on the back of a pargo and we're driving along. And we go from this part of the ground that goes from the concrete to the boards, like literal boardwalk.
[00:32:23] Susan Barry: Okay.
[00:32:24] Taylor Scott: On the Epcot resort area, there's a lake. Well, when we went from the concrete to the boards, it shipped to pargo, the oil totally dumped out behind.
[00:32:36] Susan Barry: Oh no.
[00:32:39] Taylor Scott: Fast forward six weeks. There were two or three college program students at Disney's Yacht and Beach Club in food and beverage that summer. We all got the opportunity to shadow the general manager for a day, and we'd gotten to the point where we had not only walked around with her, Deanne Gable was her name. We walked around with her, we went to meetings with her, and then we went back to her office and I asked the question, “What's the hardest part about being a general manager?” Because I wanna be a general manager one day. And she says to me, “I think communication is the hardest part.” And she goes some for example, somebody spilled fryer oil on the boardwalk about a month ago, and I never knew about it. And then a guest slipped and fell, and then it became this whole ordeal. And I'm 19 years old. I sat there, and I'm like, I'm so sorry, that was actually me.
[00:33:35] Susan Barry: You admitted it.
[00:33:37] Taylor Scott: I did, I did. And she felt so bad. She's like, oh my God. I did not mean I didn't know. She's like, first of all, don't worry. That's okay.
[00:33:43] Susan Barry: I wasn't trying to call you out. Oh, gosh.
[00:33:45] Taylor Scott: Yeah, she said, you guys cleaned it up. She did know that we did our thing, but just she never knew about it and so anyway. So to this day, all these years later, every time that my wife and I or my parents, any of my friends and I are walking around the Epcot Resort area, we go to that spot on the boardwalk in front of Disney's Yacht Club Resort, right before you get to the Swan and Dolphin. There's boards there and anybody goes there, you'll always see the place where they had to redo it because Taylor Scott spilled fryer oil in 1998.
[00:34:18] Susan Barry: It's a shrine to communications. Taylor Scott, thank you so much for being here. I know that our listeners are clamoring to get both of your books, and I really appreciate riding with us to the top floor.
[00:34:30] Taylor Scott: Thank you so much for having me.
[00:34:32] Susan Barry: Thank you for listening. You can find the show notes at topfloorpodcast.com/episode/218. Jonathan Albano is our editor, producer, and all-around genius. He even wrote and performed our theme song with vocals by Cameron Albano. You can subscribe to Top Floor on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you like to listen, and your rating or review will go a long way in helping us give you more of what you like.
[00:35:08]Narrator: Thanks for listening to the Top Floor podcast at www.topfloorpodcast.com. Have a hospitality marketing question? Reach us at 850-404-9630 to be featured in a future episode.