Transcript: Episode 246: Creativity Through Line

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[00:00:00] Susan Barry: This is Top Floor with Susan Barry, episode 246. You can find the show notes at topfloorpodcast.com/episode/246.

[00:00:14] 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. If you're a longtime listener, thank you for sticking around, and if you're new here, I'm Susan Barry. Depending on how you know me, I'm a marketer, a podcaster, a consultant, a speaker, a bird influencer, and/or a person who keeps starting weird side projects. The through line across all of these jobs is creativity. I've spent most of my career in hospitality, and what fascinates me isn't just the hotels themselves. I love hotels, but I also love learning new things and solving problems creatively. I love learning about how other people solve problems, how they tell stories, how they bring their creativity to bear to create experiences, and make something memorable out of what could be just something ordinary. That is the thread that connects everything that I do. So today, instead of interviewing somebody else, I wanted to talk through a few ideas that I've been sort of chewing on mentally lately. On the surface, I think they're gonna seem unrelated, but I do think that they're all symptoms of the same thing and have sort of the same through line, which is creativity. Hospitality has become very good at wringing the creativity out of the business. It sometimes seems like we are measuring, teaching, and rewarding the wrong things. If you listen to Top Floor on the regular, you've definitely heard me talk about this idea before that hospitality is an apprenticeship business. Hospitality is one of the few industries where we will happily charge someone six figures to learn the business, and then immediately tell them they don't know anything because they have never worked a Saturday night shift. A hospitality degree is wildly expensive. It can cost anywhere from about $25,000 to well over $100,000. At places like Cornell and NYU, tuition alone is, like, $65,000 a year. What? Meanwhile, something like 55 to 65% of hospitality students are taking out loans to finance their education. After they graduate, the average entry-level hospitality salary is somewhere around $35-50,000 a year. This is not an anti-college or anti-education rant. Like, education has tremendous value. I'm not an idiot. But I think that hospitality has a unique problem. This industry is fundamentally an apprenticeship business. We trust the people who have line experience, who have worked at the front desk, waited tables, or cleaned rooms. We trust people who have worked nights, weekends, holidays, double shifts, back-to-back. And honestly, that makes sense. Some lessons you can only learn through on-the-job experience. But we've created a gap between education and operations and have not figured out a way to close that gap. And it has real consequences because if someone borrows the amount of money that it takes to get a hospitality degree and then starts at an entry-level hospitality salary, the math does not math. It gets ugly very quickly. The problem is not hospitality education, please don't get me wrong. The problem is that I think that we haven't created enough sort of creative pathways both into and up the ladder within the industry. I don't know if it's apprenticeships, alternative credentials, or hybrid education models. Like, I don't have all the answers, I'm not sure. But whatever it is, I don't think borrowing a fortune and hoping for the best is a sustainable workforce strategy. This leads me to something else that I've been thinking about, which is if you were 18 years old today, how would you even know that hospitality exists as a career? I'm not being funny. Like, seriously, where would you learn about it? When I was growing up, we didn't stay in a bunch of hotels, and we didn't go out to eat very often, but there were sort of cultural touchstones, and a lot of our past guests have talked about this, that watching specifically the TV show Hotel got them interested in the business. I didn't watch that. I was far too young. But I definitely watched The Love Boat. There were tons of those in the '80s and '90s. Newhart, Cheers, evenBeverly Hills 90210, and Saved by the Bell had main characters who worked in restaurants. There were plenty of shows that everybody watched that made hospitality visible. Today, all I can think of are White Lotus and The Bear. The White Lotus is mostly about the rich guests. The Bear is about the staff, but it also makes restaurant work look like a prolonged panic attack, which is a problem. Neither one of those is, like, a real effective recruiting tool. You have to contrast that, though, with Below Deck, which Anna Blew told me about in episode 245. What's fascinating is that Below Deck accidentally became one of the most effective recruiting campaigns in recent memory. The show turned yachting from a sort of niche career that most people didn't know existed into something that thousands of people suddenly wanna do. Recruitment agencies have reported this huge increase in applications. Major yachting hubs saw waves and waves of aspiring crew members trying to break into the business. I think a lot of these applicants were looking for glamour that maybe didn't really exist. Many of them had no relevant experience, but I think that's still a better problem than invisibility. At least people know that a career exists. Meanwhile, our industry wonders why a lot of people don't understand what great careers this industry offers, and it really, really does. But where would they learn? We don't just have a labor shortage, we have a storytelling shortage. We are asking people to join a profession they rarely see represented positively in the culture, and when they do see it, it's usually through the lens of difficult guests, workplace chaos, or murder. I think we need better stories because people can't aspire to careers that they don't know exist, and they don't know how great they are. There's another part of this, too, which Glenda Lee articulated for me in episode 134, and I have not stopped thinking about this since she said it to me, which is that we expect people to provide white-glove service who have never experienced white-glove service. It's so true. When I was younger, I was obsessed with etiquette. When I say obsessed, I'm not being my usual over-dramatic, hyperbolic self. I'm not overstating it. I was collecting antique books, reading antique etiquette books, reading them from cover to cover, like memorizing them. I wanted to know the correct way to do everything. I wanted to know the rules. Part of that was sort of just genuine curiosity about how the olden times worked and all that stuff, but if I'm being honest, I think part of it came from feeling a little bit like a weirdo. I thought that if I just learned the rules and followed them to a T, I could figure out how to at least, like, seem like I was normal or normal adjacent. Over time, my thinking about this has changed. First of all, I no longer care if people think I'm weird. But also, where I used to see etiquette as a roadmap, I now often think of it as a gatekeeping mechanism. Not everything, of course. Confidential to my mother, not thank you notes. I will continue to write thank-you notes. But the most important good manners make people feel comfortable and welcome. A surprising number of etiquette rules exist primarily to identify who belongs and who doesn't, or, like, who knows the secret code. I'm just not as interested in that anymore. I'm less interested in whether someone knows which fork to use than I am in whether they make other people feel welcome and feel good. The best hospitality professionals I have ever met and worked with understand that instinctively. They know both when to follow the rules and they know when to break them to make a better experience. In a roundabout way, a very roundabout way, that brings me to my latest weird project, which is Top Floor Mail Club. It's a monthly travel-themed mail subscription. Every month has a different theme, and it includes four or five travel-inspired surprises mailed to you in a little envelope. Yes, I fully understand that snail mail in 2026 sounds slightly unhinged, but here is why I did it or why I'm doing it. We're all spending so much time online. I know I'm not telling you anything you haven't heard before. So much doom scrolling, so much, like, sucked into a vortex of misery. We're consuming content at this incredible speed, and I think that people are craving something different. I think analog is back. It is for me. I am. I want experiences that are physical, that are maybe a little slower, have some element of the unexpected to them. Hospitality has always been about creating moments of anticipation, discovery, and delight, and I think, I hope, those same feelings can find you in your mailbox. Can I create a tiny travel experience once a month that people actually look forward to receiving? I don't know. That's the experiment. But if I'm going to put my money where my mouth is when it comes to bringing more creativity back to the industry, I might as well give it a shot. So if you wanna see what I'm talking about, you can join our waiting list at topfloorpodcast.com/mail-club, and that'll be in the show notes, or follow along with the ridiculous content that I've been making on Instagram at Topfloor Mail Club. As I have thought about all of these topics, one idea keeps showing up or returning to me, and that is that hospitality is ultimately a creative business. I know there's a lot of math. Believe me, I remember it well. But it's not just operations, P&Ls, real estate, deal flow, and number crunching. Those things, duh, obviously matter. But at its core, hospitality is the ability to make people feel something. And if you can't do that, all the deal flow in the world doesn't make up for it. It's true whether you're designing a guest experience, creating a marketing campaign, recruiting talent, or mailing travel-themed surprises to strangers every month. The ability to create meaning is still the most valuable skill I know. Creativity is the through line. 

Thank you for listening. You can find the show notes at topfloorpodcast.com/episode/246. 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.

[00:13:48] 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.