The Elevator Pitch
Many years ago I was told about the Elevator Pitch.
It’s what great brand owners can do – describe their brand in a compelling and distinctive enough way so that a complete stranger ‘gets it’ – all in the time it takes to travel a couple of floors in an elevator.
I’ve always really liked the Elevator Pitch. It really forces you to think about what you are trying to do. What’s the ultimate objective of your business. Cuts out all the waffle and noise, forces you to be succinct.
Happy people make happy guests
One of my earliest recollections having first bought the hotel was seeing the change in people after their first walk on our beach. The effect was so powerful that their physical demeanour actually changed – the beach clearly lifted their spirits and put a smile on their face.
Seeing this happen again and again I realised what we needed to do – we had to keep this effect going by creating a lovely environment run by lovely, happy people who had a single minded desire to make other people happy – why the name Gallivant worked so well and why I had the confidence to trademark the slogan ‘Happiness is a place’.
Happiness is a place
You see it’s ultimately all about the way the Gallivant makes you feel, the effect it has on you when you’ve with us, the single one thing that above all else we aspire to do, day in day out, and that is simply this – to make people happy.
It sounds simple, it is not
It’s a simple but very big idea and the starting point of every new thing we try – the question we ask ourselves when changing things is always ‘will it make people happy?’
Having this as our North star gives me the confidence to try lot of new things – some don’t work, but some really do. I think this attitude of not being afraid to try something new, this constant evolution and desire to improve is one of our superpowers that guests often comment on and why the Gallivant continues to thrive to this day.
Daring to be different
I’m asked almost every day what sort of hotel the Gallivant is and why I set it up. It’s clearly tempting to launch into a list of things you think that would appeal, a list that every good hotel can reel off and doesn’t really say much at all. Lots of ubiquitous features that are indistinctive and frankly rather dull. All as forgettable as the last, none of them really a reason to stay.
This is the reason why I believe you leave so many hotels without any lasting memory of your stay only a few days later. This wasn’t a club I wanted to join, the Gallivant was going to be different – created to have a lasting impression, to make people happy, to dare to be different.
Meeting Jeremy King
When I was first setting out in the world of hospitality I met Jeremy King at a hotel show in London. Back then I was just another wannabe hotelier and he was / still is the most brilliant restauranteur of his generation (think Arlington, The Park and Simpsons in the Strand). I asked him for his number which he generously gave me and a few weeks later he was sitting opposite me in a café.
Having his time to ask all my questions was clearly going to be an amazing opportunity and I was super excited to get his advice. He sat there quietly listening to all my inane questions and when I’d finally shut up I waited with baited breath to hear what he had to say.
It was simple but lazer sharp, something that still steers my wife and I to this day.
“You know Harry, all I have ever tried to do is run restaurants that I would want to eat at myself, perhaps that might be a good starting point for you, create a hotel that you and your wife would want to go and stay.”
Boom! How simple yet brilliant was this. It’s in part why the Gallivant today is consciously designed and run as much like a private house as we can and not like a hotel at all. A ‘not hotel hotel’. And I’m lucky to count Jeremy as a friend who still when asked will listen to what I have to say.
The Gallivant elevator pitch
So what I hear you ask is the elevator pitch for the Gallivant?
A hotel that feels more like a lovely home, so not really a hotel at all, somewhere that makes people happy. A place my wife and I would like to go and stay.
