Excellence Fuels Influence in Hospitality
by David Klemt
Cool grabs attention. Good builds trust. And excellence? Excellence transforms your brand into an industry benchmark others want to emulate.
When someone recognizes a hospitality brand’s excellence, when they admire it, that means they respect how its team operates. They see consistency, character, leadership, and the brand’s aesthetic.
They see something that resonates with them. Something they’d recommend, talk about, maybe even want to copy to some degree. When a brand’s excellence is grounded in authenticity rather than performance, it becomes a serious competitive advantage.
The Five Traits of Excellence
When I first looked into these traits, they were described as “admirable,” or the characteristics associated with “admirability.”
However, I’ve had time to sit with these traits, and I feel it’s more appropriate to view them through the lens of excellence.
With that out of the way, research reveals five recurring traits of excellence (or admirability, if you prefer):
- Attractive
- Competent
- Desirable
- Friendly
- Trendy
These traits represent perceived value. Not just operational performance, either. They’re tied to the vibe, confidence, and cultural relevance that set brands operating at a higher level—excellence—apart from the rest.
Attractive: First Impressions Still Matter
Let’s not pretend aesthetics don’t matter.
Attractive brands look the part. They photograph well. They feel polished. However, the polish goes deeper than surface level. The aesthetic is part of a greater brand alignment.
Branding communicates and supports identity. Design supports the experience. Everything feels intentional.
You don’t need marble countertops or $300,000 lighting installs to succeed. Yes, those can be fantastic details, but they don’t automatically lead to excellence.
What’s necessary is cohesion, confidence, and strategic clarity in how your brand shows up every day.
Look like you believe in your concept. Most importantly, just don’t look it, live it.
Competent: Show Your Mastery Without Flash
Competence is often invisible when it’s done right. On the flip side, it’s painfully obvious when it’s missing.
Competent brands:
- run tight ops;
- deliver consistent product and/or service;
- empower their teams to handle problems before they escalate; and
- communicate clearly, inside and out.
Guests and staff trust competent brands because they follow through.
It’s not about perfection. As Bruce Lee is quoted as saying, “If you are cursed with perfectionism, then you’re absolutely sunk. This ideal is a yardstick which always gives you the opportunity to browbeat yourself.”
Instead, it’s all about professionalism and developing leadership skills.
Desirable: Create Pull Without the Performance
Desirability isn’t just about being booked out or trending. I’m not saying those are problems; both are excellent goals to pursue.
What I’m saying is an even better goal is to become someone’s desired brand. You want to lead your business to the level of excellence that makes it the first that comes to mind when someone wants to feel seen, celebrated, cool, or impressed.
People want to be associated with desirable brands. This absolutely applies to hospitality businesses. Guests want to be wowed and motivated to post about your business. They want to host their friends at your spot. They want to bring dates to you and your team, to visit with their colleagues and clients after meetings.
But you have to blow them away with excellence and make your brand desirable.
Desirability shows up when your space aligns with identity. It’s when people say, “This feels like me,” or, “I fit in here.”
Friendly: Be Approachable Without Losing Edge
Hospitality can’t be excellent if it’s cold. Friendliness is the bridge between capability and connection.
In admired brands, friendliness isn’t a script, it’s embedded.
It’s how the hosts greet guests. How managers lead the floor, and how bar teams communicate under pressure. Friendliness, like excellence itself, is achieved by nailing every step and every detail.
Your team is a reflection of your brand’s personality, and leadership’s reinforcement of standards surrounding tone and attitude. Regardless of personality, friendliness needs to be a pillar of your brand; it’s a cornerstone of hospitality.
That doesn’t mean dulling your edge if you, your team, and your brand have one. In that case, it means balancing edginess with professionalism and being warm and welcoming.
So, make sure friendliness isn’t something you or your team fake. Just like believing in your own brand, your team needs to actually live hospitality.
Trendy: Be Culturally Aware, Not Chameleonic
Trendiness is tricky.
Do it well and you feel current. You and your team are plugged in, exciting.
Do it wrong? You feel desperate.
Excellent, admirable brands don’t chase trends, they curate them. Excellent brands set the pace rather than follow someone else’s.
These are the brands that understand what fits their DNA, and, perhaps more importantly, what doesn’t.
Think of trendiness as a signal that you’re paying attention and evolving but not forgetting who you are and losing your brand identity.
Excellence Attracts Talent, and Keeps It
It’s no secret this industry has a labor challenge. But what’s often missed is that excellence works like gravity on guests and on talent.
People want to work somewhere led by someone that gives them a sense of pride. They want to work somewhere that gets talked about for the best reasons. They’re eager to be part of a brand that provides them near-daily opportunities to say, “I helped build this.”
So, give that to them. Become the leader in your market with the team that others are eager to join.
When your brand is admired, recruiting becomes less about chasing candidates and more about filtering them. You attract people aligned with your mission, energy, and culture.
Even better? Admiration born of excellence drives retention; people stay where they feel proud, seen, empowered, and challenged.
Excellence Inspires the Next Generation
When you lead your brand to excellence, you’re not just running a business, you’re helping shape the future of hospitality.
Operators who work toward, achieve, and maintain excellence become case studies. They get quoted, referenced, and emulated.
And whether they know it or not, they spark ambition in others. They inspire the bartender who dreams of opening their own cocktail bar. The server who’s sketching out a fast-casual concept. They’re a mentor to the GM who eventually moves on in their hospitality journey and launches their own successful concept.
Excellent leaders turn staff into students, and transform students into operators, and the cycle continues.
That’s a legacy. That’s leadership. It’s one of the most underrated impacts of getting all of this right.
Why Excellence Drives Long-Term Value
Cool is magnetic. Good is reliable. Excellence is memorable.
Excellent brands get the press, the partnerships, and the loyalty that goes beyond convenience.
They attract talent that wants to grow with them, not just collect a paycheck.
Admired brands:
- operate with integrity;
- evolve with purpose;
- communicate with confidence; and
- stay consistent in chaos.
To that last point, an excellent brand’s standards are so concrete, so non-negotiable, that they’re capable of thriving in chaotic situation. In fact, they defeat chaos and learn from it.
In short, excellence leads whether it’s trying to or not.
Reflection Questions for Operators
- What’s one thing your brand does that genuinely earns admiration rather than just attention?
- Are your aesthetics aligned with your service culture?
- Do your team members feel proud to represent your concept?
- What trends have you adopted that actually fit your identity?
The Final Bite: Know Who You Are, Then Amplify It
Now that you’ve seen all three dimensions —coolness, goodness, and excellence—you’ve got a strategic lens most operators never even consider.
It may seem overwhelming to consider 21 traits and how they relate to your brand. Luckily, you don’t need to master all of them. What you need to do is lead with intention.
Know who you are, amplify that, and remember:
- Cool gets them in.
- Good keeps them in.
- Excellence makes them talk.
Want to build a brand that lasts? Get intentional about how people perceive you, and how your team lives that perception every single shift.
Image: Canva
