My name is Evan Carmichael and I believe that the fastest and most effective way to build a business is to model the strategies of people who have already done what you’re trying to do. I call it Modeling the Masters. My last post was: 3 Lessons from Henry Heinz (from immigrant farmer to ultra-successful entrepreneur)

Today we're going to look at how a high school jock whose priority was partying turned his life around and built one of the most successful hotel chains in the world. This is the story of Issy Sharp from the Four Seasons and the top 3 lessons that you can learn from his success.

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"Whatever you do, don’t ever use a crutch, and don’t ever think of having an excuse for not having said, ‘Yeah, I did my best.’ - Issy Sharp

Isadore "Issy" Sharp, (born October 8, 1931) is a Canadian businessman and founder and chairman of Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts. Sharp didn't have much stability in his youth and moved 15 times in 16 years. He also didn't care much for school. According to Sharp: “My life in high school revolved around sports. Partying became my priority.”

That all changed when Sharp was accepted into the architecture program at Toronto’s Ryerson Polytechnical Institute. He began to earn high marks for his creations and worked for his father building houses and small apartment buildings.

Yearning for more, at age 29 he founded the Four Seasons Hotel in 1960 and opened his first hotel on Jarvis Street in downtown Toronto in 1961. He built a reputation for luxury and sweating the details which allowed his business to flourish. In 2006, Bill Gates and Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal bought control of the company for $3.4 bllion. Sharp's current net worth is $540 million.

Action Item #1: Inspire Your Employees

If you ever want to build a successful business beyond yourself you're going to have to have a team of people working with you who are inspired to give their best every day.

Sharp didn’t become the leading luxury hotelier in the world all by himself. In the over fifty years he has been in the industry, Sharp has developed a unique leadership style that has encouraged his employees to devote 110 percent of themselves to the company. By creating a working environment that is built on trust, credibility, and integrity, Sharp has inspired his team to work to realize their best efforts. In the end, he understood that this was the secret ingredient to helping the company realize its best results.

According to Sharp: "We do that, first of all, by establishing a meaningful goal, an overriding purpose that most people can relate to. If the goal is clear and the focus is sharp and constantly reinforced, we unify and energize through a sense of common purpose that inspires employees to ardent effort.”

Action Item #2: Really Service Your Customers

The best companies are based on happy customers and repeat business. You want to strive to create an experience where your customers love buying from you and tell their friends as well.

In each and every one of its worldwide locations, the Four Seasons tends to set the top hotel price for the area - it is usually about 20 percent higher than its closest competitor. How can Sharp risk such a pricing policy? He does it by guaranteeing that his “guests get a fail-safe experience so that a company is eager to pay the extra $50 to ensure a hassle-free trip for an executive who might be working on a $50 million deal.”

According to Sharp: “Our competitors interpreted luxury chiefly as dazzling architecture and décor, but how important is that to our customers? They are mostly executives, often under pressure, fighting jet lag, stress and the clock. We decided to redefine luxury as service.”

Action Item #3: Live By The Golden Rule

The Golden Rule is to treat people as you would like to be treated. It's not only a great way to achieve happiness as an entrepreneur, it's also a highly profitable strategy.

The driving force behind Sharp's success has been his desire to treat Four Seasons employees with the same level of respect that they in turn are expected to give their guests. The success of this policy has shown itself not only in terms of customer happiness but also employee engagement and satisfaction. For years, the Four Seasons has been the only Canadian company to land on Fortune magazine’s list of the 100 best companies to work for in the U.S.

According to Sharp: "We aimed to treat others as we would want to be treated ourselves. Enforcing our credo was the hardest part, and senior managers who couldn’t or wouldn’t live by it were weeded out within a few years... We hire for attitude. We want people who like other people and are, therefore, more motivated to serve them. Competence we can teach. Attitude is ingrained."

True Story

In 1967, one Four Seasons employee went to the extreme in demonstrating the kind of service Sharp was trying to encourage. A bellboy for the hotel, Roy Dyment discovered that a dignitary guest had left his briefcase behind after checking out. The guest soon called from Washington stating that the contents of the briefcase were essential for an upcoming meeting. Feeling responsible, Dyment bought a plane ticket at his own expense and personally delivered the briefcase to the former guest.

More Quotes

Long-term success is never achieved on our own. The phrase ‘a self-made man’ is a myth – all along the way we need support.

If someone had told me ‘Look, you’re going to start today and spend the next five years wasting your time trying to get this thing start’, I would have said I can’t do that. But you never think about what it’s going to take of you. Think: I’ve got it now.

Whatever you do, don’t ever use a crutch, and don’t ever think of having an excuse for not having said, ‘Yeah, I did my best.’

Contest

Congratulations to Tanya Freedman for winning the A.P. Giannini card from my Entrepreneur Heroes series by writing a this comment on my last post. Tanya, please contact me so I can get the card sent to you.

For this week's contest I'm going to give away a Jeff Bezos. Jeff Bezos chose the name Amazon.com for his company after the powerful and continuous South American river, and because, at the time, Yahoo! listed its search results in alphabetical order.

"If there’s one reason we have done better than of our peers in the Internet space, it is because we have focused like a laser on customer experience, and that really does matter, I think, in any business.” - Jeff Bezos

To win the card all you have to do is leave a comment below. One winner will be selected at random from the comments.

Are your employees motivated? What have you done or are you planning to do to keep them interested in giving their best? What part of Issy Sharp's message impacted you the most? As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts if you leave a comment below!

Evan Carmichael

To learn more check out my list of Issy Sharp articles or my website, EvanCarmichael.com.