Chief Experience Officer

My title at Wingtip was Founder & CEO, but my superpower was in creating and executing new customer experiences. Sadly, with all the emphasis of late on “customer experience,” the phrase has been used to elevate good ol’ “customer service”, diluting the phrase’s original meaning. I mean it in its purest form: creating a new experience for customers, likely starting before they are even technically “customers,” and seeing to it that every detail, from beginning to end, serves to enhance the experience.

Wingtip gets the ultimate compliment

By far, the highlight of my professional career has to be almost a full page about Wingtip, the company I founded and ran for 15 years, in the 20th anniversary printing of The Experience Economy by Joseph Pine & James Gilmore. When I first started writing the business plan for what would become Wingtip, The Experience Economy was one of a few books that left a lasting impression on me, and heavily influenced my thinking (Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping by Paco Underhill was another one). Mr. Pine made several visits to Wingtip, both the store and the club, and found the concept worthy enough to include in the foreword of the new edition:

With both a retail store and a social club with a full bar & restaurant, there were countless opportunities to stage memorable experiences for our customers and members. Here are a few I was most proud of:

• The Manhattan Project. So amazing it deserves its own page.

• Teaching members and guests to saber Champagne. By now, most foodies have seen Champagne sabering, either in a video or live. We didn’t want to saber for customers; we wanted to teach customers how to do it themselves. We consistently sold 100+ Champagne sabers each year, no doubt driven by so many customers knowing how to do it.

• Port tonging is the new Champagne sabering. Sabring is no longer as novel as it used to be, so we added port tonging. No one does it better than Eleven Madison Park so you can watch one of their videos if you want to see how it’s done. It never drove the Port sales I had hoped for, but for those that saw it, it was most certainly a memory.

• Pocket square library. Essentially, the club designed a custom piece of wall art to display a couple dozen pocket squares that members could borrow for free. Literally the first member to borrow a square came back a couple days later to ask if he could buy the one he borrowed. Ironically, it was one of my personal pocket squares that I just lent to the library, but I sold it to him anyways. Members trying out a square and then buying it once they saw the compliments they received with it made the program a no-brainer.

• Smoking jackets. To this day, I have yet to visit a cigar lounge that offers visitors a smoking jacket to wear while in the lounge except for Wingtip. Why? You may be shocked to learn that smoking jackets serve a functional purpose: to protect the wearer’s clothes from the smoke. That is why they are often made of fabrics that don’t breathe like velvet or silk. Wingtip had a coat rack with at least a half dozen coats in sizes small to XXL for members to wear while in the lounge, and if anything, we never had enough to meet the demand.

• I don’t know if parties count as “experiences.” Of course they are, but I’m not sure there’s anything too creative about organizing and charging for food, drinks, and music. That said, the club’s annual Frank Sinatra Holiday Party, Ian Fleming’s Birthday Party in the spring, and the Kentucky Derby Party were all blow out events that members looked forward to year after year. One innovation members loved best, and which I took immense pride in as a clotheshorse, is that members that bought a tuxedo through the store received a free ticket to the Sinatra Party…for life. This accomplished several things: (1) it drove formalwear sales, (2) it drove Sinatra ticket sales as no one came to the Sinatra Party alone, so they’d buy a +1, and (3) it ensured a beautiful looking crowd for the party each year with more and more donning their tuxes.

At Microsoft, Dinner by Dynamics

Cold calls and cold emails are one of the worst parts of sales. Various experiments with messaging left me with a response rate of approximately 0.00001%, and I know I was not alone. What could I send a C-level executive to get above the noise? My answer: a twist on the traditional “executive dinner” I called Dinner by Dynamics.

The idea was to host a very high-end dinner where Microsoft’s CRM solutions would actually orchestrate the dining experience. For example, we used Dynamics Sales to upset guests on additional appetizers or wine. We used Dynamics Customer Service to handle a guest’s incorrect entree (which was planned) and Field Service’s schedule board to coordinate tasks amongst the Sommelier, Chef, server, Microsoft and partner players. We also used the HoloLens 2 to teach a guest how to saber Champagne, and to guide me through port tonging. The dinners were each 5 courses so that our 5 solutions could each take center stage. We held one dinner at Wayfare Tavern in downtown San Francisco, and another at Plumed Horse, a Michelin star restaurant, in Saratoga.

In all, it took collaborating with close to 100 people within Microsoft, the partner organizations, and the restaurants to pull everything off, but it was well worth it. The events generated close to $500K in new pipeline, and resulted in $200K in booked revenue within 6 months of the events. COVID-19 shut things down barely a month after the second dinner, otherwise we’d probably still be doing them today.

You can watch a 90 second highlight video of the Dinner at Plumed Horse below…

Or check out some of the photos from the first Dinner at Wayfare Tavern below…

Photo credits: https://dines.co

The Manhattan Project

There is one experience that involved over 2,000 man hours and never saw the light of the day, partly because it was meant to be conducted in secrecy, but mainly because it was weeks from wrapping up when I left Wingtip. It was called The Manhattan Project because (1) it was all about the Manhattan cocktail, (2) like its namesake, it was a large operation conducted in secrecy, and (3) it required scientific precision in order to achieve the desired results.

The Manhattan cocktail is very personal for me. The first woman I enjoyed one with was my grandma who would have been in her late 80s at the time. It wasn’t until I met the woman I eventually married that I met another woman that actually liked Manhattans. It was so central to our relationship that Wingtip’s Bar Director mixed a Manhattan during our wedding ceremony for a special blessing. By luck or by plan, it also happened to be the top selling cocktail at Wingtip by a large margin which enabled the club’s investment in The Manhattan Project.

The premise: a Manhattan is made of two parts rye or bourbon (purists would say rye), one part sweet vermouth (purists would say Italian sweet vermouth), and a couple dashes of bitters. There are hundreds of bourbons and ryes, but just a handful of Italian sweet vermouths you’d find, even at the best stocked bottle shop. Martini & Rossi is the market leader, although Carpano Antica is what you’ll find at most craft cocktail bars; Punt e Mes and Alessio are lesser known but easily obtained. And while there are hundreds of bitters, Angostura is found in every bar, as well as the original recipe, so it made sense to go with it. The question was: for a given bourbon or rye, holding all of the other variables constant, which Italian sweet vermouth would make for the best Manhattan?

To answer the question, we needed to make sure the Manhattans were made exactly the same, to the milliliter. And we needed Manhattan-loving judges willing to put on lab coats and blind taste hundreds of Manhattan samples — over 400 to be exact (2 whiskies x 4 sweet vermouths per week for 50 weeks).

Every Monday night for a year, about 12-15 members out of a total group of 25 of the club’s biggest Manhattan fans, would assemble privately for the evening’s tastings. Two whiskies were tasted in succession each night. Most nights, the members would have no idea what whiskey was being tasted, or whether it was a bourbon or a rye. The whiskey would be measured to the milliliter in large, class A volumetric flasks. Same for each of the four vermouths. The Angostura bitters were measured in a smaller graduated flask. The ingredients would be poured into a large beaker, and exactly 7 ice cubes would be added. To ensure each Manhattan was stirred the exact same amount, the beaker was set on a magnetic stirrer, set to the same RPM every week, and stirred for exactly 60 seconds. The stirred cocktail was then rushed to each attendee and poured into a test tube-looking shot glass for a taste, notes were taken, and scores recorded. I would say “rinse and repeat” except there would be no rinsing — that could risk residue from a prior Manhattan influencing the taste of the next Manhattan. No, for The Manhattan Project, every single liquid got its own dedicated glassware to ensure purity. That meant, at the end of a typical night, washing 120 test tube shot glasses (4 per whiskey x 2 whiskeys per night x 15 attendees) plus a dozen and a half flasks.

There was the night Richard Rhodes, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Making of the Atomic Bomb, came and spoke to the group about the actual Manhattan Project. And the night Dr. Eric Simanek, the Robert A. Welch Chair of Chemistry at Texas Christian University (TCU), dropped in to discuss his book, Shots of Knowledge: The Science of Whiskey. It was not uncommon for national brand ambassadors of premium whiskey brands to come for their tastings, drop off schwag, and tell the story of their liquid. Even more special were the handful of nights were Master Distillers joined us, including Dave Pickerell of Whistle Pig (R.I.P.), Brent Elliott of Four Roses, Denny Potter of Heaven Hill (now at Beam Suntory), Ralph Erenzo of Hudson Whiskey, and Chris Fletcher of Jack Daniel’s (photos below in order).

The findings are incomplete and unpublished, although I’m confident saying that everyone that participated would agree that the choice of sweet vermouth makes a big difference. While every member had a clear personal favorite discovered over time, it varied enough to make the exercise worth while. Some day, I hope to start the project anew in order to deliver the results that the American people deserve.

Design credit: https://jina.design