A Hotel for All Seasons

Four seasons is one of those all-too-few commercial brands with which Canadians have achieved global renown, alongside Massey-Ferguson, Ski-Doo, Seagram’s V.O. and the BlackBerry.

Stories of great, sustained success usually are unlikely. This one’s no different.

Isadore Sharp, protege of his father, Max, as a builder of Toronto houses and modest apartment blocks, falls into the inn keeping trade after putting up a surprisingly successful motel for a client in the 1ate 1950s. On the strength of an architecture major from Ryerson University, a twenty-something Sharp, convinced he can do as well at this burgeoning trade as others, ultimately creates the world’s biggest luxury hotel chain. Sharp builds a current 82 hotels and resorts in 34 countries, from Bora Bora to Washington DC and from Nevis to Prague, in the process inventing a new type of hotel facility and style of hotel management, and making the Four Seasons brand synonymous with luxury lodging worldwide.

This is the compelling tale that Sharp, in his 48th year as an innkeeper, tells in Four Seasons: The Story of a Business Philosophy. Having based his enterprise, and this account, on the golden rule—applied to relations with his employees, guests, financiers and the partners who own his hotels (Four Seasons is a management company, as are most of its peers)—his saga is a refreshing antidote to the widespread, reckless pursuit of Wall Street greed that triggered a global banking collapse and the current worldwide recession.

By and large, Sharp’s story is, improbably, one of ever more audacious projects and strategies paying off, creating a legacy that says good guys sometimes do finish first. Experienced in the construction trades, Sharp literally helped build the first Four Seasons Motor Hotel in the early 1960s on what was then a seedy stretch of Jarvis Street in downtown Toronto. All the managerial tenets of feedback, positive reinforcement and empowerment that would come into vogue decades later Sharp absorbed working shoulder to shoulder with his contractors on Jarvis Street and carried with him into negotiations with landowners in San Francisco and Milan, whom he won over with his patience for listening to their objectives.

Sharp’s novel approach, by which he reinvented luxury hotel keeping as much as Cesar Ritz and Conrad Hilton had done before him, was to build small-scale hostelries (250 rooms rather than the 800- to 1,500-room norm) absent the crowds of conventioneers and flamboyant lobbies that defined hotel luxury at the time. Four Seasons instead offered oases of serenity and exacting service for which it charged the highest room rates in every city in which Four Seasons operates. For Sharp’s target audience of well-heeled but harried senior business executives, a residential atmosphere far from home was the ticket for building a loyal clientele that would be a reliable source of cash flow in both robust times and economic downturns.

Sharp offers the obligatory family history, doting especially on the former Rosalie Wise, his lifelong partner, a professional interior decorator who worked on several Four Seasons properties. But that private aspect of Sharp’s life—of growing up Jewish in a Toronto still hostile to Judaism, of a family lineage that traces to Holocaust victims and beyond—is best reported in Wise’s own remarkable memoir, Rifke: An Improbable Life. And a more comprehensive book than Four Seasons would have dealt with the Sharps’ energetic philanthropic life, beyond the role Issy played in helping launch the annual Terry Fox Marathon of Hope Run, now in its 28th year, spanning 55 countries, and having to date raised more than $500 million for cancer research. There is no mention here of Sharp’s role in funding the architecturally daring expansion of the Ontario College of Art and Design or bringing about a long-awaited opera house for Toronto in the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts.

These are not omissions for which Sharp is to be faulted. As the subtitle makes clear, the ambition here is not rollicking reminiscences of a glamorous career (for that, you want Conrad Hilton’s entertaining Be My Guest), but a case study on how to build a sustainable business grounded in unfailing adherence to the highest standards of employee relations and customer satisfaction. Sharp’s account is all the more credible for including episodes in which Four Seasons fell short of the mark and suffered the consequences. When employees at a London hotel complained about shoddy staff quarters, the facilities were promptly upgraded. Since then, renovations of hotels for which Four Seasons has won the management contract begin with overhauling staff facilities to the same standards as guest rooms.

In the evolution of modern business, emphasis has shifted from “blocking and tackling” (the everyday grind of attention to detail) to the headline-grabbing mega merger that yields a short-term doubling in revenues but a long-term string of headaches, including culture clashes, that dooms most takeovers.

Sharp’s book is all about blocking and tackling, making sure the plumbing in a new hotel has been designed so as to be soundproof, that guests who check out upset about something get a call later in the day from the hotel general manager, that the traffic from a meeting-room event scheduled that day is routed away from restaurants and other quiet public spaces. And that new employees be recruited for character, not previous hotel experience, since the latter, but not the former, can be imparted through training. (For a Chicago hotel opening, 15,000 prospective employees were scanned for 500 positions.)

Inculcating a culture of mutual respect is never ending and decidedly unglamorous, and so it rarely happens, notwithstanding the ubiquitous avowals that “people are our most important asset.” Beginning in the late 1970s, Sharp set out to be an “evangelist” of applying the golden rule to bellhops and visiting royalty alike. It was almost a decade before Sharp had completed the transformation, replacing scores of traditional command-and-control managers along the way.

What Sharp alone understood during the ascendancy of his firm was that location and product (a memorably comfortable bed, exquisite cuisine) can readily be copied by any rival. But a service culture of fulfilled, enterprising employees takes decades of role modelling to develop and cannot easily be replicated by competitors. As it happens, Sharp was first with spas, low-cal menus, no-smoking floors, TV sets hidden in armoires, chain-wide concierge service and so on. But these all are commodities, all easily copied. The night desk manager who notices the crumpled condition of a late arrival’s suit and offers to have it dry-cleaned by 6 a.m., or somehow finds a suite in a fully booked hotel for a prospective guest without reservations, is the product of a culture that continually rewards individual initiative.

With a multitude of illuminating examples, Sharp succeeds in putting across the tangible benefits of his philosophy. “The greatest challenge for business leaders this coming century,” Sharp concludes, “would be to align corporate values with human values—not just by giving the corporation a human face, but by giving it a human spirit and cohesion as a community. The corporation can be an ethical organism, evolving as people grow, appreciating tangible and intangible value continually through training, teaching, and learning.”