For tasting rooms, restaurants, and inns
Staff Workshops
A visit, three hours with your whole team, and a second visit weeks later to see what held.
Picture a Saturday at four o'clock in October. A couple walks up to the door of a tasting room, a dining room, or a front desk, and the first thing the host says decides the next hour. Every table is full and the hosts are doing their jobs, and the story that would have made the visit matter never reaches the guest standing at the door.
At most properties the story lives with one or two people, usually the owner and the winemaker or the chef. It comes out over a glass when a guest asks the right question, and it stays with them the rest of the week. The people who greet guests all day never got it, so they fall back on a memorized script, and a script is the first thing to go when the room fills up.
A guest remembers the whole trip as one story. They taste in the morning, have lunch on Main Street, and sleep somewhere that night, and each of those doors tells them something about the place. When the tasting room, the dining room, and the front desk tell different stories, or none, the guest notices.
Who this is for
Wineries and tasting rooms
Where wine club conversion has slipped and the room still feels busy on a Saturday. Where harvest brought new hosts, and each of them tells a different story about the place.
Restaurants
Where servers can recite the wine list and nobody can say what the place is about. Where regulars, private dining bookings, and the story told at the table depend on who is working that night.
Inns and boutique hotels
Where front desk consistency drifts from one shift to the next, and direct bookings, return stays, and reviews depend on the welcome a guest happened to get.
Tourism bureaus and associations
I can run the same session for the member properties of a region, so the hosts at its wineries, restaurants, and inns hear it together.
How it works
The session gets built after the visit, not before.
The call
Thirty minutes with the owner or GM before I set foot on the property. What the place is about, what you want a guest to take away, and what worries you when you are out of the room.
The visit
I come as a guest. The team is not told, so I see an ordinary day. I watch how guests are met at the door, where the conversation gets thin, and where the room gets ahead of the hosts.
The session
Three hours with the whole team, including the people who don't usually face guests. It is built from what I saw during the visit, with no template behind it, and the team does most of the talking.
The report
A written report on what I saw, what the session covered, and what the team decided to try.
The second visit
Several weeks later I come back as a guest, long enough after the session for habits to show.
The comparison
A second report puts the two visits side by side: what held and what slipped.
I record the session so part-time and seasonal hosts can watch it on their own time. Scoped per property, with the number coming out of the first conversation. Expenses are billed as itemized line items.
In the room
The first sentence at the door
"Did you make a reservation?" and "Welcome in, let's find you a seat" can end at the same table, and only one of them keeps the guest. The team works out its own version for a tasting room, a host stand, or a front desk, and practices it out loud.
Reading a guest
The first forty seconds, spent working out what this person came for. A family with tired children needs a different visit than four retired geologists on a day trip, and the host who runs one script for both loses the room.
Stepping in and stepping back
When to talk, when to pour or serve and leave the table alone, and how to tell the difference without asking.
The place's story, in the host's own words
Each host picks the one or two true things about the place they would tell a friend, and practices saying them without a script.
One story across the property
What the tasting room, the dining room, and the front desk each say, and how to keep them telling the same story to a guest who visits all three.
Every guest the same
Guests and members are recognized as people regardless of what they spend. The team practices what that looks like on a slow weekday and at a full Saturday.
Asking and listening
Questions that get a guest talking about the occasion, so the host learns what the visit is for before deciding what to say.
When the rush comes
What a memorized script does when the room fills up, and what a host can do in its place.
One hiring principle goes home with the owner: hire people who love the place and like talking to strangers, ahead of people who simply work fast. The method draws on Freeman Tilden's 1957 Interpreting Our Heritage, the book National Park Service interpreters have trained on for decades, and on the fieldwork method of folklorist Sandy Ives, who taught me at the University of Maine.
What this is not
There are no scorecards, rubrics, scores, or index of any kind.
It is not mystery shopping. I am there to help, and the team hears what I saw from me, in the room.
No individual is named to management.
Anything I see that could cost the property a sale goes privately to the right person and is never published.
I do not bring slides. I talk with the team.
Who leads it
I'm Patrick R. Dunn. I spent more than a decade as a National Park Service interpretive ranger at six sites, which meant reading a group of strangers in forty seconds and deciding what they needed to hear. Before that I studied narrative at the University of Maine, fiction under Stephen King and folklore under Sandy Ives.
I hold WSET Level 3 and trained at the Disney Institute in Disney's approach to quality service. I also spent thirty years leading crisis management and operational resilience teams, so I know what happens to a standard when the pressure comes on. I do every visit and lead every session myself.
Questions owners ask
Do you work with restaurants and inns, or only wineries?
All three. The door is different in each place, a tasting room, a host stand, or a front desk, and the session covers the same ground: reading a guest, the first sentence, and carrying the property's story in the host's own words.
How is this different from mystery shopping or an audit?
Mystery shopping scores a team from the outside and reports to management. I do visit as a guest, but the point of the visit is the session. The team hears what I saw from me, in the room, and decides what to try. There are no scores, no rubrics, and no individual is named.
Will my team feel watched or judged?
The session is built to avoid that. Nothing is scored, nobody is named, and the report describes the room, not any one person. Much of the three hours is spent on guests the team already remembers.
How much of my team's time does it take?
The session takes three hours with the whole team, including the people who don't usually face guests. I record it so part-time and seasonal hosts can take it on their own time. The two visits happen during normal service.
Can you work with a property outside Northern Nevada and California?
Yes. The visits and the session are in person, and travel is billed as itemized line items.
What does a workshop cost?
It is scoped per property, and the number comes out of a first conversation about your place and what you want guests to take away. Expenses are billed as itemized line items.
Start with a conversation
Thirty minutes about your place and what you want guests to take away. No deck and no proposal until there is something to propose.
patrick@vianarra.com · +1 (650) 418-0507