“If I were to boil down a recommendation for creating cultural competitive advantage, it would be communicate, communicate, communicate!!” — From the book “What I learned from Sam Walton” by Micheal Bergdahl.

Sam Walton (1918 – 1992), for the folks who are not aware, was the founder of the american retail giant, Wal-Mart.

In our line of work, the importance of those three words, cannot be overemphasized. We run an off-beat homestay, in an offbeat location, compete against 166 other homestays (according to HolidayIQ, that is the number of homestays in Coorg as on date) at all possible price points. Communication is our lifeline. To that effect we throw quite a lot of resources into it, we have a website, www.bethelestate.com, this year I’ll add www.bethelhomestays.com (which is work in progress now) to it. We have 5 telephone numbers where we can be reached, we are listed in a number of sites, we have two blogs, our photographs go into a number of online sites..all of this online real estate, just to make sure we reach out to folks

Then, We have a well defined process that we follow with our guests, it starts from the time we make first contact on phone/email and ends with the final email thanking our guests and requesting their feedback. With that last email we ‘close the circle’ on our execution. Thereafter we try to put blog posts and photographs so that we can have a more permanent connection with our guests and the time they had with us.

Most of the times, things move like clock work, some time system gets stressed, some times it breaks.
In case of Vinod, who we sent to Nelgi, on the 21st of March, it caused him an extra hour’s travel. Vinod, a thousand apologies from Bethel team…:-\.

On the 21st March weekend, we were running completely full, so we sent Vinod to Nelgi homestay. On that weekend we had Abhinav Sharma, who was joining us, we also had Abhinava Bhatnagar who was an old guest planning to come again, but who had not confirmed the dates.

I made the mistake of saving Vinod’s cell number as Abhinav’s and send the same to Rakesh.

On the week end, we have Abhinav who tells me he is in Srirengapatnam and ‘Abhinav’ who tells Rakesh that he is in Hunsur!!! Suddenly our well oiled system has broken down completely and its panic all the way!! The first thought we had was that Abhinav Bhatnagar is joining us, we immediately started to act, I would find who/where is Abhinav Sharma and who/where is Abhinava Bhatnagar, meanwhile Rakesh would get a spare room ready. After some frantic calls, I was able to confirm, Abhinava Sharma was in Srirengapatnam. So we decided to focus on the other ‘Abhinav’, the other ‘Abhinav’ was guided to reach Kutta town where we would pick him up. In all of this we never for a moment suspected that the person whom we were referring to in our conversation as ‘Abhinav’ was Vinod!!! Surprisingly Vinod never corrected us whenever we referred to him as ‘Abhinav’ in all our conversations!!

Finally at Kutta the air was cleared, all this confusion meant that Vinod has to drive an extra hour and half to reach Nelgi where he was going.

All that was needed was, “We are expecting Abhinava Sharma today. Are you Abhinav Sharma? ” one question to Vinod and all of this could have been avoided. When in doubt, ask!, Talk, Communicate…

“Communicate, Communicate, Communicate…” — Sam was right, whether its associates or employees, guests or customers, not getting your communication right, is a recipe for disaster.