A few years ago, a New York restaurant’s general manager overheard a table of guests wishing they’d had time for a street-cart hot dog before their flight home. So, he ran outside, bought one for two dollars, and plated it like a course. That small, slightly ridiculous act of noticing became the origin story of restaurateur Will Guidara’s bestselling book, Unreasonable Hospitality. The book shares the philosophy that took Eleven Madison Park from a middling brasserie to the best restaurant in the world, and are success principles that span across industries.
Guidara describes a distinction: service is black and white — doing the job competently and efficiently. Hospitality is color — how you make someone feel while you do it. You can run a technically flawless restaurant, or a technically flawless clinic, and still leave people feeling like they were processed rather than cared for. Resulting in loss of trust, loyalty, and business.
Since our profession is a service industry, this book belongs on your Veterinary reading list.
Veterinary Medicine Has Always Been a Service Industry
Pet parent clients are not bystanders to the medicine. They authorize it, afford it, administer it at home, and live with the outcome. Getting the diagnosis right and getting the relationship right are inseparable.
There is a need to assess the Veterinary practice systems: Are they designed for throughput or for human connection? Are discharge conversations rushed? Do estimates provided feel sterile? Does the energy in the waiting rooms feel like a DMV? (Just because autocorrect likes to make us DMV doesn’t mean it should feel like that.)
This can still happen when a field optimizes for clinical excellence and treats everything else as overhead. But Guidara’s argument is that this is a false trade-off. The businesses that win aren’t choosing between excellence and warmth; they’re refusing to separate them.
This isn’t actually a new idea for Veterinary medicine.
Decades ago, under the private-practice model that dominated the field, a client’s veterinarian was often one specific person known by name, sometimes reachable directly. I had dinner recently with a small-animal practitioner with over 40 years in practice who still loves what he does today. He said that he has always handed out his personal cell number to clients. That doesn’t scale to a modern multi-doctor practice or a corporate group. But what got lost in the professionalization and consolidation of the field is the felt sense that someone specific who you trusted was in your corner.
Price-shopping for a spay isn’t really about the fifty-dollar difference between clinics; it’s what happens when a client no longer feels like they’re choosing a relationship, so they default to choosing a transaction.
The numbers back this up. Veterinary visits have declined for four straight years running, even as 97% of pet owners call their pets family. And while affordability of Veterinary care is an issue, the number of people who said the care wasn’t worth it shows a trust and communication crisis.
So, what can Veterinary medicine borrow from Unreasonable Hospitality for success and for connection?
1. Name why the work matters, on purpose.
Guidara insists you must be able to name, in your own words, why your work matters; then work with that purpose intentionally, not by accident. Veterinary teams already have purposeful work in abundance. Almost everyone in the building got into the field for the love of animals. The opportunity is to say it out loud, often, and build the client experience around it, instead of letting it get buried under scheduling pressure.
2. Let go of needing to be right without letting go of being correct.
Guidara writes about pursuing excellence by trying to do as many things right as possible, while letting go of the need to be right. At a restaurant, that trade-off is low stakes. In medicine, it can’t mean loosening the diagnosis. Clinical rightness isn’t negotiable.
But there’s a version of “being right” that costs practices more than it earns, and it isn’t clinical. It’s the instinct to correct the client who walks in already certain (thanks to ChatGPT or a well-meaning neighbor) about what’s wrong with their pet. Winning that exchange in the first sixty seconds can feel necessary. It also puts the client on the defensive right when you need their trust enough to say yes to the workup.
The alternative isn’t agreeing with a bad diagnosis or letting them feed a diet that you know is unsafe. It’s not needing to win the point before you’ve earned the room to be heard. Listen to them, acknowledge the research they have done, and go together to the right answer instead of announcing it as a correction. The medicine still has to be right. The conversation doesn’t have to be a contest.
3. Internal connection: Build a way to ask for help that removes the shame.
At Eleven Madison Park, any team member could touch their lapel to silently signal they needed backup. No explanation required, no stigma attached, because the whole team knew the system. Guidara’s point is blunt: asking for help is a display of strength, not weakness. Let ego get in the way, and the whole team, clients, and patients suffer.
This lands with more urgency in Veterinary medicine – a profession of challenging jobs by people who care. Stress and burnout worsen in a culture where asking for help feels like admitting weakness. A simple, systemized, low-stigma way to say “I need a hand” is a retention and wellbeing strategy easy to implement and can feel like life-saving.
The same idea applies to clients. Guidara writes about a moment where making a guest feel foolish, even unintentionally, cost the restaurant a connection it was unlikely to ever get back because hospitality only works if the other person feels safe enough to let their guard down. Pet parents walk into hard conversations — cost, prognosis, euthanasia — already anxious, and often already ashamed about finances or about not noticing symptoms sooner. A practice culture built to protect that vulnerability, rather than incidentally puncture it, is one clients are more likely to stay loyal to.
The Takeaway Isn’t a Program . . . it’s a Posture
None of this requires a bigger budget or a redesigned lobby. The hot dog worked because it was specific to those guests, not because it was expensive. I’ve heard of veterinarians calling the children of the pets who were euthanized to check in on them. Dropping off birthday cards and pup cups for birthdays of pets in palliative care to celebrate milestones. Surprising clients on their birthday. Washing a patient for a senior client.
“…there was one family that touched all of our hearts many years ago. They had a dog with terrible flea allergy dermatitis. They reached out to us and used up the last of their monthly money to buy gas for a friend to bring the dog in for us to try to help her. Over the next few weeks, we found out more and more about this sweet family, including that they were living in a building that had no windows or doors. We helped the dog get more comfortable, and all of us at the clinic decided to donate money and then go and help this family put doors in their house and seal the windows. We also got them heaters and a small av unit. They were eternally grateful, and over the years we helped them off and on. Anytime they had any “extra” money, they would send it to us to help someone else. They were an amazing family with a sweet old lab that just needed help getting back on their feet.” ~ Jessi Yoder
Guidara borrows a line from Maya Angelou to close his book: you can’t use up creativity — the more you use, the more you have. The same seems true of hospitality; it doesn’t get depleted by generosity, it compounds.
(Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect by Will Guidara is available wherever books are sold.)