Welcome to The Welcome Conference!

I’m obsessed with the book Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara.

It's so good. Read it.

It’s a book that lies in the intersection of my professional career. For 16 years, I designed tourist attractions, guest experiences, brand activations, and other destinations that thrive on hospitable practices. They fall over themselves trying to outdo one another in the name of hospitality. These are places that worship Walt Disney, PT Barnum, the Vanderbilts, etc.

But working in employee experience, you don’t hear about hospitality or showmanship all that much. Even with the focus on employee experience exploding in recent years, sometimes it still feels a little cold to me. That’s where Unreasonable Hospitality came. It mixed both the guest and employee experience.

Since I follow any media that Will puts out, I jumped at the change to attend his annual conference. The Welcome Conference 2025 brought an incredible lineup, all focused on the idea of hospitable experience. For one whole day, the hospitality firehose would blast insights from some of the best: Jesse Cole (owner, The Savanah Bananas), Lindsay Wrege (owner, 321 Coffee), Rory Sutherland (Ogilvy UK exec), Adam Grant (bestselling author and podcaster), Jenny Nguyen (owner, The Sports Bra), Fawn Weaver (owner, Uncle Nearest Distillery), Tony Hale (actor), and Choir! Choir! Choir! (open participation singing concept). The tickets went faster than a Taylor Swift concert, although admittedly Lincoln Center is not quite the size of, say, Madison Square Garden.

The insights are too many for a blog you’re reading at work, so I’ve picked a few that were lightbulb moments for me that I’m carrying with me in my work:

Jesse Cole, Owner, The Savannah Bananas

After running on stage in his signature yellow tux, Jesse talked about eliminating friction for your customers starting with a “friction audit.” How can you make the pain points bearable? Do you even know what those pain points are? Jesse says it can be hard and messy to do things differently, but, “creating something truly special is always messy at first.”

He also pushed into “winning the upper deck,” which falls under one of his rules: Do for one what you would do for all. Jesse and the Savannah Bananas entertain everyone, in every deck, no matter how close or far their seats are. Everyone is a guest and deserves to be treated as an important part of their experience. He believes you can scale graciousness, you just need some creativity and intention, and the Bananas are proof of that.

Lindsay Wrege, Co-Founder, 321 Coffee

I’ll admit, I didn’t know anything about Lindsey and she wasn’t the initial draw to The Welcome Conference. Then 10 minutes after she walks onstage, I’m crying. Is it because she had a great backstory? No. Because she has founded a coffee shop and roastery that employs individuals with developmental disabilities and has a 500-person recruitment waitlist? Closer, but no.

It’s because as she is explaining all those things, she’s interacting live with the very employees she’s talking about. She brought a handful of her team to NYC and shined a light on them the whole time. She could’ve easily crossed that out of the travel budget, but then we wouldn’t have met Aaron.

Lindsay knows that fostering belonging at work is a choice we have to make, not something to expect. When people doubt her employees, she is their biggest advocate, fully understanding the power of a boss that lets you try. “When you don’t give people the opportunity to fail, you don’t give people the potential to grow.”

Rory Sutherland, Vice Chairman, Ogilvy UK

Rory has a pretty cool job, which is ,“uncovering unseen opportunities.” He has a particularly famous TED talk on this. In his conference session, he made points about selling what customers actually need, and one of his analogies really knocked that home for me. He gave the example of weather reporting and checking the temperature outside before your leave for work, but, “no one actually needs to know the weather, they just need to know what to wear.”

Mind blown. Yes! That is exactly what people want to know!

Customers don’t really care about the technical or specific, they want to know what they should do and how to do it. “People don’t buy what they don’t understand,” he cautioned. But I understood him completely, and with that, I ordered his book.

Jen and I with The Welcome Conference creator, Will Guidara.

Jennifer Patterson & April Neal, Ourselves, Patterson Consulting Group

From the moment we walked into the plaza, we knew it was going to be a good day. There was a brass band playing us into the registration queue, cigar-shaped croissants, and everyone was chatty.

The vast majority of the theater was filled with restaurant and hotel folks, and here we were, with our little HR Consulting badges talking to barbecue masters and fine dining establishments. It was not an HR conference, or a Learning & Development seminar. It was definitely open to anyone, but we had sought it out of the usual professional development opportunities.

To me, finding inspiration and practices from other industries is critical to the way I understand the world and our clients. I’m looking for more non-HR events to go to, keeping us broadly informed about the state of work and the people doing it.

Have you seen any of the speakers in this article? Or have an idea for a niche conference? Drop us a line!