I remember walking alone to kindergarten, trying to figure out how to get there. My parents never thought of taking me or picking me up. Not only had they too little time; they expected us to be self-sufficient as they were as youngsters.

Often he took jobs anywhere he could get them. Once, when he was excavating a basement with a horse and plough, he broke his shoulder. But he shrugged it off and uncomplainingly kept on working, something I never forgot.

I was building two steps for a house, making wooden forms to be filled with concrete.

Dad, who was watching, never told me I was building them wrong; and it wasn’t until I had poured the concrete that I saw my mistake; the first step was too big and the top step too small.

Dad handed me a sledgehammer, and all he said, then or later, was, “Break it, and do it the right way next time.”

He could have saved a little time and money by telling me beforehand, “Measure twice, cut once.” But the method he chose was unforgettable. 

As factual head of Max Sharp & Son, I was not only in charge of construction; I was rental agent, salesperson, and financier.

He then gave me some advice. “Why don’t you get rid of the rubber boots and start working with pencil and paper instead of pick and shovel?”

I got the money, but not until afterward did the significance of his advice sink in. He was telling me, “You’ve got a good business mind. Why not stop laying bricks and use it?”

I didn’t know it then, but I’d be doing that very soon.

Rosalie never complained, never tried to change me, though she once left me a note so succinctly pertinent that I still keep the original in my notebook:

“Overachievers suffer loss of intimacy. No time for fun. Relationships starve on a diet of self-absorption. Home is the place to express the playful part of oneself.”

Why don’t you build it twice as long. Just exterior with no interior finishes, no plumbing; it won’t cost much. But that will give you a big roof you can put a huge sign on—MOTEL 27—so people can easily find you.

I was still busy building houses and apartments, of course, but in what little spare time I had, I began soliciting opinions from our current and previous financial backers on building a motel downtown.

So when Murray read in Time magazine about a man named Mike Robinson, who ran a successful chain of motels, one of them in downtown Phoenix, I wrote him a letter. He invited us down, so Murray and I flew to Phoenix.

We lunched with Robinson by the pool in the courtyard of his motel: two stories high, all the rooms facing inward. It was sunny, attractive, and peaceful despite being surrounded by a run-down area with a noisy busy depot.

The idea of creating a courtyard oasis without spending a fortune captuted my imagination, and when this fellow said we should fly to Los Angeles and talk to a man named Al Parven, who knew a lot about the hotel business, we complied.

Parven was about to leave for Las Vegas. “Come with me,” he said, “and I’ll show you something.”

He showed us a hotel designed for gambling. What I learned of relevance to our mission was that landscaping really enhances the type of low-rise building we were contemplating.

And that was the one critical decision that determined my future career. I was now, for better or worse, about to become a part-time hotelier.

Ian worked in a little place in midtown Toronto, a considerable comedown for the ex-GM of several of England’s most celeberate inns as well as the Treetops Hotel in Kenya, where Britain’s present queen once stayed. He had every credential we needed, and just then he needed us. Another lucky break.

Because we couldn’t afford advertising, we decided to make food our drawing card and establish the dining room as our showcase, something people would come for and talk about, thus attracting others.

In the end, we decided to serve only roast beef, make our roast beef the best in the city, and present a customary menu only in our coffee shop.

Our second hotel was even more of a gamble than the first. I was putting more scare capital in a business I didn’t really know; I was still primarily a builder, constructing houses and apartments.

But even before Four Seasons’ success rationalized my desire to build a second hotel, I was seeking a suitable site for building another.

I was now envisioning another new type of hotel: a resort within a city, a two-hundred-room hotel with a pool and courtyard surrounded by parkland.

But most of the people I talked to about it were unenthusiastic; they figured it was too far out, in more ways than one.

I foresaw only one difficulty, but it loomed large: How do you build a two-hundred-room resort without any money?

The hotel was so successful that Cec Forsyth, our mortgage lender, congratulated me for reaching the pinnacle of success, which seemed to imply that business from here on would be somewhat anticlimatic.

Nothing could have been further from the truth.

And without thinking, half joking, I told him to tell his company that if they ever wanted to build a hotel better than the Dorchester, I could do it for them.

It was such a flippant remark, I never thought any more about it. But obviously he had passed on my comment to his head office, for a few weeks later, he called me to say, “Mr. Sharp, my people are interested in what you were saying about building a hotel. We’ve been working on a real estate project in London for some ten years, and we haven’t been able to get it off the ground. If you’re interested… ?”

Their survey also found that I was wrong. London’s five five-start hotels, it said, left no room for another, especially an unknown.

I still wasn’t convinced. I remembered how everyone knowledgeable in Toronto was sure our two hotels there would fail. And here we would not be building in some third-rate district but in the center of London on Park Lane and Piccadilly, next to a beautiful park: a magnificent location.

With London growing, business booming, and travel on the rise, I couldn’t see why a five-star hotel in such a location could fail.

More important, I believed that the biggest percentage of our customers would be businesspeople and affluent tourists from North America, and I thought I knew better than London’s hoteliers what would please the most.

“Sir Gerald, how could you have trusted me with such an important project when you knew if things didn’t work out, I couldn’t have covered my obligation?”

“My dear boy,” he said, “over time you make a judgement about people. You develop a belief and a trust.”

Those many meetings of our were not primarily about business per se. They were about the foundation of business: trustworthy relationships.

This was something I’d long believed without giving it much thought. But from then on, in every deal, it would be in the forefront of my mind.

The Sheraton buyout paid what I owed and kept me in business. And dealing with ITT—one of the most powerful companies in the world—was the best business experience anyone could hope to get.

I decided that in the future we would protect the company financially by capping our share of ownership at a small percentage of equity, no more than $3 million to $6 million per property.

This was based on a simple principle: invest no more than our hotel fees would give us over the first five years, an amount we could easily borrown on our management contract, and if no more money to invest was required, we had the option to reduce our equity or put up our share.

Besides limiting risk, it established a new business model: Four Seasons as a management company, not a real estate developer.

Now, just as bankruptcy loomed, I thought of the ITT-Sheraton contract, which gave me $18 million, as my most consequential as well as most productive business deal. Until then, I was a builder engaged in development, a hotelier only part time.

But the contrast in comfort between running a huge convention hotel in Toronto and catering to the carriage trade in the finest hotel in London made me realize what I would really like to do: create a group of the best hotels in the world. And what we really want to do is usually what we do best.

But my mind was made up. “We will no longer be all things to all people,” I said. “We will specialize. We will offer only midsize hotels of exceptional quality, hotels that whever located will be recognized as the best.”

I resolved to sell any hotel that didn’t meet our new standards.

Dad never mentioned my giving up management and taking our name off his favorite building project. But it was his joy, his love, and I know it hurt him, though neither he nor my mother ever said a word. I felt terrible about it afterward. Too late, I realized I should have said, “This particular hotel doesn’t have to measuer up.” But I didn’t, and I’ve never forgiven myself.

This was a lesson painfully learned. One has to be accountable. We can’t make judgements and decisions in isolation; we always have to judge their effect on others.

The Ritz-Carlton gave us some recognition as hotel operators, and hotel developers began to bring us deals. So it forced us to consider what our competition was offering.

We initiated many more ideas to enhance customer appreciation. We introduced fitness centers and no-smoking floors. We anticipated trends in food with low-fat, low-salt haute cuisine. We put shampoo, hair dryers, makeup mirrors, and bathrobes in rooms for guests who prefer to travel light.

Each room was slightly larger than our competitors’ regular rooms, with quieter plumbing, a better showerhead, and a bed with a comfortable custom-made mattress. We offered all this, plus an abundance of carefully chosen details, from the right pillow to the softest toilet tissue to bouquets of fresh flowers daily.

“Almost every employee,” I also pointed out, “knows more about some part of our work than we managers do, and if we build good relations, they’ll let us know when they think we’re wrong.

And the more top performers we can develop, the more chance we have of winning. The fast track for self-development includes helping others develop.”

To compete, we’d all have to feel about service the way Ray Krok, head of McDonald’s worldwide, felt about hamburgers. Explaining why his company led competitors around the world, Krok had said, “We take the hamburger more seriously than they do.”

There is an old two-part rule that often works wonders in business, science, and elsewhere:

1. Take a simple, basic idea and

2. Take it very seriously.

Simultaneously, I became an evangelist, preaching the gospel of service every hour of every day on every trip to every hotel, continuously restating it, clarifying it, developing it.

My job was getting employees at every level to focus on one priority: pleasing customers.

It took most of the first half of the 1980s to clear out all the obstacles that stood in the way of improving service: to part ways with every executive who believed my “kooky” credo should be confined to the PR department, to part withs with every executive whose actiosn contradicted policy and sabotaged our credibility.

I had to make cuts at the very top: hotel general managers and head office senior executives.

Considering past growth, I, too, assumed that spending on travel eventually would start climbing again. I saw the recession less as a mishap than an opportunity, and I shared my views with our corporate office executives.

“While our competitors are dropping standards, we will raise our,” I said. “And we’ll hold firm on pricing.”

In my mind, there was absolutley no question of selling. I went back to Gordie Bell and pledged all my Four Seasons stock, knowing I had to succeed or I’d lose everything.

It’s strange, but I can’t recall being deeply concerned, perhaps because of my depth of involvement and belief in what I was doing.

Remembering that César Ritz made his hotels world-famous by hiring some of the foremost chefs, we decided to do something similar.

My concept of our resort was unlike that of all the other hotels built or being build in Wailea.

The main roads leading into them were about seventy feed above sea level, so their main lobbies and entrances were usually at this level, and access to beach and sea was either down long, winding stairs or by an elevator that cut off the view of the sea.

I suggested to our architects that our driveway should curve down the hill to beach level so our guests, on arriving at the hotel, would have a striking first impression of the sparkling Pacific.

The Regent properties gave our company an equitable geographic balance, reducing our exposure to economic cycles in any one region.

And I could see that once out of this slump, earnings before interest and taxes would be reasonably balanced: 40 percent from Asia, 40 percent from North America, and 20 percent from Europe.

That diversification proved to be key. Even in a disastrous year, Regent was paying off. In 1992, we lost $4.1 million in America, cut only by a litte more than half by earnings in Europe. But with profits of $5.2 million from Regent, we were doing reasonably well in one of the worst years in memory.

Considering this, I realized we were also in a period when successful firms in the past had felt they had it made and no longer had to strive so urgently. And although I had no reason to think this could happen to us, I decided to help ensure continued leadership.

So at our shareholders’ meeting in 1999, I said we were setting a new Four Seasons goal: to be recognized and accepted as a company that Wall Street calls a blue chip, one of the stellar mainstays of the market.

We had already achieved blue-chip status, and to maintain momentum I announced that we should again raise the bar and set a new objective: to be seen, over the next three to five years, as a member of a select group of blue chips, what I would call a special category—leaders of their sectors, best of the best: companies like the Walt Disney Company, the Coca-Cola Company, LVMH Moët Hennessy-Louis Vuitton, Sony Corporation, the General Electric Company, and Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.

Looking back over the last forty years, I’ve identified the four key strategic decisions that formed the rock-solid foundation of Four Seasons. These are now known as the four pillars of our business model. They are quality, service, culture, and brand.

Great companies first build a culture of discipline… and create a business model that fits squarely in the intersection of three circles: what they can be best in the world at, a deep understanding of their economic engine, and the core values they hold with deep passion.

Trust, we agreed, had been the primary reason for our success, crucial to the reputation that precedes us in every deal, in every hotel opening, and in all our operations.

For example, a certain politician, who for years had been our gest whenever he had to be in Toronto, suddenly stopped coming. Months passed. He still didn’t show. So our front desk clerk called his office to find out what was wrong.

He learned that the politician liked our hotel but not our pillows; he liked the pillows of a competing hotel. The front desk clerk called our executive housekeeper, who arranged to get four pillows that were the same as those of our competitor. We then invited the premier to try us again, and he has stayed with us ever since.

We didn’t let this little experience end there. We checked all our pillows; they weren’t as good. As a result, the pillows at all our hotels were replaced by much better ones.

Excellence is often just a capacity for taking pains.

B.S. and I became partners in many hotels: London, Singapore, Bali, Kuala Lumpur, Shanghai, Phuket, the Seychelles, and many more, some currently under construction…

As with B.S., almost all my partnerships were personal as well as working relationships, based on mututal advantage and mutual trust, which I now considered the emotional capital of a company, an often overlooked component of success.

And as each new partnership opened doors to others, it added yet another link to what I hoped would eventually become a worldwide network of influential connections and foreign properties.

No other hotel company has ever been able to duplicated the contracts we signed with these partners.

I believe the failure of many entrepreneurs is due to their inability to delegate responsibility and authority. The complete trust and faith I had in all our very senior executives gave them the self-confidence and desire to train and develop the top people now reporting to them, and this respect and trust went right down the line, giving us the opportunity to attract and retain the brightest and the best—because they believe their opportunities lie in their own hands.

As opening time neared, we advertised for local labor. More than three thousand applied, many with hotel experience we didn’t want—we find that expertise is easier to learn than bad habits are to unlearn.

Instead, we hired a lot of people who’d been doing backbreaking labor in the sugarcane and pineapple fields, people who we felt would appreciate clean work and nourishing meals in a healthy, attractive, air-conditioned environment. We were right.

Over the years, we’ve initiated many new ideas that have been copied and are now the norm in the industry.

But the one idea that our customers value the most cannot be copied: the consistent quality of our exceptional service. 

That service is based on a corporate culture, and a culture cannot be mandated as a policy. It must grow from within, based on the actions of the company’s people over a long period of time.