From $500 and a Firing to Running the World’s Top Butler School, with Steven Ferry

Anthony Codispoti (00:01)
Welcome to another edition of the Inspired Stories podcast, where leaders share their experiences so we can learn from their successes and be inspired by how they’ve overcome adversity. My name is Anthony Codaspote and today’s guest is Stephen Ferry, chairman of the International Institute of Modern Butler’s in Inverness, Florida. The Institute teaches five-star service skills to private homes, hotels, and luxury resorts. Its mission is simple.

raise professional standards, and create unforgettable service moments for every guest. Students learn mindset, etiquette, and hands-on technique through on-site and online training, consulting, books, and lectures. Industry peers often call the school the Ivy League of Butler education. Stephen’s work has shaped that reputation. He has authored a series of books on the profession.

Most recently, Hospitality Butler’s and the two volume, Serving the Wealthy. His more than 50 published articles, like the Future Hospitality Professional, have guided readers across the globe. Over the past quarter century, he has trained tens of thousands of individuals and teams around the world, earning glowing recommendations in the process. Now, before we get into all that good stuff, today’s episode is brought to you by my company, Ad Back Benefits Agency.

Listen, if you run a business, you are likely stuck in the cycle of rising insurance premiums. You’re paying more, but your team is getting less, and many people can’t afford coverage at all. We do things differently. We offer a solution that provides your hospitality employees with unlimited access to doctors, therapists, and prescriptions that’s always free for them to use. But here’s where you really need to pay attention. See, unlike every other employee benefit out there, our program leverages

different insurance frameworks to put more money into your company’s bank account. As an example, we recently helped the client increase net profits by $900 per employee per year. Results vary, but the consultation is free. See if you qualify today at addbackbenefits.com. All right, back to our guest today, the chairman of International Institute of Modern Butler’s, Stephen Ferry. Thanks for making the time to share your story today.

Steven ver (02:21)
Thank you, Anthony, and thank you for that glowing intro.

Anthony Codispoti (02:26)
My pleasure. So Stephen, where did the idea to start the International Institute of Modern Butler’s come from?

Steven ver (02:33)
Well, you know, the world of the butler has been going on for a thousand years. ⁓ And in that time, we have failed to come together to set standards. ⁓ If you compare us to the concierge, they’ve been going for what, 160 years or so. They’re very well organized and we do not have an organization until very recently of butlers or butler trainers. And we have ⁓ no set standards or we didn’t.

And so was suggested by Verna Loiter, a colleague out of Naples and Florida ⁓ in 2004, that we set up an organization to set and raise standards ⁓ in a sort of a pan-determined way ⁓ for the profession.

Anthony Codispoti (03:23)
So let’s take a step back. Everyone listening will notice hints of an accent. Where are you originally from?

Steven ver (03:29)
Guilty as charged, England.

Anthony Codispoti (03:33)
What part?

Steven ver (03:34)
sorry and usually when I say sorry they repeat their question because they thought I said sorry.

Anthony Codispoti (03:41)
And what part of the country is that?

Steven ver (03:43)
⁓ It’s southwest of London, it’s the of the commuter belt for London itself, central London.

Anthony Codispoti (03:51)
Okay.

So I don’t know if this is accurate, but myself and probably lots of other people, when they think of butlers, they probably think of Doughton Abbey and you know, like the English tradition behind it. So is that some influence having been born and raised there where this ⁓ interest in modern butlery has come from for you?

Steven ver (04:15)
I would say so. An actual fact, how it started was my wife in 1986 or five was asked to help man ⁓ the personnel for a private yacht. And I was involved in something completely different then I was actually working in a nonprofit. And her job was to make sure the service provided was top notch in her work.

She found out about a butler school in London, England. And when she came back from that successful project, she told me about it and I thought, hmm, you know, that’s something I could do. I might be quite good at it, ⁓ but I’m busy doing something else at the moment. And that’s all I thought about at the time. But it was something that I naturally fell into. ⁓ I never had a butler myself and I couldn’t have afforded one. ⁓

and I didn’t know of any butlers, but it very much struck me that the British butler had something going for him in terms of his ability to ⁓ provide service to people.

Anthony Codispoti (05:27)
So what does the modern butler do? What does this look like? Like the only image that I’ve got in my head is sort of like old timey England, you know, when you’ve got royalty and they don’t know how to dress themselves and so they’ve got to have somebody lay out their clothes and button up their gear for them. Is that what it looks like in present day?

Steven ver (05:48)
I would say so, but we’ve sort of advanced quite a lot beyond just that, but you still have those exact same functions being done. That particular job in terms of the helping the boss dress is actually the work of a valet, not the valet in America who parks cars, but the person who dresses the boss, like a lady’s maid does for the ladies. And so you still have that function being done, sometimes being…

pinch-hitted or double-hatted by the butler. ⁓ But the butler generally today, he’s running the whole estate and house for like 150 years, something like that. ⁓ And that would be managing the staff of all the estate, but it really depends upon what does the boss need and want. If he’s got a huge estate, the butler will run it inside and out. He might run multiple estates. ⁓

One time I was offered the position of a butler responsible for running 26 estates, mainly in California, each one of which was probably 30,000 square feet and 10 acres on average.

Anthony Codispoti (07:02)
And this is one individual who owns all these properties, or is this like a company conglomerate that has them for entertainment purposes? I’m trying to better understand the profile of the typical client.

Steven ver (07:16)
Well, this particular client was obviously a private one. You’ve got two main areas of employment for butlers. One is private service, which is working in palaces or private estates. And the other is the hotel butler. They’re related. They’re 50 % of what they do. Mostly the people skills are the same pretty well. But the actual functions that you perform are the difference between being the CEO of a company

and being, let’s say, a personal assistant, a private assistant for somebody in a hotel. ⁓ So the profile, that was working for somebody who I’ll tell you the background on this person, I can’t say who it was, ⁓ but she married into a lot of money and she was an interior designer before she married. So her whole game was purchasing estates and interior designing them.

And in addition to those 26 estates, goodness knows how many there are now, she had huge warehouses with furniture ready for the next estate. And in fact, when I went, we went out to lunch once, on the way to lunch, we passed an antique furniture store and she couldn’t help but go in and get $20,000 worth of furniture. Didn’t have any, yeah, as one does obviously.

Anthony Codispoti (08:37)
as one does.

Steven ver (08:41)
Anyway, it’s very interesting, very exciting. There are so many different types of people, each with their own peccadilloes and interests, so it’s never a boring job.

Anthony Codispoti (08:50)
So it strikes me that this profession has been around, I think you said, a thousand years, and there was never a central institute until recently that was managing the standards. How do you think that oversight existed for so long?

Steven ver (09:07)
Well, I think simply because it wasn’t needed. Until the last 50 years, up to the last 50 years, the apprenticeship system was in place. So you’d have a butler who would then have someone come in as the hall boy. The hall boy looked after the butler. He was the butler’s butler. ⁓ And he was promoted to third footman and then the second footman and the first footman.

the footman of the people who served at banquets and who also hung on or walked in front or behind the coaches as they went along the roads. ⁓ And then became under Butler and finally he was the Butler. So there was this apprenticeship system. So we always had ⁓ standards being up kept. But as soon as you got people who were not so wealthy or not so ⁓ structured, ⁓

then you have people becoming butlers who weren’t really butlers. And so then when it started moving into hotels, then the…

the problem began so that you don’t, have people saying I’m a butler and they don’t know what a butler is.

Anthony Codispoti (10:23)
They hadn’t gone through that apprenticeship hierarchy.

Steven ver (10:25)
Exactly. Then you had to start having schools. And I went to the first Butler School in London, actually, run by Sir Ivor Spencer. And that was like 85. That was the first Butler School. And he actually gave a fairly good education. I mean, it was the only one that existed actually, if he wanted to bypass the ⁓ apprenticeship route. And it was good and it was bad.

What was good about it was you could have people who weren’t necessarily, I’m gonna talk about class now. In England, classes used to be quite a thing. ⁓ Most butlers came from the lower classes, which meant they weren’t that well educated. ⁓ But when you start opening it up to people who are switching mid-career from, let’s say, ⁓ an accountant or… ⁓

a hotel general manager or something like that to being a butler, you start to have people who are a bit more well read, a bit more intelligent on the whole. And I’m totally generalizing here. And that’s where you could start expanding the scope of what a butler could do.

I’ve, we also do a small amount of placement. We try not to because it’s a pain in the, you know what, um, but the, the job, and this was like 20 years ago, the highest paid job that we had to find someone for was a $450,000 a year for a butler. But why it was because he was required to manage the portfolio of the boss. So, you know, he came with extra qualifications.

I was offered 350,000 and that was 20 years ago to be, to manage these 26 states. So, and I come myself from, you know, I was actually a teacher most of the time before becoming a butler. So you were able to up the quality of the services and the range of services that butlers could offer to employers.

Anthony Codispoti (12:37)
So in those situations, talking about 20 years ago being offered $350,000 to manage 26 estates, I’m completely green to this industry, so correct me here where I’m misspeaking, but it doesn’t sound to me like that’s a traditional Butler job. Like I think you just made the comment that’s more of like a, I don’t know, like a CEO or a COO.

Steven ver (13:00)
Yeah, exactly. We actually call him CEO Home Inc. That was my word for it. That would be the sort of the post title, but you are an estate manager. Estate manager, or in my case, it would have been a state’s plural manager. And you have to have managerial skills. Yeah.

Anthony Codispoti (13:24)
So are you also doing some of the traditional Butler services that we think about, we see on TV? Or you’re too busy running 26 estates and the staffs that go with them to sort of do some of those more traditional things, I would guess.

Steven ver (13:39)
Exactly. The range of services that a butler can offer is very, very wide, which is why I say when people say, how long does it take to become a butler? I said it’s a lifelong, I usually say it’s a lifelong learning experience. mean, one of the, just one of the things that you need to have, you may need to have under your belt is everything that a sommelier does. In other words, you have to have the whole wine, the whole wine industry and everything about it under your thumb.

And you couldn’t possibly do everything for a boss. So it really depends on what does your boss want you to do. And that’s what you focus on. And if you need to bring in people under you, for instance, as a butler running the whole estate, I could bring in under butler or even other butlers ⁓ to ⁓ provide the more hands-on or guest facing experiences. So, I mean, in one job as a butler, I was cooking.

I was serving, I was running the estate. It wasn’t a very big one, but there were two lovely buildings ⁓ in different locations. ⁓ Driving, ⁓ shopping, ⁓ serving at table. Those are things that I could manage in one job. But if I’d also had to run a bunch of other estates, it would have been a bit rough.

Anthony Codispoti (15:01)
So ⁓ tell us what year was the Institute founded?

Steven ver (15:05)
2004.

Anthony Codispoti (15:07)
2004. And when did you see this transition take place where Butler started to become a thing in hotels as well?

Steven ver (15:14)
Actually, it’s a funny story because it goes back to India where ⁓ there’s two luxury chains there. One is the Taj and the other is the Oberoi. And the owner of the Oberoi Hotel was losing market share to Taj. And this was in the 80s. And so he thought, you know what, because most of the Oberoi Hotels are old palaces.

And he of course, himself lived in an old palace and he had butlers there. So he said, you know what, let’s try putting butlers in hotels. ⁓ And that’s what he did. And his market share started climbing again. ⁓ And he didn’t particularly let on about that. But when the Lanesborough in London in the early nineties found out about it, they said, let’s, know, butlers are British.

Let’s put the British twist on this and have butlers too. And that was very successful too. And then the head butler at the Lanesborough. ⁓ He then started, he then said he then went and trained all the other lanes, all the other ⁓ Rosewoods, because it was a Rosewood property at the time, Lanesborough ⁓ and gave them Butler service. And then he thought, how are this? I’ll start my own company. And he did that ⁓ for a bit. And it was mostly across the

the pond and then around 2004 or a bit earlier actually 2002 we got pulled into training and this was before we started the Institute ⁓ the butlers at a hotel just DC and we trained the butlers there and that was one of the first to have butler service in America and it’s just taken off from there.

And in fact, we were working in private service, but as soon as the hotels started to pick up on this, most of our work started to switch to the hotel side.

Anthony Codispoti (17:21)
Help paint a picture for me. What does Butler service in a hotel look like? So I go to check into this fancy hotel. Am I being assigned a personal butler? Is a butler sort of like in charge of a wing of rooms? How does this work?

Steven ver (17:35)
It totally depends on the hotel and their investment. I went to the the main hotel, Rosewood Hotel in Dallas, I think it is. And I did an assessment for them and what would it take to do Butler service? And in order to have shifts, in order to have people covering people being sick and time off, even though they’re what 8080 keys? I don’t know if that’s the exact number. I’m rusty on it.

It would take something like a hundred butlers and there was no way they could make it work if you had one butler per guest. And in that particular property, it didn’t make sense because the suites weren’t that big. ⁓ Beautiful, but not that big. ⁓ So.

What has happened is people then sign on as a sort of a marketing gimmick and they say, yeah, we got Butler service. And what does it involve? Actually just renaming the pool attendant a butler, for instance. I mean, that’s the very worst. They’re not butlers at all. Or it could be one butler for the whole hotel. And all he has time to do is almost nothing. And so in order to address this particular issue, what we did, what I did probably around 2008,

is I created a Butler rating system for hotels. And it goes from the no Butler, which is the pool guy renamed, all the way up to five Butler, which is where you have your own dedicated Butler for your villa or your suite. And that’s obviously ideal because the list of things that you can do, services you can provide ⁓ for the guest is much greater and almost approximates of.

a private service butler. In fact it does. If the boss wants you to go and play tennis with him and lose, just, then you can afford to do that.

Anthony Codispoti (19:40)
⁓ I love that. okay, tell us more about the specific services that you guys offer because as we called out in the intro, you’re often referred to as the Ivy League of butlers. So I wanna understand more specifically what you guys are doing, what sets you apart.

Steven ver (20:01)
Okay, well, that’s a big question. First of all, the services that we offer, over the years, we’ve narrowed it down to what we’re interested in doing and what isn’t a pain in the derriere. ⁓ So we’ve jettisoned anything to do with corporate ⁓ entities, especially where they’re into DEI, which automatically means that we can bid.

and we never get accepted and that’s happened a lot in the past. ⁓ Or where they got a huge amount of paperwork, which is also why we don’t do government contracts. ⁓ We focus just on clients who want their staff trained, because then we don’t have to bother with trying to bring students in, like running a bricks and mortar school. ⁓ And we could just focus on the training.

aspect of it, which we do online, certainly since the lockdowns. But we also ⁓ mainly do on site, which is why we try to do so much travel. ⁓ On site is definitely better. But we also provide the books. We provide online courses for people who want to take themselves through a course ⁓ in private service.

We sometimes help them with placement, but otherwise they’re doing it on their own and they’ll find a job. They usually do in private service. Why are we considered? I mean, it’s very flattering for people to say we are the…

whatever it was you said. Thank you, the Ivy League. I’m not sure that’s so good anymore. Well, the Ivy League colleges or universities are going through a bit of a rough time, I think. ⁓ But anyway, ⁓ I’m flattered. In fact, I’ve even spoken at an Ivy League university. ⁓ I’m flattered by it. ⁓

Anthony Codispoti (21:45)
The Ivy League of butlers.

How so?

Steven ver (22:13)
But I think the only reason we have that isn’t because we offer a wide range of services, but it’s the quality of what we offer and the results we get. We focus on particularly, we do all the dog and pony show, like how do you lay a table and so on. But what we focus on is the most important is the soft skills, the people skills. Because that, when it comes to it,

is the main issue that bosses have. If a person is ethical and fairly intelligent, it’s not that hard to pick up on the skill sets required. ⁓ And they wouldn’t apply for a job where they didn’t have the skill sets or where they couldn’t pick them up rather quickly. ⁓ But it’s really the, I don’t know if you know the expression, a guest smells like a fish after three days.

Anthony Codispoti (23:06)
No, explain that one.

Steven ver (23:09)
That doesn’t necessarily apply in the hospitality industry, but if you’ve got someone staying at your own house, you’re happy to have them there. You’re very excited the first day, the second day, everything’s good. The third day, it’s starting to niggle you a bit maybe, when are they leaving? Yeah.

Anthony Codispoti (23:27)
Very familiar, okay.

So is there maybe an example of one of these soft skills, the people skills that you teach to your butlers that would be helpful for our audience to hear just in ways to conduct themselves better, to create better relationships?

Steven ver (23:47)
Wow, well, I mean, there are so many tools to use. ⁓ I’ll give you a very simple one. But then after that, I’d like to give you one which I think is the most important. A simple one is acknowledgement. ⁓ Usually, people don’t acknowledge. They just assume that the person heard them. But that’s actually a very bad communication practice, especially when you’re face to face. What you did just then was very good.

I said, acknowledgment is important and you gave a very slight head nod. So I know you got it. So you’ve got it in the bag. But so many interviewers, they asked the interviewee a question and the interviewee answers and there’s no acknowledgment at all. The interviewer simply goes on to the next question. And if you do that forever or if you do that throughout, you wonder if the person heard, you wonder if the person got it.

You wonder if the person cared and it’s not very satisfying from an interviewee perspective. ⁓ And if you’ve probably met some people who just go on and on and on talking, have you met people like that? Well, in hospitality one certainly has. You you get buttonholed by the guy who just has to tell you about his stamp collection or the lady has to tell you about her 65 grandchildren. You know, and you know you’re in for two hours of agony.

Anthony Codispoti (24:59)
couple.

Steven ver (25:14)
Unless you can, we teach people how to turn that off. It’s actually quite simple, but you have to do it properly so they don’t feel that you’re not listening and you don’t care. ⁓ acknowledgement is very important and it can either be a simple head nod like you did or a little, I see, that’s good or something like that. And that encourages the person to keep talking as long as he needs to.

⁓

And it also lets you control the communication by acknowledging when they’ve said what they needed to say. And that will stop. Sorry, go on.

Anthony Codispoti (25:58)
And

yeah, that’s helpful. So how do we get out of those ⁓ conversations where we feel like we’re cornered? Somebody telling us about their stamp collection of the 65 grandchildren.

Steven ver (26:09)
Okay, I’ll tell you. ⁓ What you do is you listen very carefully to what the person is saying. And then you think, now, how can I respond to this? You get something that you can say about it. you know, you know that your great aunt used to collect stamps and ⁓ she had a red penny or something, a red penny stamp. ⁓

And so you think, can I say about that? And okay, and then you listen for when the person pauses slightly, because they will pause, most of them to take a breath. And at that point you jump in, in great enthusiasm, you talk to her about, or this person about your aunt and her red penny. And ⁓ you just sort of keep going until you’ve run out of things to say. And then you say, well now,

It’s been absolutely fascinating talking to you about this and don’t say I’d love to continue the conversation later because they certainly will and you’re back at square zero, but simply it’s been absolutely ⁓ Fascinating talking to you about your stamp connection now if you excuse me, I do have another guest to look after that’s in a hotel environment Now if you excuse me, I do have to ⁓ Do XYZ? ⁓

Anthony Codispoti (27:23)
⁓

Et cetera, et Right.

So I liked that. What you basically did was you took over the conversation in a gentle way, kept it on the same topic matter that they were talking about, but it allowed you to step in, take over the dialogue at this point, the monologue, and then bring it to a natural conclusion rather than just interrupting her saying, I got something else to do, right?

Steven ver (27:51)
Exactly, or what they do

in hospitality or other places, they’ll say, excuse me, I got a phone call. But even a dimwit can hear there was no vibration or there was no ringing. The whole purpose is to make them feel very satisfied with you listening to them, and they succeed in getting their message across. And the reason that people get into that frame of mind where they just talk nonstop.

Anthony Codispoti (28:00)
Yeah

Steven ver (28:18)
is because nobody has listened to them before and they’re desperate to get their message across.

Anthony Codispoti (28:26)
So going back to what we were just talking about a couple of minutes ago, it seems to me that your client base kind of falls into two buckets. You’ve got your corporate clients, Companies, hotels, et cetera, they want you to come in and train their staff. And then you’ve got individuals that are coming in to be trained, particularly for private service. Am I understanding that correctly?

Steven ver (28:48)
Yes, but again, most of the time we train on site, but we back that up with, I mean, when we get, were up in East Hamptons ⁓ earlier ⁓ training a house. Actually she was ⁓ the chef on a private yacht that I recommended the owner promote to their ⁓ estate manager in East Hamptons.

because she was loyal and she was very competent, very competent indeed actually. I went and trained her and helped put her on the job. ⁓ And then we followed that up with the online course where she would get an awful lot of information that we wouldn’t have time for face to face. That’s a very good ⁓ sort of double whammy strategy for getting people on post.

Anthony Codispoti (29:40)
You know, in various books that you’ve written, Stephen, you’ve highlighted key competencies for modern service roles. And we touched on one sort of that acknowledgement factor there. What are some of the other ones?

Steven ver (29:53)
EQ. You know what that is?

Anthony Codispoti (29:56)
I do, but please tell our audience.

Steven ver (29:59)
Okay, EQ is actually a misnomer. It’s trying to make an art into a science by introducing something which is actually from mathematics. It comes from IQ, which stands for intelligence quotient, because intelligence quotient is a number that’s put together from a person’s response to questions asked.

which then gives them an IQ of 80 or 150 or whatever. When you say emotional quotient, it sounds like IQ, but there’s no numbers involved particularly in emotions. So that’s the first thing. But otherwise EQ is not understood as a subject, even though it is the latest hot button. And quite rightly so in hospitality and actually in life.

If you don’t know, did I mention about if you have a walkie talkie? Okay, all right. Imagine having a walkie talkie where you’re communicating like crazy to a person. Now imagine that you’re on wavelength 911 and they’re on wavelength 90.

Anthony Codispoti (31:00)
No, not yet.

Steven ver (31:17)
None of the communication arrives and that’s exactly what happens when a person tries to communicate to another without bearing in mind what their emotional level is. As an example, someone’s crying. I used to do this a long time ago. come on, man, cheer up, it’s not that bad.

That’s completely wrong wavelength. ⁓ Exactly. But the basic on that is what is the emotional level of the person you’re talking to? In this particular case, the one person in grief is way down the scale. The person ⁓ who is saying, on, cheer up, they’re way up the scale and they don’t meet. And so you’re not effective. And it’s very important when dealing with anybody.

Anthony Codispoti (31:41)
You’re being toned after the situation.

Steven ver (32:08)
to determine what their emotion is and to use that emotion or one slightly higher on the scale ⁓ in order to deliver the same communication that you would normally do.

So as an example, for instance, yeah, in hospitality, they do a lot of comping. You know what that is?

Anthony Codispoti (32:26)
Understood.

Comping, yeah, where they give you like a free drink or maybe like an upgrade to the room or something like that.

Steven ver (32:42)
Exactly. That actually loses something like 6 % of hospitality profits. This figure is like 15 years old. Goes towards uncomping. Most of which is unnecessary if you simply used the right ⁓ situation handling communications plus the emotional scale. Because what you can do is you get the person to the point where actually they don’t give a toss anymore about whatever it is they were bitching about. ⁓

And I can give you a small amount example. ⁓ Let’s say that someone is unhappy because the waiter spilled the wine glass, knocked it over, and it’s red wine, and it’s all over the white tablecloth. And so the guest gets angry.

The wrong thing to do is to offer him the free meal. Certainly you wanna replace the glass, the wine and apologize and do all the things you’d normally say. But you wouldn’t wanna go overboard to make it up to him. Why not? Because that emotion is propitiation.

propitiation is a bit of a tough word to say for most people, but it is where you give someone something in order to buy them off and not harm you, not hurt you. And that’s what hotels do. Please don’t shite in the lobby so much here, take the whole stay for free, but please stop shouting and upsetting the other guests. The reason that’s wrong,

Anthony Codispoti (34:21)
Yeah.

Steven ver (34:29)
is because when the guest is angry there are a certain emotional level propitiation is lower than that it’s actually very close to fear and when you go lower than somebody’s emotional level you actually bring them down

And what you’re, yeah, so they were angry. Now they’ve gone down to covert hostility, which is a fascinating emotion. Some people call it ⁓ passive aggressive. In Philippines, they call it doggy smart, doggy mouth, doggy smile, because it looks like a dog with all his teeth in evidence. It looks like,

Anthony Codispoti (34:48)
Interesting.

Ha ha ha ha.

And so what’s the right way to handle that situation?

Steven ver (35:18)
I’ll tell you in a moment, Kovac’s still here, I’d like to define a bit because I think it’d be very helpful for people to recognize that this isn’t emotional, it’s like a snake in the grass. They smile at you and because they’re smiling, you sometimes might be foolish enough to think they like you, but they don’t. They’re just too frightened to punch you in the nose. So they will, instead of punching you overtly in the nose, they will go, ha ha ha ha ha.

Anthony Codispoti (35:20)
Okay.

Steven ver (35:47)
and they’ll find some way to undermine you. They’ll stab you in the back in some way, either with you or they’ll go behind your back and leave a comment ⁓ on the internet about how bad you are. That’s passive aggressive, that’s covert hostility. ⁓ And they’re rather dangerous, they are dangerous if you don’t recognize it.

because there’s a certain way to handle them emotionally too. But to go back to your question, how do you handle somebody who is angry or antagonistic? There’s a slight difference between the two. Antagonism is where you’re going straight in the guy’s face, face to face, attacking. Anger is a bit more like a bomb going off. You’re just exploding at everything. Neither of them are very pleasant and guests will react like that sometimes if they’re upset.

How do you handle it? With the same basic principle, with a different emotion. But it’s an emotion which is similar to Aikido. Are you familiar with Aikido or shall I explain it for the list? Aikido is where you use the other guy’s force against him. Most of these martial arts are block, punch, kick. They’re all attack, attack, attack. ⁓

Anthony Codispoti (37:00)
Please explain. I can see where you’re going.

Steven ver (37:14)
like this. Aikido simply takes that guy’s hand as he tries to punch you and you twist it and go in the same direction so that he loses balance and then you can twist his wrist for instance so that he’s incapacitated. But there’s been no blows, ⁓ nothing like that. You use the other guy’s motion against him. So it’s the same thing.

with using the emotional scale to handle someone who’s upset or angry like that, ⁓ you become bored.

Now that, I have to say that with a caveat because you could become, people might think, well, you should become bored and you say, ⁓ you’re always complaining, Mr. Smith. Why don’t you just let it go? You know, and that would just make him more mad.

Anthony Codispoti (38:09)
Is what you’re talking about that you just you don’t respond with emotion? Like just very even keeled? Is that what you mean by being bored?

Steven ver (38:16)
No, because that’s the big misconception here and I need to undercut a bit. Emotion, there are about 50 emotions, 40, 50 emotions, one of which is boredom. That is an emotion. And people think that someone who’s not displaying an emotion is not displaying an emotion, but actually they are. It’s just one that doesn’t seem to be too dramatic or volcanic in some way. Boredom may seem like no emotion, but it actually is.

an attitude and emotion that a person has towards a subject in life. Some people may be bored at American football. I certainly was when I first came to America, because I didn’t understand it and they just seemed to huddle around talking half the time, which is nothing like rugby. ⁓ But that’s just my emotion or was my emotion towards American football. Other Americans, for instance, get extremely exhilarated or enthusiastic about it.

or antagonistic ⁓ depending upon how it’s going for them. All of those are different emotional levels and so it’s the same with boredom.

I’m sure you’ve been bored with things in life. I’m sure everyone who’s listening has been bored with certain subjects. When my wife starts going on about something, I sort of switch off a bit. Not about everything, but she’ll go on about stuff which doesn’t interest me. So I’ll go, uh-huh, mm-hmm, sure, honey, like that. It’s not a very good thing to do unless she’s being angry. If she’s actually very excited about it and I start being bored, that brings it down.

and then she’ll get angry and say, you never listen to a word I say or something like this.

Anthony Codispoti (40:02)
So how do you be bored in sort of this angry professional situation that you’re talking about?

Steven ver (40:07)
It’s very easy. Your body language says boredom, but at the same time, you you’ve got the emotional level, but you also got what you’re communicating. What you’re communicating is all the usual stuff. I’m very sorry about that. And you find out what happened and what their upset is about it and so on and so forth. And as you’re addressing the problem,

It shows that you’re concerned and caring and you’re gonna handle it for them. But you do it with bored voice tone, bored body language in terms, mean, body language includes voice tone, but also when a person is bored, what do they do with their eyes? They look over here and they look over there and then they look back at the guest ⁓ and they may nod slowly. You know, have to drill it and practice it until you can do it naturally without thinking. ⁓

and at the same time the right words are coming out of your mouth. it’s just, I mean, if you knew what, people don’t even know what emotions are, what are they actually made of?

Anthony Codispoti (41:14)
Well, here I want go back to this boredom thing though because this is very counterintuitive to me. If I’m talking with somebody and I’m upset and I see this very disinterested body language, isn’t that going to make me more upset? Is going to trigger me more?

Steven ver (41:27)
Absolutely. If what you say also shows a bored attitude towards the guest’s complaint or the person’s whatever they’re angry about. But if you are addressing the problem at the same time as being in a bored tone of voice and so on, the boredom, that’s why I went back to people don’t know what emotions are. Emotions are wavelengths. They’re actual physical wavelengths.

And so boredom acts in the same way that noise canceling earphones do when you’re in an aeroplane. The sort of scrunchy noise or the jet engines or your next door person talking to you is canceled out by the boredom wavelength. It’s actually a physical thing we’re talking about here. And so, I mean, I’ve used it hundreds of times.

Anthony Codispoti (42:13)
Interesting.

Steven ver (42:21)
and the people I’ve trained have used it and I’ve been absolutely amazed at how quickly it defuses someone’s anger.

Anthony Codispoti (42:28)
wonder if there’s a video of you doing this somewhere in a piece of education. I want to check this out and I want to share it with our listeners. So if you find something later on, let me know and we’ll drop it in the show notes for folks because it’d be interesting to see this in practice. I want to ask you about an article… Yeah, go ahead. Yeah.

Steven ver (42:42)
Well, sorry, before you go on though, just to,

I’m very happy just for them to contact me or, and they can contact me and I’ll train them and their staff either for lots of money or for no money at all, ⁓ depending on the situation, because I want people to know this technology. Otherwise there’s also a website that they can go to where they can actually see, I mean, it’s very brief and basic.

It won’t get them up to speed, but it’ll certainly get them on the right track. Yeah.

Anthony Codispoti (43:17)
So for people to contact you, and we’ll repeat this information towards the end of the show, but Steven Ferry at modernbutlers.com, Steven is with a V and Ferry is F-E-R-R-Y, Steven Ferry at modernbutlers.com, it’s how you can contact him to get this training, either at a fee or he’s offering it up for free. That’s pretty generous. So let’s talk about this article.

Steven ver (43:24)
Exactly.

Of course.

Anthony Codispoti (43:42)
that you wrote entitled the future hospitality professional. Because I’m curious from your decades of experience in the industry, where do you foresee changes coming in this space?

Steven ver (43:56)
Well, you know, there’s two things. There’s my universe, I make postulates and decide this is what I want and what should be. And then there’s what actually happens. And the trick is to make them both coincide. So I don’t have a magic, what do you call it? A crystal ball. ⁓ But I know where I want it to go and where I hope it will go. And that is where, I think it was Nesbit who talked about high… ⁓

High touch.

Long time ago, I guess. And he was talking about that as the antidote to high tech. And right now, high tech is winning over high touch. High touch is where you really connect with the people. And the people, ⁓ if you look at what’s the main market for hotels or for butlers, it’s not robots, it’s not software, it’s people.

Robots and software don’t go to hotels to vacation because they don’t need to. People do. And people don’t really like to be treated by robots. Why? Because there’s no life in them. There’s no actual emotion. When they do try to emote, it’s completely fake. now I’m very excited. Okay. ⁓ And so what I…

What I hope will happen is that the pendulum will swing back to away from this high tech thing. It’s not to say we abandoned technology, you can’t. It’s much too useful, but it doesn’t take the place of people. And I think if we’re gonna salvage this civilization as a whole, we need to put the balance back in. Otherwise all sorts of society upset will happen and this civilization like.

the 300 plus that have gone before it on planet Earth recently, ⁓ will go belly up.

Anthony Codispoti (46:00)
Me.

You’ve got another business, Stephen. DNA quality assurance. What’s this about?

Steven ver (46:09)
About, ⁓ well, several years ago, I teamed up with two German gentlemen who were very deep, knee deep and had long tracks in hospitality. And we looked at the fact that it’s actually related to the emotional thing that we talked about and also high touch. ⁓

The fact is that the people like Forbes,

who go in and assess and give ⁓ rankings to hotels, their ratings are based too much on

the provenance of ratings that in 1950s in London, the whole idea of giving ratings to hotels was born. And at that time, what was important was the facilities. There’s nary a mention of the service that you’d get. And I can tell you, I mean, I can’t say the 50s, but when I was going shopping in for clothes in London in the 60s, you’d be completely

the people who are meant to help you would look down their nose at you and their attitude is what you’re doing here. And if you go and ask for assistance, you wouldn’t get it. ⁓ Except you get it with a sneer maybe. ⁓ So the idea of service wasn’t really embedded in the way that hotels were being judged. And so we are judged that it would actually be better if we rewrote all the…

Anthony Codispoti (47:24)
you

Steven ver (47:47)
all the standards, four, five star and four star, we had different levels, ⁓ which included soft skills, people skills, ⁓ and communication skills and everything like that, as well as what is the property like? ⁓ And so that’s what we’ve done. So we do ⁓ audits and we also do follow-up training in order for ⁓

And we don’t do actual ratings. We just improve their chances of getting a five-star from the existing agencies. We originally just tried to do that, but it was, the hotels and the industry was too deeply embedded with Forbes, et cetera. ⁓ And so we just simply act as an assist to get them above what the requirements would be.

Anthony Codispoti (48:42)
So you understand what those requirements are. You go into these hotels that hire you and say, okay, here’s what you’re doing well. Here’s what needs some work. Here’s some things that you can do to fix all of that. Next time Forbes comes in here, you guys will have a much better shot at getting the rating that you’re after.

Steven ver (49:00)
Exactly, but our standards are higher. I mean, some of them are the same because you know, there’s only so much you can do to fix something, but some of the standards are higher. So they have a bit of a cushion, let’s say, for passing the Forbes standards.

Anthony Codispoti (49:18)
Stephen, it’s clear that you’ve been doing this over two decades now. You’ve had a fair bit of success in this, but we all overcome hardships in our life. I’d be curious to hear about a particular challenge that you’ve overcome, how you got through that, and what you learned in the process.

Steven ver (49:35)
Okay, well I can give you an example. My wife and I decided we’d had enough of Hollywood and we left with $500 in our pocket, which doesn’t last very long in London. Let me tell you. So we immediately had to just grab any job we could and we went to an agency and got temp work. And I come from a background where I’m actually quite…

a good organizer and manager and so on. And I hadn’t adjusted my point of view. And so when I went in as a temp, I’ve never liked secondhand smoke. And in England, they have zero respect for this as an issue. And everybody was smoking like a chimney. And so I thought, well, let’s handle this. And I wrote up a complaint with a solution.

And I was a bit surprised to see I’d been fired the next day. Because the agency wasn’t amused at what the bosses said. And the funny thing was, and if I’d done proper research, was the managers I wrote to, they were all smokers too. So I hadn’t surveyed the environment before talking. No, it’s pathetic. I mean, that’s one example.

Anthony Codispoti (50:54)
You didn’t know your audience.

Steven ver (51:02)
And what happened was my wife is very well trained in PR. And so she took me out to lunch the next day. Well, actually it was during lunchtime. We didn’t have enough money for lunch. We went to a beautiful garden and she read me the, I wouldn’t say she read me the riot act, but she told me about the birds and the bees and you have to know your audience, et cetera. And it was from that, that I got off my, I wouldn’t say I was a king of the castle, but.

I learned a bit of humility and that it really helps to know your audience as you pinpointed. I had another example too, actually. This is from my time as a butler, early days in a private estate. And that was a time when I also was the chef. And so I had a meal I was doing for I think 16 people, 16, 18 people.

I cooked the whole thing and I served the whole thing and it was like a six course meal. And I was feeling quite, you know, happy. I knew I was getting lots of brownie points until…

I heard them say something, them being a bit of a smart aleck, I said something too. But they weren’t talking to me. They were talking to each other. And the whole room went quiet because I’d made two errors. I hadn’t realized that a word that I had said had a double entendre. The one not intended was one that would seem like I’d made a racist comment.

And if a hole had opened up in the floor and I disappeared down it, I would have been very happy. But it didn’t. So I lost a few brownie points on that. ⁓ Well, obviously I had to apologize. And I kept my mouth shut for the rest of the meal, because I was clearing the main course when that happened. I basically had to earn, luckily I had a lot of brownie points in credit, but I also had to then sort of…

Anthony Codispoti (52:49)
How did you recover?

Steven ver (53:07)
paddle twice as fast to catch up. What I learned from that though, and that was sort of like a big no-no. ⁓ What I learned from that was that there are rules as butlers and they’re there for a reason. And you can’t overrule these rules. And part of it was know your audience. And my audience was the people I was serving and there’s a distinct line between me and them. I’m there to serve them.

not to buddy buddy with them. ⁓ So anyway, that brought it home to me. So I haven’t made that mistake again.

Anthony Codispoti (53:44)
There’s a common thread between those two examples, know your audience, know who you’re speaking to.

Steven ver (53:48)
Exactly.

As the saying goes, it’s a PR world.

Anthony Codispoti (53:53)
Yeah, I’m curious, Stephen, if you have an observation from your work that gives you insight on the broader economy. And here we are recording in early twenty twenty six.

Steven ver (54:04)
Okay, I think our economy is just an expression of our civilization.

⁓ You can’t have a good economy if people don’t like each other.

Why? Because it’s a sort of a zero sum game, it seems, or you have to ⁓ crawl over everyone else’s back to get ahead and so forth. And that’s not the way to build an economy. An economy should be built based on love, actually. And I know this is a very long stretch from where things are at the moment, but it shows how do we treat each other? Right now, I think there’s two problems. ⁓ The social media,

is totally antisocial. It turns people against each other because you’re not talking to a real person. You’re talking to your idea or what you see or what you see in the text, which isn’t a real person, even though it’s coming from a real person. And people start to lose their civility and their manners and their love for others. And so as that happens, mean, what does the army do? The army focuses on

teaching you or used to during war time at least how bad the enemy is. And if you think they’re bad enough, then you shoot them. And that’s sort of what’s going on now. ⁓ If people are bad, which they tend to be, if you can’t face to face and sort out disagreements, then everything goes to hell in a bucket. So I think if we want to improve the economy, we need to sort out the antisocial media or get people off it.

They need to stop reading the newspapers because that basically says everything is bad over there. Everyone else is bad. Most of the media, Democrats are bad, Republicans are bad, et cetera, et Iranians are bad. ⁓ And we also ⁓ need to fix education. I’m sort of looking at the big picture, but what the schools and universities particularly are turning out at the moment is entitled…

Anthony Codispoti (56:08)
me.

Steven ver (56:17)
people who are not ready to produce and they haven’t been trained to produce and therefore they feel disenfranchised from society because they haven’t been allowed to contribute to it. And that sort of starts with their parents, some of them, who don’t let them contribute. You know, a kid comes up to mum and says, mum, can I make the cake? And she says, go away, stop bothering me. You know, that sort of thing. Right there, you’ve cut that kid’s reach to contribute.

Anthony Codispoti (56:46)
Hmm

Steven ver (56:46)
And

if you can’t contribute to something, then you’ll start attacking it. Over time, that’s the way it’ll go. And so we’ve got to fix education so it actually teaches people tradable skills that they can use to help rebuild society. When we’ve got a real civilisation society, the economy will look after itself because everyone will be looking after each other as well as themselves. ⁓ And I don’t mean to sound like this is a kumbaya moment where we just flap jaws and

and so on. No, it takes a lot of hard work and intelligence to make things right. And that’s what I’m talking about. And so that’s where I think the connection is or nexus between economy and civilization. Or there is a nexus there and we need to fix the basic.

Anthony Codispoti (57:37)
Yeah, that’s all really interesting. You know, as I listen to you talk, ⁓ I don’t know how to pull those big giant levers that you’re talking about there. But one of your stories, it got me thinking there’s something I can do just in my day to day life with my own kids. I thinking specifically about my nine year old who every time he makes a peanut butter sandwich gets peanut butter all over the kitchen. It’s on the dining room table, which is 15 foot away. It’s on the faucet. It’s on the counter.

Steven ver (57:58)
You

Anthony Codispoti (58:07)
He’s got it in his hair and I lose my mind. I’m like, give me the knife. Let me finish this sandwich for you. And I think I just, I need to just let him do his thing, help coach and correct him. And then when he’s done, I can go in and clean up the remnants of what he wasn’t able to get himself. Sorry. So I’m just trying to think of how to take sort of the big picture advice that you’re talking about and distill it down into something that I can do in my little corner of the world tonight.

Steven ver (58:13)
⁓ Right.

I love it. One thing I could add to that though is instead of you cleaning it up, help coach him to clean it up and validate him when he does it.

Anthony Codispoti (58:45)
Yes,

yes, you’re 100 % right. And so I do coach him to clean it up. And then at some point it is a lost cause with diminishing returns and I’ve got to go in there to sort of get the last remnants of it. But I like that you threw that in there. Yes, don’t steal that part of the cleanup, the cleanup part of the project from him either. Thank you. yeah. Stephen, for our audience, how would you characterize what your superpower is?

Steven ver (59:14)
You know, I’m going to say something that might turn some people off. But in 1970, I got into Scientology. And Scientology is actually an applied philosophy. It’s something you do. It’s not something you believe. And what is it you do? Huge amount of techniques or policies like business policies that you follow that that result in improvement.

And so I have got a huge amount of information picked up over, what is it, 56 years ⁓ on how to deal with, how to help people and how to deal with whatever issues they’re running into. And so that’s my secret source. ⁓ You called it a superpower. That’s actually what got, I mean, how did I end up actually sort of

redirecting the Butler world, because I did actually. ⁓ And it’s not something I’m going to jump up and down saying, look what I did, look what I did. But I have to acknowledge the fact that I was the one who first started saying we need to modernize our profession and lo and behold, what has happened, it’s modernized. It wasn’t because of my ⁓ superpowers as an individual, it’s just that I was able to spot what the truth was of the situation and communicate it to people.

And the truth simply took over. My colleague said, you know what, you’re right. We can’t keep looking down our noses and sneering at people for being inferior as butlers. Because that was the basic general approach. ⁓ We have to modernize because we’ve got an international audience. ⁓ They have different morals. They have different understandings. They have different expectations. ⁓

And modernizing includes the digital world. Because when I started first saying this in the early 90s, we were sort of starting to go digital. And in those days, I think we had PDAs. But they were like the latest breaks. Yeah, Palm Pilots. Instead of having to write on a card with a pen, whatever the boss said, you’d simply worked about your PDA and it was all, you know, etc. So

Anthony Codispoti (1:01:25)
Home pilots, yeah.

Steven ver (1:01:36)
modernization was definitely the thing to do. And I ran into trouble at that time because nobody else initially believed that. And in fact, one guy, I sent him a candidate from Rhodesia, or I think it’s got a different name now, ⁓ because he ran a Butler school and he was old school. And

he wrote back instead of engaging in conversation and getting this guy to come to his school he said when you get a proper name I will consider talking to you that’s what I mean by looking down your nose or sneering at what was the guy’s ⁓ well in Rhodesia they caught they the mothers and fathers give their kids names which are qualities ⁓ graces

Anthony Codispoti (1:02:17)
Wow.

Mm.

Steven ver (1:02:34)
And it was something like Happy Zulu or something.

Anthony Codispoti (1:02:37)
I’m

working with a woman now whose first name is Gift. So I understand.

Steven ver (1:02:41)
There you go,

exactly, ⁓ And I took umbrage at this. I tried to salvage the poor guy. it’s Cleverzulu, that was his name. Delicious name. ⁓ And I then asked this chap, my colleague, what exactly is your definition of a butler? And he said, well, one, they have to be British.

Two, they have to be men. And three, they have to serve royalty or nobility.

Well, that was his view, I guess probably in the late 90s.

Fast forward 10, 15 years, and he used to call hotels, hotel butlers, marketing gimmicks. And it’s true, some of them were. But then fast forward 10, 15 years, and I find out he’s busy training butlers in Chinese hotels.

So even he evolved, even he did.

Anthony Codispoti (1:03:51)
He evolved.

I love

it. Stephen, I’ve just got one more question for you today, but before I ask it, I want to do three quick things. First of all, anybody who wants to get in touch with Stephen, his website is modernbutlers.com and that’s plural, modernbutlers with an S.com and his email address, which we gave out before, Stephen with a V, D-E-V-E-N, fairy, F-E-R-R-Y.

at ModernButlers.com, StephenFerry at ModernButlers.com, and we’ll have that in the show notes for folks. Also as a reminder, if you want to get more hospitality employees access to doctors, therapists, and prescription meds, that as paradoxical as it seems, actually increases your company’s net profits, reach out to us at addbackbenefits.com. Finally, if you are enjoying the show today, a quick comment or review on your favorite podcast app goes a long way towards helping others discover our show.

Thank you for taking a quick moment to do that right now. Last question for you, Stephen, a year from now, you and I reconnect and you’re celebrating something big. What’s that specific thing, that big thing one year from today that you hope to be celebrating?

Steven ver (1:05:03)
⁓ Well, ⁓ I love that question actually and lots of other very good questions. Thank you for the interview. ⁓ This is one that some may not like too. It’s not a political statement, but it’s a statement that because I’ve done a lot of ⁓ and research. And in fact, I really went off the deep end when I was much younger and I did a lot of research and I wrote my first book, which I never published ⁓ researching what has mankind done so far? What technologies? What?

What has he got under his belt? And I realized that until we could make man sane, we would never have any civilization succeed. I think there’s something like 312 civilizations that have preceded us and they’re nowhere to be found. But the main problem with civilization at the moment is that we’re under the control of people who want to have complete power over everybody.

and they like to push people down so they’re the only ones who are left standing. What would really make me celebrate is knowing that these people had been reigned in and they were no longer controlling things in society. So again, it’s not a political statement. It’s more of a humanitarian statement because I want to see people winning, not losing. And right now I think there’s too many people who are losing rather than winning.

Anthony Codispoti (1:06:31)
That’s a good message. Stephen Ferry from the International Institute of Modern Butler’s. want to be the first to thank you for sharing both your story with us today. I really appreciate you.

Steven ver (1:06:42)
And you too, thank you, Anthony.

Anthony Codispoti (1:06:44)
Folks, that’s a wrap on another episode of the Inspired Stories podcast. Thanks for learning with us today.