CLIP: How Company Culture Reflects Personal Culture

Neal discusses his open door policy that separates him (and other family businesses) from big corporations to his employees. He also takes the "hospitality" ...


From Durable Value Episode 16

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Ryan Swehla:
The culture that you have as a person emanates out into your business and into your life. That has to in some way, be a reflection of your family, your family values and how that culture has emanated out to how you treat employees.

Neal Khatri:
They like that we were a family business and not a big corporate where today you're here, tomorrow you're fired. They don't know who the boss is. They can come, literally come see me. Any employee, even making the minimum wage, they can come see me. My doors are open for anyone of them. In our business, maintaining a good property and a good customer base is everything.

Neal Khatri:
That's our success. It's not just a one-time customer. A return customer is what we want. New customer, you can't find a thousand new customers every day. No one can. Is keeping the old ones keep going after new ones. So it's a hospitality business and we are very hospitable to our friends, relatives. That's in our blood. If someone came to my home, they don't go without drinking water, tea or something. We just don't let them go. You can't. They say, no, you don't..." You have to.

Ryan Swehla:
I'm guessing when you stay in other hotels, just like when I walk into another office building or another apartment complex, I just can't help but start seeing that's good. That's bad. Why haven't they done this? Oh, I like if they did that. I'm guessing when you stay in a hotel you see the same thing right?

Neal Khatri:
I literally run our hotel drive up and I see all the issues could be very minor, but I am, "How did you see that? How did you see that?" I say, "Well, God gave me more eyes." That's all. It's a joke.

Ryan Swehla:
Yeah. Exactly. What about going to other hotel properties?

Neal Khatri:
Oh yeah. I learn a lot going to other hotels and actually nowadays you can take pictures and bring that back and also I attend a lot of seminars, conventions, and I happen to know a lot of people in the business. I'd been in it 47 years and in Modesto, in the hotel business. So real old timer but never too old to learn new tricks.

Neal Khatri:
They're out there and main thing, if I can keep a customer happy and my employees happy, I'll be happy if I can do those two things. We've managed to do that,



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