There’s a book called Unreasonable Hospitality, written by the guy who ran Eleven Madison Park back when it was ranked the best restaurant in the world. His name is Will, he is brilliant, and you can check him out here – https://www.unreasonablehospitality.com/who-we-are
His whole philosophy comes down to one idea: Service is giving someone what they expect. Hospitality is giving them something they didn’t expect but secretly wanted.
The Four Seasons has a version of this too. Always escort, never point. Someone asks where the bathroom is, you don’t point down the hall. You walk them there. Their confusion is now your problem, and you don’t hand it back until it’s actually solved.
I got a real example of this last week. From a sock company.
My Bombas order got delayed after I had already paid for expedited shipping. Their first move was a $25 gift card that expired in under two months and only worked if I spent more money to use it. I told them, gently, that this felt like the minimum viable apology. A real gesture costs the customer nothing to redeem. Not the other way around.
Here’s what they did with that.
They refunded the shipping fee outright. Sent a brand new order with expedited shipping, no charge. Removed the expiration window on the credit entirely. And the rep wrote back using my own words, calling it “the opposite of a minimum viable apology,” to tell me they got it.
No defensiveness. No ticket number. No “per our policy.” Just a person who owns a bad experience and fixes it in the same conversation.
Then, in the middle of trying to make it right, they messed up and shipped it twice. Two full 12-packs instead of one. Twenty four pairs of socks.
And instead of asking for the extra pack back, they told me to keep it.
That’s the moment. Not the refund, not the follow-up email. The part where a company trying to fix one mistake makes a second one and that second mistake turns into magic. No box to mail back, no “please disregard the second shipment,” none of it. Just, these are yours now.
I will never buy socks from anyone else. And I have told more people about this than I have told about almost any product I have ever bought.
That’s what unreasonable does. It doesn’t just fix the problem. It becomes the story you can’t stop telling.
Now hold onto that feeling. Twenty four pairs of socks and a company that said just keep them. And picture that same energy in healthcare.
A doctor says you need a procedure. Now what.
First, figure out where you’re even allowed to go, because the wrong building means a bill that wrecks the whole thing.
Then prior auth. Paperwork someone else was supposed to submit, sitting in a queue nobody’s watching, while nobody tells you it’s stuck.
Then the forms. Filled out by you, about a diagnosis you didn’t choose, for a procedure you didn’t want, in language written for someone with a medical degree.
Then the calls. To the doctor’s office. To the insurance company. To schedule, then to reschedule because the prior auth still hasn’t cleared. Telling the same story to a different person every time, because nobody wrote any of it down the first three times.
Then the waiting, to find out if any of it worked, while the actual problem, the one that started all of this, doesn’t wait for anybody.
And somewhere around month four, a bill shows up that doesn’t match a single number anyone quoted, and now you’re back on the phone, arguing about money instead of getting better.
That’s not friction. That’s an obstacle course, and the person running it is sick. That’s the default. That’s pointing.
Two weeks ago, a five year old needed urgent surgery. Not even a surgery we’d normally cover at ZERO. Two people on our team, Danielle Hughes and Noah Eubanks, got her covered, scheduled, and through it, fast. Thirty minutes of their morning turned into a five year old getting the surgery she needed that exact same day instead of her family fighting a system for weeks or months.
That’s escorting.
A sock company can find the gap between “here’s seven steps, good luck” and “you’re all set,” and close it in one email thread. (Check them out, they earned it. https://bombas.com/)
Healthcare finds that same gap for a five year old needing surgery and calls it a miracle. A story people tell in meetings for months. An exception worth celebrating.
It should not be an exception. It should not require a five year old and two people deciding to act “unreasonably” to happen at all.
Many have quietly agreed to something they’d never say out loud. That healthcare gets to be the one part of life where nobody escorts you. Where you’re handed the paperwork, the prior auth, the phone tree, and told good luck, while you’re scared and sick and the clock is already running.
We built ZERO because we stopped accepting that as normal.
In the real world not every patient gets that five year old’s story. Not every patient gets two people who happened to be paying close attention that morning when she needed help. That’s the problem. Hospitality that only shows up when you get lucky isn’t hospitality. It’s a coin flip with a nice story attached.
The five year old shouldn’t have been the exception. She should have been the standard.
That’s the whole point of what we’re building. Not the exceptional save. The standard one.
