Power Entertaining

Secrets to Building Lasting Relationships, Hosting Unforgettable Events, and Closing Big Deals from America's 1st Master Sommelier

Eddie Osterland

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781118283448
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Volkswirtschaftslehre
• Subtopic: Entwicklungsökonomie

Master the art of entertaining and cement lasting business relationships in the process

You're at a fancy downtown restaurant for dinner with a million-dollar business deal on the table. The waiter hands you the wine list. Now what? So much for that shiny M.B.A. and your powerful business connections. What matters right now, at this moment, is your wine IQ—and your ability to entertain this client in a way he'll never forget. In Power Entertaining Eddie Osterland, Master Sommelier, and America's foremost wine and food coach outlines dozens of power entertaining tips that can make anyone a more effective host or hostess—be it at a corporate business event or private dinners with clients in restaurants.

When it comes to hosting big business meetings or important sales events, you will discover how to entertain business clients and business associates with ease, knowledge, and confidence, using good wine and food as the ingredients to build strong and lasting business relationships.

• Teaches how to transform boring business meetings and sales functions into memorable social events that people will want to attend again and again
• Enables you to build long-term business relationships based on the time-honored principles of courtesy, generosity and old world hospitality
• Learn how to convince the restaurant's Maitre d' to give them the best table in the house—even on a busy Friday or Saturday night

Success is always in the details, so master the finer points of entertaining before your next big business event.

Chapter 1
My Definition of Power Entertaining

More business decisions occur over lunch and dinner than at any other time, yet no MBA courses are given on the subject.

—Peter Drucker

Does the thought of taking a big client to lunch make your palms sweat or cause your stomach to knot up?

Does the idea of hosting a group of business colleagues or major customers at dinner in a fancy restaurant make your heart pound or leave you gasping frantically for breath? I’m serious!

It may be because you think you’re bad at small talk, are impatient with “social niceties,” or don’t know how to properly read a French menu or wine list. (Your mother never taught you this stuff.) Or, maybe it’s because you know it was only a year ago that you finally learned the difference between tabbouleh and baba ghanoush—this after stumbling upon the Food Channel one night while channel surfing for another episode of Law and Order: SVU.

Or maybe it’s because you fear your client (the man or woman you’re taking to dinner) knows more about good wine and food than you do, and you don’t want to look like some yahoo when he or she orders the halibut cheeks with tempura crosnes (aka Chinese artichoke) and you opt for the 16-ounce sirloin with a side of twice-baked potatoes.

Relax my friend; you’re not alone!

Just as many people fear public speaking more than their own death, a lot of us also have a morbid fear of entertaining other people—especially in business settings. Oh yeah, you might be comfortable taking that client buddy of yours for a beer once in a while at that bar down the street from your office. (You know, the place with the loud music where the beers come with nachos and a quart bucket of fried calamari.) But that’s as far as you ever go with “business entertaining.”

Until now, it hasn’t mattered much, either. You’ve had jobs where business entertaining wasn’t really necessary. Or, if it was, it was always a low-key and occasional thing, like taking your secretary to lunch on their birthday, celebrating a colleague’s promotion, or buying that occasional lunch for your client buddy you know well.

Now Business Entertaining Is Part of Your Job Description!

But now you’re in the big time. Now your job requires you to do business entertaining on a regular basis. You may be:

• A salesperson who must regularly wine and dine clients in nice restaurants
• An executive who often closes big business deals over dinner or cocktails
• A chief executive officer CEO who must play host to business prospects at swanky cocktail receptions, glitzy dinners, and other business social functions
• A corporate banquet or meetings planner who’s looking for new ideas in planning office parties, client events, awards dinners, and other business functions
• A banker, lawyer, ad executive, or investment advisor whose clients like to do business over dinner and drinks
• One of the millions of other men and women in business today for whom business entertaining is part of doing the job

Yes, for many people today, business entertaining is part of the job description—at least the implicit job description. And now you’ve realized it’s part of your job description, too!

You picked up this book because you realize that you need to develop the skills, know-how, and panache to entertain others with style, ease, and confidence in business situations. In essence, you’ve decided that you need to master the skills of power entertaining!

What exactly is power entertaining, you ask?

As its core, I define power entertaining as the art of building strong business relationships with colleagues and customers, using great wine, food, and hospitality as the currency for bringing people together, creating enjoyable events, fostering interpersonal chemistry, and instilling in people a desire to do business with you and your company or organization.

This book is about giving you the tools and social savoir faire to power entertain with confidence, because doing so can make you a star in your business, somebody whom others will be attracted to and want to do business with time and time again.

Building Business Relationships Is More Important Than Ever!

Building relationships has always been key to success in business, but today it’s more important than ever. Business is hypercompetitive, and building and sustaining strong client relationships is critical not just to getting business but to keeping it. Remember the sales adage, “Keeping an existing customer costs a lot less than acquiring a new one”? That’s always good advice, but today (given the cost of doing business), it’s truer than ever!

Mastering the art of power entertaining will help you both attract and retain customers. And guess what? It doesn’t have to cost you an arm and a leg. You can entertain others with class and style but also at a very reasonable cost. So, I encourage you to make power entertaining a part of your company’s business development efforts and marketing mix from this point forward.

There’s also a second reason to make power entertaining part of your approach to business development today: by applying power entertaining principles to your interactions with clients, you and your company can get a critical leg up in today’s increasingly global business environment. That’s right. In today’s world we all know that business is increasingly global and cross-cultural in nature. To be successful in this new business world, executives must be able to entertain effectively across multiple countries, cultures, and time zones. Sophistication and worldliness are important, and knowing the subtleties of how to entertain others in a wide variety of situations can make the critical difference when it comes to landing large international clients, closing deals with foreign partners, building relationships with global customers and suppliers, and much, much more.

See where I’m going here?

Let’s face it; business entertaining is something you need to know how to do—with skill, charm, knowledge, and self-assuredness.

Thus, the time for you to get over any ambivalence you may have about business entertaining is now, my friend. And learning the principles of power entertaining can help you do that. Embracing power entertaining principles and practices will help you start or grow your business. They can help you nurture both new and existing business relationships. They can help you advance in your career and excel in your interactions with others. Bottom line: power entertaining is a unique form of marketing and business development that you can use for a variety of business purposes.

An Entertainment Coach to CEOs

Over the years, I’ve helped hundreds of business executives and CEOs become successful power entertainers, and my goal in this book is to help you become one, too. What does it take? Just a slight change of mind-set on your part and a willingness to embrace and apply the principles of power entertaining that I outline in these pages. If you conscientiously apply the ideas and suggestions I outline in this book, you, too, can be a power entertainer in whatever realm of life and business you operate!

How Power Entertaining Is Different from Traditional Business Entertaining

For years, many companies have built their business entertaining (and business development efforts) around a simple model of “boozing and schmoozing” clients. Typically this entails businesspeople using their expense accounts to wine and dine clients and business prospects in expensive restaurants or other exclusive venues. And sometimes it involves a company sponsoring big cocktail receptions or sporting events or hosting big business banquets. The premise in all these cases is to throw expensive food and alcohol (sometimes a lot of it) at people with the hope that it will increase sales and improve business relationships. But truth be told, it’s often hard to gauge the success and cost-effectiveness of this kind of business entertaining, especially after hotels and caterers are paid and everybody’s expense reports have been submitted! And, it’s often an excuse for everybody (salespeople and customers alike) to get so heavily hammered while “discussing business” that they don’t always close the business.

So, is there a better way to do business entertaining? You bet!

Power entertaining differs from traditional business entertaining in at least five ways:

1. Power entertaining isn’t just an excuse to booze and schmooze with clients; it’s actually a business development strategy. It’s about creating highly pleasurable social events for people built around great wine, great food, great company, and great ambience. It’s also about giving people enjoyable memories of an evening with you (and your company) that will “brand” you in their minds, cause them to remember you fondly, and make them want to do business with you in the future!
2. Traditional business entertaining often involves large social events featuring lousy hotel food and boring everyday wines of no distinction. In contrast, power entertaining events are often held on a small, intimate scale, featuring sampler menus of delicious foods alongside many different kinds of wine served throughout an evening. The idea at a power entertaining event is to introduce people to wines and foods they’ve never had before and to use this as the catalyst to get people talking and interacting with one another—and with you! The wine is often the star of the show at these events, while the food items served with the wine play an important and savory supporting role.
3. Traditional business entertaining often includes boring after-dinner speakers that nobody remembers. In contrast, power entertaining events include strong educational and entertainment components, so people leave the event feeling they’ve learned something (and enjoyed something) that they will long remember. To inject entertainment and educational components into a power entertaining event, you might decide to:
4. Have a professional sommelier give a short lecture to people about the finer points of wine tasting.
5. Introduce people to a selection of wines and appetizers they’ve never tasted before.
6. Serve people unusual pairings of wine (for example, comparing American wines and their European counterparts).
7. Organize wine and food pairings around other specific themes.
8. Give people who attend your event small gifts and mementos like menus, recipes for the food served, and info about the various wines they sampled that night. All this to create an event that they will long remember.
9. Power entertaining events give people a better chance to network than occurs at more traditional client events. At power entertaining functions, guests get to mingle with one another while enjoying the various wine/food pairings you serve to them throughou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: My Definition of Power Entertaining
• Chapter 2: Toss (and I Do Mean TOSS) That Caesar Salad!
• Chapter 3: 20 Secrets of Successful Power Entertaining
• Chapter 4: Power Pairing Great Foods with Great Wines
• Chapter 5: Your New Best Friends
• Chapter 6: So Many Wines, So Little Time!
• Chapter 7: Taste Wine like the Masters Do
• Chapter 8: Out of the Kitchen Closet
• Chapter 9: Power Entertaining at Home
• Chapter 10: Masterminds
• Epilogue
• Appendix A
• Appendix B
• Appendix C
• Appendix D
• Appendix E
• Appendix F
• About the Author
• About the Collaborator
• Resources
• Index
• Supplemental Image
• End User License Agreement