What a private bank taught me about hosting

The guests at a private bank’s client dinner have eaten at every restaurant you could name. They are not impressed by a room. What they notice is whether someone remembered that they do not drink, whether the chairman knew their name, and whether the evening ended when it should have. I spent years learning what that kind of attention costs and what it is worth. Here is what stayed with me.

Know who is in the room before they arrive

At the bank, a guest list was never just a list. Before any dinner we knew who was coming, who they were coming with, what they had been invited to before and what they had declined, and which relationship manager they trusted. We knew who did not drink, who had recently lost a husband, and who had sold a company in the spring and would rather not be asked about it.

Most of that came from asking. Some of it came from paying attention at the last event. All of it changed the seating plan, the menu and the tone of the welcome. A room full of people who feel known is a different room from one full of people who feel processed. You can see it within ten minutes of the doors opening.

The host’s briefing is the most important document

Every event we ran had one page that mattered more than the running order, the floor plan or the budget: the briefing for the people hosting. Who is on your table. What they care about. What not to raise. Which guest should be introduced to which.

A chairman who walks in with that page in his pocket hosts like a man who has known everyone for years. A chairman without it spends the first course finding his feet. We still write that page for every client dinner, and we still ask the host to read it in the car.

A room full of people who feel known is a different room from one full of people who feel processed.

End on time

The most generous thing you can do for a busy guest is to let them leave. Our dinners had a published finish and we hit it, which meant the speeches were scripted, the courses were paced with the kitchen and the coffee arrived when it should. Guests noticed. Several told us it was why they kept accepting. Nobody has ever said an evening was spoilt by finishing when promised.

Generosity is in the detail, not the budget

The bank’s events budget was large, but the moments guests spoke about afterwards were rarely the expensive ones. The umbrella held at the kerb in the rain. The vegetarian menu that was as considered as the main one rather than an afterthought. The handwritten place card with the name spelt correctly, accent included. The car called before the guest had to ask.

These cost almost nothing, and they are decided weeks before by someone who has imagined the evening from the guest’s chair. That is the whole of our job, really.

Say thank you the next morning

We wrote to every guest the day after, and we wrote to the venue and the chef too. The notes were short and they were specific: the course they said they liked, the conversation they seemed to enjoy. It took an hour. It kept the evening alive for another week and it told everyone involved that they had been seen.

We do the same for our clients now, along with a note of what we noticed in the room and what we would do differently next time. The thank-you is the last thing a guest remembers, so it is worth doing properly.

None of this is complicated. It is a matter of deciding that the guest matters more than the show, and then arranging everything else around that decision. The bank taught me that the people with the most money are the least impressed by money. They are impressed by care. So is everyone else.

Gabby KoyaFounder and Creative Director

Next: The quiet rules of a good gala dinner