We were lucky to catch up with Taylor Scott recently and have shared our conversation below.

Taylor , thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. What do you think it takes to be successful?

Successful people simply commit to doing “little things” that unsuccessful people don’t do. Success rarely comes on its own, but instead success usually follows some type of sacrifice. Sometimes it takes sacrificing time, other times it’s financially, and other times it’s simply giving of one’s self to something or someone – a cause bigger than one’s self.

I grew up in Eastern Kentucky, as a passionate student athlete, and I had many great coaches, teachers, and mentors. I also spent most of my impressionable years watching, listening to, and studying great athletes at the high school, college, and professional levels; and in many ways, I still do the same today. Once I entered the business world and began working in the hospitality and entertainment industries, I began noticing that many of the same principles, virtues, and lessons many of us learn from our coaches can be applied in our current lives and careers today as adults.

I’ve spent these past five plus years writing and speaking on those ideas. Through the process of researching, conducting interviews, and crafting my first book – Ballgames to Boardrooms, and then my second book – Lead with Hospitality, I’ve learned that the most successful people practice their desired future today, they work hard, listen to their “coaches” or leaders, they have fun, and they unleash compassion along the way. The greatest leaders and the most successful organizations in the world make it a point to connect, serve, engage, and inspire their teams, guests, customers, and clients, and the communities in which they operate.

In a nutshell, success will usually be the result of simply being human, emotionally connecting to people we lead and work with, and serving selflessly.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I took those leadership, business, and life lessons from all my coaches, teachers, professors, and mentors growing up and during my college years, and then spent 20 years working in the hospitality and entertainment industries for Walt Disney Parks and Resorts, Gaylord Hotels and Resorts, Wynn Resorts, The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas, and Disney Vacation Club. Parlaying my practical work experience with my undergraduate education at Florida Southern College in Lakeland, FL and graduate work completed at Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration, I started a business to inspire leaders – both seasoned and up and comers – to lead with hospitality so they can transform mere “jobs” into truly meaningful work for themselves, their organizations, and the people they lead.

Lead with Hospitality, LLC is a professional, personal, and leadership development company that provides live learning experiences (interactive workshops and inspiring keynotes) for organizations who are committed to pouring into and developing teams and leaders to become their absolute best. We have both books – Ballgames to Boardrooms and Lead with Hospitality, our Leadership Development Series (12 hours of instructional content – enough for a two-day workshop), and our Delivering Memorable Hospitality content and learning experiences for frontline teams and individual contributors. We also license our content to organizations who invite us to certify and teach their own facilitators and Learning and Development teams to deliver the experiences; and we also have a team of Lead with Hospitality facilitators who are in high demand all over the country for Fortune 500 companies, small businesses, and lifestyle brands in the hospitality, entertainment, and airline industries.

What sets our content and the learning experiences apart from other providers is that everything we’ve created, packaged, and deliver to participants in our clients’ organizations is inspired by my career working for some of the best, game-changing brands in the world. I have actual principles, illustrations, and applications I’ve learned from great leaders, not so great leaders, and a few in between. We’ve also built a diverse team of facilitators, coaches, and consultants with backgrounds from various industries with lifetimes of stories, experiences, and lessons to share with our clients.

Aside from launching the Lead with Hospitality book and starting the business itself – Lead with Hospitality, LLC – during the pandemic, I’m most proud of our relationship and work with organizations such as United Airlines, Fidelity Investments, The Statler Hotel at Cornell University, Sodexo Live, and Choice Hotels in the first two years of our existence.

I want people to know that our six virtues of leading with hospitality are the following – Connect, Strive for Self-Mastery, Serve, Engage, Coach, and Inspire – in that order. Our programs, learning experiences, and content will open hearts and minds to a human approach to leadership which has been proven move people to move, allowing leaders to take teams further, quicker. We’re on a mission to inspire more connection, purpose, and meaning in the lives of both teams and leaders of teams so that we transform jobs into truly meaningful work.

Can you share one of your favorite marketing or sales stories?

During the pandemic, I was a contract facilitator for a global airline, tasked with facilitating and delivering leadership development sessions and experiences for leaders at various levels of the organization across the entire enterprise. When I noticed they had a need for a certain type of leadership learning experience for a relatively large population of leaders (approx. 2,000 people), and they did not have any content for the project. The organization had a need for content and appeared to lack direction, support, and the resources they needed in order to deploy this leadership training. In good faith and basically “betting on myself”, I created the content for them – for no pay, and shared with them what I’d created along with a plan for how I could become their preferred vendor for the deployment. The plan included Lead with Hospitality, LLC not only supplying the content – at no charge; no license fee in year one, but also a team of professional, inspirational leadership development facilitators and consultants to deliver the program across the enterprise.

This was risky in that I devoted time, energy, and my own resources for no compensation to create the program. Ultimately the airline agreed to outsource that program and four additional programs to Lead with Hospitality, LLC and now they are licensing the content I initially created so that thousands more up and coming leaders in their organization will be inspired, encouraged, and enlightened as they grow in their careers with the organization.

Can you talk to us about how your side-hustle turned into something more.

This whole thing began when I was the Director of Loyalty Marketing at The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas, when I started a blog outside of work as a passion project. It was called the OneMoreStepRevolution … and I’d write and publish at least one and sometimes two blog posts per week between January of 2011 and the Fall of 2015 when I took the leap and wrote my first book, Ballgames to Boardrooms.

Ballgames to Boardrooms was self-published, and I wrote it, worked with an editor, marketed it, sold it, and hustled to get a few speaking engagements, all on my own while also working at Disney Vacation Club based at the Disneyland Resort in Southern California.

Shortly after the book launched, I took several more leaps of faith from the comfort of a job to the uncomfortable and daunting prospect of becoming an entrepreneur as an author, speaker, and consultant. I did things like speak for free, take consulting / task force project jobs in hotels and for consulting firms as a contractor; all while writing and working on a then “passion project” – Lead with Hospitality, the book.

During the pandemic, I sent an email to the notable author, Jon Gordon, and asked him to write the Foreword to my book. He not only said yes, but he also introduced me to who eventually would become my publisher; and by the Friday of the following week, I had a book deal in the midst of the pandemic in the Spring of 2020. It was then that I began creating the Lead with Hospitality leadership development content and the Deliver Memorable Hospitality frontline learning experience content to complement the book.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.LeadWithHospitality.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tscott1502/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/taylor.scott.5055
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tscott1502/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/tscott1502
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKR4B8iUcBFQGDWhaDDYesg