Ep. 83 Why Hospitality Is the Underrated Key to Success in Online Business w/ Melissa Rodriguez

Jul 14

Think about the last time you had a truly great experience at a hotel or restaurant. Everything felt effortless. Someone seemed to anticipate your needs before you even voiced them. You felt completely taken care of.

Now think about the last time you worked with a coach or service provider who made you feel exactly the same way.

That overlap between the hospitality industry and the online business world is bigger than most people realize. And nobody knows that better than Melissa Rodriguez.

Melissa is a small business operations coach and event specialist at One Team Partners, where she brings over a decade of hospitality experience to the world of online business coaching. After spending years in hotels, food and beverage, and large-scale entertainment events (including work with the Academy of Country Music), Melissa made a pivotal shift following a pandemic that essentially wiped out her entire industry. Today, she helps business owners build strong team cultures, avoid burnout, and create sustainable operational systems that actually hold up in real life.

Her philosophy is simple: people remember how you make them feel. And whether you're running a hotel banquet or a six-figure service business, that truth doesn't change.

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From BEOs to Business Strategy: The Operations Connection

In the events world, nothing is accidental. Behind every seamless wedding reception or awards show is a document called a BEO (a banquet event order) that breaks down every detail of the day, often down to the minute. Melissa describes it as the Bible for the event: what's being served, when tables need to be set, when water glasses get filled, and exactly how much buffer time is built in for the inevitable unexpected.

"I would never build a timeline that didn't create space for mistakes, for changes, for pauses," she explains. If dinner is at 5:30, she's filling water glasses at 4:45, not 5:15 because spills happen, tables need resetting, and plans shift.

She brings that same backwards-planning approach to her clients. When someone tells her their goal is to "send five emails today," she gently redirects. That's a tactic, not a goal. A goal sounds more like: I want to bring on 17 new clients this year. From that anchor point, she builds backwards — what strategies support that? What does success look like month by month? What are you doing today that feeds where you're trying to be a year from now?

It's not unlike plugging a destination into your GPS. You know where you're going, but sometimes a reroute pops up. The destination doesn't change — just the path to get there.

Your Team Is Your Most Important Asset

Here's something Melissa says without hesitation: your team members matter more to your business than any single client.

That might feel counterintuitive, especially when so many of us were raised on the idea that the customer is always right. We go to great lengths to make clients feel prioritized — weekly check-ins, proactive updates, thoughtful communication. And then we turn around and treat our team members like an afterthought.

The financial case alone is compelling: the cost of employee turnover is significant, and leaders who don't invest in their team culture pay for it one way or another. But beyond the numbers, Melissa points out that it's often less about indifference and more about unawareness. Most leaders aren't trying to make people feel unseen. They just haven't slowed down to think about how their day-to-day actions are landing.

Her solution starts with something simple: asking. Not "is there anything I can do better?" — which implies there might not be — but "what can I do better?" Because there's always something, and assuming otherwise sends its own message.

One-Size-Fits-All Doesn't Work for People

One of the tools Melissa uses with her clients is the SDI — the Strengths Deployment Inventory — which helps teams understand what motivates each individual and how they best receive feedback, recognition, and support. It's similar to Myers-Briggs or DISC in concept, but what she loves about it is how directly it addresses the blanket approach most leaders default to.

"We like to create these blanket strategies," she says. "But not everyone has the same way of feeling seen or feeling appreciated."

Some people want to be thanked publicly. Others find that mortifying and would rather a quiet acknowledgment in a one-on-one. Some employees are energized by checking in with their manager about the weekend; others want to skip the small talk and get straight to the work. Neither preference is wrong — but treating everyone identically guarantees you'll miss the mark for most of them.

Melissa compares it to parenting: you don't motivate all your kids with the same reward, because they want different things. The same is true of a team — and, she adds, of your clients.

When you're managing a team of fifty, you obviously can't keep all of this in your head. That's where systems come in. Not to make things feel impersonal, but to make sure nothing falls through the cracks. A calendar reminder to send someone a birthday card isn't a shortcut — it's proof you cared enough to set it up in the first place.

Values Are Only Useful If They're Lived

Brand values come up a lot in business conversations, but Melissa approaches them from an operational angle that resonates: your values mean nothing if your systems don't reflect them.

One Team Partners does a full audit with clients, holding up the mirror and asking — do your processes actually match what you say you value? Often, the values themselves are fine. Leaders chose them because they reflect how they genuinely want to operate. The gap is in the execution. A company that says it values communication but has no internal feedback loop isn't living that value, regardless of what's on the website.

During One Team's growth phase, Melissa's team had a standing practice in their weekly meetings: each person shared which value they felt they were living highest that week and gave a specific example. It sounds small, but it kept the language alive and made values feel real rather than decorative.

One note on values worth sharing: words like kindness and authenticity — being nice and telling the truth — are baseline expectations, not differentiators. If you're going to anchor your business to a value, go deeper. What does it look like in practice? How does it show up in a client email, a team meeting, a difficult conversation?

Creating a Culture Where Feedback Is Normal

The hardest feedback to receive is often the kind that comes from your team. It's one thing to hear that a client didn't connect with your design — that's just part of the work. It's another to hear that someone on your team feels like you're not communicating clearly. That one hits differently.

But Melissa argues the solution isn't to brace yourself — it's to build an environment where feedback flows constantly in all directions, so no single conversation feels like a confrontation.

When feedback is the norm, it stops being loaded. People expect to receive it after every project, every presentation, every meeting. They also expect to give it. And when that's the culture, no one is waiting for an annual review to say something important. The small things get said — and addressed — before they become big things.

She also makes a point worth holding onto: feedback doesn't have to mean criticism. Telling someone they absolutely nailed something is still feedback. It's arguably the most actionable kind, because it tells them to do more of that. When we default to only naming what needs to improve, we miss the chance to reinforce what's working.

Hospitality as a Business Mindset

What Melissa brings from hospitality into business coaching is more than a set of skills — it's a philosophy. Behind every smooth experience is intention. Behind every person who feels genuinely seen is a leader who decided to make that a priority.

Whether you're managing a team, serving clients, or trying to build something sustainable for yourself, the question is the same one Melissa has been answering her whole career: what would make this person feel truly taken care of?

Start there, and then build the systems to make it repeatable.

Melissa Rodriguez is a small business operations coach and event specialist at One Team Partners. You can connect with her on Instagram at @oneteampartners.thrive or reach her directly at melissa@oneteampartners.com to inquire about a complimentary discovery consulting call.