Details Drive Profit Doctrine

"Sol was also a stickler for detail, something he also hammered into his managers. Years later, his highly professional marketing executive, Howard Karawan, told this story: “We were walking around the construction site of the Royal Towers at Atlantis in the Bahamas, and I looked at a tradesman doing some plastering work some 40 feet above the Great Hall of Waters lobby. I said to Sol, ‘Nobody is going to pick up on the detail in the ceiling. Why don’t we value-engineer it out and save a few bucks?’ “Sol…"

"That’s the problem with value engineering. It’s easy to cut a bit here and there, but you just never know when you have cut too far and lost the impact.’” To Sol, every decision on detail was important. He preached it and demanded it, and he hated being lied to by his managers. He could spot a lie a mile off. He could smell a lie. And once he had caught you lying, he…"

"Sol knew that the devil was in the details, and numbers added up. If one toilet roll per week was stolen from every room in a 2 000-room hotel, his profits would be dented by $100 000 by the end of the year. He also knew that by “tweaking” his room rates, huge numbers would flow to the bottom line. For example, if you could squeeze another $3 per room out of the customer and you had 3 000 rooms, your profits would improve by over $3 million…"