Part 6: Like the virgin to the child...

Like a virgin to a child

After the award ceremony for the very first "Hotelier of the Year" in 1990 at the Sheraton at Frankfurt Airport, someone asked me if I could give a talk at Coca-Cola in Essen about what might have earned us this award. Carelessly, I agreed. 

After this first presentation (still with slides and overhead projector) more followed and quickly "the snowball became an avalanche!"

From the 1990s until around 2015, there were between 150 and 180 performances per year.

For twelve years I had a professional drive me - almost a million kilometers - because I could no longer do it myself.

After Germany, Switzerland and Austria, the radius quickly expanded - mainly due to the "European Quality Award", which we received in Paris in 1998. This was followed by all the major European cities, from Belfast to Istanbul, from Helsinki to Athens, usually without an overnight stay and with a return flight on the same day. So I was forced to become a frequent flyer. 

Special highlights were lectures in Blumenau/Brazil or on Long Island/NY.

Or appearing at the Dorchester in London as an "After Dinner Speaker", after a dinner together with the Princess Royal Anne and her "Ladies in waiting" (her ladies-in-waiting) at the same table. A completely different world...

Until the annexation of Crimea in 2014, the Russian Federation was added, with Moscow - Nishi Novgorod - Volgograd - Yekaterinburg, - Irkutsk (Eastern Siberia) on Lake Baikal.

After that, I let all my contacts in Russia go to sleep, which was difficult for me because I had been able to meet some wonderful entrepreneurs there. But it always felt a bit like being in the Wild West. 

Incidentally, I have never asked for payment in advance and it has always been paid on time.

Some lectures were recorded live and later published as books. This resulted in a total of six books. The very first, "Motivaction", published by Orell Füssli in Zurich, quickly sold over 30,000 hardcover copies, plus a paperback edition; the fourth, "Wahre Herzlichkeit", sold 180,000 copies in the Russian Federation alone. One book was published in English, another in Croatian and another even in Japanese!

Study trips ...

...have always been a bubbling source of new ideas for us since the 80s. We regularly visited London, Paris, New York, San Francisco and Las Vegas. This not only benefited the Schindlerhof, but also my seminars and keynotes.

Now there was also Japan! My wife and I traveled to the land of the rising sun during the cherry blossom season - the custom of hanamithe custom of "marveling at the blossoms."

In Osaka, we ended up spending a night in a "love hotel". Rooms in red and pink, upholstered headboard in the shape of a heart, mirrors on the ceiling and, in the underground garage, covered license plates on the front and back of all the cars. We couldn't take any ideas with us here...

But Kyoto inspired us. We stayed for several days at the "Tawaraya Ryokan", probably one of the most exclusive traditional guesthouses in Japan.

The monasteries and zen gardens, the minimalist architecture with a focus on the essentials, but also the legendary Japanese hospitality really impressed us!

We were even lucky: Mount Fuji-San showed itself to us right up to the summit.

New Schindlerhof conference worlds

And once again we were able to think about an expansion - because a large plot of land had just come up for sale: a field directly adjacent to the parking lot and the original Schindlerhof. We immediately made a deal! 

This building site was so large that we not only had space for a new conference center including underground parking and a spacious garden, but also for additional hotel rooms. 

We decided not to build the rooms for the time being so as not to let our equity ratio fall too far.

This decision later turned out to be absolutely right when our daughter joined the company...

But more about that later!