"How hard do you want to work?" asked our predecessors as they headed out the door...

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I seem to be losing the battle to stay positive in these posts! I guess it's because I feel the need to explain why I feel the way I do about the B&B business - "I think this is the right thing to do because this is what I learned when..."


Most of us are smart enough to learn from our mistakes, and if we are really on the ball, we will learn from other people's mistakes without having to repeat them ourselves!

Years ago, in England, I made it a habit to stay in a B&B rather than a hotel whenever I could, but across the pond, the business is very much different than it is here, or at least it was 30 or 40 years ago.


Which begs a question about anyone's motives for getting into the bed and breakfast business in the first place.

Back then, people ran their own homes as B&Bs, taking in paying guests on weekends or even full time, hoping to make a little extra money to help cover the mortgage and property taxes. There would usually be just one or two rooms set aside for traveling visitors, and walking through the front door of a B&B was pretty much like going to stay with friends or family.

My best experience was at a B&B in St. Ives, Cornwall, a tradition-drenched fishing village that did not seem to have changed much in several centuries. The woman who ran the place was a potter and painter and her husband was a fisherman whose boat was moored to a massive rusty chain that could be seen (and smelled) from the kitchen window.

The house was filled with kids and clatter all day long, something was always bubbling on or baking in the stove, and the atmosphere was almost pulsing with friendliness and fun. The rates were cheap, cheap, cheap - probably a third of those at local hotels - and while it wasn't the Ritz, the place was clean and comfortable and interesting whichever way you looked.

The lady of the house seemed perpetually daubed with paint, clay, flour or a mixture of all three, and her rule was that if she wasn't around to put the kettle on and supply tea and scones or whatever, guests should learn where to find what they needed and help themselves.

I would have stayed there a month if I could, but I was on a tight schedule attempting an all-England tour (it's not a big country!) before heading for unknowable adventures in the USA. The year was 1975.

Most of the B&Bs I visited were either farmhouses or seaside terraced homes, and I enjoyed them all for different reasons - kids, dogs, chickens in the back yard, a feeling of belonging, not to mention good grub and plenty of it.

Here, most bed and breakfast inns strive to be up-market from and superior to local hotels, and while I can see good business sense in that, I also believe there is great wisdom in having at least one room that offers what might be called an "entry level" rate - not more than $100 a night, so that young people in particular who have never stayed at a B&B before can gently dip a toe in the shallow end before diving wildly into unbridled luxury at $250 plus!

There is absolutely no sense in enforcing a price structure that meets resistance from the market (the "demographic") you are attempting to appeal to, and empty rooms at $275 a night are in no way superior to equally well-appointed accommodations that are constantly filled at $150.

And that leads me to what the future may hold for Jenny and me.

We got out of the B&B Biz after agreeing with Janet at the Artists Inn that the differences in our approaches to the business were irreconcilable. In our time at the AI, occupancy was up on average from around 50% to a steady 65% and revenue was up by about $5,000 a month overall, starting soon after we took over as innkeepers. The operation was set to gross a year average exceeding $25,000 a month for the first time since Janet fired two other innkeepers who likewise recognized that her policies were bad for business and ignored them.

The pictures above illustrate a very fundamental difference in business philosophies. Our boss at the Artists Inn felt that what you see in them constitutes rustic charm, something guests would not only find acceptable but welcome as they trudged up the stairs to rooms then costing $165 a night. But in a B&B, as in so many things in life, perception is everything, and when people perceive that they are being ripped off and treated like fools, they are often strangely unhappy about it. Not that customer satisfaction has to be a concern of an absentee owner, of course, as long as no one has the temerity to demand a refund.

A bed and breakfast depends quite critically on the personality or personalities of the resident innkeepers, and guests can sense in an instant whether they are welcome or not. That's the reason why the Lord Mayor's Inn in Long Beach was a bottom-line bomb before Jenny and I showed up, and why before we got there the Artists Inn was merely keeping pace with prior-year numbers month after month. As Dennis and Jody asked us before they departed, "How hard do you want to work?" and of course they were right - doing the best job we knew how was only going to make Janet richer, not us!
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More muscles to frown than to smile? Maybe, but happy guests are so much easier to deal with...!

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Janet's policy was to take as much money out of her business as possible and put little or nothing back in. Profit may be as pure a motive as there is, but in a service business, it's wise to heed the old adage about spending money to make money. It costs a little more to give guests a truly special experience, but the effort is repaid by the happiness they express by coming back again and again, which in turn boosts the bottom line.

The sort of people who pick a B&B over a hotel are not themselves penny-pinchers. What they abhor above all about even the best of hotels is not their high price but their cold, clinical impersonality, the feeling that you are paying good money to be treated like just another animal in the barn (however plush that barn may be).

Pasadena has some pretty good hotels, as hotels go, the best of them being what is now the Langham Huntington (which is actually in San Marino). But even that, with its imposing architecture and gardens and its bountiful fresh floral displays at every turn, has a sort of hallowed, formal air that is not really welcoming. There is, no doubt, something special about a hotel that can charge $350 a night for a room only a little bigger than the bed in the middle of it, but some of that "special-ness" may come from gratitude that you can afford to spend so much for so little.

A really good B&B, in contrast, offers a friendly welcome, a home away from home that is perhaps a little better than home because it's always tidy and well cared for. Paint splotches on the walls, a sign of hasty making do rather than getting the job done right, do not signal care and attention to detail, any more than do dead flowers on the tables in the dining room!

Quiet, classy comfort that does not intimidate...that's the aim. And in the background, ready to step forward when needed, are innkeepers and staff who have real smiles on their faces and behave is if they are actually happy to have you there.

Janet created something imaginative when she turned a run-down old house on Magnolia Street in South Pasadena into a bed and breakfast inn with an artistic theme and rooms dedicated to Van Gogh, Monet, Constable and (surprise!) Norman Rockwell. But at some point, she must have decided that high standards were an unnecessary expense, and even as it doubled its size to fill the fomer duplex next door, the inn's shine began to dull and its age began to show through multiplying cracks.

Different innkeepers through the years added their own special touches such as edible blossoms on the edge of breakfast plates for added color and style and decanters of port wine plus high-end chocolates in every room. But by the time we got there, the dining room tablecloths were faded and unhemmed, the morning coffee tasted like ground acorns, and the wine in chipped decanters was closer to unleaded gasoline in both taste and price than the pride of Portugal (or Napa Valley)!

I have digressed again into what might seem to some to be a litany of complaints, but what I am trying to do here is set the scene for what I hope will down the road become a mostly positive chronicle of life in a business that should be as much a pleasure for those who provide this special brand of service as for the people who receive it. In our year and a half at the Artists Inn, Jenny and I received almost daily confirmation that we were doing things right, in compliments, tips and other gifts from guests (never expected, but also never refused) and reservations from people asking over the phone, "Will you be there? We won't come if you're not!"

When we first arrived, Janet told us that it was up to us who took over for us at the Inn when we needed to take a break, and at first we went along with contacting a couple who had been regular stand-ins for years when Dennis and Jody went on vacation.

I had started to build up mid-week bookings from local companies with employees coming in from out of town, because B&Bs do best on weekends, naturally, and that's not enough to sustain a 10-room operation for the other 50 roomnights week that can sometimes remain unsold. We were making real progress in that area, primarily by ignoring Janet's "no discounts!!!" policy and offering deals that made us competitive with local hotels. I also installed (and paid for) wireless Internet access, because not having it in 2004 AD was a ridiculous oversight. To give her her due, Janet reimbursed me a couple of months later...

We ditched old-timers Pat and Rich in a hurry when one of our regular business guests told us on our return that he'd been told that NO, he could not have his breakfast as usual at 7:15am instead of 8:00 because "We don't do that." Then came complaints about the innkeepers hurling abuse at each other across the kitchen at breakfast-time, with every word carrying into the dining room and ruining everyone's good morning mood. The coffee, too, was undrinkable, we were told, probably because grinding beans fresh every morning also came under the "We don't do that" heading.

We had to decide whether to follow Dennis and Jody's lead and force guests to suffer Pat and Rich because they made us look good in comparison, or to say instead that our surrogates were a reflection of our commitment to the Inn and should therefore maintain our standards in our absence. We chose the latter, until after several months Janet responded to repeated entreaties from the Bickersons and insisted that they be reinstated. That decision alone revealed everything we needed to know about the owner's attitude to the guests who put fat profits in her pocket!

Neither Jenny nor I could figure out why anyone would deliberately choose NOT to be nice to guests. Forget the old cliche about it taking more muscles to frown than to smile - being friendly and welcoming gets immediate feedback most of the time, and we'd always get a special kick out of seeing an uptight, travel-weary guest relax and warm to us before our very eyes.
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Should we exceed guests' expectations, or treat them as if they're lucky to be here?

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Having finally committed to the notion of getting our B&B thoughts and experiences organized in a hopefully readable form, I have decided to take a brief pause and take a closer look at what I am trying to achieve here, for my own sake and to convince readers of our positive intentions.

Obviously, there's disappointment that the very first business that we worked at for an extended period collapsed when we chose to leave it, and it is true that Jenny and I have had "issues" with other B&B owners since the debacle at Long Beach.

But this is not meant to be a bitter tirade against others, or a claim that only we know how to run a bed and breakfast effectively (meaning, let's face it, profitably!).

I have said several times already that doing the job right is much more about combining common sense and the golden rule than learning secrets that can only be gleaned from years of experience.

In the months between our vacation stint at Sue's place (the terrific Wild Rose Inn in Genoa, Nevada) and our decision to leave the Carson Valley and try innkeeping full time, I spent days and then weeks on end visiting countless websites and trying to get a feel for what made a bed and breakfast operation special. I read books and blogs and advice columns until I was cross-eyed, but as the weeks and months went by, I came to realize that the instincts that had kicked in at the WRI were really all Jenny and I needed to make a go of this new venture.

Our first fulltime employers did us a favor by reinforcing our best intentions and teaching us dramatic lessons in how not to run a B&B. How strange it was that Reuben could on the one hand express envy at the ease with which Jenny and I related to strangers and made them feel comfortable, and on the other fail to recognize the damage his own attitude was doing to his own "people business"?

Dennis at the Artists Inn gave us one piece of advice that really stuck with us: "This is a Yes business, so always think long and hard before you tell someone No." We learned as we went along that sometimes you have to draw the line, but generally people are respectful and considerate and do not make unreasonable demands...they, too, follow the golden rule!

At the Artists Inn, we found ourselves working for a lady who had almost zero frontline experience at running her own business. Janet boasted that she had only cooked breakfast at the Inn twice in 15 years and made it clear that she did not expect to have to babysit her innkeepers. That was good news after the micro-managing paranoia we had been subjected to in Long Beach!

The bad news was that Janet basically felt that guests who paid good money to stay at her establishment were privileged to be able to do so and should accept whatever they found without complaint. Peeling paint in every direction, weeds choking pathways, battered and mis-matched furniture...all of that was, she felt, part of the Inn's charm and would make people feel at home.

The fact that the Inn had been on the market for many years and had come within an inch of actually finding a buyer was not, as far as Janet was concerned, an incentive to spruce the place up, improve occupancy levels, and make the Artists Inn more attractive not just to guests but to potential new owners. The inn was listed at $2.3 million when we arrived, and the realtor who put together the brochure and led other agents and occasional would-be buyers on tours of the property confirmed that that was Janet's appraisal, not hers or a number supported by a professional in the field. The message was clear: Janet would only sell if she found a buyer willing to pay around 30% above fair market value; in other words, she didn't want to sell the business at all.

Whenever I commented about the battered back fence, the unkempt condition of the yard, or anything else that was sure to catch the eye of guests and color their assessment of the value we were providing, Janet would respond with variations on a theme: "I'm selling the place and I don't need to fix it up. Whoever buys it will want to change things to make it their own anyway."

My counter-argument was similarly like a cracked record, versions of, "Sure, but this is a business, and we are charging people up to $250 a night to stay here - we owe it to them to make everything look as nice as possible."

The contradictions came to a head one day when Janet brushed off my latest list of broken down eyesores that needed fixing and said defiantly that she was going to walk through the entire property with her realtor and discuss my silly little so-called problems with an expert. It was, of course, the worst thing she could have done. I tagged along for the first part of the tour, but when it became clear that Suzanne had a list of complaints that was even longer than mine, I made my excuses and headed back to the office, hoping that Janet would appreciate that I had chosen not to stick around and gloat.
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The Demise of the Lord Mayor's Inn in Long Beach

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Our departure from Long Beach was a swift and uncomplicated affair.

After my explosion at Laura, I told her in much more measured tones that there were some things that would have to be changed if they decided they wanted to keep us on, and we left for our next weekly escape to Pasadena leaving a summary of points behind.


There was nothing earth-shattering in the document, just a calm (I thought, and I hoped) evaluation of what had gone wrong in our relationship, and how I believed improvements could be made that would make the Lord Mayor's Inn finally profitable.

It was not about spending money to change anything--some of the rooms were a little run-down and needed some superficial TLC, but generally, this was a 12-room operation with almost unlimited potential.

Given the fact that Long Beach's tourist office is a hive of energy and good ideas and the Convention Center has become one of the most successful in the country, we figured that a sensible occupancy target for the LMI was 65-70% year round.

Given that when we arrived, the old place was barely managing 10%, that might have seemed preposterously optimistic. But we had learned that the only thing holding back the business was the attitude of the owners. Potential guests were out there in their hundreds--thousands!--but something was going seriously wrong twixt intitial phone contact and that critical decision-making moment when a reservation was made, at least when Jenny and I were not around.

Working together, the two of us had already made measurable headway, but we needed to be given a free hand, along with the owners' respect and appropriate reward for our labors. Nothing greedy, just an increasing paycheck as business improved, building towards an industry standard $3,000-$4,000 a month vs. the $2,000 we were currently being paid.

We came back from our break and were told that our proposals were "not acceptable"--how soon could we leave? Tonight, we said in unison and without hesitation, and that's how fast matters progressed from then on.

Please understand this: Jen and I could demonstrate from greatly improved revenue figures and from customer reports that we had made a very significant improvement at the Lord Mayor's Inn during the few weeks we had been there (it was a little over four months on the day we left). There had been no complaints from guests--not about us, at least! The only bad vibes had been from guests outraged by the treatment they had received from Laura and Reuben...all manner of spiteful, unprofessional, self-destructive conduct by the couple who said over and over again "We're the owners here!"

So this was not a case of uppity employees trying to blackmail the bosses into bending to their will. We had proved ourselves. We were willing to devote even more time and toil to making the LMI a success for the first time in its 15-year history. We were simply not willing to be treated badly any longer, or to suffer guests being abused.

Laura said she was not sure that an occupancy rate above 60% was a good idea--could the old house stand such a thing? We laughed and said that with a healthy cash flow, the old house could stand pretty much anything.

So, we left. And the next thing we heard was that a guest I had signed up for five nights was turned away at the door, with the explanation that there was "no record" of his reservation, and the managers had been "let go" because of incompetence. I felt worse for the poor guest left stranded on the porch with nowhere to spend the night than I did for the libel that Laura had heaped upon our good name...by then, we were resigned to the poor woman's insanity and oblivious to her mean spirit.

Please note: No names have been changed to protect the innocent, because in this story there are no innocents. Running a bed and breakfast can be an enjoyable experience for all concerned and guests can sense when they are welcome and when they are not.
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Out Of the Frying Pan...

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I guess our first objective when we visited the Artists Inn was to find out if we were somehow wildly out of step with our assessment of the owners' policies at the Lord Mayor's Inn. We were confident that our commonsense approach to guests (our belief that they were paying the freight so they deserved every reasonable consideration and cooperation) was the right one, but our clashes with the "owners here" had become so frequent that an occasional nagging doubt would creep in.

One day, Laura somehow managed to come up with the straw that broke this camel's back and I laid into her (verbally!) with a force that had even me scared. Jen was downright gob-smacked, as they say in England--she'd always told me that she envied my even temper and my constant if sometimes seemingly unwarranted sunny optimism, and when I'd done venting at Laura, she said that it was the first time in almost 30 years together that she had ever seen me lose my rag.

The flame that lit the fuse was Laura's constant negativism and mean-spiritedness, which was at least directed at everyone...not only was her meek little husband not spared, but he was her most consistent target.
During Reuben's illness, Jenny and I visited him at the recovery center and took along a CD player and a selection of classical music discs, knowing that the was a huge fan of Mozart in particular.

When we handed over the gift, he seemed a little nervous about accepting it, and we later discovered that he had been allowed a mere four hours of enjoyment of it before Laura took it away from him, saying that it was "inappropriate" that he permit us to make his time in recuperation more enjoyable.

She did not return it to us--she kept it hidden away somewhere until Reuben was back on his feet. Hell's bells!

I remembered that one of the things I did for the Brassers was help them get full use from the DVD hookup to their TV in their new loft in the Walker Building, a few blocks away from the Inn, on Pine Avenue.

I walked them repeatedly through the very uncomplicated steps required to watch a movie, and did not leave until I was confident that they would have no problems in future.

Weeks later, I asked Reuben how he and Laura were enjoying the option to choose their own TV entertainment, and he told me that they had somehow pressed the wrong button and could no longer get the DVD player to work. I asked him why on earth he didn't ask me to fix the problem for him, and he said mournfully that Laura felt my duties at the LMI had to take top priority and it would be wrong to distract me from them!!!

Here was this soft-spoken, seemingly gentle woman who dressed like an escapee from Little House on the Prairie, and behind the mask was a bitter person who was apparently affronted by anyone who was not as miserable as she was. No wonder Reuben was terrified of her...

We learned from Dennis and Jody, then the Innkeepers at the Artists Inn in South Pasadena--employees, not owners--that the Brassers' behavior and attitudes were unlike anything they had ever come across and so, most important, we were not going mad!

Better yet, we discovered that the two of them were expecting to move on sometime soon, hoping that their retirement would coincide with the sale of the AI to one of several potential buyers.

The South Pasadena B&B had at that time been on the market for six to eight years, and when we finally met the owner, Janet Marangi, she explained that she had just celebrated her 70th birthday and had decided that she had better things to do with the rest of her life than worrying about the day-to-day operation of a bed and breakfast inn.

Dennis and Jody were amused by Janet's portrayal of herself as someone engaged fulltime in the inn's operation--they said they very rarely consulted her about anything and felt it was their job to make it possible for her to spend little or no time visiting the place. In fact, things went smoothest when the owner wasn't around!

Jenny and I felt envious of anyone able to do what we had dreamed so long about doing without interference from owners determined to enforce unworkable--in fact, counterproductive--management policies.

We dropped a heavy hint that if none of the pending sales went through and Dennis and Jody still wanted to move on, we'd like to be considered as their replacements.

Sure enough, after a few weeks, Dennis and Jody decided to recommend us to Janet, who in turn rang around a few local connections whose phone numbers we had supplied just in case.

One of them was an old friend who in recent years had become the premier caterer in the Pasadena area, and Peggy's glowing reference bowled Janet over and got us the job.

Our new boss explained that the position might only last a few weeks because several people were interested in buying the business, and one was on the brink of making an offer.

The offer was made by a couple who believed that they could run a B&B while separately servicing busy jobs in the movie business...and then just as quickly, they saw sense, and the deal collapsed.
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The Golden Rule: Treat B&B Guests as You Would Expect to Be Treated at $150+ a Night!

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As time went by, we became resigned to the fact that to the people who paid our paltry wages--$1,000 a month for each of us!--we were the enemy.

We consoled ourselves with the simple fact that guests loved us. They would leave us gifts of wine and flowers--sometimes even money!--and tell us over and over how wonderful Jenny's cooking was and how the two of us had made their visit an unforgettable experience. We had some problems, ruffled feathers on the part of disappointed visitors, but we never had anyone leave unhappy--it was a point of pride for us that if a guest was not comfortable, we weren't either.

Reuben once said to me that he envied how easy I found it to look strangers in the eye and talk to them as if they were my friends, and I just laughed off the (I assumed) compliment and said it was a symptom of a simple mind. I told him that I felt that getting along with people from the get-go was easier than the alternative, and suggested that the majority of guests felt exactly the same way--being happy was a whole lot less stressful than complaining, right...?

Both Reuben and Laura had a carefully cultivated image of themselves as caring Christians out to make the world a better place, and at every possible opportunity they would tell us about their good works and their church connections. But they were both prone to the most extraordinary temper tantrums, and it was clear that Reuben was scared to death of his wife, who in turn hid a mean-spirited, critical nature behind a soft-spoken, grandmotherly demeanor that may not have been Oscar-worthy but could easily have snagged a Golden Globe Award.

Reuben once said "God is our booking agent," and I laughed at that, commenting to him that given the lousy job he was doing, it was just as well that the Almighty did not expect a commission. Religious jokes were not appreciated, I learned...but I did not apologize for that one. God is much more Jen's thing than mine, but I have always identified with the notion that if he exists, Big G is most likely to help those who help themselves and to ignore people who idly wait for a miracle (hopefully excluding those of us who buy Lottery tickets four times a week!).

From a business standpoint, the Lord Mayor's Inn was an unmitigated disaster, although in our first couple of months we were able to deliver a marked improvement in occupancy, up from about 10% to 25%. We had to fight the Brassers to do it, though. Once, the two cottages around the corner from the Inn (a brilliant addition to the room inventory that we will copy if we ever get the chance) were both full with kids in town to take the California Bar Exam at Long Beach Convention Center, and inexplicably both sets of guests arrived at the breakfast table shivering and complaining that they had all had to suffer cold showers on this one of the most important days of their lives.

Jenny and I were mortified, of course, and offered to let them take showers in as many of the empty bathrooms in the main house as might be needed, but of course by then there wasn't time. We were at least able to give them good breakfasts and warm them up with hot tea and coffee, and then it fell to me to figure out what on earth could have gone wrong in not one but two separate hot water systems.

It turned out that Reuben Brasser had crept around the back of the two annexes and turned off the hot water heaters in both of them, claiming when I challenged him that I had told him that neither of them was occupied. It was MY job, he said, to make sure that water was not being heated in the cottages when there were no guests to make use of it, a nonsense observation that confirmed to Jen and I that we were right to think Reuben had finally lost what little was left of his mind.

By then, I had been in touch with another interesting-looking B&B, the Artists Inn and Cottage in South Pasadena, not at first as an escape route but simply to discover what the Innkeepers there were doing to make their business a success. I knew it was doing far better than the LMI because the Artists Inn website gave guests open access to a calendar that showed the availability of all ten rooms for two weeks at a time. They were averaging about 50% occupancy, more than twice the norm for the Lord Mayor's Inn in spite of the fact that Long Beach is far more of a tourist magnet than South Pasadena.

Our "big kids"--Jen's two sons and a daughter from her first marriage--all live in the Pasadena area, and we made a habit of going to stay with them in turns when we needed one night away from the Brassers in any given week. On one of those escapes, we paid a visit to the Artists Inn, and were very impressed by what we saw.
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What the B&B Biz Really Comes Down To!

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The month we had spent at the Wild Rose Inn in Genoa taught us that one thing neither of had a problem with was getting along with strangers and making them feel welcome and at home as "guests" (not really the right word, since they pay for the privilege of living with us!).

We also learned at Sue's place that the money she was paying Jen ($25-$75 a day, with my services thrown in for free) in no way reflected the 12-14 hours a day it takes to stay on top of the job and do it really well. Sue had blatantly exploited Jenny, but the lessons we learned during her month in Europe were, in the end, priceless.

Oddly, we discovered that as smart and as pleasant as Sue usually was on the surface, she had quite a bit in common with the Brassers, chief among them an exasperated, put-upon air around the people who make reservations and pay the bills.

There is no doubt that Sue provided guests with a comfortable place to stay and an abundance of good food--no "one egg per guest" rule for her!--but she could sometimes be cold and impatient. We discovered in a very short time that B&B visitors can be annoying and demanding, but it does not take a whole lot of effort to keep reminding yourself how essential they are to every aspect of the business and cut them plenty of slack. Early on, I began playing a harmless little game, paying special attention to people who seemed tense or out of sorts and timing how long it would take me to thaw them out and relax them.

Jenny has a natural talent with strangers, honed during her years as a nurse and midwife in England, and I had had a lot of experience dealing with people who were not particularly happy to see me, because I had been a newspaper journalist for 40 years--on staff as a "hard news" reporter, then freelancing for more than 20 years in the U.S. as an entertainment industry feature writer.

As a reporter, you develop a thick skin and the ability to persuade people to give you what you need from them whether they want to or not. And even when I was helping promote the showbiz careers of actors and their acolytes, getting good material that had never been published before required the ability to make people like me and trust me even when to do so went against their better judgment!

So Job #1 was always making people feel we were happy to see them from the moment they stepped across the threshold, and providing them with whatever they needed within reason with good humor, a term that in my case has always meant making deliberately bad jokes and apologizing for them whenever absolutely necessary. It's not hard, because people don't choose B&Bs by accident--somewhere along the way, they found that Motel 6s and Holiday Inns were lacking what they needed and they chose to pay a little above the odds to get more personalized treatment in a close approximation of a private family home.

Most people are bound and determined to be happy with the choice they made and the one guest in a hundred who starts out miserable and stays that way despite an eager innkeeper's best efforts is usually pretty easy to work around. Looking back, I have always tended to think of an unhappy guest as a failure on my part rather than their own, and no one could ever accuse Jenny or me of being indifferent.

The clash between us and the Brassers at the Lord Mayor's Inn in Long Beach escalated into comedy by the end of our third month on the job, with Reuben and Laura staying away most of the time, but with Reuben creeping in several times a day unannounced, mostly to check on the thermometer inside the SubZero refrigerator in the kitchen. It certainly wasn't sub-zero (celsius!) when the old man had his way--I would turn the setting colder to guard against, primarily, sour milk and spoiled leftovers, and Reuben would tiptoe in and turn the dial the other way, ostensibly to "conserve electricity."

In the early days we had been made aware of a rule that we were not permitted to eat anything "belonging to the business" and so we were provided with a single shelf to store our private groceries, plus space in the door for my beer. Pretty soon, I began scratching my head at my sudden inability to keep track of how many bottles of Guinness and other "dark" beers I had on hand, a talent that had for years saved me from ever running out when I needed an evening tipple or two.

Laura remarked a few weeks into our LMI experience that anyone who drank even one beer every day was "clearly an alcoholic," and she also informed us that because Reuben was diabetic, he never touched alcohol and could not be expected to approve of its presence in the fridge. However, as long as the quantity did not get out of hand, big-hearted Reuben would be willing to work with us.

What was odd was that more and more often, I'd open the fridge door and say to Jen, "That's weird, I thought I had at least three beers left," or words to that effect, and I would bravely make do with the one or two that stood forlornly on the shelf. The truth (that I hadn't forgotten how to count or was going mildly mad) finally dawned on us one day when we came back from a break and found a pineapple cake Jenny had made ravaged as if by a wild (or at least very hungry) animal.

Why not just use a knife? we wondered. Laura blamed guests unknown, but that just didn't make sense. Rash and self-destructive behavior by someone long deprived of both sugar and beer was a much more sensible and sad explanation.
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The Lord Mayor's Inn in Long Beach: "10% Occupancy Would be Great!"

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The Brassers were truly amazing, and we assumed unique among bed and breakfast owners. Reuben once confided that "even 10% occupancy year round" would be a blessed improvement for his business, and for a while, we began picking up serious momentum towards a far more effective target...50%.

What happened within a very few weeks of our arrival in Long Beach at the end of October, 2003, was that Reuben--then aged about 80--fell seriously ill and had to be admitted first to hospital, then to a local extended care facility. Laura became understandably preoccupied with her husband's frail health, and the two owners made it clear that for the time being at least, we were on our own.

Jenny and I compared notes, and agreed that we had learned nothing from Laura and Reuben that was not for the most part contradicted by but in some cases supported by plain old common sense.

What guests wanted most of all from their bed and breakfast experience was cleanliness and comfort, good food, and the feeling that they were welcome...not always in that order, but there was never much daylight between priorities #s 1,2 and 3. Value for money might have nosed in at #4, but "B & B people," as many of our guests thought of themselves, were perfectly happy to pay more than the rack rate at local hotels so long as they were made to feel special.

The Brassers fell down in every possible way when it came to guest relations, from first contact when phone inquiries came in (a specimen conversation might on their end consist of, "No, we don't do that...No, I'm sorry, that's not possible...The Visitors' Bureau might have information about that... No, we don't offer discounts" and that would be one of the friendlier ones!).

As the Brassers backed away from their own business, reservations started to climb, and by the time Reuben was back on his feet late in December, Jen and I were confident that we had learned infinitely more without the owners around then we could hope to discover with them "supervising" us.

For a while, we fell back into a routine where we would work Thursday through Monday and the owners would step in while we took our "weekend" off on Tuesday and Wednesday. We lost track of the number of longer-stay guests who would welcome us back at breakfast on Thursday like long lost best pals, regaling us with tales of the chilly treatment they had received while we were gone. There was no doubt that in spite of (or perhaps because of) 15 years in business at the Lord Mayor's Inn, Reuben and Laura Brasser were wholly unsuited to running a bed and breakfast.

As time went by, our relationship with our bosses deteriorated beyond the bizarre into a conflict in which we did everything we could to make their business more successful--and profitable--and they conspired to undermine us.

On New Year's Day, we had had our first really serious butting of heads when I was summoned to the Brassers' loft apartment three blocks from the Inn as if it was a matter of the most extreme urgency--the call came in while I was in the shower, and I had to run through the rain to address what I assumed was a problem related to Reuben's health. It turned out that Laura was almost literally fuming because I had flat-out refused to comply with Reuben's demand that the hot water system in the main house be kept on low (tepid water from the hot taps) until 6pm.

I had explained to Reuben that when guests paying in most cases quite a bit more than $100 a night arrive at the Inn after a long day's travel, they have the right to expect amenities that include enough hot water for a refreshing shower before dinner. I told him, politely I thought, that it was unreasonable to deny our guests something that they would find in the cheapest of cheap motels, but that if he wanted to handle all check-ins in future, I would be happy to let him explain why hot water was being withheld.

I was lectured on my lowly status at the Lord Mayor's Inn--"We're the owners here!"--but I held my ground and said that as long as Jenny and I were in place as resident innkeepers, we would do the job to the best of our ability, confident that the already noticeable improvement in the bottom line would continue and that any extra expenses incurred because of our policies would be fully covered by additional cash flow.
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How Jenny and I Got Started in the B&B Biz

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It's way past time to get this Bed and Breakfast log (BBBlog!) rolling, so that everything is set up when Jenny and I finally return to a business that we both enjoy, and are damn good at. We often find ourselves looking back on our experiences so far and agreeing that B&B owners are, according to everything we have seen to date, a very odd lot.

It all began in early 2003 with Sue Knight at the Wild Rose Inn in Genoa, Nevada, a pretty little town in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas which claims to be the first settlement in the state (dating all the way back to 1851, or the day before yesterday in terms of the big picture of civilization!).

Jen had been saying for years that she would love to run a B&B--"just a small place, no more than 5-6 rooms"--and because we had become friendly with the couple who first built the WRI, we kept our eye on it when they left and were intrigued when it was taken over by a woman who was then known as Sue Haugnes ("pronounced Haynes, dear, my husband's people couldn't spell!"). That would have been in the mid-90s, I guess. Sue is an ex-pat Brit like us (I have been in the U.S. since the first day of 1976, Jen and our big kids since the summer of 1978) so it was not hard to strike up an acquaintanceship.

Finally, in the spring of '03, Sue called to ask if Jen would be interested in taking over the place while she went off on a trip to England--her Mum was and still is in an old folks' home in Bournemouth. Two weeks became a month, and we moved in to be innsitters at a slave labor rate, $25 a day if the house was empty, $75 a day if one or more room was rented (we later learned that the starting rate for innsitters was $150 a day, with or without guests, but back then, ignorance was bliss!).

The upshot of our month as innkeepers was that we learned what we had always suspected: Jen loved every minute of it, even without help to change sheets and clean rooms, and I had a blast dealing with reservations and incoming guests, and learning all I could about the business by exploring other Inn websites and marketing services..

Come September, after I had put myself on some B&B job mailing lists and newsletters, I received a posting about a job at the Lord Mayor's Inn in Long Beach, less than an hour south of our old stamping ground, Pasadena in Los Angeles County. I assumed the job would have been filled by the time I got the notice, but e-mailed anyway with brief information about us. Back came a request that we arrange a face-to-face interview, and since Jenny was tied up with her job at the Sturgis Ranch, I drove south to fly the family flag.

The LMI was in a slightly seedy part of Long Beach, slightly seedy being my recollection of all of Long Beach dating back 15-20 years when the boys and I used to go fishing on party boats (the term describes groups of fishermen, not drunken revelers!) out of Long Beach Harbor. I was amazed at LB's transformation since my last visit, becoming a lively, vibrant tourist center and back from the brink of ghost town hell.

The B&B was stately and frayed at the edges, but had great potential, I thought, so I was surprised when the old man who interviewed me, Reuben Brasser (co-owner with his wife Laura) said that year-round occupancy was barely 10%! We were offered the job and accepted the crappy pay (about a third of the fair market rate) because we felt that we were in essence going to B&B school and could not hope to make a decent living until our training wheels were off.

The experience was valuable, it turned out, but frustrating because of the extraordinary hostility that the Brassers harbored towards pretty much everybody, with staff and paying guests vying for the top slot on their list of phobias. What we were presented with in short order was a series of lessons on how not to run a bed and breakfast.

Some sample rules: "Never initiate a conversation with a guest. Do not make eye contact. Do not provide more than one egg per guest at breakfast. If guests ask for information about local attractions and events, remember at all times that we are not entertainment directors. If they need to find local restaurants, give them the binder of menus (note: many were years out of date) or hand them the yellow pages. Do not allow guests to take food or drink into their rooms. Guests who arrive before 6pm must be told that hot water will not be available before that time in the interests of conservation and environmental concerns. If they wish to take a shower upon arrival, they will have to wait."
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