Skills You Can Teach, Attitude You Can't: A Conversation with Ingo, the Founder of Calvia Beach House
Background and Career
You spent years in corporate roles before hospitality, including time at Mercedes-Benz. You also had a JV with BlackRock. How does that background show up in the way you run Calvia Beach House?
"Corporate life teaches you structure, processes, accountability and how to read numbers properly. I try to bring that discipline into a business that's naturally quite unpredictable. But the most important learning that I implemented at Calvia Beach House was: Surround yourself with amazing professionals. It is quite obvious that you can't run a restaurant like a large corporation with large budgets. So it's really about knowing when to apply the corporate mindset and when to let it go…which is sometimes simply trial and error."
Hospitality in Mallorca
How would you describe the hospitality environment here in Mallorca?
"It's very professional and it's seasonal — those are the two words I'd use. Mallorca is Europe’s largest tourist destination with many, many amazing restaurants. Being average is not an option here! Which is what I really love about this industry, it challenges you to continuously improve, in order to be successful! The island itself sets a certain standard — guests come here with high expectations, and rightly so."
Does your corporate background help you deal with the challenges of running a restaurant here?
"Definitely with the operational side.. strategy, forecasting, managing costs, thinking about the business properly rather than just day to day. Where it doesn't help is the emotional side of hospitality, the daily feedback you get from your customers – as the CEO of a Mercedes-Company you seldomly receive instant and complete feedback. To deal with that I had to learn on the job."
Goals, Growth & Culture
What are you trying to achieve with Calvia Beach House?
"I want it to be a place people want to come back to because they are happy here. Calvia Beach House is a “happy place”, where you can recharge your batteries and forget the struggles of every-day-life. This is very important for me, as both my team and I spend many hours here, too and we also want to be happy! Ideally we manage to make our guests our friends or even better, our fans! Friends – or fans – forgive, even when things go wrong. And it is simply amazing getting to spend time with friends every day! It feels less like work, more like fun."
Where do you think there's still room to improve? And looking back, how has the restaurant changed over the past three years?
"Three years ago I had no idea about what it takes to run a restaurant. I would even say I was naive. But we were finding our feet, working out who we are as a restaurant. Now we know our identity much better: relaxed, beachy, but with real quality behind it in every aspect of hospitality. Where I want to keep improving is better understanding and exceeding our guests´ expectations consistently. I really want this place to be a happy place for everyone entering."
What are you looking for when you're hiring staff, and what are the core qualities that matter most to you?
"Skills you can teach. Attitude you can't. I look for people who genuinely want to make someone's day better, that's the core of hospitality. Beyond that, I am looking for team players. People that bring their own personalities to the team, help create a “team spirit” and strive for excellence and fun. I want people who take ownership, who don't wait to be told twice, who go the extra mile for their teammates and who fit into the kind of environment we're building here. This is also our competitive advantage, as it is relatively easy to copy systems and procedures and products or menus, but it is impossible to copy a “team spirit”.
What's the culture you're trying to build at Calvia Beach House?
"Professional, hard-working, fun and a bit family-like, that's the balance I'm always trying to strike. Professional because guests deserve that standard. Hard-working simply because I never saw success without putting the hard work in, fun because if the team isn't enjoying it, it shows on the floor. And family-like because I want people to feel looked after here, not just employed."
Scale & Busy Nights
How many guests do you serve in a year, and what does that scale bring with it?
“Last season we welcomed more than 47.000 guests over a period of 7 months. This season I expect more than 50.000 guests. Some days we cook for more than 400 guests. On a slow day we have around 90-100 guests. This spread is at the same time the biggest challenge for every restaurant. The seasonality from month to month (April vs July), or even during the week (Tuesday vs Saturday), or if you want to know exactly, even during the day (lunch vs dinner). Having the opportunity to make 50.000 guests in one season happy is an enormous gift but also a massive challenge, as this in reality means you need to cook for 350 people on a Saturday night in July between 20h and 23h. Always to the expectation of the client. And as our clients come from all over the world, those expectations vary a lot. Just imagine an Italian client ordering pasta in Spain, or a UK-guest ordering a rare steak or burger. Let alone expectations in terms of waiting times - A family with two young children have a different expectation compared to a young couple on their honeymoon.
On a busy night with 250 to 400 covers, waits are sometimes unavoidable. How do you think about that?
"I play football, and if there's one thing football teaches you, it's this: even when the team has a bad day, the fans don't walk away. They stay. They forgive. That's what keeps a club going.
It's the same here. Things go wrong sometimes, that's the nature of hospitality at this scale. What matters is how we respond, and how grateful we are to the guests who give us that same understanding. We treat every mistake as something to learn from, and we're lucky that our staff feel the same way, most of the time, they know when something hasn't gone right, and they want to put it right. That mindset is everything. It still hurts though when we couldn’t get it right, as we hate to disappoint our guests, friends or fans."
Palma Nova & What’s Next?
Palma Nova has gone through a real transformation over the past few years. What's your take on that change, and how has it shaped the restaurant?
"Palma Nova used to have a certain reputation of “medium quality”, and it's genuinely changing, there's more quality here now, the vast majority of places are doing things very well, and the whole area feels like it's raising its game. That's good for us and I honestly believe we are adding to this development. It means the guests coming here now expect more, and it pushes us to keep improving rather than resting on being a nice spot on the beach.”
What's next for Calvia Beach House? What would you like to see for its future?
"In the short term I want us to deliver on our promise each and every time: Come and you will have a great time at Calvia Beach House! And longer term, I think there's real potential and there's no reason Calvia Beach House couldn't exist beyond this one beach."