Danny Meyer - The Power of Hospitality

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
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Hello and welcome, everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy, and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, stories, and strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. Invest Like the Best is part of the Colossus family of podcasts, and you can access all our podcasts, including edited transcripts, show notes, and other resources to keep learning at joincolossus.com.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:51)
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**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (2:17)
My guest today is Danny Meyer, the founder and CEO of Union Square Hospitality Group, which compromises some of the most acclaimed restaurants in New York City, like Gramercy Tavern and Union Square Café. Danny is also the founder and chairman of Shake Shack, which began in New York City but is now a publicly traded company with hundreds of locations worldwide. Our conversation focuses on how great hospitality leads to great business, regardless of the sector that it's in. We discuss why hospitality is the starting point for Danny's business philosophy, why first impressions matter, Danny's concept of A-B-C-D, which stands for Always Be Connecting Dots, how to scale hospitality, and how to build a business with essentialism and soul.
Just the other day when my son went ice skating for the first time and fell a lot, he said to me, well, you learn from your mistakes so you try to make as many of them as you can. You'll hear Danny say something powerfully similar late in our conversation. It's a lovely thought then that I found out that my son, my first born, was a boy in one of Danny's restaurants in a reveal orchestrated by his incredible team. I hope you enjoyed this wonderful conversation.
So Danny, I thought of a neat place to begin this conversation, which will probably go a lot of different directions is to go all the way back to some early experience that you had as a tour guide in Italy and ask what that experience at a very young age taught you about hospitality. And then I wanna explore the idea of hospitality in as many ways as we can.

**Danny Meyer** (3:38)
I'll start by saying my dad was at that point in the group tour business and he had established footholds in about eight different European cities. And interestingly, as a summer job, by the time my older sister and then I and then my younger brother each turned 20, we got to pick a town in which his tour business was based to be tour guides and work for his on the ground local teams who were always citizens of whatever that city was. I wanted to be in Italy. So when I turned 20, I picked Rome. My dad had picked out an interesting niche to sell these group tours to.