Businessman

It's easy to be good when things are great; it's tough to be good when they're not.

You give me someone with the right personality, and I'll give you a bar manager in three weeks. You give me someone who has been a lousy bar manager for 30 years, and in three weeks, you'll still have a lousy bar manager.

I could take a cemetery and make all the tombstones beer companies. There's a lot of craft beers that came and went. A lot of them.

If I were to pick the life of someone whom I professionally mimic in many ways, it would be Howard Hughes, surprisingly.

Most people who get into the business are social animals by nature, but do they have the financial abilities to manage a business? A great bar owner has both.

A plate of food hits the table, lands right in front of you. One of two things happens. Either you sit up and look at it and react to it, or nothing happens. If nothing happens then that restaurant is stuck in mediocrity forever.

Leadership cannot be taught. Either you're a leader by the time you're 12 years old, or you never will be.

Putting somebody else in crisis mode and causing them to make quicker decisions, urgent decisions, rather than prolonged, more logical decisions can be very advantageous. So, to be successful in business, you have to understand the power of confrontation and how to use it correctly.

When my company does a good job, we make people happy. They laugh, they smile, they have a good time - that's what we do for a living. Any business doing that is making a noble effort.

If you have to signal a bartender to get a drink, then they're not looking at you, which is their problem. They're not doing their job. So don't feel rude when you signal a bartender. They're the ones who caused you to signal them. Go for it.

When a sizable group of customers speak, I always listen! The 'customers' view' is key to my confidence in decisions.

People connect to a good bar very personally.

I don't want to hire people who have less of a commitment than I do.

I've traveled the world, and as an America,n I get insulted when people say American businesses aren't respected overseas. Look at how our food and beverage companies do around the world. We are regarded as the best at this. A lot of what we do here is exportable, and I don't think there's anybody that does it better in the whole world.

I think life takes circles sometimes.

Make no mistake: confrontation is unavoidable in business.

Don't build a bar for yourself. Build it for your customers. It's all about them: the walls, the finishes, the textures, the food, the beverages, literally everything has to be for them.

I'm a businessman, not a bartender.

If you can't build a relationship with your customers, you're in big trouble. If you can remember the numbers from the reports and spreadsheets you spent hours poring over in your office, but you can't picture the faces of your customers - you're in big trouble.

Any time a bar or chef cares more about their own ego than the tastes and comforts of their customers, they should just open a monument to themselves and not a business.