Masters of Scale Live: Shake Shack founder Danny Meyer with Caffè Panna's Hallie Meyer
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Welcome to a very special edition of Masters of Scale. We recorded this one with a live audience in New York City just this month. I'm Jeff Berman, your host. I was so grateful to have hospitality legend Danny Meyer join me on stage for this first in a series of live events presented by Capital One Business.

You probably best know Danny Meyer as the founder of Shake Shack, which now has more than 500 locations in 23 countries around the world. And it was just announced will be serving their world famous burgers on Delta Airlines. Danny also leads an ever growing portfolio of one of a kind restaurants and investments through his Union Square hospitality group.

Midway through our conversation, we invited a rising entrepreneur to join us on stage, and it's one who made a lot of sense for this conversation because it was Dani's daughter, Hallie Meyer. She's making her own name in New York City as the founder of Cafe Panna, a growing ice cream empire of her own. ♪

We haven't made just how you do it.

This is Masters of Scale. We kicked off the event with a recording from a story that we did with Danny several years ago with a live musical score from the artist Margot McDonald. I'll never forget the first time I finally figured out that almost every Roman trattoria has the exact same pastas on the menu, and every one of them is related. There's the cacio e pepe, which is simply spaghetti with pecorino cheese, olive oil, and lots of black pepper.

Then, by simply adding guanciale, the bacon that comes from the cheek of the pig, it becomes spaghetti alla gricia. Or, by adding eggs, that same exact recipe becomes spaghetti alla carbonara. And if you omit the eggs and add tomato sauce instead, you get spaghetti alla matriciana. Four different pastas, all related. Great Italian cooks really cherish and respect their ingredients.

A little olive oil and salt doesn't provide much disguise if the tomato itself isn't perfectly sun-ripened or if the basil isn't fragrant. One of the things I discovered about myself in Rome that I prize wherever I find it is an Italian word called "sprezzatura." Sprezzatura is what happens when the food or the painting or the athletic endeavor or the architecture

comes across as having been effortless. In other words, you can dig into a bowl of pasta that is so amazing and makes you so happy and it appears to be effortless. That's sprezzatura. It's so easy to fall into the trap of believing that more is better.

But whenever I find myself thinking that way, I try to remind myself of the simple bowls of pasta that I first discovered in Rome. And that little things can make all the difference. Now for him, please. Danny, we were backstage together. I was watching you listening to that. What did that bring up for you? It's actually bringing up a lump in my throat. Truly. I can't believe this is happening right now.

Can we go on to a different question? Sure. No, you know, it's, I think I've just composed myself, but first of all, I recorded that well before the pandemic. In fact, my voice even sounds younger then, but I think what I was trying to get at is the joy of discovery and how infrequently that happens as you get older. The fact that you get to taste something for the first time, see something for the first time, smell something, experience something for the first time, and...

They're still out there. In fact, one of the reasons I love traveling and I just constantly stay curious, Audrey and I go to new restaurants all the time right here in New York or wherever it is we're traveling. But

is to get new discoveries. It's just, for me, it's like the greatest joy there is, is to learn something new that you never thought of before. And then, and I'll just share one other thing, because I know you guys think about entrepreneurialism and innovation all the time, but innovation for me is never about inventing something that was never there. It's truly about

How many of these discoveries did I store in my taste memory, my heart memory, wherever? And then use that file cabinet and pull out those things and combine them at the right time and maybe freshly in a way that seems fresh, but it really isn't. What's something that you've discovered or rediscovered recently that's influencing what you're doing or how you're thinking about the world?

You know, I think Audrey and I were recently in Portugal, which I hadn't been to since I was really, really young. And the joy of going to a country where I don't know the language, I can speak Italian and French, but I can't speak Portuguese. And just kind of soaking up different streetscapes in the wine country, a completely different landscape in the Douro Valley, and

It's just so exciting. I just love learning how people live. And I've always learned the most by learning how people eat. So I want to go back to that trip to Italy at 12 and a source of so much inspiration for what you've done in your life and career. You've talked about your dad having declared bankruptcy a couple of times in your youth. One might imagine that would be daunting then for someone to go and be an entrepreneur and build businesses.

What do you think got you there to being an entrepreneur, to being willing to take the risks? I don't think I ever considered anything other than being an entrepreneur. That was what I grew up with. I watched my dad doing that. And I loved the creativity aspect of it. I loved that he was a great writer. He always had a fresh idea up his sleeve. And it wasn't daunting for me to take something that I was obsessively passionate about, which is

going out to restaurants and knowing how I wanted to be treated and trying to create a restaurant, which became Union Square Cafe, that if only it existed, would have been my favorite restaurant. It was really easy for me. And in retrospect,

It just made complete sense. We didn't have any restaurants in New York in 1985 like Union Square Cafe. We had really fancy places and we had a couple chain places, but we didn't have a place that you could eat really good. Like today, there's hundreds of them in New York City and Brooklyn where you can eat really good food and it doesn't matter whether you're wearing jeans or a coat and tie and they treat you well.

It used to be in New York that the restaurants that treated you the worst were the most popular. Bizarre, but true. If someone had told me, you know, during the first 10 years of my career, I only had one restaurant. If someone had told me I was going to one day be on a show called Masters of Scale, I would have said, you're absolutely insane. I will never, ever open a second restaurant. Why not? Because I didn't want to end up bankrupt. And I associated...

both of my dad's bankruptcies with scaling his business. And he did scale his business. And I'm really sad that it wasn't until after he died at the very young age of 59 that I gave myself permission to realize I'm not my dad. And number two, there's a whole lot of businesses in the history of the world that have scaled and not gone bankrupt. And it

it really helped me to understand that it was not about scaling. It was about his

Achilles heel, which is that he didn't surround himself with enough really talented people who complemented both his strengths and his weaknesses. And instead, he surrounded himself with a lot of people that made him feel somewhat exalted, which is what he needed emotionally. And I made a determination finally when I did expand after almost our 10th birthday at Union Square Cafe, opening Gramercy Tavern, which is now 30 years old, that I

I was going to constantly surround myself with people who could do things better than I could. And that gets easier and easier as life goes on because, you know, one of the really fun things about all these years of growing and doing this is that I feel like it's my responsibility to constantly take inventory of what I do during the day.

And truly, because none of us is ever going to invent more hours in the day. So the real question is, if I am ruthless about saying, here is how I'm spending my time, and I do this about once a quarter, literally with a piece of paper and pencil in my office, invariably 20% of the things I'm doing are things that someone else on our team could do as well or better than I do it.

And every time I do that, it's an act of generosity because someone else gets to grow. Every time I don't do it, it's an act of selfishness. But I think even more importantly, every time I don't do it, it's an act of stupidity because I don't get to grow. And my license to grow is to increasingly do fewer and fewer and fewer things, but increasingly only those things that uniquely –

I can do better than anybody else on the team. Yeah, I love that insight. And I appreciate that having a team that complemented with an E, not an I, you allowed you to take the leap. But what got you over the psychological barrier of taking the leap to go and launch Gramercy and have a second restaurant and then go beyond? Yeah, two things. Actually, three things, I'd say. One was a fair amount of therapy, psychoanalysis.

I mean it. Three days a week on the couch, really learning about what was motivating me and what was demotivating me. Did that start after your dad passed, or did you start that before he passed? It ramped up, that's for sure. Yeah.

And then I'd say the second thing was I got a knock on the door one day from a guy who was a really good chef. Audrey and I would go to his restaurant called Mondrian. We loved it. And his restaurant had gone out of business. And he knocked on the door. Basically, we saw each other at the Aspen Food and Wine Conference, a guy named Tom Colicchio. Some of you may know him from Top Chef. Yeah.

And he said, I want to be your partner. I love Union Square Cafe, and I think we could do something special together. And that became really the second kind of way that I created a restaurant with Union Square Cafe. It was I've got this idea that I'm really passionate about, and now I've just got to find the right place for it and the right chef for it.

With Gramercy Tavern, because of Tom, it's like, I've got this chef that I really, really want to work with, and now I've got to figure out the right idea and the right place for it. So it was therapy, it was Tom, and there was a third? Yeah. Audrey said, if you don't open a second restaurant, you're stupid. So marry well. Yeah.

One of the interesting things about your universe is you have restaurants like Manhattan that are one-offs and I think probably designed to be one-offs. You have restaurants like Daily Provisions that have expanded but are still relatively small. And then you have Shake Shack, which is incredible scale and scaling. How do you decide which ones are meant to be what? Well, that's a great question.

That implies that I ever decided Shake Shack was going to be a scaled concept because I didn't. It started as a hot dog cart. And this was the summer of 2001. We didn't open a second Shake Shack for five years. So getting back to your question, I had my hand on the emergency break of scaling forever because of the stuff you asked me about earlier.

And really the thing that pulled me over the edge to open a second Shake Shack, it's not anything I ever wanted to do, was another two things. The first one was that the biggest problem we had with that first Shake Shack was way before there were apps on telephones, you know, where you could cut the line by having an app.

And the biggest problem we had was people complained I'd go there more often, but the line is too damn long. I was one of those people. Yeah. I remember. And we tried everything. We had a shack cam so that you could look online in real time and see exactly how long the line was. Yeah.

And people actually loved that. They used it. But the second reason was that Randy Garuti, who had become the – it was before he was CEO of the company, but he was definitely running the business at that point for us, lived on the Upper West Side.

And he walked by this space every single day that had been closed for years. It used to be called the Museum Cafe. And he said, we've got to open a second Shake Shack. It'll help us cannibalize the lines. I said, all right, if you really think so. And we spent more money than we ever thought we could building this place. Never thought we would make the money back on the second one. Second one opens.

The good news was that the lines were around the block. The bad news was we got robbed on the first night we were open. Someone broke into our safe. And the better news was that the line at the first Shake Shack didn't get cannibalized. It got longer. And so we said, uh-oh, we got a tiger by the tail. So most of the restaurants we opened were

I call restaurants of terroir. They're like a single vineyard wine. They belong where they were planted. Gramercy Tavern, not only did we name it after the neighborhood, but you feel like you're there. Union Square Cafe, you feel like you're there. And as you said, Manhattan, The Modern, those are restaurants of terroir. We call those our hardback books. But then Daily Provisions is another example. Never intended it to be, you know, more than one. Now they're

There will be seven by three weeks from now. So it's still tiny relative to Shake Shack. But if you find that people have found a place in their heart for something you're doing and it's becoming essential, it's becoming part of their lives, you don't have a right to hold it back from people. You don't have a right to...

employ more people. You don't have a right to not give this gift to communities, but you've got to really be clear that they love it. So then you can put it in a paperback and that's the difference. You have this knack. I mean, let's be honest, you can see a space or you can meet a Tom Colicchio and you see the opportunity. And I appreciate a

almost following the lead of the business and the brand and the customer. You're almost following them on the journey is what I'm hearing you say. It's a dialogue. You know, when you start a restaurant, and I assume this is the case for a lot of businesses, you definitely start with a huge amount of belief and passion that your idea is fresh enough that it's going to solve a problem for somebody that didn't exist. I've never been excited about

doing a replica of something else that I've already seen. I like to, we call it writing a new chord with the same existing notes. So in the same way that if you're a musician, there's only eight notes in the octave plus some majors and minors. No one's inventing a new, but that doesn't mean there cannot be an unlimited number of new songs. And in our case, what I'm always doing, and this gets back to discovery, is I'm

I like to take five different experiences that have stayed with me, could be mostly restaurant experiences, and ask myself, if you merge those all together, what would you get?

One of the other ways that you are achieving scale is through an investment fund. And it's interesting going through your portfolio because you are in Salt and Straw, the ice cream company. You're in Pinky Cole's Bloody Vegan. But you're also in Clear, the company that helps you get through lines more quickly. Goldbelly. Goldbelly. How are you deciding where to make investments to help others on their scaling journey? Yeah, well, so after Shake Shack had its public offering in 2015 –

A couple things happened. That was another thing I wasn't all that excited to do, but I'm really glad we did because it was a wealth creator for people on our – 100% of everyone on our team at that point got a chance to buy stock at the strike price, which was $21. The first trade happened at $46. We never – people were retiring mortgages and school loans and car payments. We never, ever could have done that on our own. But I said to myself, this was so great –

Could we do it again? And I realized that I'm not smart enough and I don't have enough ideas necessarily to ever do that again. So that's when we came up with the idea of what if we could identify other entrepreneurs who had fantastic ideas we wish we had come up with, but we just hadn't, and who were leading cultures that we would be proud to associate with Union Square Hospitality Group in terms of being an employee-first group,

caring deeply for the guest experience, caring deeply for their communities and their suppliers, and obviously their investors had to be good businesses. And so we raised a first fund, and then we raised a second fund, and we've got about 26 investments at this point. And I get a chance to be, I'm not on any one of the boards, which is great, but I'm at meetings three days a week with the investment committee, and I get to be sort of the great uncle. I'm no one's dad.

But I'm sort of like a great uncle. All the founders know that I'm a phone call away and it's a good chance for me to share stuff, mistakes I've learned so that they don't have to make the same mistakes. They can make new mistakes, but they don't have to make the same old ones. When we talk to investors, they're often talking about betting on the entrepreneur. It just feels like you've got a nose for the idea as well. How much of it for you is the person and how much is the concept? Well, we're learning because we look back

I think anyone who's got a fund, you look back at the good ones you missed. And fortunately, you look back at a lot of the bad ones you're happy you missed. And I think we probably made more money by not betting on the ones that we're happy we missed. But I do think that in general, the leadership is probably even more potent than the idea itself. I think a great leader can pivot and make a decent idea even better.

But I've never seen a great idea overcome bad leadership. More with Danny Meyer and we'll meet his daughter, Hallie, to hear how she's growing her popular New York City ice cream business, Cafe Pana, in just a minute.

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Go to Grammarly.com slash enterprise to learn more. Grammarly, enterprise-ready AI. The first week at the farmer's market, we sold out within the first hour. And we thought, wow, that was amazing. The next week, we sold even more. I'm Trey Lockerbie. I am CEO and co-founder of Better Booch.

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earning enough points and cash back to handle these unexpected costs and maintain momentum during this critical growth phase. Capital One and the Spark Card was incredibly helpful. We were literally converting the points into cash to pay down our balance to make it through that. That was invaluable for us because we're now in thousands of stores in all 50 states throughout the U.S. To learn more, go to CapitalOne.com slash business cards.

Welcome back to Masters of Scale. You can find this conversation and more on the Masters of Scale YouTube channel. One of the other ways you're scaling is by raising a next generation of entrepreneurs. So I'd love to invite your daughter, Hallie, up and join us on stage.

Thanks for having me. I'm thrilled you're here. Hallie, part of your journey involves Rome as well. Oh, yeah. Will you tell us about what Rome is for you in your journey? It's kind of alarming how similar the journey of inspiration is, especially since growing up, I think, and especially since I've started my own business, there's been a lot of

kind of tension between, well, are you doing exactly what your dad's doing? Are you doing something totally different? And it's a very interesting tension, but it's no denying that Rome is a huge thing for both of us. It's just the place that, for me, I think the story started when I traveled there with my family growing up. But I think it really kind of solidified when I had an experience in, actually, after the 2016 election, I decided to

leave the startup I was working on because it didn't feel like the right thing to do anymore. Was it in the food space? It was. It was in the food tech space, actually. Yeah, it was a home-cooked meal delivery service, which there are many of now, actually. But at the time, I said, you know what, I want to sign up for a year of AmeriCorps service. And that year of service didn't begin until the following school year.

I was like, I think I want to open an ice cream business eventually. So I think I should just go to Rome because it's a place that I've loved growing up. And I found a cooking job at a place called the American Academy in Rome, Rome Sustainable Food Project, which is still hosting cooks from around the world actually in this like fellowship program.

I made it a goal to eat at least two gelaterias in Rome every single day I was there. Great goal. And I definitely did at least two. Good for you. And I recorded all of the experiences. But all of it was, you know, with in mind, like, how can I put these notes together? Yeah. So tell us about Cafe Panna and what have you taken from your experience growing up with your dad? And what are you doing differently? Yeah.

So I'll start with Cafe Panna. So Cafe Panna is an Italian-inspired ice cream store or business now because we have two locations. We make everything in-house. We change the menu daily, which is kind of the most fun part for me. And that's based on the ingredients that are available at the market or that's based on –

The next is definitely the ingredients available. The next is customers sending dozens of emails a week saying, you really need to do this take on a Swedish dessert I had. It's banana with meringue and Nutella. Got it. Great. We're going to do that. And then they feel like they've just won the lottery because we made their flavor. That's the fun of it is like speaking to people in all of their different ice cream languages. But yeah, a lot of it does have to do with the –

the ingredients that are available. And that was how the kitchen ran at the Rome Sustainable Food Project, the menu change daily. So that was fun to kind of like take that. And at the gelateria I worked at in Rome as well, it was like every morning you got in, okay, what are we making? So that approach, like is, that's what...

It keeps me excited. I think it keeps my team pretty excited, too, and it keeps our customers excited. Now at this stage, the business is a little over five years old, the Gramercy location, and we opened a much bigger factory in Brooklyn in July. So it's also a storefront, but now we're producing all the ice cream there. So we've got a lot more capacity than we did. So we currently sell at those two stores, ship nationwide on Gold Belly.

And sell to a growing roster of hand-selected wholesale partners, specialty stores and restaurants. Great. And what from your dad's experience has really informed what you're doing? And both like, oh my God, I'm totally doing that. And oh my God, I'm totally not doing that. Yeah, well, definitely hearing this during the last 20 minutes, I'm like, wow, I'm really doing that. I think one of the things my dad is really good at is he doesn't give me advice unless I ask for it.

Which I really appreciate. And usually, you can correct me if you think I'm wrong, but I think usually the thing I come to you for advice for is generally around HR moments and conversations. But I think what I'm hearing a lot of from your story is kind of where I'm at right now, which is a little bit of an instinct to press the brakes on scale, right?

And for me, it comes from just like an obsession with the product itself and just really, really believing that our success to date has to do with people's love for the product and the places that they get it and their memories around that. And that getting any bigger than a certain point

could potentially like burst the bubble of obsession people have with it. So I'm definitely hearing a lot of that. Yeah. For you, how do you know, like you're describing an instinct. Is it instinctual? Is it more analytical? Like are there data points you're looking at? Or is this like, I just feel that we might lose control of this, of the quality of the relationship with the customer? I think it's definitely feeling because there's plenty of data to suggest that

people want more of the ice cream in more places. However, I do think unlike a restaurant, there's plenty of ice cream companies out there, right? And so there's plenty of data in that regard. You don't think there's plenty of restaurants out there? Yeah. Sorry. There's something different about it. I can't describe it. But people see this as a product business as opposed to like a full-on experience, which is part of what I love about it, right? Because

Our interaction with people can be like the majority of the speaking to their souls we do can be through the flavor, which I love because that's how I – that's what keeps me going. Even though, of course, we have to have a nice experience at the register and, you know, hopefully we're wiping your tables down in the cafe and you get your order on time if you order through DoorDash. But it's so different than putting on a show every single night in a restaurant. So I think that seeing other ice cream businesses' stories of growth –

many of which I love. I love all ice cream. I'm truly obsessed with ice cream. My dad can attest to that. And so can my mom. It's easy to see where a brand that people just adore and consider like a personality trait of theirs can become something that is just everyone's suddenly. So I'm definitely wrestling with that. Yeah. Dani, how did you react to your daughter going into a version of the family business?

Well, Hallie's been – I love it. I don't think we ever said, Hallie, you should do this or you should not do that. Hallie's been cooking her entire life. Like I know when I was a kid growing up in St. Louis, instead of doing homework, I would go out and play touch football or street hockey or whatever. Hallie did her homework and her version of cooking.

you know, blowing off steam was to go read cookbooks. Um, Holly, what, what's success for you in this? See, this is, this is the type of question that, I mean, you're just getting at the core of it. That's my job. Yeah. I think, so I think right now in this particular moment, I'm especially in the,

It's just over five years. I was the only person that wasn't an hourly staff member until a year and a half ago. I have done every single thing in the business. So everything I see through a very kind of like operational lens and I'm working my way, kind of trying to work my way away from that because I know the importance now of

taking your what you do in a day list. And that was the other thing that I was like, wow, yeah, I guess this is another thing I've absorbed, really trying to make sure that I'm not doing things I'm not so good at, because I can bring the most to the table when I'm doing the things I'm really good at, which for me is the creative side, the menu development side, the recipes and all of that. It's really not managing managers, which I have done for four years, but

God, it just, I'm really excited to have someone who's good at doing that now. So I think that's a little bit in my way of saying, well, what's the next step? But what success for me looks like is that the product is perfect and that everyone who buys it is just obsessed with it. And we're there right now. And so I think that's the

That's the fear. It's like, well, what happens if you do more? But more specifically, now that we have the Brooklyn location up and running, it's starting to be able to say yes to more wholesale partners. So a lot of people want – a lot of small stores want to stock the product, some bigger stores too, and some that I'm wondering, does this work? Does this not work?

But I think it's pressing the gas on wholesale out of this location and not pressing the gas on more scoop shops yet. Before we get to a final few lightning round questions that we do, Dani, if I remember right, I've heard you talk about not pursuing perfection. When you hear Hallie say the product is perfect – I don't like that. I don't think it's perfect. I don't think it's perfect. I just think it's so great and fun. And it's –

Why don't you like it? I don't like the word perfect. Yeah, no, I don't either. No, I think perfection is a recipe for unhappiness. I really do. And so...

Yeah, I'm really all about pursuing excellence, which is, for me, the way I describe it. No, you can have all the perfection you want. I definitely don't have any of it. I won't have it because I can't. But what I love is the journey of excellence, which is this kind of balance between honoring the work you did yesterday, flawed though it was, because we're all human, but honor it. No one woke up

This morning saying, I really want to suck today. Right? Everybody gave it their best, even if it wasn't a great day, but honor it. And then...

Figure out how could we do it a little bit better tomorrow. It's a phenomenal segue to you're both known for incredible customer service and hospitality. What's either a non-obvious component of that for you or a non-obvious source of why you've become so great at that? Especially in the ice cream world where people have really, really strong emotional attachments to their customers.

specific order that they placed or the fact that their flavor is not back. But I think the biggest lesson I've learned is just how much you can make someone's day if you remember the flavor they like, you shoot them an email the week you're launching something like it, and they just, it's that type of thing. It's like the fact that their whole day can be made by the fact that their local ice cream shop remembered that they like

a flavor called Galaxy that has pink frosting in it, you know? Which sounds awesome. Yeah. Yeah. How about for you, Danny? You know, I think about it a lot. I spent a lot of time both as a salesman when I was first living in New York and I would drive around the city. We didn't have the internet, but wherever I picked to eat lunch by myself was the highlight of my day. And I was nosing out places to eat, discovering new places in all the boroughs.

I often found that solo diners were not treated very well. And I traveled solo to London. I traveled solo to France. And a lot of times they would look down their nose because you were just one. And so a big part of my motivation for hospitality is...

how I wanted to be treated. Well, I don't know about you. I'm super hungry now. Um, so let's, let's leave with this. Danny, you said you don't offer Hallie advice unless she asks for it. I'm asking you on behalf of everyone here and listening and watching one piece of advice from each of you. How are you going to start? No, absolutely not. No, I think you should, you started the whole thing. So I think if you're an entrepreneur, I would say, um,

Try to grow where you're planted before you just propagate. I like scaling. I've learned to scale. I enjoy it because I like seeing people on our team get to grow. But I think it was a great—for whatever emotional reasons, I didn't grow for 10 years. The gift to me was that I planted roots. And I think we know this from grapevines, that the deeper those roots dig into the soil—

the more flavor the resulting wine will end up having. And so try to grow where you're planted a little bit before you scale. Love that.

I think that's very much what's probably on my mind and driving the slowness. The one piece of advice that I have is not even from me. It's from Stephen Sondheim, which I love because of my grandmother and both of my parents. And it's a quote from Sunday in the Park with George, which is about an artist. And it definitely has to do with doing things at your own pace and not letting external forces dominate.

push you to move at any different pace. And it's anything you do, let it come from you, then it will be new. Beautiful. Danny and Hallie, thank you so much for being at Master of Scale Live. Anything you do, let it come from you, then it will be new. Wise words shared by Hallie Meyer and so many insightful lessons from both her and her father, Danny, in our conversation.

This was just the first in our Masters of Scale live show series. We'll be coming to a city near you soon, and we'd love to have you join us. Please go to mastersofscale.com slash live to learn more. I'm Jeff Berman. Thank you for listening. We've grown exponentially since we opened 10 years ago. We initially started with, I think there were 10 of us, maybe, total, which is just completely ridiculous.

That's Jillian Field, Capital One business customer and co-founder of Union Market, a popular neighborhood market and cafe in Richmond, Virginia. With her growing success, now with 45 team members, Jillian has always kept sight of what really matters. We felt since we opened that having some sort of employee appreciation event was really important to us. Every year, Jillian holds a company-wide celebration to show her staff how vital they are to the success of Union Market.

Recently, she used points from her Capital One business card to host her employees at Busch Gardens Theme Park for a day of fun with family and friends.

We buy all of their tickets as well as their plus ones. It's a lot of fun and definitely a great team bonding experience. Capital One really has been great over the years. It's so easy. We could apply these points to supplies, masking tape and Sharpies and ticket receipt paper, but we like to retain them for our employees. That's been really important. To learn more, go to CapitalOne.com slash business cards.

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Visit mastersofscale.com to find the transcript for this episode and to subscribe to our newsletter. Special thanks to musician Margo McDonald, the entire Wait What Events team, and the crew at the Green Space in New York City.