HOST: ALICE CHENG
Welcome to Hospitality On The Rise, the podcast about the people shaping the hospitality industry and their journeys. I'm your host, Alice Cheng, founder and CEO of Culinary Agents, hospitality's go-to hiring platform. And I'm here to give you your dose of virtual mentorship.
Here, we'll be sharing the stories, lessons learned, and advice from hospitality leaders who've carved out their own path to success. After all, this industry is where many get their start and go on to do incredible things.
Whether you're a pro, starting out, or just love the hustle, this podcast highlights what makes hospitality extraordinary, the people.

HOST: ALICE CHENG
We're so excited to have Jeff Benjamin here with us today. Jeff is a longtime restaurateur and hospitality expert, a key figure in shaping Philly's reputation as top tier food destination. He's the CEO and Board Member of Federal Donuts & Chicken, COO, Co-Founder of VB Grupo, Co-Founder of Vetri Community Partnership, Managing Partner at FNB+, author of many books and the little birdie told me there might be one coming up.
So, without further ado, Jeff, welcome. Thank you for spending your time with us this morning.

GUEST: JEFF BENJAMIN
Great to be here. Thanks, Alice.

HOST: ALICE CHENG
And I've had the pleasure of knowing you for many many years, for almost the entire lifespan of Culinary Agents, that's a decade plus. And you have been a busy person. You have been busy. How did it all start? How did you know that hospitality was your thing?

GUEST: JEFF BENJAMIN
Yeah, really early on, I was a teenager looking for work as extra income, and our industry is really receptive to that kind of thing. The hours work out for someone who's in school or who has other obligations. And we had just moved to New York. I hadn't met anybody, didn't make any friends, was looking for things to do on weekends. And I took a job as a busboy. And, you know–it may sound odd to say to those who are currently toiling as busboys as I was–but it bit me the day I started. From that moment on, I knew I was going to do something in hospitality for the rest of my life.

HOST: ALICE CHENG
That's amazing. I mean, you gotta start somewhere, right?

GUEST: JEFF BENJAMIN
There was just always something happening. There was a lot of action going on. It was just a fun environment. And yeah, it was a lot of work. I was working at a catering hall. We were there till three in the morning, and I just couldn't think of anything else I wanted to do.

HOST: ALICE CHENG
So knowing this that early, were you like, “I'm going to go to school for this. I want to just keep working.” Where did it go from there?

GUEST: JEFF BENJAMIN
You know, “career path” wasn't as well spelled out back then. There was no internet. There was no way I could search what was available to me. There were only a handful of colleges and universities that were specializing in this. Of note would be Cornell, UMass, UNLV at the time. So kind of what I did was I applied to those schools, to UMass and Cornell.
I got in and said, “This is what I'm going to do.” I ended up choosing UMass. But really, it was an economic decision. And spent four years in Massachusetts and got a degree. It wasn't clearly spelled out. I think I could have just worked my way through things. But it certainly helped me to see different parts of the industry. It exposed me to hotels, restaurants, clubs. And then ultimately, I launched my career in contract dining with what was called ARA Services at the time, and that was Aramark..

HOST: ALICE CHENG
Yeah, I see… I know and see you're a big baseball fan. Maybe that was your way of getting into all the games, right?

GUEST: JEFF BENJAMIN
Yeah. You know, honestly, to this day, I still kind of utilize that strategy. We have multiple outlets and arenas and sporting stadiums. I use that. I use that to get in.

HOST: ALICE CHENG
Yeah, you go in for a quality check, right? You gotta go make your rounds.
Well, great. So you're working in it. I always kind of try to draw this piece out because when I talk to leaders, you make it all sound so easy. You're like, “I wanted to do it. I went to school. I started working and then poof! Now I own all these restaurants and I'm a CEO,” all that good stuff.
So I'm here trying to fill in the blanks here. So you know you want to do it. You went to school. You're learning. You're exposed to all these things. And now you're working in more of a food service type of establishment. What made you kind of look–because there are differences; there are similarities, but there’s differences. What made you look more into independent restaurant space?

GUEST: JEFF BENJAMIN
Yeah, mostly you couldn't, I couldn't scratch that entrepreneurial itch. Yeah, I think working in a corporate environment provided me a lot of tools that I wouldn't realize I needed until I needed them. Structure, process, things like that, I learned at the hands of the Aramark corporation at restaurant associates.
But that itch to kind of be innovative and work with people who are super creative–not to say that there's no creativity there, but there's a box you need to live in. And setting your kind of own destiny. Back in ‘98, when Marc and I opened Vetri, there wasn't a ton of growth-oriented entrepreneurialism. You opened your restaurant. You ran your restaurant for the rest of your life. You made it a decent living, and that was it. No one really talked about being a multi-unit restaurant operator back then. So it was kind of just more of a scratching of an itch than anything else.

HOST: ALICE CHENG
Yeah, and so that's a great segue. So how did you meet Marc? How did that partnership come about? I mean, it's been many, many years.

GUEST: JEFF BENJAMIN
Yeah, you know, it was a series of just kind of happy accidents. You know, Marc was coming home from a couple years stint in Italy where he was honing his skills as a chef, and I was working in contract dining in New York. And his brother and I were friends through mutual friends who introduced us. And we had afternoons free, so he and I would often play golf at Van Cortland Park in New York in the Bronx. He could take the 1 train up and play.
So one day we're on the course and he says, “You should meet my brother. He's a chef.” I'm like, “Yeah, I'll meet him. I don't have a job for him or anything like that if you’re asking me.” He said, “No, no, no, he's got a job. He's just moving home and you're in the food business. He's in the food business.”
We met and became friends and kind of just kept in touch. And at one point I had mentioned to him that it'd be really cool to go out on my own one day. You know, I've got this safety net of working for corporate establishment, but it'd be fun. And he said, “I'm going to do that. I'm going to be a chef at my own restaurant one day too.” And we got to talking. And then at some point, his brother, who's in the film business, was making an independent movie and used my apartment as a set for one of his first movies–which I'll never do that again, by the way.

HOST: ALICE CHENG
The one in New York, the one in Midtown East?

GUEST: JEFF BENJAMIN
Yeah. And Craft Services was run by Marc and his dad. So every morning I would sit and have coffee with Marc and his dad. And at one point Marc's like, “I'm moving to Philly back home,” which is where they're from, “to open a restaurant, you want to join me?” And I said, “Sure.”
About two weeks later, he called me and said, “By the way, were you serious?” I said, “Sure.” He's like, great. In July of ‘98, I visited this worn-out restaurant that needed a ton of work in Philadelphia. And in September of ‘98, we opened.

HOST: ALICE CHENG
Wow, you don't hear those types of stories. Now it's like, “I'm waiting for my permit for …”

GUEST: JEFF BENJAMIN
Yeah, well, you're right. And honestly, there's a lot of red tape. You know, we do most of the work ourselves. He and I stained the floors ourselves. And I think we opened for like $75,000 or something like that.

HOST: ALICE CHENG
Wow, and the rest is history. It's still there and thriving,

GUEST: JEFF BENJAMIN
Yeah, I keep saying it's the 26 year overnight sensations.

HOST: ALICE CHENG
Well, and then you went on to open many within a pretty short amount of time.

GUEST: JEFF BENJAMIN
Yeah, the first window of time was longer by today's standards. It took us about eight years to get our second restaurant because we never were searching. It just kind of… opportunity hit and we said, you know, people keep leaving us to go do their own thing because we're not big enough to promote people. And we found a space, and–it found us actually. And we opened in a part of town that people don't typically open restaurants and it kind of took off nicely. And then that spawned multiple within several years. You know, eight years between one and two and then for the next five years we opened another seven or six or seven. So yeah, it helped us grow.

HOST: ALICE CHENG
Yeah, and I'm going to hone in on something you just said, which is, people are leaving us and, know, what the expansion… Sometimes part of the strategy is how do you create more opportunities for people you want to retain? By default, you're growing your your footprint and business.

GUEST: JEFF BENJAMIN
100% of it. I think it's a necessity. You start to realize as a sous chef or as an assistant general manager that the general manager and the chef both own the restaurant. There's no promotion for you. So your resume is constantly out on the street, and I didn't fault anybody for doing it. So when we were able to open other restaurants and give other people avenues, ultimately you create a culinary director position and a director of operations position and multiple GMs. And now you see a pathway towards “career” rather than “job.”

HOST: ALICE CHENG
Yeah, throughout this time… So I'm curious to, you know, what were some of the or some of the aha-slash-lessons learned, especially from those early early years? Because now you're on to.. I can't even count. I lost count.

GUEST: JEFF BENJAMIN
Well, we've grown, sold, grown again, invested in a few other things. I don't know that necessarily aha moments, because maybe I'm not as quick to study. So it takes me a little while to get to aha. But a lot of the things that we talk about are cliches, and they're cliches for a reason because they're true.
It's about the people, it's about the relationships. Don't go chasing the overnight success. Don't just grab a deal because there's a lot of money involved, or don't turn it down because it's going to take a lot of work. Hard work can get you where you need to get to, and it may take you a little longer, but there's a reward there.
But I'd say the most important thing is we surrounded ourselves with quality people for the vast majority of our career. And we've had some fit and starts along the way. And as you probably know in your end in the business, there's some bad hires out there. I don't know that they're necessarily bad people, but, the fit matters, right? You know, oftentimes when I was counseling a manager ready for their next step, it was often, “Get ready for your next step, but not with us.” And that's, you know, a hard conversation.

HOST: ALICE CHENG
Yeah.

GUEST: JEFF BENJAMIN
I think probably the most recent lesson that was made clear to me, probably one that I knew all along, is your first loss is your best loss. When you're working with someone who clearly doesn't fit with your organization or isn't part of your growth strategy, you kind of keep them around because you're a nice person and you don't want to hurt anyone's feelings. You're doing them no service at all. So helping them understand what's best for them and for you is probably the best advice you can give someone.

HOST: ALICE CHENG
Yeah, that's great. That's great advice, because I would imagine in the world of hospitality, that whole “give them another chance, another chance.” There absolutely is that that makes the industry so great because it is a place that welcomes from all directions and does give second, third, maybe fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth chances. But there is a balance to what's best for you, the business and also them.

GUEST: JEFF BENJAMIN
Yeah.

HOST: ALICE CHENG
And things change. Circumstances change, people change, everything changes.

GUEST: JEFF BENJAMIN
That's exactly right. The person I hired in 2001 was great at 2001 Vetri organization. But by the time we got to 2005, they were ready for something else. Like you said, circumstances change. Maybe they have a family now and their needs are different. That happened with me and Marc. When we started, we were both single guys opening a restaurant, we had no other care in the world. And then as we grew our families and our needs changed, we started to look through the lens of family people. And we hired based on people who saw that kind of ethos as well. It just changed, it changes your perspective.

HOST: ALICE CHENG
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And it continues to change. So speaking of continuing to change, you had mentioned you built, sold, etc. Some would say, I would say, others would say as well, that you have a keen eye of recognizing opportunity. Got any tips and tricks on what's your framework there? Spill your secrets.

GUEST: JEFF BENJAMIN
You know, not necessarily tricks. I think if I documented the missed opportunities, it'd be a longer list than the ones that were successful. But we talk about our successes a lot more. You know, the reality is, I think that one piece of advice I'd give you is take the meeting. Doesn't matter. Just always take the meeting. Understand, you know, what's a half hour of your time to spend with someone who's got a new good idea? Or maybe it turns out to be a bad idea.
Most people know that when they reach out with a potential opportunity for us, I'll spend a half hour with them. And at the end of that half hour, it may have just been a half hour spent, and that's that, and we move on our separate ways. There are people I've met with and passed on an opportunity with that two years later show up with a really good one. So they're already in my, well, to use an outdated term, they're already in my Rolodex, right? I think I just dated myself. I did have a Rolodex on my desk for the first five years we were open.
But you know, I think many people look at its face and judge that book by the cover and say, “That doesn't look like an opportunity for me.” And then all of sudden, in hindsight, they see someone who took that up and “Wow, I could have done that.” So I think that’s why take the meeting.

HOST: ALICE CHENG
Yeah, yeah, that's great. You never know. So you took the meeting. And you built the restaurant empire. You moved on to you and Marc, kind of have been together and continuing to do things together. And kind of took a step away from the independent restaurant space for a little bit. But then you just couldn't stay away.

GUEST: JEFF BENJAMIN
The bug bit, yeah, you're right. I mean, that's it. Right.

HOST: ALICE CHENG
You took the meeting, right? The opportunity came and here you are. How do you balance? Because you've got a couple of really big titles and roles here. How are you balancing all of these moving parts?

GUEST: JEFF BENJAMIN
I think I said earlier in this, I don't want to be too redundant, but it's the people, right? So I'm surrounding myself with people who kind of enable me to do multiple things at once. You can't be the CEO of a fast casual concept and the Chief Operating Officer of a fine dining Italian restaurant if you're the only person working. And there is just a huge team involved with both. So I think that's part of it.
The person who I took to help run Federal Donuts & Chicken with me actually came from the Vetri business. He was in fine dining. He's got this really great fine dining background and wanted something more. Told me he wanted something more. I said, “This is going to be kind of out of the box for you, but I'm doing a new project. Would you like to join me? “And he's like, “Yeah.” So if he didn't join, it'd be a lot harder. You balance, you help create balance.
I also stayed pretty grounded because I have, as you know, a great family. I desire spending time with them. So it's a lot easier for me to say, “Listen, today I'm doing this, but at five o'clock, I'm going to be home for dinner with you.” Or when my daughters are home from college, which is rarer and rarer these days, I'm going to make sure I'm around.
Again, many of those meetings we took enabled me to do that today. I will tell you that from ‘98 to probably 2005, I wasn't as able to create my own time. So to those of you who are listening or just launching your career, who don't see that you're able to not miss your child's baseball game or basketball game or dance competition, it'll come. I'm not here to tell you it's easy, but you have to really be deliberate. Most of you are deliberate in your job day to day, but your job is to be a good parent, good spouse, good partner as well. So create that balance.

HOST: ALICE CHENG
Yeah, yeah, that definitely is something that is a common thread talking to leaders is that you put your dues in, you do what you're supposed to do. You network, you say yes, you learn, and it makes space and time so that you can do other things in the future.

GUEST: JEFF BENJAMIN
But you have to be deliberate about it.

HOST: ALICE CHENG
Yeah, yeah, like, where do you want to be five years from now? Work back. How do you get there? How does somebody else who's there already, what did they do? Right?

GUEST: JEFF BENJAMIN
And truth be told, don't stress if you have to deviate. It's going to end up being a blip in time on the timeline of my career, or our careers. But 2020, if anything good can come out of it, is it showed us that we know how to deviate and change our trajectory a little bit. And do it. And look, we're all here today. We're working maybe a little differently or at a different capacity. But just because you set your five-year goal, and in year three something throws a curveball at it, don't scrap the project.

HOST: ALICE CHENG
Yep. And surround yourself with like-minded and great people, right?
So throughout all this, you're also writing books. Was that just like you woke up one day, you're like, ”I'm going to write a book.” I mean, was the hospitality book your first one or did I miss one?

GUEST: JEFF BENJAMIN
Yeah. Nope, that was the one. I like to write. I think I'm… and writing has taken on a different definition these days because you could write verbally. You can speak into a thing, but I just like to, I like to know that my thought that I had yesterday, I'm not going to forget I had. So I'll jot it down and, you know, like, [SHOWS NOTE PAD] but you know.
So someone said, you must experience a lot. At the time, all the chefs were writing cookbooks. Front of house guys just weren't doing any. Obviously, famously, Danny Meyer did it, and many have followed. But I wasn't looking to write the how-to of hospitality. But I also wasn't looking to do a tell-all, “Oh my god, the time that the chef threw a pan at me” or catching people doing untoward things in the bathroom at your restaurant. I wasn't looking to do that either. But I was looking to write a book with the stories of which could inform the next generation of restaurateurs or hospitality professionals. “Hey, what you just experienced is not an anomaly, it's fun, but here's a lesson I took from it.”
In front of the house, I did write a story about something that happened to me at a Burger King once that I took into the fine dining atmosphere as a lesson. So really just meant to tell a story, and I'm actually in the process of updating that book, and we haven't decided whether it's gonna be a brand new book or the book itself will be just updated with newer versions, new chapters. I've got probably three tables of contents for three different books sitting on my computer right now.

HOST: ALICE CHENG
Well, let me know when that comes out. I highly anticipate it.

GUEST: JEFF BENJAMIN
Thank you.

HOST: ALICE CHENG
And now you're a CEO board member of Federal Donuts & Chicken. And that was, I don't want to use the word “deal” because it kind of is an understatement. Can you share a little bit about how that came about because that was like a concept, and then there was an investment and opportunity, and now you're focused on growth.

GUEST: JEFF BENJAMIN
Yeah. So I mean, the seeds were kind of some years ago. We had a line cook named Michael Solomonov, who was just an amazing…

HOST: ALICE CHENG
I've heard of him.

GUEST: JEFF BENJAMIN
Yeah, he's been around, Google him. And he was just an amazing guy because he showed up every day just eager to figure out something new that he could do. One day he came to me and said, “Hey, I don't know anything about the business of running a restaurant. My goal in life is to own a restaurant. Do you have time to spend with me?” And no one in the back of house has ever interacted with me in that way. I said, “Sure. On Tuesdays, I usually do our books and I create the P&L and forecast. And if you want, you can join me on Tuesdays.” And he did. And he did, and he kept doing it every Tuesday. And we ended up writing a business plan together.
And we ended up becoming very close friends. We joke a little bit. My 22-year-old daughter, Rebecca, was one of the first babies he ever held. And now my younger daughter, Ali, babysits for his baby. But we stayed in touch over the years, and we watched his Mediterranean-based, Israeli-based restaurant empire become an actual empire.
And him and his partner, Steve Cook, with three other partners, launched this little donut and chicken thing, just because they were having fun and they had a space that was roughly 800 square feet on Federal Street. And it was cute and it was fun. And like a lot of us do, we do these kind of vanity play passion projects that have literally no ability to scale. And for better, worse, or indifferent, it kind of scaled a little bit.
And they got to the point where it was starting to be noticed by people that they could probably grow this thing to a national brand. Pause for a second. I had been involved in some other transactions. I got a little glimpse of what it takes to do some M&A work in the restaurant business. So people would occasionally call me and ask for advice on these things. During the pandemic when we all had literally nothing to do, I did get a call from a friend of a friend who's in the private equity world. And so they were working on some deals. Would I be willing to have coffee? So we sat outside at a restaurant that was still open outdoors. And we had coffee and talked about deal making and what were some brands that were kind of ripe for growth. And we both landed on the fact that he was probably alluding to a brand that I knew, and it was Federal Donuts. And I said, “Listen, if a deal is going to happen, I'd like to participate and I'd like to become an investor. But I also think I can help. I could be a strategic investor. I don't just want to give money to you.”
He called me a few weeks later and said he could use some help shepherding it through. And would I invest and also take the independent board seat? So I said, “Absolutely no problem. I would be honored to work with Mike and Steve and certainly love to bridge the gap between PE and restaurants,” which it's a needed relationship if you want to grow, but sometimes there could be some disconnect. The wants and needs of a PE firm and the wants and needs of an entrepreneur are not always aligned. And I was there to kind of wear both hats. I know what an investor wants. I also know what the creator wants.
But within several months of joining, we realized that there were things that were standing in the way to scale systems of creating product in multiple locations at the same time in different states. So we spent about the... As the story gets told, it will be that I reluctantly stepped into the CEO role. They asked, I said no, but like an hour later, I said yes.
But yeah, so I've been operating in the CEO role for the past year and a half and really basically we just did a deep dive into what's working and what's not. And now in the past several months, we've launched a franchising business. We've successfully sold 13 units, and I have every reason to believe that'll double over the next year or so. And every reason to believe that it'll be a successful nationwide scale in the next three to five years.

HOST: ALICE CHENG
Yeah, congrats, congrats.

GUEST: JEFF BENJAMIN
Thanks.

HOST: ALICE CHENG
I played my part in the beginning when I used to, every time I visited Philly, I would bring home a box of donuts on the train. I was that person that had the wafting aroma of donuts and chicken in my lap.

GUEST: JEFF BENJAMIN
Nothing sells the donuts more than the smell of a donut. I mean, the reason why we have the hot fresh donuts really for the most part is a great marketing play.

HOST: ALICE CHENG
I did spare the riders. I did not eat any on the train. I waited till I got home,

GUEST: JEFF BENJAMIN
Well, you should have brought more and then just handed them out to people.

HOST: ALICE CHENG
Hey, that's good, I mean, that would be very hospitable of me. So, you know, I would say what's next, but it sounds like, this is the current what's next focus. And then another book on the horizon.

GUEST: JEFF BENJAMIN
Yeah, well, actually–I know I was told not to move–I did just come out with another book.

HOST: ALICE CHENG
Ooh! Congrats.

GUEST: JEFF BENJAMIN
This one has nothing to do with the restaurant business other than it does nod to my relationship with Marc and how we ran the business. But as you alluded to, I'm a baseball fan. And so it's a story of my father and I going to baseball games together over my lifetime and the fact that really the true quality time I had with him was during nine innings of a baseball game.
So I don't know if you saw it, it's titled “Extra Innings” because really all I wanted was extra innings with him. But it does have a hospitality component because you asked what's next, and the truth is I want more. I want another inning. I'm not gonna retire. My kids started laughing at me when I alluded to retiring, so I just stopped saying it. It's not gonna happen.
But I want to do more of this. I liked helping a young brand get bigger and better, and I suspect that once the Federal Donuts & Chicken brand is fully matured in my needs–I'm not needed–I'll find another brand that does the same thing and do it again.

HOST: ALICE CHENG
Yeah, I mean, that's that entrepreneurial spirit-slash-fire in you, right? I think a lot of people in this industry who realize one day or realize from the beginning that one day they want to own their own business or they want to– Yeah, it's a very entrepreneurial industry in general, especially the independent restaurant, the world of it, right?

GUEST: JEFF BENJAMIN
Well, there's not as big a barrier to entry as many other industries because you can work as a busboy or a server or a line cook and very realistically believe you're one day going to own the restaurant you're working in. And that doesn't happen in a lot of industries.

HOST: ALICE CHENG
Yeah, absolutely. And now more than ever, there's just more tools. You know, one of the reasons why we do these Hospitality Career Paths and this podcast, Hospitality On The Rise, is to show people some real examples of how people have done it and what they're doing and how they thought about it, how they continued it, what they're thinking about next, etc.
You know, there's something to be said about keeping, you know… It's a lot of hard work, as you said, and everyone knows. And you can get stuck in a rut every now and then or get frustrated in any industry, but in hospitality I think is like next level. The inspiration and the examples are so helpful in many different ways. It could motivate somebody, it could give them different ideas on how to approach things. It could flip a switch in a certain way that could really put them on a different trajectory. I think what your path here I think is very eye-opening in many different ways because you've done so many different things, but they all have a common thread.

GUEST: JEFF BENJAMIN
Yeah. And I think… I'm glad you do things like this podcast because I do want–you know, there wasn't podcasting when I was coming up in the business. But you know, for lack of a better term, misery loves company, or we like to commiserate, right? So I wish I could have had access to 20 people feeling what I was feeling when I was distressed over the business and what's next for me.
And you know what? There's a hundred people going through what I'm going through right now. I'm not patient zero in the world of stagnant growth. And you're going to have that moment where you go home and say, “Should I leave the industry?” And by the way, it's healthy to ask yourself a question. If you continually ask yourself that question, then maybe the answer is yes. But the reality is if you're into it and you really want to work hard and you don't mind taking time to do it and you know there's going to be fits and starts, someone out there is going to recognize your potential and hope you get through it.

HOST: ALICE CHENG
Absolutely. Just make sure you take the meeting.

GUEST: JEFF BENJAMIN
Take the meeting. That's it.

HOST: ALICE CHENG
Well, on that note, it is quick fire time.

GUEST: JEFF BENJAMIN
Great.

HOST: ALICE CHENG
What advice would you tell your younger self?

GUEST: JEFF BENJAMIN
Other than take the meeting, you know, don't be discouraged. There were plenty of times where I was going in at 5 a.m. The things you missed, don't sit there and recount, “I missed that party” or “I missed my friends doing this.” Don't do that to yourself. Stay focused, keep your eye on the prize. You'll get there.

HOST: ALICE CHENG
What’s your advice for someone struggling in the industry?

GUEST: JEFF BENJAMIN
You know what? Here's the… Ask for the meeting. Find people like me. You know what? We've been there, done that. And I often tell people the reason why I know what I know is just longevity. I'm not smarter than you. I'm just 30 years into it, you know? And so come to me and say, “I'm really struggling. I'm in a rut. What do I do?” I'm not going to tell you what to do. I'm going to give you your options. I'll give you four or five options.
And there's hundreds of me out there. Don't go to your next friend on the line cooking next to you because they're going through the same thing you are. It's going to be you two bitching and moaning to each other at that point. Go to someone who can actually effect change. And there's plenty of us out there.

HOST: ALICE CHENG
What's your advice for fellow hospitality leaders?

GUEST: JEFF BENJAMIN
Don't forget where you came from. You were that guy on the line, bitching and moaning at one point. You were that assistant-assistant general manager who was working the overnight shift at one point, complaining about the industry. Just because you've gotten some sort of modicum of success–success measured financially or just with notoriety or with Instagram followers for all I know–you weren't always that person.
The good news is most of the people I'm surrounding myself don't suffer from that ailment, but I have met people and you have too in this industry, and in an industry that feels like they've gotten to this level and they're kind of breathing rarefied air. We're all breathing the same air, and don't forget. Because also, especially in our industry, we're in the hospitality business and you can be super hospitable to your guests, but don't forget you're also supposed to be hospitable to the people you work with.

HOST: ALICE CHENG
I love it. Thank you. And I'll take a minute to also thank you. You have always been very supportive and recognize Culinary Agents from the very beginning and put me in rooms that I otherwise wouldn't have been in. So I appreciate that.

GUEST: JEFF BENJAMIN
My pleasure.

HOST: ALICE CHENG
And Culinary Agents appreciates that, all the ongoing support. And I asked for the meeting. You took the meeting.

GUEST: JEFF BENJAMIN
Exactly. So we're proof.

HOST: ALICE CHENG
And here we are.

GUEST: JEFF BENAJMIN
To those of you listening, we are proof. I took the meeting back when I was getting Culinary Agents pens. That’s good.

HOST: ALICE CHENG
Yeah, yeah, I still have some for you. You can use them to sign your new books.

GUEST: JEFF BENJAMIN
Thank you. Thank you.

HOST: ALICE CHENG
But thank you so much for your time and sharing your experience and your timeline. Can't wait to see what's next and then what comes after that. And congratulations on everything.

GUEST: JEFF BENJAMIN
Thanks so much, you as well.

HOST: ALICE CHENG
Remember, success looks different for everyone in hospitality. No two paths are the same. If you have a leader or a topic you want to hear about, email [email protected].
Hospitality On The Rise is brought to you by Culinary Agents, connecting top talent with employers since 2012. Whether you’re hiring or looking for your next opportunity, join us at CulinaryAgents.com
For more inspiration, subscribe to Hospitality On The Rise and visit HospitalityCareerPaths.com, a free platform by Culinary Agents.
Thanks for tuning in! Remember to like, follow, and subscribe. And if you loved this episode, share it with someone who could use a little inspiration.