YouSaid · the spoken record

Ben Weprin

lines on the record: 99
first: 2024-09-23
most recent: 2024-09-23
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“99 luck. Yeah, you have to take the lottery ticket. You still got to go to the store and cash it. So you have to have some awareness and you want to connect dots. And like, it's just luck. It's like I'm lucky to have my parents, my brother. I was just lucky. Like I was lucky to be born where I was. The luckiest thing that ever happened to me was meeting my wife and convincing her to marry me. That was luck without her zero. You know, I'm probably back at, you know, just for feet, selling shoes. And so that's luck. I mean, that's lucky.”
2024-09-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Graduate Hotels: Ben Weprin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, if there wasn't COVID, we wouldn't be having, we would be talking about us selling the entire portfolio over a $2 billion portfolio of real estate. That'd be the conversation and the brand, or maybe keeping it. I don't know. But you have to make these decisions as a real estate developer and investor and they're cyclical and things change. And it's like I ask for all this. I was ready, willing, and able to accept it, but also to keep moving forward with passion and energy and conviction because that's actually transferable. That energy, it's contagious. And I believe in what we're doing. And now we've done it.”
2024-09-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Graduate Hotels: Ben Weprin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that's the nature of your business, which is it's a business where you can actually buy things without having any money because you can just find the people who have the money, but then it requires loans. And then once you buy a property, the clock starts ticking, right? And it's going to at some point, the timing has to be perfect because you're going to have to pay back the loan or sell the property. Everything has to happen in the right way in your business.”
2024-09-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Graduate Hotels: Ben Weprin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hilton can now hope Hilton owns the They can now franchise and grow that brand through their network, through their owners all over the world. And it's part of their system now, not part of ours. It's hard for me to say that out loud, but it is what it is.”
2024-09-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Graduate Hotels: Ben Weprin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So essentially, by doing that deal, like had you, I mean, the deal with Hilton, and I'll just say it was closed in March of 2024. They paid over $200 million just to acquire the rights to the brand. You kept the properties, you own the buildings. You are the landlord, right? And you also operate the hotels. So essentially Hilton bought the name graduate and sort of the brand aesthetic.”
2024-09-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Graduate Hotels: Ben Weprin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Paying off the expensive capital that we had taken to survive COVID And it would enhance the value at the property level by affiliating with Hilton. Our biggest sort of challengers in these markets, people that are not just product driven are people that are affiliated with, you know, have brand loyalty and collect points, which makes perfect sense. And so we said, look, we can affiliate and be part of their distribution and revenue management and their network that we would increase our overall occupancy and our overall performance at property level. And that was the business plan.”
2024-09-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Graduate Hotels: Ben Weprin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we made it through. We got out. Sometimes you got to do what you don't want to do so you can continue to do what you do want to do and thought that if we sold the brand, that we would survive and live to see another day and really enhance the property level investments. And so that's what I call Chris Nacetta, who is an incredible CEO and leader and runs Hilton. And Chris had told me, you know, when I started, you know, we started the brand. said, hey, if you ever, you know, I think this is really unique. I've never bought a brand while I've been the CEO for 15 or 20 years. But if I did, it would be graduate. And so called Chris.”
2024-09-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Graduate Hotels: Ben Weprin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or pick your university. And so they came back and droves. We were obviously ready and welcome and excited to receive. And we'd also shown our commitment to these markets by not going anywhere. And this was actually why we ended up selling graduate was we took a very large expensive loan out during COVID to continue to execute to deliver the projects, continue to pay our mortgages.”
2024-09-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Graduate Hotels: Ben Weprin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, into 2021. The states had different rules obviously coming back, but really well into 21 and 2022 we started to see a spike, a real spike in terms of people coming back. And you had high school kids that had never gone, that were college bound and never visited a school. I mean, so we had a massive amount of parents and students coming to looking at schools and evaluating where they're going to spend the next, you know, four years of their life. We had people that were in school that had never even been there. They enrolled to Chapel Hill and had never even been to the campus.”
2024-09-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Graduate Hotels: Ben Weprin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, corporate. We had a lot of layoffs. The property levels, we had a massive amount of layoffs. I think we laid off 2,000 people out of the, I think, 2,200 at the time.”
2024-09-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Graduate Hotels: Ben Weprin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And let students who are stuck stay in the campus, like whatever we could do. We had a skeleton crew, right? We would have the general manager at these hotels. We had half of them that were under development. And we were just trying to stay alive.”
2024-09-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Graduate Hotels: Ben Weprin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Went to zero. Wow. Everything stopped. We had 2,200 employees. I thought someone was playing a joke. That wouldn't happen. I really did. I thought it was like someone was like AI simulation and this is how hard could something be. Everything was in front of us. The business was ramping. We had this great niche. We figured out our cadence of how to do this and tell the story and go into these markets, the brain that really caught. And then it just went to zero and it was illegal to travel. And, you know, operating businesses are not designed to do zero. And we didn't know what to do, right? We were like, okay, the number thing, one thing we have to do is continue our show, our commitment, our conviction, our dedication to these markets, right? Like they don't want them to think that we're this out of town investment firm. It doesn't matter. So what can we do? We can open up the doors and let in first responders. We can open up the doors.”
2024-09-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Graduate Hotels: Ben Weprin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We really start, I think, you know, in 2016 was our first kind of like we had a couple hotels. We did about $30 million in revenue. In 2020, we had 4,600 rooms. And the portfolio did 72 million dollars. It opened 15 hotels. We had another 15, 17 underdevelopment.”
2024-09-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Graduate Hotels: Ben Weprin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So this is sort of a march of growth from 2013 up until today, but there's a huge speed bumple on the way, which was COVID. All of a sudden, universities empty out hotels. I mean, I stayed in some hotels during COVID, and it was really unpleasant. You know, everyone's wearing masks and there's wet, not wet wipes. You know what I mean? sanitizer everywhere and the room service is shut down and it really was not fun to stay in a hotel during covid. How did that impact the business? I mean, it must have been very significant.”
2024-09-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Graduate Hotels: Ben Weprin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, there was people that were reluctant, but when you own the asset, and you do exactly what you say you're going to do time and time again, you build that trust and that goodwill. And it took a little bit of time, right? A brand is not overnight. You really have to build credibility and authority to come into a market and show people what you've done in other places by executing their vision on a very specific, you know, level very specific magnifying glass. And they come through and say, these people cared. We had to connect to all of them and make them buy in to the mission.”
2024-09-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Graduate Hotels: Ben Weprin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With a lot of rooms, so how can we make that feel smaller and more intimate and really connect to the school? And so, you know, the front desk is a vintage shoe store. It has, you know, I bottom myself, it made perfect sense, and it was fun and interesting and told a story as soon as you walked up. And so that was the story that we wove throughout the entire thing and what that, you know, mission meant to so many different people. And the whole idea of just inspiring other people to chase their dreams.”
2024-09-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Graduate Hotels: Ben Weprin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And Nike, as a company, started there, right? Bill Bauerman was the coach, Phil Knight was a student or was an athlete. And then Nike came, and it was Phil Knight said, you know, it's like, don't stop till you get there and don't give any thought to where there is. And Steve Fontaine changed the idea of what people thought was possible. And so we had to invoke that energy, that optimism, that spirit, the idea that anybody can do anything if they set their mind to it. And Nike as a metaphor for that, as that vision and the track and field, which is they're most synonymous with and the colors and the mountains. I mean, it is an absolutely beautiful campus that's, you know, submersed in the woodlands. And, you know, Eugene is a beautiful city. It's kind of weird and quirky and distinctive. And so we had to really get into that. We talked to a lot of alumni. We spent a bunch of time up there. It was an existing hotel.”
2024-09-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Graduate Hotels: Ben Weprin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Glad you picked Eugene. It's one of my favorite assets in markets. And the central character was Phil Knight, Steve Prefontaine”
2024-09-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Graduate Hotels: Ben Weprin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Incredibly inefficient. That's the complete opposite of a large scale chain hotel They sort of decommoditize the whole thing. We wanted to do, or what we did, was turn that upside down and say, you know, could we make, you know, the challenge as you grew bigger was to think smaller and find more stories and more history and more nostalgia and create, you know, we have this term nostalgia. You create a new memory in an old place that you'd already been that felt familiar. So it had to feel familiar like a new familiar in a new way.”
2024-09-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Graduate Hotels: Ben Weprin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. They would be the mascot when we were designing the hotel. Talking about Chapel Hill. It was Michael Jord We did Nashville, it was Dolly Parton. We did Knoxville with Payton. We just finished Auburn. It was Bo Jackson. We were thinking about pop cultural references and the things that were consistent across many different generations within the school. And we would implement it into the furniture, into the carpet, into the story, into the design.”
2024-09-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Graduate Hotels: Ben Weprin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so we started really getting into the idea of having conversations. We built this writer's table and we would take alumni from all these different generations from the schools that we were building or doing a project in. And we just had dialogue and conversations, old school. And we would talk. And these projects take 12, 24, 36 months, particularly doing an adaptive reuse or reposition. So you have time to really submerge yourself in the culture and find out what are the stories, what is the history, what did you love about college? What made it unique for you to go to Princeton? What made it unique for you to go to Palo Alto, Providence? What we would do is once we would get all of these pieces, we would find sort of a central character that we were going to base the design and the story off of.”
2024-09-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Graduate Hotels: Ben Weprin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was just gross out by the whole thing. And then we build that hotel, we did Oxford, we did Athens. I don't know. Year, two years later, I remember seeing that solo cup painting in my office, or not in my office, in our warehouse. You can imagine the stuff that we have in there. And I saw it in that hotel in Arizona needed, it didn't, it never got, it didn't catch particular like Athens or Oxford. And I remember thinking to myself, I'm like, we're actually the solo cup, right? We were taking ourselves”
2024-09-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Graduate Hotels: Ben Weprin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Had to be great, had to be important, had to tell the story. And so, yeah, I was absolutely involved. And we brought in in-house design and a whole team of people that were this mission-driven approach to hospitality. And I remember we do our model room review because we had Tempe and Athens and Oxford. And they set everything up and we were going to go in, model room is when you build the room that you're going to do throughout the entire hotel. And I walk through and the first one I saw was Oxford. And there was this giant painting on the wall. It was a red solo cup. I walked in. I was like, that is awful. Take that down. Like we're like some fraternity party. You guys, we're a high touch point, bespoke adult driven hotel. We've got to be more like the hotel and it just reflect the neighborhood, not solo cups.”
2024-09-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Graduate Hotels: Ben Weprin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So the first one opens up in the fall of twenty fourteen. This is in Arizona and Tempe, near ASU, Arizona State. And then soon after you open one in Athens, Georgia. I'm imagining you were very involved in the design and the sort of the aesthetic of what that first one would look like because it had to be great.”
2024-09-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Graduate Hotels: Ben Weprin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So in these markets, there was a high alumni interaction and connectivity. And not only were they coming back to the schools with reunions, there was camps, there was weddings, there was, you know, the sort of we coined the term visication when people would come with their students, prospective students, and to look at a school. There was art crawls. There was so much going on in these culturally rich inspirational markets in the summer that we were way busier in the summer than we were in the winter.”
2024-09-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Graduate Hotels: Ben Weprin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we were going to become vertically integrated We're going to own the hotel. We were going to operate the hotel. We were going to brand the hotel. So we controlled the full customer journey and experience everything that a customer would touch, see, feel, would come through the DNA of graduate.”
2024-09-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Graduate Hotels: Ben Weprin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it's got sort of, again, aspirational, like you could be the graduate, you could stay there, it's not super expensive, right? It's affordable, but it's sort of a little bit of upscale compared to what might have been available in the town.”
2024-09-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Graduate Hotels: Ben Weprin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We kind of spitballing, throwing names against the wall, and we were thinking of other academic, but also like, what is inspiring? And the idea of a graduate of somebody that you graduate, our motto is we are all students. The idea that you continue to learn and grow and evolve and you never really graduate. And it was a great sort of, you know, play on words.”
2024-09-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Graduate Hotels: Ben Weprin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Never even thought about building my own brand, but then when something didn't, you know, when we, it was like, this was the Sunday. This was like we could put all the stuff that we've been doing together collectively into one really unique package, the connecting all of these dots, you know, all of this, the idea that it's hard barrier to entry. It's hard to get into, it's unique, it's distinctive, it's the idea that people take very passionate ownership of where they went to school or where they're from and the hotel product was terrible and no one had done it. I was like, why anybody done it? Why hadn't somebody built a brand? There's all these brands around whatever it is, but nothing around university nostalgia. Why anybody done? I figured out pretty quickly, it's hard. Easy to say, hard to do, but that's actually a great recipe for a new business too.”
2024-09-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Graduate Hotels: Ben Weprin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so went back and started literally was like without any research, without any diligence, I was like, we should start a college. We should do Ann Arbor in Oxford and we should start a college brand.”
2024-09-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Graduate Hotels: Ben Weprin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we're looking at that one, and then one day a guy in my office, and we were super small, he said, well, look in Ann Arbor. I told you I'm a Buckeye. I don't even go to Ann Arbor, like Michigan. That's like the worst. I reluctantly go up there. You know, it's not that far from Chicago. And I go to Ann Arbor. And I really don't want to like it, right? I mean, my family's Buckeyes. Like, you got to understand the yin and yang here. Yeah. And then I start walking around Ann Arbor. I don't want to like it, but I love it. And it has all the character and the charm and the history. And the university markets are just so inspirational and it's contagious, the energy, the optimism, right? The youthful exuberance. I'm like, this is awesome.”
2024-09-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Graduate Hotels: Ben Weprin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Lot of the business was connected to university. The university is a great driver outside of parents. There's professors coming in or prospective students or alumni or camps or all these things that are happening. And so we thought that was an interesting business model that had been overlooked, particularly in Chicago and New York. So we started looking New York. We went up by Columbia, went down by NYU, and the pricing was just, there was no way to do what we wanted to do. New York's too competitive a market. We started looking at LA around Westwood and USC, and we just couldn't find anything. Just kept going further and further in terms of markets. And we were starting to look at a deal in Oxford, Mississippi at Old Miss.”
2024-09-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Graduate Hotels: Ben Weprin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we thought, you know, neighborhood hotels close to a university. That was it. There wasn't any science behind it. It was all art.”
2024-09-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Graduate Hotels: Ben Weprin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Can we take that on the road? And how can we combine all these things that we've done? And which deal was really the most successful? And it was without a question, Hotel Lincoln.”
2024-09-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Graduate Hotels: Ben Weprin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure. We're starting to build a team of people that were very passionate about hospitality. And so we're saying we could do these sort of design driven hotels in neighborhoods within Chicago that we really understand. And real estate is so block by block and building by building. And so identified four neighborhoods in Chicago. We've done Lincoln Park. We wanted to do Gold Coast, CBD kind of Michigan Avenue, and then West Loop, and we ended up doing four separate hotels”
2024-09-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Graduate Hotels: Ben Weprin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, this is it. I live down the street. Developed it, own it, like super proud, grateful, loved every bit of it, right? And then I was like, well, you know, find problem, fix problem, right? That's what we did. We found the problem. There wasn't product that matched the market. We fixed it by building this asset. And we built some trust because we executed and we delivered. Now let's scale.”
2024-09-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Graduate Hotels: Ben Weprin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The zoo. I mean, we had a giant tiger porcelain tiger that was across the street. We had all these animals. We had a giant, huge wall that, you know, we went and bought, you know, cheap flea market art to cover it, sort of gallery wall, which has been a trademark ever since. We just made it feel warm and comfortable.”
2024-09-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Graduate Hotels: Ben Weprin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right away I mean, people came into the restaurant, in the hotel, and it just caught kind of lightning in a bottle. And you can't plan for that. It just happens or it doesn't. And it worked immediately.”
2024-09-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Graduate Hotels: Ben Weprin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. It was going to basically want it to feel like my apartment in Chicago. And the food and beverage was going to get local people to come in and see it and say, wow And then we built this rooftop bar that overlooked, that was magnificent, still is, that overlooked Lincoln Park, that looked downtown, that had Great Lake Michigan views. And people came here and said, holy cow. Like this has just been sitting here in plain day sight. I can't believe that this exists. And they got excited about it.”
2024-09-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Graduate Hotels: Ben Weprin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. Okay, so you're going to renovate this hotel, but you want to, I mean, you want to have a good restaurant in there. You want to have a coffee bar, and you want it all to kind of reflect the neighborhood. So you were going to have posters and art and memorabilia in the hotel.”
2024-09-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Graduate Hotels: Ben Weprin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that was the first deal that I did with a real institutional firm. Did it with Angelo Gordon, which is like an investment firm. And they paired me up, actually, the guy that was in charge, Keith Barquette, his brother, was a developer in Chicago and did a lot of historic renovation and development. And Keith said, I'll do this deal with you, but you got to work with my brother who's a construction expert. So that's how that ended up working with both of them. And that was look, I mean, all of these deals, they're such building blocks, you just got to do deals and build a skill set.”
2024-09-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Graduate Hotels: Ben Weprin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I thought my parents would stay there. Thought DePaul parents, you know, parents visit. There's a lot of young people that lived in Lincoln Park. I thought we'd get business from the Cubs, but it was one of one. And that's the really, to me, that was a really sort of light bulb moment was like, there's no competitive set here. And that's a great business.”
2024-09-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Graduate Hotels: Ben Weprin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it was going to be good enough, which is a huge market, right? It's first of all, there was no competitive set or a frame of reference for people to come into and say, oh, well, I'm used to the, you know, four seasons or Ritz Carlton or whatever. And then it was just good enough, right? You had to do it at a low price point because there was no, you know, comps or history. We didn't know what we were going to be doing. Instead, you're inventing a new product and putting it into the universe. You have no idea how it's going to get absorbed. And lender is investors. Everybody looks backwards and says, well, this is what's here. And the only basis is sort of the price per square foot or just what your pay in terms of replacement cost. And so we had to do it on a really tight budget.”
2024-09-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Graduate Hotels: Ben Weprin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, those were kind of the drivers, and I didn't have the experience to do it, went to raise the capital, the investor matched me up with a local developer that had done a lot of renovation and construction. And I was going to be focused on the marketing, the sales, the design, and the sort of overall plan. And the idea was to really connect to the community. And we found all these interesting stories in our research and that we knew because we lived there, like Frank Baum lived in Lincoln Park when he wrote Riser of Oz and Abraham Lincoln, obviously with Lincoln across the street. And his bodyguard was this guy, John Parker, that was supposedly drunk when Lincoln got shot and said we did the rooftop bar after John Parker.”
2024-09-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Graduate Hotels: Ben Weprin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. It was like, you know, you're, you know, sort of a background singer. You want to be a lead singer. You need to grab the mic and kind of, you know, and I still, look, I didn't have the experience of urban development. And especially historic renovations or repurposing. I had done that on the hospitality side. I'd seen it adjacent, but I never done it. And so when I came up with this idea and this plan to do a story-driven hotel at a low price point, it was basically a second bedroom hotel in that community. And really just thinking about myself as a customer or my parents or my mom or dad coming to see their grandkids, they didn't really care about what was happening on Michigan Avenue. They wanted to be in Lincoln Park and close to us. And so could we build a hotel that was served as that sort of second bedroom? And DePaul was relatively close.”
2024-09-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Graduate Hotels: Ben Weprin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, and I didn't want to travel as much. I, you know, was having kids and business and I wanted to be in my neighborhood. Like it just kind of made sense.”
2024-09-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Graduate Hotels: Ben Weprin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Chicago, trying to figure out what's next, right? What's the evolution of this company? And we'd grown, we'd add some people. And like I lived in Lincoln Park and I would go to this gym on Lincoln Avenue, Equinox. And every single day I walked in front of this vacant. We used to be a day's in, dilapidated hotel on the park. Great sort of just, you know, red brick, simple, great views, but had been closed down for four, I don't know, four or five years and people looked at it and tried to figure it out. And one day it literally just hit me in the head. I'm like, this neighborhood, it's so special.”
2024-09-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Graduate Hotels: Ben Weprin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I fly up there. Literally the same day. Like this happened at like 11 o'clock in the morning because I gave this presentation and the guy sat me down. It was like I was completely crestfallen. I fly up there and I go to 114th and Pleasant and I go in the back room where Frank would check the dupes and smoking cigarettes. And I can remember what it smelled and looked like. And it was like at five o'clock before dinner service. And I sat down and I told them the whole story. I said, here's what happened. And these guys want me out. And he said, I remember, he said, Ben, I told you the most important thing at a restaurant and who's across the table. And same thing for a business deal. And I have your back. And you go, I go, don't worry about it. We'll be okay. We got this. We'll do something else together. And your family to me. And I never forgot that. And it was such a powerful lesson. And it gave me, I was really worried and obviously scared. And it gave me a lot of confidence and conviction that I could go on and keep going. And longer story and short, I'm in.”
2024-09-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Graduate Hotels: Ben Weprin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The way because they wanted to take control of it and do it themselves. They thought they could do better job than I was doing or my idea, my vision for the property didn't align with theirs. There was no turning back. And I was going to have to tell Rayos, Frank Pellegrino, who is a legend, an icon, and one of the most connected people in all of New York in terms of everyone comes into his restaurant. He knows them all. I had to go tell him that I was getting kicked out and they wanted him out of. Raleigh.”
2024-09-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Graduate Hotels: Ben Weprin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They wanted to get into hospitality. And I don't know, six months, seven months in, they called me down and said, hey, can you give a presentation on Rayos? And they knew all about Rayos. We had signed the operating agreement. Everything was going. And the guy said to me now, he's like, hey, we want you out of the Raleigh. And same thing with Rayos.”
2024-09-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Graduate Hotels: Ben Weprin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT