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INTERVIEW

INTERVIEW

INTERVIEW

INTERVIEW

He Turned Down JP Morgan for a Restaurant Job

52 minutes

Season 6

·

Episode 3

In This Conversation

Will Dasco got demoted the summer he was a bartender on Cape Cod. Bartender down to server — a punishment, on paper. He made more money, he was better at it, and it set the direction for the next decade.

A few years later he finished an accounting degree at Suffolk and had two comparable offers in hand: JP Morgan Chase and Hillstone Restaurant Group. He took the restaurant job. His family hated it. "I got a lot of stern talking-tos" — but finance didn't feel right in his core, and hospitality did. What followed was ten years of saying yes to everything: Boston to Beverly Hills to San Francisco to Boca Raton to Orlando to Pompano Beach, where he was promoted to general manager a week after his 24th birthday. Then Miami, then Atlanta six weeks before the pandemic, then Denver. He saw more of the country in his twenties than most people see in a lifetime, one transfer at a time.

And then, just before 30, he hit the question that ends a lot of good runs: is this it?

Key Topics

The demotion that changed his trajectory, and why serving paid better than the bar anyway

Turning down JP Morgan for Hillstone, and the conversations with family that followed

Why saying yes to every transfer is the whole game in your twenties — "if you don't say yes, they'll move on to the next person

In This Episode:

  • Becoming a GM at 24 and feeling the weight of it immediately

  • Moving to Atlanta six weeks before the pandemic, and what that kind of isolation does to you

  • The manager who gifted him a snowboard as a parting shot — and how falling down a mountain taught him to adjust in public

  • The night he wrote a resignation letter, made himself a Negroni, drank it, and hit send with nothing lined up - "I couldn't decide what was next until I decided that this wasn't it"

  • Getting walked out ten days into a three-month notice, and how he thinks about that now

  • Why he started Hospitality by Will, and the video about needing an hour of silence after a shift that went everywhere

  • Chasing a viral moment and catching yourself doing it

  • What AI genuinely can't replace — and the moment every one of us starts shouting "agent, agent, agent" into a phone tree

  • Reader stories from the industry, including a guest locked out of their room at 3am with no clothes on

Will Dasco

Founder

Hospitality by Will

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About Our Guest

Will Dasco is the founder of Hospitality by Will, a leadership and education platform built on a simple premise: better leaders build better teams, and better teams create better hospitality. He started behind the bar in Boston in 2013 and spent nearly twelve years at Hillstone Restaurant Group, running restaurants as General Manager in Pompano Beach, Bal Harbour, Atlanta and Denver — where he grew revenue 44% year over year and delivered the location's first million-dollar month — before moving into culinary management in New York. Most recently he served as Director of Food & Beverage at The Ned & Ned's Club in New York City. Today he consults, coaches and speaks on service, culture, operations and the human skills that make hospitality businesses work, and he has become a vocal advocate for the idea that a career in hospitality builds leadership and emotional intelligence that translate anywhere.


Connect with Will on Instagram → https://instagram.com/hospitalitybywill