"I’ll Build It So They Can’t Tell Me No"

Sarah Dandashy of Ask a Concierge got a flat "no" from a major brand two weeks before we taped this. Her response: build something they can't turn down. In her third visit to Check-In with Bryan, Sarah opens up about the rejections behind a career that looks effortless from the outside — the year-long TV development deal that died, the brands that passed, and the mindset that carried her through all of it: "It's not rejection, it's redirection." Sarah made her professional debut at 14 as a fairy sprite at the Georgia Renaissance Festival — eight hours a day on her feet, inventing a character and pulling strangers into a world that didn't exist. She still calls it the best hospitality training she ever got. From Jeddah to London to Atlanta to Washington D.C., she trained at Georgetown's School of Foreign Service pointed squarely at diplomacy, and landed in hospitality instead. In 2012, working the concierge desk in Beverly Hills, she started filming what-to-see-and-do videos in Los Angeles and took her advice off the desk and onto the internet — years before anyone called it a content strategy. "I was creating reels before other people were creating reels." In 2015, Les Clefs d'Or International named her Best Young Concierge in the world. She has since written the bestselling HOSPITALITY FROM WITHIN, spoken on the TEDx stage, and now spends more than 200 nights a year on the road.