I was sixteen when I started at Potbelly. They had twenty-two shops. I was there for ten years and by the time I left, they had over two hundred and fifty.

That math tells you everything you need to know about where I got my education.

I grew up in that company. Started on the floor, worked every role, helped open new locations across the country, and somewhere in my early leadership days found myself standing in front of a training director who had flown in from Dubai to learn how to open Potbelly in the Emirates. I was the one they sent to teach him. No playbook, no title that justified it. Just the belief that I knew the work, I knew the culture, and I knew how to translate both.

That moment cracked something open. I realized that building the right culture, in the right sequence, with the right tools, was not just a management function. It was the whole game.

So I chased it. Everywhere.

Argo Tea. Eight locations, zero infrastructure. I was running the highest-volume location in the company at O'Hare and started building tools just to do my job better. Within a year those tools were being used system-wide. I was a GM. Nobody asked me to build a training program. I built one anyway because the team needed it. That was enough reason. It led to more openings, more responsibility, and eventually multi-unit leadership.

GRK Greek Kitchen brought me in when they had one location and nothing else. No handbook. No systems. I built the entire operational foundation from scratch, opened five additional concepts across Chicago, got into menu development and concept design, opened a bar and a full-service restaurant, and did it all while running the business and leading the teams. That's not a brag. That's just what happens when you care more about the outcome than the job description.

Infuse Hospitality is where the scale got real. Thirteen locations became sixty-five. I was not just running operations. I was in board rooms, presenting to investors, leading strategic planning, working alongside the CEO to make decisions that shaped the organization. I built the infrastructure that made the growth possible and I never stopped believing that the only reason any of it worked was because we got the people right first.

RH is a brand that understands beauty. The spaces are extraordinary, the product is world-class, and the hospitality operation inside of it was unlike anything I had been part of before. I oversaw fifteen locations including the opening of the RH Guesthouse in New York and the early stages of international expansion. That year reminded me why I do this work. Because the cost of getting the people wrong shows up in ways you cannot unsee once you know what to look for.

At Take Flight Hospitality I co-founded the company and built multiple concepts from nothing. A name, Aviator Coffee, and a blank page with multiple leases signed. I turned it into a proof of concept good enough to sell.

The through line in all of it is not the titles or the unit counts. It is the moment in every organization when I realized the same thing: nobody was talking about the people. Everyone was managing toward profit and wondering why the culture kept breaking. I knew what was missing because I had seen what it looked like when it was there.

That became the OverZelis Method. Five levels. One rule. No skipping.