Daniel C. Peek, President, Americas, JLL Hotels & Hospitality, interviewed by Lan Elliott

Dan shares how perseverance and continuous learning have been instrumental in his career trajectory and why he looks for a positive attitude and the desire to be a part of a team when building high performing teams.  Dan also describes the four elements needed to distinguish oneself, and explains why leaders should support team members leaving for a new opportunity.

Transcript

Lan Elliott: 0:00

Hello and welcome to its Personal Stories. My name is Lan Elliot. On behalf of its personal stories, a nonprofit dedicated to empowering personal success. And today I am happy to have my friend Dan Peak, the president of Jones Lang LaSalle Hotels and Hospitality for the Americas Re region with us. And if you're not familiar with Dan, who has been in the industry for many years, representing owners who are selling their hotels, I hope you'll go to our website where you can see more about his many accomplishments. So welcome, Dan.

Dan Peek: 0:36

Great to be here. Thanks, Lynn.

Lan Elliott: 0:39

Thank you so much for agreeing to come on. Yes,

Dan Peek: 0:42

absolutely.

Lan Elliott: 0:45

Dan, I know you've had an incredible career because I feel like we came up in the industry and real estate almost around the same time. Could you share some of the inflection points in your successful journey and if there were factors that were contributions to your success?

Dan Peek: 1:08

Yeah, I would say I think like a lot of people, I didn't start out, I didn't begin with the end in mind. So my when I started my journey to higher education, I thought I, I studied journalism. I. So I was, I wanted to be a, I wanted to be a broadcast journalist. That lasted for about a year. And I found out that was not for me for whatever reason. And I look back at the time and I was very young and I was like, I'd always worked in hotels and restaurants as a kid. And I was like maybe there's a career in that. And so that really started a journey of education thinking, that I would work in the operations world. And that I started down that path of. Training, going to hotel school and. Working for working for one of the big brands and working for one of the independent operators, managing hotels. And and then realizing about the time that we were starting a family that there's some inherent challenges in the operating world and and also had a curiosity about investing in real estate. And so did it be from a bridge perspective, got into the consulting world, which was a place I considered when I got outta school. And I was welcomed back into that part of the sector and stumbled, literally stumbled across the industry that I've been in for the last 27 or 28 years, which is, broadly speaking, hotel capital markets. And I would say, the first, those are several inflection points. First, not realizing that. Hospitality was a career for me. And then not realizing that, and then coming, stumbling across this idea of real estate and then transactional real estate. And again, you when you're early in your career, you don't know that you're really on a path, but that, again, coming across the transactional world first with a small firm. Which was a, an incredible learning experience. It was managing a small hotel, you did everything. You, you did the analysis, you wrote the package, and you did the execution with your partners and you learned a great deal. And so today those are in a bigger firm there's a handful of people who do that on every project, but back then you were you were the handful of people. And so that hands-on learning and. And watching, what we do today evolve as a business and become bigger and more sophisticated and more broad based was fascinating, right? So in and of itself, that was a bit of a, that was a bit of a, a tipping point for me. And then I started to look around and realize I. There seems to be a bigger real estate world out there and trying to understand that perspective that how did these assets get financed and, who raises the raises? All this, where does all the equity come from? It's not just sitting around. And that's where I joined a company at the time called HFF and helped build a hospitality practice there. And that was a company had a very big. Presence in the debt business and in the equity business and in the other product types, and looking for ways to create that synergy. And with hospitality alongside, office and multi-housing and industrial and the many other product types that exist in the commercial real estate universe. And and that's also where I I would say, stepped into more of a leadership role where I realized that, it wasn't about me. I had to build a team and I had to go find and the, that was, that's where I found my passion, right? My passion was building a team and looking for the, the next generation of members of our sector and people I'd worked with, when they literally from their, from their first days in our business. And then, and then obviously evolved from there. So I would say, identifying. This is just something people did, which I had no idea at all. And then identifying, or at least, coming in, coming into contact with different ways to do it and becoming a broader business. And then today, I sit as, one of over a hundred thousand people in a global company that you know, obviously just not just with no toe space, but broadly, touches the real estate world literally everywhere around the globe. And that interconnectivity. So it sort of contin for me has continued to evolve. And, work with a much bigger team and a lot of specialization right across the board. So it's been a fascinating journey, I'll be honest with you. And but when you see those points, you it's you jump, you you in a sense, you close your eyes and jump and take the risk. And they turned out to be good risks. Not all of them were perfect and they all had bumps in the road, but I would say. Each step has resulted in progress. And I've never, you never stop learning, right? I'm learning things today. I literally learned things today about my business and about the people I work with and about the industry I sit within that I quite literally did not know yesterday.

Lan Elliott: 5:22

It's fascinating, your journey, and I agree. The area of the industry, which is real estate and capital markets, isn't so obvious to a lot of people when you look at the industry and like you, I had to find my way there as well. I'm curious if you think there is a particular skill or trait that has made you very successful in your career.

Dan Peek: 5:45

That's a good question. I would say I. It is a difficult business. It's one where the path isn't always straight and it's not always clear. There's a lot of fog on the horizon. I would say my favorite word in the English language, and I think the most important trait for someone who does what we do is perseverance, is you have to get up every day and keep moving. And I remember. There's been a lot of rough days in our business. When the market's difficult or the project's difficult or the, the two parties aren't seeing eye to eye, what have you in a transaction, and you you're beat up at the end of the day. I remember reading Colin Powell's book and he always said, one of Powell's rules was, it all it always looks better in the morning. Go home, get a good night's sleep, think clearly in the morning, and always. And then it's actually, it was actually a great point'cause I, inevitably this morning I quite literally woke up and I sent an email to to, to my partner at about five 30 in the morning. And I didn't even tell him what it was, but it was had some clarity in the morning and I had a different perspective on something we've been struggling with. And so like little things like that, but perseverance, keep working away, keep chipping away. I think that's number one. You need to accept the fact that you don't have all the answers. Be willing to accept help, advice, suggestion, be open to suggestion, right? I think as we grow in our careers you can't have a tendency to oh, been there, done that, yeah, I get it. You don't always get it. And so there's, again, to my prior point, there's always something to learn. So always being willing to open-minded and to learn. And so I think those are really two key things, but that. Being able to persevere and and do it with, do it in the right way, in a positive way. I think there's, you can become people can become, a little bit of, a little edgy right in, in our business. And I think that's that's it. Life's too short, wake up, do your best keep moving forward.

Lan Elliott: 7:30

Yeah, I agree. I think there's two really important things I wanted to pull out of that, which is this idea of to keep going, this per perseverance, putting one foot in front of another, because especially real estate is very cyclical. There are moments like we've been in where there's uncertainty and nothing happens, and you need to just keep plugging away at it and knowing it will turn around and it will come back. It usually comes back stronger than it ever was. And the other piece of it is taking the space to clear your mind to go do something else and just trust that the answer will come, or that you will have a more measured response than you would've had in that moment. I've been known, sometimes it takes me a week to have a more measured response. But if you can give yourself that space and wait until you can come back with the right, thoughts, the right approach. It can make such a big difference. Absolutely. That's,

Dan Peek: 8:27

that to me is also always one of the benefits I have of working within a larger organization. And there's benefits still to being in a smaller organization, larger organization. One of the benefits is a lot of partners with a lot of different experience. And a lot of team members who've seen and different things. And and one of the reasons I say, I look at it, it's like I have a big bag of tools and so I can take a step back. I can get advice and, at the end of the day, we're trying to solve problems for our clients. And I may, my, my natural inclination is I like to use the, I have a hammer and I like to use the hammer. It might require a wrench, it might require a screwdriver, it might require something else. I can turn to my partners and I can help, craft a solution that meets our client's needs. Because at the end of the day, it's the client's needs that have to be met. And I think, yeah, you're right. Being able to step away and look at something from a fresh perspective to solve a problem. Create a solution, right? Is really the key to success in this business, particularly as things evolve and the market evolves every day.

Lan Elliott: 9:27

Yeah, and I think also you mentioned not assuming that just because you have a hammer that the hammer's going to be the answer, and being open to asking other points of views and being able to pull together diverse ways of approaching a problem and maybe finding a better one than you would have otherwise.

Dan Peek: 9:47

You completely agree. Yeah.

Lan Elliott: 9:48

You had touched on high performing teams and you've had to do this a few times, and obviously what you do in your business, you are working for clients. They always want the best prices or maybe 20% better than the best prices ideally, and having those right team members is really critical. How do you go about building high performing teams? How do you think about it? Are you looking for something in, in the people on your team? How do you think about building a team?

Dan Peek: 10:23

I think it starts with attitude. I think attitude is really the most important thing. As I, someone who's a POS who has a positive attitude, who really wants to be part of a team. I think we play a team sport. It is not an individual sport. It's a team sport and we all bring different skill sets. The degree to which certain members of our team can. Analyze financial performance or can look at a market or can understand physical condition of an asset or can understand what's going on in the, on the financing side and the complexity in the financing markets today, the complexity in the structure of equity today is and so I, one. You gotta bring together the, again, it's a little bit like tools, right? You gotta bring together the right players. But that attitude is everything. I think one of the, one of the joys I've had is when you sit in the chair, I've sat in for a while now in a few different places. We describe that as player coach, right? So really, at the end of the day, we never become in our, in, in our. In our company and in the companies I've been in we don't become managers. We don't just sit behind a desk and orchestrate. We work on transactions, we work on client situations and we work together with the teams and that, the player coach and that and I, over time I've become more coached than player. I still do both, but I'm more coached than player and that's the great joy of my career. Is the coach role. And so particularly with younger people who are growing in the career and having been there, is just helping them find their path and helping them become part of a high performing team. And the other thing about our business is it's, it's like a project based business, right? So one day you're on this team and another, and you're also working on that team and you're working on this third team. And so being able to figure out how to work together and what I loved and what I've been able to do over the years is is grow teams that sort of, they in a sense grow up together, right? You you you build the culture together. You just, you establish best practices together. So in a sense, it's not a, it's not a, you're not dictating down, alright, this is how we do it this way. Dot the, I cross the T but you learn best practices and you try to hold everyone accountable to best practices, but you're always open to new ideas. And so I think high performing teams are, the best ideas come from across the board and you always ask questions, right? If if you ever think back to some, like when we were in school, there was a lot of studying of different manufacturing around the world. I remember. I, two things I always remembered. I always remember all the studies that were done in about Toyota's manufacturing process, right? And they had that sort of five five or i, it was five or six why's, when something went wrong. They always kept asking different why questions, to try to understand exactly what happened and learned so that the next time it was better. And then I always remember Jan Carlson's book, moments of Truth, who ran Scandinavian Airlines, which I'll never forget. I talk about that all the time. And when I see somebody do something really well, and it's those are the two things. It's sort every single day. We learn that ability and it's a high performing team. Always ask questions about, if something went wrong, we ask why. Or at a moment of truth, when something went right, we acknowledge it. And so I think we just always looking for, and I think it's the best way to do that is when, is when you build that team to together over time and you develop your culture and your best practices together versus here's the 475 page handbook. Just do it this way. That doesn't work particularly in our business where there's a lot of creativity and a lot of opportunity for growth. And then lastly, I would say that opportunity for growth is really important. I think there's certain, practices in our broader industry that we sit within where people get in a they're in a role and they're in that role for a very long time. And it becomes it becomes a bit of a negative cycle. I. Because it's okay, where do I go now? Where do what's next? And I always want to, reinforce the fact that no, you mean you establish the ceiling. Once you're, once you're ready, in a sense you develop your replacement, you develop who's gonna take your place on the team, and then you move up. And our job as leaders is to find. More space for you. Where is there white space? Where is there an opportunity? Where are we not? None of us have 50, 60, 70% market share. There's always room for more people to go out and find new business and find new opportunity, and so I. A high performing team, as much as we love to keep everybody exactly where they are, is really one that sort of continually grows and creates more what we call producers. And so that's always about priming the pump and maintaining that growth the growth of the team over time.

Lan Elliott: 14:47

Yeah, I think that's really important. I always find that I get itchy once I figured out everything in my job and I've done all the things I can see. Then I start to look around and I get a little more itchy for the next challenge. I'm always looking for a new hill to climb. And I think that long term view of how do we continue to engage the team members, how do we continue to challenge them and grow them and make sure they have opportunities to go. To the next level rather than just staying in the same spot, right? And I think it's a great way to keep people if they're continuing to be challenged and finding new opportunities.

Dan Peek: 15:27

And that's one of the great things about being in a larger organization is that, there are more, there, there are more paths for everyone in their future.'cause not everybody's gonna fight. It's not a straight line. It's not. Everyone's gonna start here and then you go to this one, you go to that one, you can go in different directions, you can go off. I know people who focus in on the equity side and move to the debt side, who focused in on this product type and went to a different sector, who started in one market and went to a, the other side of the country. Because that's where they saw opportunity and that's, that was their calling. And as a leader you need to be supportive of that. When you have a strong team member and they have a calling to take the next level, and by the way, sometimes that is a calling. Then they say, you know what? I need to go do something else. And I get that sometimes I'm sad about it which I get because I enjoy working with them. But I also, if you listen and you understand and you think about who they are and where they want to go and how that next step is gonna get them there, you're supportive because look, at the end of the day, that happened to me too. I did not spend the last 35 years of my career in the same company. I had to move around a little bit. I changed my jobs and change what I do and change the firm that I work at to get to the place where, you know, where I am, and so I, I respect that in others and that's just, that's what we have to do. And so it's, sometimes it's not easy, but it is you wanna be supportive of your team and what's right for them. Absolutely agreed.

Lan Elliott: 16:46

You had mentioned you love being able to bring people in at the beginning of their career and grow them. What do you think is required for a young person to distinguish themselves? What makes them stand out?

Dan Peek: 16:59

I'll go back to the original, one of my original comments, which is attitude. That sort of open openness, willingness, being a good teammate. That's, that, that's number one. As much as we'd love you to be, to show up and be, the best possible Excel modeler. I think that's, that, that's a great, that's great, but we can help refine that skill. That's easy. You can get training for that. But being a good teammate being a good, being good in the huddle, being good in the, being good in the, in the trenches together, I think is number one. Being willing to constantly learn. Being able to learn take some direction, I think is good. Communication skills have become are at a bit of a premium today. I will tell you when we when we bring in a young person who can communicate and who can write, I. It is. It stands out. It stands out. It really does. And taking the time to think about what you're communicating and writing is unbelievable. There's a young, there's a young woman on our team who is like the, she's almost like the designated proofreader and she is. Shockingly young and I to be the proofreader, but I look at it, I like, I send something and I get it back and I'm like, I can't believe I missed that. It's that's one of the things we look for. And, but it's, it, look, at the end of the day, it's that sort of joy, right? Positive attitude, that sort of joy and that willingness to learn. Is the most, is that's the key, right? If you wanna, in a sense you want to be a sponge, you wanna absorb as many things as you can. And then, and then lastly, those skills that we're all gonna require, which is you have to roll with it, right? It's a little bit of that perseverance and a little bit of that dealing with adversity, right? I would say that dealing with adversity in life. Let alone business, let alone your job. And that having to deal, we've all had to. And I think there's nothing wrong with that. And I think so that ability to do so and having that sort of toughness that, that. Mental toughness, I think is another one of those aspects to distinguish yourself. It doesn't, you don't have to be harsh, you don't have to be mean or anything like that, but just mentally tough. You keep moving in the same direction, even though,'cause it, because you're not always gonna, like the decision a client makes, we're gonna work real hard and pitch something and we're gonna lose. We're gonna work really hard on a deal and it's gonna get to the five yard line and it's gonna blow up and we're not gonna, and it's not gonna succeed. And you have to be willing to all. Go home, shake it off, get up the next day and come back and just keep going forward. So there's a lot of things there, but it, at the end of the day, it comes back to attitude. Attitude is, it's not everything, but it's a lot of it.

Lan Elliott: 19:22

It's very hard to teach, so it's very hard

Dan Peek: 19:24

to teach. All those things are hard to teach a lot of that's about your sort of how you grow up and where you come from, and you can learn'em. Sometimes it's already there, and, there's a lot of, that's growing up in, it's a playing on the playground and being on a team and being in a class and, going away to school, all those things. You you pick a lot of that up along the way.

Lan Elliott: 19:41

Absolutely. And I love that you mentioned several times this idea of continuous learning, because when you come out of school, a lot of times people think, I'm done with my learning, but you're only just beginning and then you learn how to do your job.

Dan Peek: 19:55

Right,

Lan Elliott: 19:55

and you get really good at learning how to do your job, and then it's not about knowing how to do your job, it's doing all the other things that will continue to propel you forward into leadership. You'd mentioned the books that you had read. I. There is more than just being really good at your job. If you really wanna go to the higher echelons, you have to also figure out how to become a good leader and do that growth piece and learn how to do that in addition to just being excellent at your work. So

Dan Peek: 20:26

for sure,

Lan Elliott: 20:26

calling that out.

Dan Peek: 20:28

Yeah.

Lan Elliott: 20:29

One of the important things that is needed to really be successful are mentors and champions who support. You in those rooms that you don't get to be in. How important is it to find mentors and champions and how does one go about it?

Dan Peek: 20:49

I think it can be, it's I think, if I look back in my life, my mentor started when I was in middle school. I remember distinctly. Beyond just my family, right? But people beyond my family who took an interest. And it was more than just, Hey, how you doing? It was people who gave me sage advice about things. There's things in my head that I think of all the time from a friend of my dad's who was athletic director and the football coach at my high school. And another friend of our family's who a friend of mine's father who always had the most. Incredibly direct advice. There was no, the no bs, your dad might not, your mom and dad might not wanna say this, but I'm gonna say this type of thing. And there was that along the way. And those are things I never forget. And there were, and then obviously there's people I've worked with over, over the years. I think you can seek them out. I think you can identify them and spend time with them. But I, number one, it's that willingness, it's that positive attitude. You need those folks within the organization who are going to support you. And I think the best way to do it is just, is to try to work closely with'em. And I will tell you that some of those. Some of the people that I've been you know, that some of the people I've been mentors with were like direct supervisor, where I had a very close relationship. Some of them were people who just took an interest. And and, I didn't always take, take advantage of those things. I'll be honest with you. And that's probably a failure on my part. So when somebody within an organization or within an industry takes an interest in you take advantage of that follow up. In a sense they're throwing you a line. That means they probably are willing to serve in that role, and you should take advantage of it. It may not work. May not be, but take it. Don't turn your back on those sorts of things. Don't, you're not too busy. To call back that individual who might be 20 or 30 years older than you who's seen it all before, or most of it before. And who's willing to share, some perspective. Just chat. Just have a call. One things I try to do is whenever somebody reaches out to me, or often it's, it'll be one of my, one of my, somebody I know in the firm will say, Hey, will you talk to so and and I try to always say yes. Because at the end of the day, somebody said yes to me when I needed to talk to someone. And like for instance one of my, what I would consider one of my mentors here within the firm who stayed here, and now when I'm back, we're still, we stayed friends the whole time. Very important person to me in my life and knows my wife and knows my family. Called the other day and I called him right back and I was just like, yeah, let's talk. And we talked for half an hour and we talked for. 15 minutes about business and 15 minutes about life and hung up and felt better. And those relationships really matter. And so I would seek those people out. I would seek people that you have that you have some commonality with. And I would seek some people that you think you have zero in common with to talk to and to try to understand, because I think that's really important. Recently we had a dinner for one of the, one of the most senior people in the f in the firm who's retired, who for all intense is retired. And and we were, and a bunch of us were there and we all said something. And I, and they were all people who've known him even a lot longer than I have. And I would come to me and I'm like, at the end of the day I was able to say a few things that I don't think he, I don't think that person knew. To the degree that it did that, that made a difference to me. And we probably talk to each other three or four times a year. But it really made a difference. One of the reasons I work at the firm I do today, and I've worked at HFF, probably the reason, right? And so these things can really have a dramatic impact on your lives. So I would seek those people out, and some, by the way, sometimes you will seek out a mentor or champion or whatever, and they're not gonna be responsive. That's okay. Don't give up on it. Somebody else is out there. But again, I would seek it out. I would try to connect. And again as much as it's easy to connect with someone who's you think sees the world the same way that you do connect with somebody who doesn't, because you will learn an awful lot from that dynamic. And I think I, the, for sure I have people in my life that are kind of mentors to me who. We see the world very differently, but we have a lot of respect for each other, and we've gotten a, we both have gotten a lot out of those that connectivity over time. So you can't do this alone. You do need people who look out for you and at some point you end up looking out for them. I do. I do find it's not a one-way street. Sometimes it is, but I've often found is I've been around a long time that it ends up being a two-way street, which, which is, which I love because in a sense, if there's a way to repay that when your mentor calls and asks you for advice. You know that it, that it had an impact on them, that they were able to help you. That now they, they trust you enough that they're asking, they're asking the same of you. And I think that's, those are special moments. I've had many of those. I've had a few, and they're special moments.

Lan Elliott: 25:23

Thank you for sharing that. That's really beautiful. And I think this idea that the relationship and the learning can go both ways and be very important for both people. Yeah.

Dan Peek: 25:34

I, and I think, the mentors I've had the ones who really get into it are the ones who really think they're getting something out of it. Like they're really into it. They're not just sitting there, oh, I've gotta talk to this kid and I've gotta give'em 15 minutes worth of advice. No, they're actually realizing they're getting something out of it because they're learning. They may be learning a perspective on what it's what it's like for other people on their team. What are they dealing with? And by the way, the generational, as we talk about a lot, right? That there's a pretty big gap, in terms of the perspectives of the world, like the post social media world. And now we're dealing with the post pandemic world and whatever, what the kids had to deal with. We were in school, we went to school from home, it didn't have that same social interaction, et cetera, and some of the challenges they faced, right? And so to be able to interact with. With with other kids who, had the same situation, young people, right? As they're going into their careers, and all of a sudden we're saying, oh, we go to the office five days a week and this is what it's like. And, we're not on Zoom all the time and all that. So I, it's again, it just, again, it constantly evolves and so being able to plug in with more than just your immediate team. Mentoring is a great way to do that and to learn more about what's going on out there. We just had our annual meeting and there was 700. There used to be a hundred people. I didn't know what to do with 700 people, but there's a lot of young people there. And so it was really helpful for me to talk to people that are the peers of my team, but that that, that aren't on my team. So it was just like, Hey, what's going on with your business? How do you guys interact? What's your team like? So I can learn more that way.

Lan Elliott: 26:57

I think also a thread that has been throughout this conversation is the idea of continuous growth and learning from many sources. There's books, there's the work, but then there's also learning from people who are at your level, but also people who are younger and learning a different perspective. I love the idea of making sure that you're talking with people who think about things in a different way. Than you. Yeah. Because sometimes it might challenge something.

Dan Peek: 27:23

Yeah.

Lan Elliott: 27:24

Dan, we're coming to the end of our time. I had a feeling that it would go very quickly'cause I always find lots of things to talk about with you. But I've got two quick last questions for you. The first one is, what advice would you give to your younger self? Let's say 22-year-old, Dan, what would you want him to know?

Dan Peek: 27:46

Don't be afraid to take a risk and try something different. You still, you can you can swing and miss and still get back up to bat, it's just, it's not, because there's this fatalistic view that, if I was listening to a basketball coach clip the other day. My son sent me, who's 27, so older than the 22-year-old, and he said, failure is fertilizer. For what grows in the future. And I was really powerful. I, like literally, I have not forgotten it since the moment I saw it, and it's true. Don't be afraid to fail. Don't be afraid to take a swing and miss, I'm not a baseball person, but it's. Sports analogy, right? But don't be afraid to swing and miss and try different things. Don't, be willing to try something different. It was the same way when I was in school. I had, I gave, I sat with a group of kids. I think we were, we were, when we were at Alice, right? When we were talking to the kids, and I was like, study something very different. They were asking me what did I, what did I really enjoy when I was in school? And I was like, what did I love? I took this government class, but was amazing, and I got to go listen to Carl Sagan speak twice. That was like, that's what I remember about school. As much as I love, Jim Eister teaching us about, management contracts, which I loved. Those were the two things I really remember was Ben Ginsburg and Carl Sagan. That's what I really, that's like when I tell my kids, what was it like Carl Sagan, so anyway, it's try something completely different than what you're doing to try your, and I try to do that today like I am. I'm 59 years old and I'm trying to learn how to play guitar. It is ugly, but I'm using a completely different kind of side of my brain and it's it's I always, like, when I was 22, I would've been like so embarrassed to do that. Don't be embarrassed of any of that stuff. So that's a very long answer, so I apologize.

Lan Elliott: 29:20

That's okay. And you're reminding me I need to go practice the drums, but the same idea I needed to use another side of my brain and I still pretty awful

Dan Peek: 29:28

just to check out and do something different.

Lan Elliott: 29:29

Absolutely. Do something Yeah. That you've always wanted do. That's very different.

Dan Peek: 29:32

Yeah.

Lan Elliott: 29:35

And Dan, you've given us so much great advice during the course of this conversation. Do you have one last nugget of advice you'd like to share with our audience who is looking to advance their careers?

Dan Peek: 29:49

Don't worry about what other people think. Just do your thing. Not to quote an old, white guy, Teddy Roosevelt said, right? It's not the critic that counts, right? The credit belongs to the person in the arena. Just go out there and, live your life, build your career, follow your dream. Don't worry about, don't worry about the critics. Don't worry about what other people think. Don't worry. Don't worry about being judged. I spent a lot of time in my career worrying about what am I catching up? Am I keeping up with my peers? Where am I relative to? It doesn't matter at all. I was older. I was one of the older kids in my graduating class. I was like, oh, never gonna catch up. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter in the least. Live your life. Follow your dream. Build your career, build your life. Don't worry about what other people think. Just you know. Live the best life you can be the best member of your community, the best member of your family, and you know the best part of your team you can, and you know the chips will fall as they do. There's nothing you can do about that. So that's my advice.

Lan Elliott: 30:45

Beautifully said. Thank you so much, Dan. I really value your friendship over the years and am so happy that you were able to make some time to share your learnings over. Your incredible career with our audience.

Dan Peek: 31:01

Wow. Thanks so much, Lynn. I really enjoyed the conversation. I'm very excited about the podcast and all the great conversations you've had and so many to come in the future. So I look forward to seeing you again soon.

Lan Elliott: 31:10

Thank you, Dan.

Dan Peek: 31:11

Take care.

Lan Elliott: 31:12

And for our audience, if you've enjoyed this conversation with Dan, I hope you'll go to our website, it's personal stories.com, where you can find many more incredible interviews with hospitality industry leaders. Thank you.