This week on the Titans of Food Service podcast, Nick Portillo speaks with Charles Johnson, CEO of the Detroit Athletic Club, to discuss its rich history and significance in the community. With a legacy dating back to 1887, the DAC has evolved from an athletic club into a premier destination for fine dining and hospitality, showcasing Detroit's heritage and resilience. Johnson shares insights into the club's commitment to exceptional service. He also shares how employee engagement, allowing staff to voice their ideas and contribute to the club's goals, ultimately creates a culture of care for both members and colleagues. Listen as Charles reflects on the vibrant food service scene in Michigan and its impact on the local community.

TIMESTAMPS

(00:00) Introduction to the Titans of Food Service Podcast

(06:34) Charles Johnson's Journey in Hospitality

(07:56) The Evolution of Hospitality Careers

(21:22) The Legacy and Influence of the DAC

(24:28) Empowering Employee Voices

(30:20) The Importance of Taking Care

RESOURCES

Portillo Sales

CONTACT 

Nick: nick.portillo@portillosales.com

There are a million ways to make money in the food service industry.

You just have to find one.

On the Titans of Food Service podcast, I interview real life movers and shakers in the food game who cut through all the noise to get to the top.

My name is Nick Portillo and welcome to the Titans of Food Service podcast.

Let's jump right into it.

Welcome back to season three of Titans of Food Service.

I'm your host, Nick Portillo.

And on this season, as I've mentioned other episodes, I'm doing my across American 50 weeks tour where I'm interviewing one titan of food service in every single state in the country.

I decided to do this on this season because I wanted to highlight people that are, you know, leaving an impact or have left an impact on the communities, on the cities, on the areas, the states that they live in.

On this episode, I'm going to be highlighting the state of Michigan.

And to help me do so, I'm welcome.

Welcoming Charles Johnson.

Charles, he's the executive manager and CEO at the Detroit Athletic Club, the DAC.

Think about that.

It's been around for over 100 years, the DAC, it's helped shape the city's history while hosting historical events, historical people and really, you know, boosting the culture of the entire city of Detroit.

It's known for its iconic architecture designed by Albert Kahn, but, but it's more than just a club.

It's a symbol of Detroit's heritage and resilience.

And under Charles leadership, the dac, it continues to be a hub for fine dining, community engagement, world class hospitality, and it is also ranked as the number one athletic club in the country.

So pretty cool.

Now before I jump into my conversation with, with Charles, what I like to do on each of these episodes is highlight the food service scene within that state as well.

So a little bit, a little background on Michigan.

You know, Michigan is the birthplace of Coney island hot dogs, Detroit style pizza and cherry pie.

And why cherry pie?

Well, thanks to Michigan's position as the country's leading cherry producer, which I didn't realize that they're the leading cherry producer.

The state boasts a diverse and vibrant food scene.

Also, I want to highlight one really cool piece of history within the dac.

And that is the last word cocktail.

The last word.

It's a gin based prohibition era cocktail which was originally developed at the DAC at the Detroit Athletic Club.

In it, Saucier states that the cocktail was first served around 30 years earlier at the DAC and it fell out of favor for a while.

So pretty cool.

All right, without further ado, let's go ahead and welcome my guest, Charles.

All right, Charles, welcome to the Titans of Food Service podcast.

I appreciate you taking time out of your day to come and have a conversation with me.

That's great, Nick.

Thank you for having me.

Yeah.

Now I know we're gonna.

I wanna jump into your career, talk about the Detroit Athletic Club, but I, I'm curious, did you watch the Lions game last night against the Bills?

Yes, I was actually there.

Oh, nice.

It wasn't the best game of the season yet.

You know, we only lost by six to a team that like the Lions, I think, has super bowl aspirations and so a good test.

Not the outcome we wanted though.

Yeah, definitely.

You know, this Detroit team is definitely the best that I think in my life, in my 31 year year life.

So it's cool to see that, that franchise under this.

I wouldn't call him new because I know he's been around for a few seasons, but under this coach and, and Jared Goff, who was a California guy, you know, went to Berkeley and so it's really cool to see that team, you know, take that, that next step.

Yeah, the city really has, the state has embraced the team, has embraced the head coach, embrace Jared Goff, really just embrace everything about it.

They are very representative of our community with their gritty style and their hard work and all those things.

And so it's, they're, you know, they're very, it's endearing to cheer for them and to.

It's been an enjoyable ride.

And it's not only the best in your lifetime.

And so it's.

For most people's lifetime, this is about as good as it's been.

Yeah.

Also too, I think sports are such an integral part of our communities.

You know, I live here in Orange county in California, and we've got the Angels, we've got the Ducks.

You know, those are our two big local teams that are based in Anaheim.

And you know, candidly, over the last decade, they haven't really been, you know, on the world stage in terms of, you know, being there in the playoffs and, and, you know, trying to get to a championship.

It's been kind of can't even make the playoffs and it's tough on the city, you know, all of the businesses around there and the, the commerce and whatnot.

And so it's.

I know it kind of comes and goes in waves, but I see in Detroit you've got, you know, obviously the Lions, even the Tigers making a run this last season with Scubal.

So it's pretty cool to see that the sports there in that city come, you know, come roaring back.

Yeah, you're absolutely right.

And the excitement it brings.

And for all the businesses, the Detroit Athletic club, we're only 500ft door to door to the entrance of Ford Field, and we're less, you know, 200ft to the entrance of Comerica park where the Tigers play.

And so when they are good, it has a measured impact on business for us, for all the surrounding businesses and just, I would say, move, you know, the wins and losses, the mood of the city sort of trends with these teams.

And so when, when they're winning, when things are good, it's.

It's a great time to be in Detroit.

Yeah, absolutely.

Absolutely.

So maybe a little background on yourself.

How did you get into the hospitality business?

You know, I really started back as a, as a young man.

I started around 14, 15 years old.

Friends of mine, parents owned a family restaurant in the town I grew up in, and I started washing dishes at a young age, my first job, and worked at this restaurant for over four years, you know, throughout my high school career, basically, and worked essentially every job that they had throughout my time there, at least for a day or two, from back house to front house, just kind of working the restaurant.

And then when I went to college to get my.

To my bachelor's, I really thought I was going to go into business.

Accounting was what I had aspired to do.

And when I went up there, because I had to work, you know, to help put myself through college, I was continuing to work in restaurants and doing those things, found fine dining and new areas of restaurants, decided that accounting really wasn't what I like to do.

I wasn't enjoying the classes.

You know, it wasn't really the people I was hanging with outside of class were not my accounting students.

They were just other students.

And so I decided to make a shift and kind of follow the hospitality career.

And I actually credit my wife a lot because it was a big decision to make, make the change.

And at that time, she's my girlfriend and she said, well, if you're going to make a change, you may as well do it now.

You know, there's no, don't wait another year or two down the future.

So I made the change and then really never looked back.

And so it started in restaurants at hotels and resorts in the state of Michigan.

And then eventually I left and went out to Long island to the Montauk Yacht Club, which is really a big move for me.

You know, I think prior to that, really didn't understand what a career would look like in hospitality or in food and beverage.

But making that big move all the way out to the east end of Long island, all the way out there, working in a very professional environment, that sort of changed things for me.

It was a pivotal moment in my career and really then started the charted me on the path that I would go on throughout my career.

Isn't that interesting?

Like you started, you know, thinking about, hey, maybe I want to be in accounting to get into, you know, go work for the Montauk Yacht Club, which I would imagine, you know, the, the standard at which they operate is very high, you know, very hospitality friendly, hospitality forward, if that's even the right word to use.

But, you know, delivering an incredible experience for every guest that comes into, you know, their facilities.

Yeah, and that's one of the things I love about hospitality, really, because you still need accountants in hospitality.

I think if I had stayed in accounting, I may have found hospitality regardless, you know, even now, you know, the Detroit athletic, a large $56 million organization, we have a chief financial officer who's got to manage a pretty diverse and unique business model.

And it requires a lot of skill, a lot of skill set.

And so, you know, within hospitality, of course you have the service piece, which is what I think I have.

And I think most people in hospital have the servants heart.

And you genuinely enjoy.

We get our energy from serving people and seeing the joy we can bring to people.

And yet you have all these multi diverse disciplines that you need to operate and to do all the things you need to do.

And so I think even if I had stayed in accounting, I believe I would have found hospitality through accounting would have been the way I would have found it.

But of course I made the change and kind of went more of the service route and management route.

But I think it really is a true calling and I think for any, for most people in hospitality, maybe you stumbled into it, maybe you were intentional about it.

As a young person, you wanted to go into hospitality.

But either way, even if you stumbled in, you're there because it's something you love and it's really just part of who you are being with people and, and serving people.

Yeah, you mentioned, you know, multi diverse disciplines when it comes to, you know, your line of work.

What, what are some of those and what do those look like?

Well, I'll use a Detroit, I thought, for example, so I mentioned accounting.

You have a cfo.

You know, we have a allotted executive chef, a certified master chef, Shawn Loving, who handles all of our culinary operations here.

He also is the executive chef for USA Basketball.

So he was in the Olympics last year.

And you have him just in his department of 75 culinarians.

You also have your entry level line cooks.

We have a large facility, we have 110 year old building, Albert Khan design building here that you need to take care of.

So our facilities maintenance folks are highly skilled in historical preservation and building systems.

Mep, everything you could have there.

We're an athletic club, so we have an athletic director who needs to do programming and we have hockey leagues and basketball leagues and we have a wellness and recovery center and physical therapy, a spa with massage and other esthetician services.

And so they, all those folks are professional at what they do and then they contribute in their own way to this club.

Our hotels, our dishwashing crew, our housekeeping crew.

It really is, you know, we have 500 employees today at this, at this facility and it's a city amongst itself.

Our, our employees are exceptionally diverse, both on the highest skill level down to, you know, maybe more entry level, but very, very diverse, both in skill, very representative of southeastern Michigan and the socioeconomic makeup of this region.

That 500 people.

If we, we form our own little city of ourselves within the dac, I would imagine too.

Right.

So there is there some sort of like training that each of these people have.

You said 500 people that work on your staff.

That's incredible.

And for anybody listening along too, if you just do a Google search and just look at the, your, your physical location, the building and, and I know there's videos on, on your website that he can see inside.

It's it's an, it's a gorgeous facility.

For all of those 500 people that come to work every day, is there like a, a protocol or is there training that they have to go to, you know, in terms of working with a, a customer?

And the reason I ask is I've had a podcast episode where I, I invited Guy Rigby, who was the head of food and beverage for the Four Seasons in North America, and the level of intense training that everybody within Four Seasons goes through to deliver, you know, an experience to their guests, it's the, it's something that I've never even heard of before.

But when you walk into a Four Seasons, you know, in any one of their properties throughout the country or anywhere in the world, you know, you feel like it's, you know, you feel that.

Yeah, I mean, it's a critical part of our success.

What we have is our service quality management program is called Consistent Performance Processes, or we call it CPP for short.

And within that is a myriad.

It's how we hire people, it's how we train people, it's how we operate, it's how we measure ourselves every single day.

That award is based off Baldrige.

And so it's a very intense award.

And I don't know that at that time we were the only hospitality organization to ever be acknowledged by.

I think that may still be true today.

And so we do a lot of training.

Training is at the core of what we do, and we certify is what we call it.

We certify people as professionals.

We have 32 different training manuals for the various positions within the clubs and different things people may do.

And, you know, the training is personalized, and yet there's a program that has to be accomplished.

So the timing can take different times for each position or each person, but it's, it's.

Is exceptionally critical to what we do and our level of success.

I think in the private club world, it's one of our differentiators of why we are so successful is this quality program.

Because, you know, we are one entity.

Four Season.

We have, we have a lot of Four Seasons folks who come work for us and from other larger corporations that come work for us.

And part of that reason is because they understand that corporate culture and they understand like sort of the, the nuance of the training and the process really about process of what you need.

We have that here and it's One of the reasons we're very, very successful.

That's amazing.

What about going back to, I think it's the Detroit Athletic Club.

What was the reason for opening back then?

It really was an athletic club at that time.

It was a group of young men.

Amateur athletics were just sort of becoming a thing.

They never really were a thing in the US before that.

And so it was a, it was a group of Detroiters who got together around amateur athletics, baseball, football, track and field.

We had the high wheel bikes, you know, the massive big wheel, the tiny back wheel.

They had bike races.

And so it started under that.

Our ethos today is still that athletic sort of competitive spirit about us.

In fact, the aau, the national organization, it wasn't founded at the dac, but it was a conglomerate of DAC members who kind of put together.

And the first, the first championships were held at the DAC's original campus.

DAC football played University of Michigan played Notre Dame football.

Our baseball team, the Deltas would play, you know, against some professional teams.

People like Ty Cobb and others played for the Deltas on rehab assignments and so know as athletics in general, professional and amateur at that time were coming along, it was sort of.

Things were happening fast, but that was, that was the nature of us.

Then it kind of transformed.

We moved clubhouses to our current clubhouse today on Madison Avenue.

And it really became more of a business club.

But it was still the Detroit Athletic Club.

Athletics have always been still this.

They are critical to what we do.

But when that change happened, it also became very social and very business oriented in addition to the athletics.

I can't even imagine what it was like back in the 50s, right with, with the explosion of the American made car, you know, the Fords and just the buzz around business in the city of Detroit.

I'm sure it was probably a sight to see.

Do you have like a museum on site where you, you know, you, you hold and capture a lot of these memories from the past?

We don't have a true museum, we would like to have one, but we do have some display cases.

We have a, we have a full time curator who handles all of our, our fine art and also our artifacts.

The DAC News is a monthly magazine.

And so through that we do a lot of History, a lot of research and a lot of things.

So we showcase a lot of artifacts, we communicate a lot to our members.

And I foresee in the next five to 10 years, you know, when space permits, we certainly have enough to fill a museum.

And so it'd be nice to have that opportunity to share that with everybody.

When it comes to, you know, the members of the club are they.

Have you, have you had any, like, historical figures that have been members of the club or who have come through, you know, over the last hundred years?

Yeah, you know, particularly in the political realm, most dignitaries in some way, shape or form have been here.

Even in current times, you know, they find their way here.

Politicians in federal government particularly, but also obviously state and local, they're here quite frequently.

Athletes come and go.

We don't really necessarily have a lot of current athletes who are members.

They have their own training facilities and you know, for them, that's a business.

They're professional.

Athletes are doing their thing.

But a lot of times, once they've sort of retired and they're in this area, then they become members.

They spend a lot of time around here.

Back in the heyday that you mentioned, the 40s and 50s, you would see the, the, the speakers, entertainers that would come in here, Harry Houdini was here, you know, Pavarotti was here.

All of the big entertainers of the day, particularly in the, in the golden era of the city of Detroit, the 20s through the 50s, that, that era had a lot.

Still to this day, you know, it's not unusual to, to come in and see no names and, and things like that.

That's one of the, the benefits of a private club is it is a place they can come.

And it's not that people don't want to see them, but it's a much more cordial environment.

They are a little bit more, they're their, their privacy is protected here a little bit more.

And so members sort of acknowledge that and let them, let them, when they're here, be comfortable and do whatever business it is they're here to do.

Yeah, that makes sense to become a member.

Is there like a wait list or is there a process to become a member or can anybody just sign up?

Yeah, no, it's, you know, it's a true member organ membership organization.

You can only become a member by being sponsored by a current member.

In fact, you need two members to sponsor you, and then you got to have another seven members who know you and are willing to write a letter on your behalf.

And then there's a, a process to go through.

And so if you were to walk in the door, say I want to be a member, you know, that we can't really help you with.

But we do have a wait list depending on, you know, resident category, which is our main category.

We have a wait list, our young folks, which is really unique for private clubs.

We call them intermediates and they're age 21 to 33.

You know, that's a multi year waitlist.

And we think about what that is for these young folks and it's highly desirable for them for lots of reasons.

The social networking aspect, the, the business networking, they want to be part of this club where whatever career they are in and young in their career in, they want to be next to it or evolve or they're get the chance to bump into the titan of their industry while they're here.

And so that group had at one point that topped our own six to eight year wait list and we had to make some changes.

Now right now it's about a two year wait list.

Two and a half year wait list for that group.

Wow.

Isn't that something I, you know, there's always that phrase like something along like you are the, the, the sum of your five closest friends and people wanting to network and be a part of that.

I think also too just being part of the history of the club and yeah, I guess bumping shoulders with people that are, you know, truly famous or significant or have, are leaving an impact like you said, titans of their own industry, whatever that may be.

Yeah.

And the dac, it's, it's, it's almost fraternal a lot of ways.

Almost like a.

Yeah.

Your affiliation with the university.

You went to a university for four years and you carry that affiliation around with you forever.

I've, you know, I'll travel the world and if I have a polo on with a DAC emblem, I'm on a bus in the outskirts of London with only seven other people.

And so he taps me on the shoulder and says, oh, my dad was a member there or my, my grandfather used to visit there or my mom remembers going there fondly as a child.

And so it's a brand that carries really worldwide, but in the US I cannot get on a flight domestically without there's some connection to somebody with the dac.

So it's got that really unique sort of part of it as well where people, even if you're not a member today, if you have any connection with the dac, you're fond of that and you're proud of that.

That's so cool.

I.

I love that.

Now, I know, you know, in researching that the DAC is the number one athletic club in the country, how have you been able to become number one?

Yeah, well, you know, there's a lot of fine clubs, and I will, you know, the rankings and all that kind of stuff are.

Our members love to know that this is the number one athletic club.

Our staff are proud to be at the number one athletic club in the country.

You know, but the reality is that recognition means very little to what happens in our four walls in any given day.

And so we stay very focused on just giving excellent service.

Our.

Our.

This year, our.

Our theme is going to be every interaction, every member, every time.

And it's really to bring awareness to no matter what's going on in the world or, you know, the dac.

I'll talk about renovations in a moment.

We're always investing in our facility and doing things.

None of that's as important as the person coming in for lunch today and that they sit down and they just have a memorable, wonderful experience.

And so we draw that sort of view onto every little interaction we have.

Every single employee here has an impact on that, even if they're not having a direct conversation with a member or the guest.

You know, our housekeeping team provide the wonderful facility you walk into our culinarians providing the meal the server is serving.

But so everybody has a role here to make sure we provide it.

And so.

And I think it's that continual striving for excellence is one of the reasons that we are as good as we are.

There's other things, like strong governance.

We.

We have a history of investing in ourselves and investing in these facilities and ensuring this premier experience.

When you walk in here, we are very big, you know, very much into protecting Albert Kahn's legacy of this building that he designed and ensuring that any renovation work we do preserves history.

And I think so.

Those.

Those types of.

That focus both on the service side from the facility side, that is why people, you know, think highly of it and why you receive accolades.

Like being the number one athletic club.

You mentioned the employees, right.

Delivering an experience that every day, you know, every moment to your guests, your customers, and how much say did they have the employees have in, you know, how you, you know, go to business every day and how you operate as a.

As a team.

Yeah, I mean, I'll say a great deal, A great deal.

We have, we have, I think it's 42 employees who've worked here 20 years or longer.

And in a hospitality organization that's really, it's not the, it's not normal.

I'll just say that.

And a lot of it has to do with this community between the members and the employees that it, it as it's one community and we are our community together.

How we actually act that out.

There's a couple different ways.

We have part of CPP that I mentioned earlier.

We have monthly departmental meetings called PEP meetings.

And through that, all employees have a voice.

They get to say what's on their mind, what they want to do.

We have quarterly all staff meetings.

We have all those things.

Probably the most significant thing we do is we use Gallup to do our employee engagement survey.

You know, millions of people worldwide take this exact same survey and through their process you get the results.

We do state of the team meetings and those meetings are fully run by the employees.

Managers are not.

Their role is not to come up with goals and objectives.

So every department gets their results.

You know, here's what's good, here's what's, maybe here's some areas of opportunity.

But the staff decide every single year what 1, 2, 3, 4 things they want to work on.

And then once they identify the things they want to work on, they also identify what we're going to do.

That's we as in them and as a management team or if a club needs to invest or what we're going to do.

And so we'll do that every spring.

And it's a year long process for us that by the end of the year we hopefully have accomplished everything we said we were going to do.

And because they set it forth, they of course wanted to see, they want to see that be successful.

So they're supportive of it, management team supportive of it.

And that process has worked really well for us for a long time.

Let me see if I heard that right.

So essentially, you know, in the spring, your staff puts together, you know, their four or five or so goals, objectives that they want to achieve for the year.

And then without the management team, so they say this is what we want to accomplish, what we want to do.

And then they layer in the management team from there to help, you know, potentially achieve those goals.

That's right.

I mean, the management team's there for the discussion, but it is not there.

It can't be their idea.

Like they're, they're you know, we're, we're instructed.

You don't walk in there and say, here's what we're going to do.

The staff have to generate it, you know, but the manager can be there to maybe keep it within us.

You know, we can't go.

If somebody said they want to build a new building.

Well, somebody's got to pull that conversation back into the light, the likelihood.

But yeah, it's, it's the staff generated, manager supported.

And then we also do one as a management team.

We do a separate set like that, just like the management team to kind of inform me this is what we want to see done this year.

And a lot of times that's a lot of.

That is interpersonal stuff.

It is.

You know, there's a question on Gallup about quality.

And really, if you get down to the nuance of the question, it's not about quality.

It's really about how you perceive other people and how they think of quality and are they working as hard as me?

Are they doing the same thing?

And that's where we tend to see most of our areas of opportunity.

And so from that comes a lot of things we've had through that session.

We've had focus groups with employees tenured five to ten years, which seemed to be our more complicated area.

And we had, so we had a focus group.

They, they informed us of some things.

With 500 employees, you know, we can't necessarily do monthly meetings with every employee.

That would be very cumbersome.

But through this conversation and line level, employees wanting maybe more facetime with their senior leader, not just their direct supervisor like a senior leader.

You know, we develop these six months progress checks where every single employee gets a progress check with their senior leader every six months.

And it's a chance to, it's.

The employee goes to the meeting.

The manager is not a review.

The manager didn't say, here's what you're doing.

Well, here's what you need to improve upon.

The employee gets to walk in, say, here's what's going well, here's what needs to improve and it's for the, for the manager to listen and take that in.

And so, you know, we've, we've just got a lot of benefits from that, from the employees saying, here's what we want.

And, you know, here's what's working, here's what's not working, here's what we'd like to work on.

Let's find a solution.

Yeah, I, another guest I had on recently was, his name was Ralph Bauer, and he's the CEO of the Melt, which is a chain of restaurants out here in the West.

And he, his big pie in the sky vision was I want to build an I love it here experience.

So essentially for every customer that walks through any one of the doors at any one of his locations that they say, I love it here.

And so in doing so, he really puts it on his team and on his staff to, you know, say, what do you hope to change and what do you hope not to change?

You know, and he says, in giving my staff that leeway to think about, you know, think about the business that way, that in years past they've added on a pink lemonade, which became their number one seller.

They.

They gave out free meals to Frontline, you know, responders during COVID And their business like it, it went down to the negative because they're just handing out free food at the time, but it just exploded their, their sales, you know, within the year.

So it's really cool to see you kind of maybe have a similar type approach where I think a lot of times you kind of have, you know, the C Suite makes the decisions, then it goes down to the presidents, the directors, and it kind of gets down to everybody else.

And are you really getting buy in?

You're working with the staff to get their buy in?

Say, you know, because they're on the ground floor every day figuring out, you know, working with the guests.

And is this the right experience that or not?

Yeah, yeah, we have, we have something similar.

So as membership organization, we of course want every member to love this place.

And, you know, it's measured by how long people are members and those types of things.

But we also have an employee core value called taking care.

And that, that taking care is, it's actually an action.

You know, it's not really as much of a value.

It's, you know, we define taking care as a proactive awareness to serve in a caring way.

And every one of those words has some special meaning.

You know, proactive, obviously.

Awareness, empathy and listening, serving and in a caring way.

And similar to what you were mentioning about, you know, letting people do things, a lot of that has to do with letting employees find, find ways to take care.

You can only.

The C Suite can only prescribe so much, yet when in the moment you're going to find all types of things for people that have ways that you can take care of them and serve them.

And so for us, we define taking care of.

There's really four elements of taking care of the Three primary we take care of our members, we take care of our staff, our colleagues, and we take care of the club as an entity.

And then we also had to take care of yourself, a little bit of self care.

But through that, when you're taking care of members, you're going to find yourself in these situations where somebody just tells you something about their life.

Maybe they're, they just had a house fire.

And this is a real story.

Not too long ago, just had a house fire.

So they're here staying in one of our hotel rooms for, for a week or so.

You know, they didn't tell us about, they didn't tell our front desk agent about the fire.

So because we can do anything for them about the fire, you know, and so they're just kind of sharing their story.

But because our employees are attuned to this and they have this empathetic, proactive sort of listening, you know, just the thought of, okay, they had a fire, what could we do?

And so what could we do is we could send them home.

When they go home the next day to back to work on the issue they have at their house, we'll send them with salads and sandwiches and soups and breadsticks just to make their day a little easier.

And those, those things like that, that personal connection, it becomes very important.

But that has to be done at the line level.

An executive can't just say we're going to do this because it wouldn't mean as much, it wouldn't be as meaningful.

And I think the actual action would be meaningful.

You know, for us, taking care is about empowering our employees.

Whether it's taking care of our members, whether it's taking care of one of our own, one taking care of another employee, or taking care of this empowerment to do what you think is best for the club.

And I will always stand behind any employee.

You know, even if it wasn't the right decision, perhaps if truly they were doing what they felt was best and right then the club will always support them.

You know, it's so interesting is in my, you know, I'm a, I'm a food service broker.

So I represent different food manufacturers and sell their products out here in the west.

And we have certain brands.

There's one that comes to mind that, that they've been in business for over 100 years and to be in business, you know, most businesses, they say fail in like 12 months time, like 90% or 80, some crazy high percentage.

But for those like the DAC that make it over 100 years, like your dedication to the guest or the customer or the client, whatever it may be, whatever type of business is, always seems to be at the forefront.

That's something.

Definitely.

That's something to say.

Yeah, I agree.

Thank you for that.

You know, oftentimes I'll be asked, you know, as CEO, sort of my view on my role or the club.

And really, it is to ensure this institution is so important.

It has been around for 137 years.

I'm a steward.

I got to make sure this thing continues to be relevant, continues to be meaningful in this community for the next hundred years.

And so you know, that.

That.

That's a responsibility that you care and you take.

And I think I have that responsibility.

I think many of our staff have that responsibility.

We see it as we're stewards, and it's a responsibility of ours to be meaningful about the way we do things, you know, and.

And we want the last great meal ever to be served here at the dac, you know, if that ever goes, if fine dining ever goes, finally goes away.

The last good meal we want be done here.

And so we just take that.

We take our place in the community extraordinarily important.

We take our place in food service and hospitality incredibly important, and see it as just a responsibility of ours to make sure that we shepherd that through to the next generation.

Sure.

Amazing.

Charles, thank you for taking time to come and share your story and talk about the dac.

And hopefully, next time I'm in Michigan, maybe I can stop in and say hello to you.

Oh, we'd love to have you.

That'd be great.

Thanks for having me here.

The DAC is a special place anytime I can talk about that.

Happy to do so.

On behalf of all of our 5,000 members or 500 employees, thank you.

And since we started this way, I'll finish with a gol.

I love it.

I love it.

Thank you, Charles.

All right.

Thank you, Nick.

Have a great day.

You too.