Welcome to How Leaders Lead. I'm Kula Callahan, here to bring you another edition of three more

questions with David Noback. David, how are you doing today? I'm glad to see you. I'm doing

fantastic. Good to see you as well, Kula, and I'm ready to go. And today we're diving into my conversation

with Ben Weprin, the CEO of AJ Capital and Graduate Hotels.

And I have to tell you, Kula, I love this podcast because I love it when I see passionate

people who are just so excited about what they're doing and the brand that they're building.

And Ben is an incredible brand builder and a fantastic leader. Just love so much about him.

I do too. This conversation is so entertaining and engaging. You can just hear in his voice

how passionate he is about their mission at AJ Capital and how committed he is to bringing the

stories that they tell to life through all of their different

products. So I'm excited to dive into today's question and get your take on some of the concepts

that you talked about with Ben. That's great. And I hope we talk about storytelling because he is

one great storyteller and has basically built a brand on that concept. Well, he absolutely has.

And that is a great layup for question number one.

So here we go.

Question number one. One of the reasons the graduate hotels brand is so successful is because

they honor the story and nostalgia of the town where the hotel is located.

And storytelling, like you said earlier, David, is a powerful part of their creative direction.

In fact, for each graduate hotel that they open, they actually create a main character for each

hotel that guides their creative process when they're thinking about design

and branding. I know a lot of businesses out there probably can't create fictional characters

to model their product after, but what's one thing leaders can take away from the idea of

...