Daniel Smith

Daniel is driven by winning. He believes winners get used to winning and losers get used to losing, and he’s built his career on the right side of that line.

Daniel Smith has spent his entire career in the trenches of high-growth, multi-unit businesses, always choosing to be hands-on rather than run things from behind a desk. He started as a teenager washing dishes at Claim Jumper and worked his way up through every rank over the next two decades, eventually rising to Vice President of Operations of a $300,000,000 company. Along the way he served on a leadership team for DOD projects at RQ Construction, and in the middle of it all, opened a CrossFit gym, running CrossFit Valley Center in San Diego for four years before selling it. From there he built a career growing brands and improving financial and operational efficiency, running operations from Ruby’s Diner to Sammy’s Woodfired Pizza and Bonefish Grill, including gaming in Las Vegas, and building a five-state Pieology franchise from the ground up. Through it all, his specialty stayed the same: people and process, building strong teams and systems that worked.

What sets Daniel apart isn’t just the résumé. It’s that he’s lived both sides of what he now teaches. For decades he ran on instincts and a playbook he’d pieced together himself. It worked, but he knew it could be better. That changed when he became COO of Hopdoddy Burger Bar and spent several years working directly with Michael Erath as his facilitator, who reshaped how Daniel led. Through this, Daniel rebuilt Hopdoddy’s operating model and people systems, adding roughly 700 basis points to margins and driving turnover down and profit to record highs.

Daniel took that same foundation with him as President of Rusty Taco and is applying it again today as Chief Operating Officer of True Food Kitchen, proving it travels with the leader, not just the company. That’s why he now partners with Michael as a Guide at Next Level Growth. He’s walked that exact path, the operator figuring it out alone and the operator who found a better way, and he knows firsthand what changes when a leader has the right guide in their corner.

Clients turn to Daniel, who’s opened close to 100 restaurants and brings that same hands-on energy to every engagement: scaling multi-unit operations, rebuilding leadership teams, fixing culture and retention, and turning strategy into a playbook the organization can run on.

Daniel lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife, Amy. He’s still driven by the belief that people drive process, and process drives results.