Meet Ryan Covert | Entrepreneur and Investor

We had the good fortune of connecting with Ryan Covert and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Ryan, what is the most important factor behind your success?
HOLIDAY is successful because we take a customer first approach to every decision we make. We’re a local, one shop brand, so everyone from our customers, staff, and leadership team give input to improve the customer experience we deliver. We want feedback, good and bad, so that we can continue to get better.

We track guest feedback through our Toast POS system and I’m proud to say that we have 97% positive feedback from April 1st 2023 to August 16th, 2023. Does that mean we’re satisfied? No, were actually reaching out to the folks that gave us negative feedback to see what we can do when we missed the mark. We are in the hospitality business and we want to make people feel like welcome when they describe their customer experience.

We know customers are evaluating us on our performance every day and we have to stay hungry to enable people to make memories at HOLIDAY.

Can you give our readers an introduction to your business? Maybe you can share a bit about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
Since starting a lawn mowing business in middle school, I always knew that I wanted to be a business owner. I’ve done every job you can imagine in a small business because it requires you to wear many hats. That is incredibly frustrating at times, but those challenges excite me! I love that everyday is different and I love to solve problems and fix processes that are broken. As a result I”ve been a first employee, a founder, co-founder, minority owner, and now owner in 5 different businesses, all of which still operate today. That varied experience has allowed me start my Self-Funded Search Fund, Infinite Ventures, that is now looking to purchase small businesses in the Southeast.

When people ask me what I do for a living, it’s always difficult for me to answer because I’ve worked in several different industries including youth lacrosse, elevators, and now the bar business. Those seemingly random things all have one thing in common, there were gaps in the customer experience. Filling that gap was the basis for each business. A business is just an organized way of solving other peoples problems for money. If you can figure out the solution, customers are happy to pay to have their need met and will come back over and over again. While figuring out the answers and delivering a consistent product is not easy, you can figure out any problem with enough time and persistence. Thats really what I’ve learned in my career: identify a problem, start learning about it, and then just persist. If anyone out there sees a problem with the world, there just might be a business there. And if you’re not sure where to start, just google it. It’s never been easier to start a business. There are countless free resources online like the Small Business Development Council (https://georgiasbdc.org/) or you can read The Lean Startup by Eric Reis. You can start a business with very little money. What it takes is your time, but anybody can do it!

Let’s say your best friend was visiting the area and you wanted to show them the best time ever. Where would you take them? Give us a little itinerary – say it was a week long trip, where would you eat, drink, visit, hang out, etc.
For out of towners, these are my go to’s:

Favorite Restaurant: The Optimist

Favorite Bar: Johnnys Hideaway

Best Pizza: Antico

Best Ticket: Atlanta United

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
The best part of the success for me at HOLIDAY is that I’ve been able to do it with my business partner, David Reed. Dave was actually my lacrosse coach at Emory University and we’ve known each other for nearly 20 years. He has provided amazing mentorship on how to be a man, a father, and a leader. It takes a lot of trust to start a new business from scratch and that helped make the HOLIDAY vision come to life. We certainly didn’t have all the answers or know exactly what we were doing, but we had a shared dream that is now reality.

Website: http://holidaybaratl.com/

Instagram: @ryanleecovert

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanleecovert