New Orleans-based hospitality entrepreneur Robert LeBlanc shared his life experiences with Velocity attendees May 21, telling them about how he founded and grew his businesses.
In his keynote address-Fireside Chat, “Next Level Thinking: Building a Business That Outperforms the Market,” LeBlanc talked about building a business that stands out, adapts, and continues to grow.
He was joined on stage by his longtime best friend, Eric Delgado, Director of MCM Capital.
LeBlanc focused on growth, diversification, and long-term positioning and emphasized that it is not about one asset class or one cycle. It is about building a business that stands out, adapts, and continues to grow.
When he graduated from Loyola University New Orleans, LeBlanc started a record label, Renaissance Records, that evolved into an event planning and guerrilla marketing firm called The Renaissance Initiative. LeBlanc’s first hospitality project was the music venue Republic New Orleans, with hotel bars LePhare and Loa New Orleans coming soon after. He opened his first restaurant, Sylvain, in October 2010. In 2014, he created LeBlanc+Smith, a boutique hospitality portfolio that now includes The Will & The Way Bar, Barrel Proof Bar, Barracuda Taco Bar, Anna’s Bar and boutique hotel The Chloe.
Proving Ground
He is married to Danielle Webb and has two sons, Bear and Wil, and they call Uptown New Orleans home.
LeBlanc talked about how he has used New Orleans as the proving ground for his ideas and his businesses.
“My wife, Danielle, and I have been in New Orleans, and we have literally endured three natural disasters, black swan events, if you will, Hurricane Katrina, the BP oil spill, and then COVID,” LeBlanc said.
“Despite all those challenges, we have a fantastic life. And Eric asked me to share in the perspective of things that I’ve applied to my journey and my career that you all might be able to learn from and take away so that you can apply some of these to your own paths and your own journey.”
He offered his thoughts in the form of a letter to his sons, Bear and Will.
“I would ask you all to allow me to do that in the context of writing a letter to my sons as though I was diagnosed with a terminal illness. I’ve always been a big believer in telling people how you feel about them when you see them or when you’re with them,” he said. “I feel like one of the saddest things in life is we often don’t express how much we care or appreciate people until they’re gone. And I don’t ever want to make that mistake. And the other thing that’s important to me is I am very proud of who we are.”
LeBlanc talked about how he and his wife started “as a record label that evolved into a concert promotion company, which evolved into a music venue, which now is a hospitality portfolio of 19 boutique restaurants, bars, and hotels across three cities, New Orleans, Nashville, and Atlanta, soon to be five in Tampa-St. Pete and Dallas-Fort Worth.”
LeBlanc said his company has been very successful.
Design Boutique Hotels
“I think one of the things that we’ve gotten the most recognition for is our ability to design these boutique hotels. Our company, LeBlanc Smith, has been called the premier quintessential emerging boutique hoteliers in the South,” he said. “I think if you want to see the Cliff Notes of anyone’s story, you can get that by Googling them or you can get that by reading an article, but I don’t think that’s where the learning lands. And so, what I want to do with you all is share my journey through a lot of the mistakes that I made and the lessons that I’ve learned.”
Then LeBlanc captivated the audience with his letter:
“Dear Bear and Will, as my time nears its end, I wanted to write you this letter encompassing all the lessons that I may have alluded to over the course of our wonderful time together, but that are important enough to me to distill down as succinctly as I tend to do here. As such, here they are. The first thing that you should do in your life is to be sure that you properly define what success looks like and what a successful life is. I have always considered myself to be successful and to have a successful life, but I define it very differently.”
Katrina had a huge impact on his life and business.
“Then Katrina came and took it all away, (we) picked back up, rebuilt in post Katrina New Orleans and built a great company hospitality portfolio that being a hospitality entrepreneur in New Orleans was really, really challenging,” LeBlanc said. “We went from having five places to two places and from a financial standpoint, we once again, just like the wake of Hurricane Katrina, we lost everything. My wife and I had lots saved. We had six places. We had a really strong balance sheet, and we had to sell our forever home and use the equity in that house to continue to pay people because we didn’t want to lose the company to pay our bills.
“And it was one of the toughest experiences I’ve been through in my life. Despite that challenge, I still define myself as successful because successful to me means having a sense of self and being happy on a daily basis, having wonderful people who you love dearly in your life and getting to spend meaningful time with them on a daily basis and getting up and having the opportunity to work on things that you love to do with people with whom you love to do them,” LeBlanc said.
Find Who You Want to Be
He said that when they had nothing financially, “I still had people I loved. I still got a chance to work on things that I loved, and I got to do that with people that I loved. And that gave me all the courage to take the risks because unless you lose the people in your lives, you really don’t have anything to lose.”
He said that the second lesson he would challenge his sons to pursue is to find who they want to be before they decide what they want to be.
“It’s really important to me that you all design the life that you want to live and then make career choices and make personal choices that fit into that. I always knew that I wanted to build a life in the city of New Orleans,” he said. “I wanted to grow a family in the city of New Orleans, and I wanted to share what made that city magical to me with the rest of the world.”
LeBlanc said: “I want to be a great man, husband, father, son, brother, friend, and community member before being a great businessperson. I don’t think the two are mutually exclusive, but I do think there are times when you’re forced to make choices between the two and anytime, I was forced to make that choice, I was going to be a better man, husband, father, son.”
He said that probably cost some growth in the company.
“I never wanted to miss one of your first steps. I never wanted to miss one of your ball games. I never wanted to miss one of your parent teacher conferences. And so, we didn’t grow outside the city of New Orleans and there’s no doubt that we could be bigger and we could have more wealth and we could have more assets had we done that. But I know the value of those things would never have outweighed seeing you do things you love, watching your first steps, picking you up when you fall.”
Things, People You Love
The third lesson is to “find things and people in your life that you love and then work really hard on those things and those people.”
He said, “Anybody in life who is successful has to work really hard at those things, but the cheat code in life is if you’re doing that with people you love and you’re working on things that you love, it doesn’t feel like work at all. It’s fun. You’ll enjoy it.
“So, I would challenge you to make choices, people you want to spend the rest of your life with romantically, friends that you want in your circle, career paths, job opportunities, companies that you might want to start. Choose those things that you know that you’ll love because you’ll do the necessary work and it won’t feel like work at all,” LeBlanc said.
“Number four, if it’s not a ‘hell yes,’ it’s a no. Too often in life, we concern over decisions. We develop pros and cons lists. We try to decide if we should, if we shouldn’t and, frankly, we use our head and we try to use logic to convince our heart to feel differently than it already feels,” LeBlanc said. “But the reality of it is you have a strong sense of self, you know who you are and every decision in life, be that personally or professionally is either a hell yes or a no. And if something that you are looking to do, whether that’s a college, whether that’s a romantic partner, a friendship, a sport you want to play, if it’s not a hell yes, it’s a no.”
He told his sons to make wise choices.
Five People You Spend Most Time With
“Number five, you’re a combination of the five people you spend the most time with. So, choose those five people wisely. When I was getting started with Eric, who you all know is a dreamer, and my college friends, we all wanted to set the world on fire,” LeBlanc said.
When his son, Bear, came along, “I started making choices on friendships based on convenience. We became friends with our kids’ friends, parents. We became friends with people in the neighborhood who had kids, our kids’ ages, and it became comfortable and it became convenient so we could hang out with friends while the kids had friends to hang out with of their own.
“We had six venues 2020 when COVID hit. I was in a hamster wheel and my life wasn’t intentional. We were just bumping along. We would take an opportunity that came along. It took us two, two and a half years and all that came to an end when COVID hit,” he said.
“As challenging as COVID was in all the material ways, it’s literally the greatest thing that ever happened to my wife and I, because it gave us an opportunity to reset personally and re-establish meaningful relationships that we still spend tons of time on, one of whom I talk to every single day, but more importantly, it gave us a really clear vision of who we wanted to be and it’s not a coincidence that we went from having six venues in 2020 to 19 venues in 2026.”
Best Version of Yourself
“Number six, your only competition is the ghost of the best version of yourself. There are so many times in life you’re going to look to your left and your right personally, you’re going to see someone who’s got more than you do. You’re going to see someone that you have more than in business, you’re going to look at people who are quote unquote competitors and you think that they’re going to succeed at your detriment and vice versa, and that couldn’t be further from the truth.
LeBlanc moved on to talk about Number 7 on his list.
“Number seven, the obstacles in the way. This may be the most important part of these 10 lessons because you will have hardships in life. Some of them you will bring upon yourself by making mistakes and some of them will happen as a result of external factors and circumstances. And I want you to understand that every one of these things is an opportunity and it’s going to lead you to be exactly who and exactly where you were supposed to be.
“The one important caveat in these things though, boys, is you can never make external excuses for your situation. I was never going to allow COVID to be the excuse as to why we lost everything,” he said.
No Such Thing as Failure
“Number eight, there’s no such thing as failure, only mistakes from which you’ll learn and pivot. The only time you fail is if you stop. The only time you fail is if you don’t get up and you just sit in the muck and the mire and that’s not you,” he said.
“Number nine, do cool things in your life, but stay humble. We define cool very differently in our family than it’s typically defined in modern pop culture and vernacular. Cool car, cool shirt, he’s cool, she’s cool. To us, cool means two things. Being comfortable in your own skin, having a sense of self and doing things with a timeless sense of style. Create relationships, do work, create projects that will last,” he said.
Lastly, he talked about joy and gratitude. “And last, but not least, I want you to experience joy and gratitude in each and every single day. Every morning you all know this, I get up and for five minutes, I say prayers. For five minutes I reflect on the things that happened the day before for which I’m grateful and it’s not big things like you and your brother or the dog or the house. I love all those things and I’m grateful for all those things. It’s the small moments that occur on a daily basis that we pass by if we’re not keeping our heads up and paying attention.
