A Pleasant Trip to Columbus

From Pittsburgh we headed back to Ohio, to Columbus this time. We arrived on Saturday afternoon and decided that we would catch a movie that night. The theatre at Easton Town Center was a dine-in AMC, meaning that you can order food from your seat and waiters will bring whatever you ordered directly from the kitchen to you. We watched Shaft, which was actually hilarious, but we spent more time admiring the mall itself.

Easton Town Center has most of the big clothing brands, all the major restaurant chains as well as some local ones, and most importantly for our purposes, plenty of free parking. In my opinion, the mall was nicer than many of the malls that I had been to in California. In one of my meetings I learned that the mall was a major development of Les Wexner, the CEO of L Brands, and that it had once regularly hosted Victoria’s Secret fashion shows. We ended up going to the mall every day that we were in Columbus to spend time in between meetings because our house was quite far from most of the companies.

Despite the distance, our Columbus Airbnb was probably the nicest one that we have had all summer. It was a large three-bedroom house with multiple bathrooms, a kitchen, and a basement bar. As we were checking in, the hosts came by to check our IDs, and then locked away all the alcohol since we were underage – much to our disappointment 😊 Since we had such a nice kitchen, I ended up cooking for two out of our three nights. In a funny coincidence, I ended up making a pizza the night before we had our meeting with a big Midwest pizza company.

In our Columbus meetings, we met a lot of companies that had very strong company cultures. The pizza company practices something called “agape capitalism”. The founder of the family-owned company runs the business based on capitalism with love. That entails ensuring that the high quality and consistency of each store is always maintained, while avoiding competitive cutthroat moves based solely on improving the bottom line, yet still maintaining a profit. The care they put into their pizza is reflected by their loyal customer base.

I had another similar experience with one of the banks that I met with. The two people I met with shared that the CEO of the bank had sat in on both of their initial interviews. Even with their growth since then, they continue to have either the CEO or president in first round interviews to this day. Typically, I always send a follow up email to whomever we meet with, but in this case, the CEO of the bank had already emailed me to thank me for my time. I was pleasantly surprised! Columbus was definitely a wonderful experience because of the companies that we met with and I enjoyed my time there.