An Unlikely Empire | J.W. Marriott

In nineteen twenty seven, a man from a farming town in Utah opened a nine seat root beer stand in Washington, DC with six thousand dollars to his name. By the time he died, that stand had become one of the largest hotel companies in the world. with billions in annual sales, over a hundred thousand employees. And a name you see all over the world. His name was Jay Willard Marriott, but everybody called him Bill. And here's what's strange about the Marriott story.

You'd assume the man who built the world's largest hotel company was a hotel guy. But he wasn't. He didn't open his first hotel until he was in his mid fifties, and he fought against it the whole way. Hotels terrified him. He'd watched every major hotel chain in America go bankrupt during the depression. And he wanted nothing to do with them. So how did a man who was afraid of hotels end up building

the world's largest hotel company. Marriott? was never really a hotel company. And how Bill built it surprised me. Let's get into it. When Bill Marriott was twelve years old, his father pointed a field of sugar beets. Baking in the Utah Sun.

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