Meaning Beyond Success

The entrepreneur behind Emerald Hospitality Group, one of the UK’s fastest growing companies, and Thriving Minds, one of Europe’s most prominent podcasts, on building high eight figure businesses, the limits of external success, and why the most important thing any of us can build is ourselves. At 25, Alberto Zandi became very successful. It was supposed to feel like an arrival. The money was there, the cars were there, and so was much of the lifestyle he had associated with success. What was missing was the feeling he had assumed would come with all of it.

“In my early twenties I had embraced the definition of success we are constantly being fed by social media, films and television. I thought once I achieved those things, everything would make sense. I would feel enough. I would be happy.” He did not. In hindsight, Alberto had confused evidence of success with the experience of fulfilment. It was an uncomfortable realisation, but also one of the most important of his life. Because if achieving the things you have spent years chasing does not fundamentally change how you feel inside, you are forced to ask a much deeper question: what actually does?

Five years later, that question sits underneath almost everything Alberto is building. Today, at 30, he leads Emerald Hospitality Group, one of the UK’s fastest growing private companies, alongside his twin brother, Arian. Together they have built a portfolio of multiple hospitality concepts, employ more than 400 people and generate eight figure revenues, with further expansion planned across the UK and internationally. Alongside Emerald, Alberto is the founder and host of Thriving Minds, which has grown to more than 1.5m subscribers and become one of Europe’s most prominent personal growth podcasts. It is an unusual combination of business, media, culture, psychology, and personal growth. To Alberto, however, the connection is obvious. They are all ultimately about understanding people and life. The numbers demonstrate that he knows how to build businesses. What interests him increasingly is the harder question of what makes something worth building in the first place.

His approach to business begins with two forces he once thought were separate: logic and emotion. “In hospitality, I normally begin logically. I look for a genuine gap in the market. I analyse multiple factors like location, demographics, competition, spending behaviour, footfall and where the area is going.” Only once the commercial opportunity makes sense does the creative process begin. Then the questions change. What deserves to exist there? What is missing? What could genuinely add value? What would make somebody come for the first time and, more importantly, what would make them come back? It is a distinction that captures much of Alberto’s thinking. The numbers tell him whether an opportunity exists. Creativity determines what to build. The strongest concepts, he believes, exist where the financial case and the emotional reason to care meet. “Long term, healthy hospitality exists at the intersection between business and art.”

A restaurant has to make money. Without that, there is no business. But a spreadsheet cannot create atmosphere. It cannot make somebody fall in love with a room, remember a dinner ten years later or decide that a particular table should become part of a family tradition. That comes from hundreds of decisions that are individually almost invisible: the music, the lighting, the smell, the people around you, the way somebody welcomes you, the energy at lunch compared with midnight, the menu, the uniforms, the architecture and the feeling you have when you leave. “You can build something beautiful, but beauty alone is not enough. People have to feel something.” Perhaps that is also why Alberto is sceptical of businesses built entirely around trends. “By definition, a trend has to arrive, peak and eventually disappear.” His ambition is to create classics instead, places that feel relevant without feeling temporary, and restaurants that become more valuable as people attach memories to them.

His fascination with Club 55 in Saint Tropez makes sense in that context. He has spoken openly about wanting to acquire the institution one day, not because it is new, but because it is almost impossible to recreate. Its real value has accumulated over generations through people returning, families growing up around it, friendships forming and summers being remembered. “You can design a beautiful room. You cannot manufacture history.” History has to be earned. Ultimately, people create it. This belief runs through Alberto’s wider view of consumer culture. “People are increasingly buying identity rather than products.” A restaurant, hotel, fashion brand or members club is no longer simply selling what it produces. At its best, it represents something about how people want to live and who they believe themselves to be.

Yet Alberto is wary of the opposite extreme, creating spaces that make people feel they have to perform in order to belong. If somebody wants to dress beautifully, they should. If they do not, they should still feel welcome. “The strongest brands have a clear identity without forcing that identity onto the customer.” That balance between conviction and openness also defines the culture he is trying to build inside Emerald. As the company has grown, Alberto has become increasingly convinced that culture cannot be delegated. “Culture starts at the top. If I expect a certain behaviour from somebody working in our company, I have to live according to those same values. My directors have to do the same. Then our managers, and so on. It has to flow through the entire organisation.” Training can reinforce culture. Systems can protect it. But leadership creates it. “Culture is not the values you write on a wall. It is how you communicate, how you treat people, how you make decisions and how you behave when things become difficult.” That understanding came gradually. Alberto and Arian entered hospitality at 22 without the traditional background many operators spend their careers acquiring. Their first six months were difficult. Initially, they tried to operate like everybody else. Eventually, they realised that being outsiders could become an advantage. They brought what they understood from the technology and strategy consulting sector into an industry that was often still highly fragmented. The restaurant stopped being viewed simply as a venue and started being treated as an organisation. Operations, finance, marketing, data, people and systems became interconnected. The businesses greatly improved.

Then Covid arrived. Hospitality stopped almost overnight. Restaurants closed, employees went home and an industry built around bringing people together suddenly could not bring people together at all.  While much of the market was retreating, Alberto and Arian began acquiring restaurants. Emerald doubled in size during the pandemic. It sounds, retrospectively, like the kind of fearless decision entrepreneurship tends to celebrate. Alberto sees it differently. “Risk becomes dangerous when it comes from ego. But when it comes from conviction, preparation and a willingness to accept the consequences, that is often where the biggest growth happens.” The experience taught him that courage and recklessness are not the same thing. That distinction matters more now. When you are 22 and building your first business, the consequences of being wrong have a relatively limited ripple effect, because the person most directly impacted is you. Now, with more than 400 people working across our company, every decision carries a different weight. Behind the numbers are employees, families, suppliers and shareholders.

Success has therefore made Alberto more ambitious, but also more responsible. It has changed the way he thinks about data too. Earlier in his career, he trusted numbers almost completely. Today, he gives instinct a seat at the table. “Numbers describe what has happened and, to some extent, help us predict what might happen next. But the world we live in today is changing constantly. Historical data cannot always tell us what the future will look like.” Entrepreneurial instinct plays a different role. “Instinct is trying to imagine what could happen next.” He is careful not to romanticise it. “The danger is when you use instinct as an excuse to ignore facts. If the numbers fundamentally do not work, you have to listen.” But genuinely new ideas rarely arrive with years of evidence proving they will succeed. Some of Alberto’s strongest decisions began as ideas historical data could not fully justify. “That is the real skill. Knowing when the numbers are warning you and when they are simply unable to see the future yet.”

As Emerald has grown, another challenge has emerged, learning not to be needed everywhere. “If every important decision still depends on the founder being in the room, you have not created a scalable organisation.” For somebody naturally obsessive about detail, that has required a different type of discipline. Building capable teams and processes. Giving people real authority and agency. Allowing somebody else to arrive at a different answer. Protecting time not only to manage what exists, but to think about what should exist next. Leadership, Alberto has learned, is not simply about becoming more capable yourself. It is about creating an environment in which other people become more capable too. His closest business relationship makes that particularly personal. Arian is not simply his business partner. He is his twin brother. “There is very little pretending when you build a company with somebody who has known you your entire life.” They disagree, sometimes strongly. But they have learned something Alberto considers fundamental: disagreement does not have to threaten loyalty. “You can completely disagree about a decision and still know that the relationship underneath it is unquestionable.” When things become genuinely difficult, that trust becomes difficult to replicate.

But not every project that shaped Alberto began in hospitality.  His famous podcast, Thriving Minds started with curiosity. “I was fascinated by people thriving in their fields. I wanted to understand how extraordinary people think, what they sacrifice, what they fear and what sits behind the version of success the public sees.” The deeper the conversations went, the more the subject changed. “The conversations were not really about success. They were about being human.” Love, insecurity, grief, ambition, health, identity, relationships, failure and purpose. The things that affect somebody with nothing and somebody with everything. Building businesses gives Alberto enormous satisfaction. Thriving Minds gives him something different: the possibility of impact at scale. Thousands of messages arrive every week from people saying that a conversation changed the way they saw their life, helped them through something difficult or gave them the confidence to change direction. “There is not enough money in the world to make me feel what some of those messages make me feel.”

Today, Thriving Minds has a clear mission: to help people unlock the best version of themselves. Alberto wants it to become the number one personal growth podcast in the world. He says that with conviction, but what matters is what comes immediately afterwards. “I am confident we can get there because my team and I are obsessed with improving the show, with the smallest details and, above everything else, with genuinely adding value to the audience. But I do not just want Thriving Minds to become one of the biggest personal growth platforms in the world. I want it to become one of the most meaningful.” Meaning is a word that appears increasingly often when Alberto talks about his life, because his understanding of success has changed. At 25, success was about arriving. At 30, it is about becoming.  He no longer believes there is a final version of yourself that you one day reach. “The best version of yourself is not a destination. I think it is a direction.” To him, growth is the willingness to keep learning, questioning, changing and confronting the distance between who you are and who you are capable of becoming. “We are never finished. The moment you think you have figured everything out is probably the moment you stop growing.” His ambition has not disappeared. It has become more examined. “In my twenties, I was ambitious for the sake of being ambitious. Now I am still incredibly ambitious, but I ask myself what that ambition is actually for.”

That question has led Alberto towards a conclusion that is surprisingly simple. External success can improve your life enormously. It can give you freedom, choice, security and experiences. It can allow you to create, employ people, support the people you love and build things that otherwise would not have been possible. But it has emotional limits. Money can improve your circumstances. It cannot tell you who you are. Recognition can validate your work. It cannot make you feel loved. Scale can prove what you are capable of building. It cannot give your life meaning. “Nothing external can fill your heart.” For Alberto, that is not a rejection of success. It is an understanding of what success can and cannot do. “Your heart has to be filled by other things. Love. Relationships. Purpose. Understanding yourself. Being useful to other people. Becoming somebody you respect when nobody else is watching.” The danger begins when achievement becomes identity. Businesses can fail. Money can disappear. Awards are eventually forgotten. Audiences move on. “The problem is when you identify yourself completely with those things. You end up in a one way relationship with them. You can love them, but none of those things can love you back.”

People can. That distinction now sits beneath Alberto’s definition of a meaningful life. The family that knew him before the success. The brother building beside him. The friends who do not care what the revenue number is. The people he loves. The team whose lives are connected to the decisions he makes. And the relationship he has with himself when nobody is watching. Purpose, in that sense, is not about becoming less ambitious. It is about giving ambition somewhere worthwhile to go. Alberto still wants to build extraordinary things. More restaurants. More cities. More businesses. More conversations. A global Thriving Minds platform. Businesses that endure beyond the founders who created them. But the destination matters less to him than it once did. The person he becomes while getting there matters more. Perhaps that is why the same question appears across everything Alberto builds: why do people come back?

In hospitality, they might initially come for the food, the room or the reputation, but they return because of how the place made them feel. With Thriving Minds, somebody may discover an episode because of the guest, but they return because something in the conversation made them understand themselves differently. And in life, perhaps we return to people for much the same reason. Not because they are perfect. Not because they are successful. But because, around them, we feel something real. Alberto has spent the first chapter of his career proving that he can build. The next seems to be about understanding why he is building. He does not want to stop achieving. He wants achievement to mean something. To build better businesses. To become a better leader. To have deeper conversations. To love people better. To understand himself more deeply. And to keep becoming the person he knows he is capable of being. Because perhaps success was never the destination. Perhaps the real measure of a life is who you become on the way there, who you bring with you, and whether the things you create leave people with something more meaningful than what they arrived with.