Josh Rossmeisl still has the first paycheck he ever earned.

He earned it washing dishes at a quick service restaurant in Central Massachusetts. From the dish pit, Josh worked his way through nearly every kind of hospitality job there is—hourly positions, restaurant leadership, high-volume operations, multiunit management, and eventually experiential dining and entertainment.

More than 30 years later, hospitality is still the only industry he has ever really known.

It has been his education, his classroom, and, in many ways, his greatest teacher. He learned the business one position, one shift, one mistake, and one new responsibility at a time. And somewhere along the way, he learned something else: if you stay with something long enough, make enough mistakes, keep learning, and surround yourself with good people, you can get pretty good at it.

That idea has shaped the way Josh thinks about leadership. Titles have never impressed him as much as what someone does with an opportunity. He believes great people can start anywhere, learn their way forward, and earn the chance to do more.

In 2006 that philosophy became very real. Josh became General Manager of Kings, at the time a single 24,000 square foot experiential dining venue in the heart of Boston’s Back Bay. Over the years that followed, he grew from General Manager to Chief Operating Officer while helping grow Kings from that original location to 11 venues, with locations in Miami, Nashville, Orlando, Raleigh, Chicago, and throughout the Boston area.

The scale was significant. The people were more important.

Some of the leaders Josh works beside today have been part of his career for decades. Erin Callahan started working with Josh more than 25 years ago as a server and is now Senior Vice President of Operations. Doug Warner joined Kings as a bartender in 2006 and would eventually become Josh’s cofounder at AMP Up1 Hospitality. Chris Barrows started as a host and grew through restaurant operations, training, recruiting, and people leadership before becoming Chief People Officer.

Their titles changed because their capabilities changed.

That has always been the point.

Josh believes great people reveal themselves through what they do once they are given an opportunity. Someone can enter a company as a server, bartender, dishwasher, host, technician, manager, chef, or senior leader. The starting point does not determine the ceiling.

If you are good, people will see it. If you want more responsibility, you should have the opportunity to earn it. What you do with that opportunity is ultimately up to you.

Over the years, Josh watched that philosophy play out again and again. People took on new responsibilities, made mistakes, learned from them, became leaders, and eventually helped develop the people coming behind them.
The organization grew, but so did the people inside it.

The people around Josh had been through difficult openings, long nights, economic cycles, shutdowns, restructurings, successes, failures, and plenty of moments when quitting would have been easier. Those shared experiences created trust that cannot be manufactured.

But longevity was never the goal. What mattered was what people did with the opportunity to grow.
That became one of the most important lessons of Josh’s career: leadership cannot be handed to someone. It has to be built. And you can’t microwave it.

Leadership takes reps. You have to be bad at something before you can become good at it. It takes good people willing to tell you the truth, standards that remain standards when nobody is watching, enough grace to learn from mistakes, and enough accountability to make sure you actually learn from them.

That is why Josh has never been particularly interested in collecting impressive résumés or building an organization around fancy titles. He looks for work ethic, judgment, curiosity, grit, empathy, adaptability, optimism, self-awareness, and a strong moral compass. He pays attention to the person quietly doing great work in the corner.

He believes people deserve real opportunities to grow, real responsibility, honest feedback, and leaders willing to invest the time required to help them become great.

In return, he expects people to show up, be coachable, care about their teammates, and do the work.

Then, in 2020, the hospitality industry shut down.

The chapter Josh and many of his teammates had spent years building came to an end. But a core group of leaders who had already worked beside one another for years made a decision: they were going to stay together and build again.

This time, they would build something of their own.

AMP Up1 Hospitality was built around a simple purpose: connect people and build community.

What followed was 973 days of building before Your 3rd Spot opened its doors.

The founding team consulted, took on outside work, built financial models, designed experiences, called landlords, rewrote decks, heard no more times than they can count, changed the name more than once, and kept going. Josh sold his house, liquidated his retirement account, moved to Atlanta, and committed fully to proving the idea.

There was no guarantee that any of it would work.

But the team believed people would gather again. They believed human connection would matter even more after isolation. And they believed hospitality could be designed around bringing people together—combining great food, beverage, service, design, music, technology, analog play, and the simple human need to belong somewhere.

On November 2, 2022, Your 3rd Spot opened in Atlanta.

Atlanta was intentionally built as a prototype.

The team wanted to learn what worked, what broke, what guests actually valued, what looked good on a rendering but failed on a Saturday night, and what had to be true before they earned the right to grow.

They weren't trying to prove they had all the answers. They were trying to build something that could keep getting better.

By mid-2025, more than 600,000 guests had walked through the doors. Your 3rd Spot was named one of FSR Magazine’s Top 50 Independent Restaurants in America in 2025. The Georgia Restaurant Association named AMP Up1 Hospitality and Josh its 2024 Restaurateur of the Year. Bar & Restaurant recognized Your 3rd Spot with the 2024 Best Hospitality Training Program award. In 2025, Your 3rd Spot ranked #46 on America’s Top 100 Most Loved Workplaces, one of only two restaurants on the national list. Atlanta Magazine has also repeatedly recognized Your 3rd Spot across categories including date night, special occasions, and social experiences.

Josh appreciates the recognition. He cares much more about what sits underneath it.

AMP Up1’s culture is built around Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose, the idea of getting 1% better every day, and a belief that nobody should become anonymous inside a hospitality company. Leaders are expected to know their people, coach in real time, use data over ego, give people responsibility before handing them titles, and create an environment where somebody can make a mistake, own it, learn from it, and come back better.

At Your 3rd Spot, the team eats together before service because taking care of the people who take care of the guests is part of the operating model. Developing the bench happens long before another building needs a General Manager. Culture has to prove itself during a difficult shift, a bad week, a tough conversation, or a decision where doing the right thing costs more.

That becomes even more important as AMP Up1 enters its next chapter.

The Looking Glass represents the company’s next brand, while Your 3rd Spot begins expanding beyond Atlanta with locations opening throughout the United States. The team spent years treating Atlanta as a working prototype before earning the right to grow. They invested first in training, systems, leadership development, technology, culture, and the operating bench required to expand with discipline.

The goal has never been to grow as fast as possible. The goal is to build brands, leaders, and a company that can last.
Josh likes hard problems. He likes people who take ownership. He roots for underdogs and for talented people whose careers may not follow a perfectly straight line. He has particular respect for hospitality people who have worked somewhere dysfunctional, learned from it, and still care enough about this industry to help build the kind of company they once wished they worked for.

There are easier industries. Hospitality is still the one Josh chose.

He believes some of the best future leaders in the industry are standing behind bars, working sauté stations, running the door, fixing equipment, managing a difficult shift, or quietly helping the person beside them get better. The responsibility of leadership is to notice them, challenge them, teach them, give them a shot, and then hold the standard high enough that the opportunity means something.

That is the company Josh and his team are continuing to build.

A place for people who want to contribute. A place for people who like doing difficult things well. A place where somebody can start in an hourly position and someday help open the next restaurant, run a department, become a partner, or create something the company has never done before.

It is, in many ways, the same belief Josh has carried with him since that first job in the dish pit.
Where you start matters far less than what you do with the opportunity.

There is still a lot to learn and a lot of work ahead.

For Josh, the responsibility is pretty simple. Keep showing up. Stay coachable. Take care of people. Do what you said you were going to do. Keep learning. Build the bench. Give good people real opportunities. Protect the culture as the company grows.

And hopefully, leave this industry a little better than he found it.