Susan Salgado

Susan Reilly Salgado is a consultant, speaker, and thought leader whose expertise lies at the intersection of organizational culture and customer experience. Salgado leverages 20+ years of academic and professional experience to help clients build remarkable teams who can deliver remarkable customer experiences.

Salgado’s work in this field began in the mid-1990s, when she was a regular guest of Danny Meyer’s acclaimed restaurants in the Union Square Hospitality Group (USHG). Salgado was inspired by the consistently exceptional customer experiences she had across Danny’s many businesses and set out to understand the secret of his success by studying the USHG restaurants for her doctoral dissertation. The result of her analysis was a model that explained the impact of effective leadership on organizational culture.

Upon completing her dissertation in 2003, Salgado was invited to join USHG as its first-ever Director of Culture and Learning. In this role, she created and implemented the company’s leadership training programs, which were a fundamental component of the company’s success in growing its culture throughout significant growth, including the creation and scaling of the Shake Shack brand. In 2010, she partnered with Danny Meyer to open a consultancy, Hospitality Quotient, and in 2017 founded her own firm to provide consulting and training services.

Salgado’s consulting work and speaking engagements have allowed her to work with companies across more than 20 different industries, such as Delta Airlines, Hyatt Hotels, Goldman Sachs, Barron’s Top Advisory Teams Summit, Merrill Lynch, Chick-Fil-A, Edward Jones, and Coca Cola. In addition to her PhD from NYU-Stern School of Business, Salgado holds a BS and an MBA from Lehigh University and has been an invited speaker at numerous universities. Salgado has been a contributor for Inc. Magazine, has recorded a TEDx talk, co-founded the NYC chapter of Conscious Capitalism, and was named one of Fast Company’s 100 Most Creative People in Business.

Salgado lives in NYC with her husband and daughter.