We knocked on the door. Then we moved in.

There's a version of getting into New York that involves brokers, decks, and a year of meetings. That isn't how this one happened.

In 2013, Michael Fuller was Executive Vice President of Development at Warner Hospitality — a group known at the time for its work on Hard Rock Hotel & Casino properties. The company wanted a foothold in New York City, so it sent two people to go find one: Michael, and Chris Najbicz, the EVP of Hotel Operations. No mandate beyond that. Go walk the city.

So they walked it. On 24 East 39th Street they came across a building mid-construction — the old Williams Club, being gutted and rebuilt. They went up the stairs and knocked on the door. Chris put the moment better than anyone has since: "Being the curious individuals we are, we walked up the stairs and knocked on the door."

That knock turned into a management contract. The building became The William — a 33-room boutique property developed by Shlomo Bakhash and The Kash Group, who had bought the site for $9 million and put $11 million into converting it across five floors into guest residences built for stays of thirty days and up. The Kash Group knew the New York rental market cold and led the design. Warner ran the operation — systems, marketing, sales. Michael never dressed the deal up, and he said as much on the record at the time: "We have to admit that on some level it was opportunistic for us to take this venture on. But getting over the extended stay aspect, this is actually a luxury lifestyle product."

But knocking on the door was the easy part. You don't open a hotel from a plane. Michael moved to New York for three months and lived inside the build. He had just had his first son, Sage — barely a year old — and instead of opening a property in one city while his family sat in another, he brought them with him. They spent December in New York getting The William open before New Year's, moved into the property while it was still being finished, and celebrated Christmas on what was half construction site and half hotel. There's a photo of Sage crawling across a brand-new floor that looks like a museum. That picture is the whole thing.

It was hard. It was also the best kind of hard. That's the part nobody puts in a deck: at this level, in these cities, you don't commute to the work — you move your life to it, and you make the most of the life that shows up while you're there. Michael didn't do it alone. Chris was next to him, The Kash Group brought the building and the vision, Warner put two people on a plane and trusted them to come back with something, and the opening crew did the part nobody writes about. We played our part on a strong team, and the team got a hotel out of it.

Walk the street. Knock on the door. Then be all the way there — present in it, in the moment, making a life out of the work instead of waiting for it to end. That last part isn't a slogan we bolted on afterward. It's the whole idea, and it's exactly what we still do.