We recently connected with Danni Eickenhorst and have shared our conversation below.

Danni, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Let’s start with the decision of whether to donate a percentage of sales to an organization or cause – we’d love to hear the backstory of how you thought through this.

My background is in non-profit and community-outreach work, so you see that experience bleed into everything I do. My restaurants are so much more than a vehicle for personal profit. In fact, they have become a vehicle through which my partners and I are able to make an impact in our community in a bigger way than we would be able to individually.

On April 8, 2020, we rolled out our #FeedThePeople program at Steve’s Hot Dogs. In the early days of the COVID-19 crisis, we saw many people in our neighborhood losing their jobs and struggling to feed their families. Suddenly, our fun family restaurant became a critical community spot, where families could pick up dinner without going far from home. Thanks to the generosity of our customers – and even Marcus Lemonis from CNBC’s The Profit – we have been able to distribute around 6,500 meals to first responders and people in need in our community. We donate approximately $10,000 in meals each year, as long as we have donations in our fund from customers.

When we took ownership of The Fountain on Locust, we decided to take the same approach. At The Fountain, because we’re located in the heart of the St. Louis arts district, you’ll see that much of our focus there is on arts-related programs – and in boosting the Midtown area in general.

Danni, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I am a community-builder and an entrepreneur. My husband and I took an unlikely path to getting to a place where we’re largely working in the St. Louis restaurant scene every day. My husband was the CFO and Accountant for a number of St. Louis businesses – and I have always been a blend of operations and marketing – most recently serving as the COO managing business interests for a global real estate firm.

My roots are in community building and communications. I worked with The Salvation Army, Great Rivers Greenway, and have always found a way to use my voice to make an impact in our community.

We’ve always had entrepreneurial business interests – a marketing agency, real estate interests, and other small businesses that we’re a part of. We never saw ourselves becoming full-time restauranteurs, however. Not until we received a call from our friend Steve Ewing, that is. He was a long-time friend and a client of mine that I’d helped on a project basis with marketing for years. Between his music career and running two locations of his restaurant, he’d become incredibly stretched thin and had decided to close his iconic hot dog joint, Steve’s Hot Dogs. He asked if I would help him find a way to tell their community.

Immediately, I offered to find way to invest, to help him turn it around – and initially, he wasn’t open to that. I knew that there was something special here. He’d built and mobilized an amazing community. He’s already become nationally-known for the food and the fun vibe he was creating. I didn’t want to see it all fall apart – so I promised to help him break the news through social and PR outreach and I hoped that the community would have the same response that I did. Boy did they! Within an hour, we had calls from every major news organization and upon opening that next day, Steve’s Hot Dogs had a line around the block that would be that way for days. After several days of “goodbyes” with his customers, Steve reached back out and said he was ready to talk about saving it. He saw what I saw.

And the rest, as they say, is history. We’ve grown the brand and expanded the restaurant. We’ll even be in the new City Park Stadium in Spring 2023.

About a year after we’d partnered with Steve, we received a message from Joy Grdnic Christensen, the founder of The Fountain on Locust. She was ready to retire, saw my work in the community – and most recently, my work with Steve’s, and was looking for someone to step into her shoes. After much consideration, my husband and I decided to go all in on the restaurant industry. We resigned from our day jobs and are now full time restauranteurs – focused solely on Steve’s Hot Dogs and The Fountain on Locust – and a top secret new project that we can’t wait to talk about soon!

Can you share one of your favorite marketing or sales stories?

In 2021, St. Louis City SC asked soccer fans in the city of St. Louis to nominate restaurants that they wanted to see in the stadium once it opened. I remember it clearly. I read the tweet on my phone while sitting next to my husband at home – I handed him my phone so he could read the tweet and I said, “I’ve got this.” I dashed off to get my laptop and went to work.

Steve’s Hot Dogs has a strong soccer fanbase. Steve and my husband are both soccer lovers. Steve’s daughter is a phenomenal soccer player. The St. Louligans have always had ties to our shop. I knew this was a match right away.

We wanted to expand Steve’s and our brand, but didn’t have the capital for expansion in that moment. It was all tied up in our move to our South Grand location. I hoped that if we were lucky enough to receive such an opportunity that this might be an affordable expansion opportunity for our brand.

Over the next day or so, I reached out everyone in our soccer community, I pushed out an email to our fanbase, and I leveraged every social media tool and connection in my playbook to ensure we had a fighting chance. Flash forward to October 2022 – we just announced that we’ll be one of the first restaurants in the stadium. We’re weeks out from our test match – and we received the highest number of votes of any restaurant by a long shot! WOW. It worked!

We’re honestly thrilled about the opportunity – not only because of what an incredible, historic moment this is for our community – but also, as business owners, we also hope this gets us the right spotlight so that we might find additional options for new partnerships and new expansion opportunities.

Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?

I’ve always been the voice behind the voice, the person behind the curtain for major brands, celebrities, companies and non-profits. At some point, I decided to build my own brand, and to step out and be seen myself, just because that would give me a second voice to amplify the causes that really mattered to me. The unexpected benefit has been that people took notice. Without building a brand, and sharing my story through social media, the opportunity to purchase The Fountain on Locust would never have come my way.

I’ve told countless clients over the years to find ways to overcome their hesitance to be the face of their brand, to build their own personal brand – and this is precisely why. Having that second voice (in addition to your brand) amplifies every cause and campaign – and it also gives people a look behind the curtain, and a chance to root for your success.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.fountainonlocust.com and www.steveshotdogsstl.com
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/stldanni
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/stldanni
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stldanni
• Twitter: www.twitter.com/stldanni

Image Credits
The one in the Fountain and the one outside of The Fountain can be credited to Michael Kilfoy, Studio X