What defines a career? Erin Levzow has mastered the art of the nonlinear path, navigating the quick-service, full-service, entertainment, and hospitality industries with ease. She resists easy categorization. Early in her career, Levzow earned a degree in theater, dreaming of becoming an actress. She didn’t quite make it to L.A.—but she did make it to Las Vegas, where she slept on the floor of her apartment before landing a job in the box office at Caesars on the Strip.
A natural trainer and brand advocate, Levzow moved into a training and internet marketing role—until the recession hit. “Everyone in Vegas lost their job,” she says. Her hustle was unmistakable. Willing to do whatever it took to regain traction, she eventually landed at MGM Resorts, then the Palms Casino, where she entered her first run of senior marketing leadership roles.
Then came the call from Wingstop: a new city, a new industry, and one of the fastest-growing quick-service brands in the world. From there came Freebirds World Burrito, Del Taco—where she re-platformed an entire martech stack in just nine months—and the Museum of Ice Cream. Now, she consults as chief marketing officer across CapitalSpring’s portfolio of brands, which include Fat Rosie’s, Newk’s Eatery, Bushfire Kitchen, Escalante’s Fine Tex Mex, and more.
Her experience moving between different hospitality categories has created a singular opportunity: to help people release, relax, and enjoy themselves—whether she’s marketing wings or a Vegas vacation—while making an impact and driving revenue.
At this stage of her career, Levzow is less focused on chasing titles and more invested in building durable brands. Working across a portfolio has sharpened her belief that clarity—not complexity—is what ultimately drives growth. While tools, platforms, and channels continue to evolve, the fundamentals remain unchanged: know your guest, know your purpose, and execute with discipline. That perspective has also given her a front-row seat to how brands scale responsibly. Growth, she notes, isn’t just about expansion—it’s about alignment between leadership, marketing, and operations. When those pieces work together, brands earn trust, loyalty, and relevance. When they don’t, even the strongest concepts can lose their footing.
“Marketing is still marketing, no matter where you go,” Levzow says. “Understanding what moves your product or brings consumers through the door requires establishing a connection. You have to understand what drives their decisions—and who’s involved in making them.”
In quick service, that connection often shows up through digital ordering, where attribution can be tracked end to end. In full service, success is more often measured through foot traffic, dwell time, and opportunities to upsell. As value wars continue to blur the lines between segments, average ticket prices in QSR and FSR are now competing in ways the industry hasn’t seen before, Levzow notes.
Ultimately, the biggest difference comes down to experience design. When Levzow compares a brand like Fat Rosie’s to Wingstop, the contrast is natural—pace, occasion, and expectation all differ. Speed matters. But the moment quick-service brands consistently deliver a truly exceptional experience, she says, the restaurant industry will reach a new inflection point.
Part of nailing that experience is building emotional connection at scale. For Levzow, that means creating marketing that sparks feeling—craveable, often humorous campaigns that may not drive an immediate purchase, but embed the brand in a consumer’s mind and move them along what she calls “a sequential journey” toward action.
Just as critical is the relationship between marketing and operations—one that doesn’t change regardless of segment. Marketing brings consumers into the four walls, whether physically or digitally. Operations delivers the experience in real time. And once the guest walks back out the door, marketing resumes the conversation—building loyalty, reinforcing trust, and earning the next visit.
In her current role, supporting numerous restaurant concepts ranging from fast casual to full-service and everything in between, Levzow is invoking a bit of mental fitness from her agency days—and that’s her favorite part. “The mental shifting I do daily is refreshing. I can be talking about tacos and experiential dining one day, and upscale casual dining the other,” Levzow adds. “Our concepts are growing exponentially, and even if they’re very different, I feel so grateful to be able to touch the marketing strategy in so many different restaurant categories at once.”
As the lines between quick-service and full-service restaurants continue to blur, Levzow predicts the most successful brands will be those that figure out what they stand for. Fastest, cheapest, expensive, experiential—she says a lot of times, brands will get confused on what it is they’re hanging their hat on—and it’s impossible to try to be everything to everyone.
Levzow continues to serve as an advocate and mentor for women across all rungs of the restaurant industry—when she first started in this industry, there was only one seat at the table, reinforcing the idea that you have to fight for the top spot. Today, women across the industry are creating bigger tables, pulling up a seat, and making their own table. The biggest shift she’s seen is a mindset towards saying, “Do you want to sit with me?”
“A lot of the narrative says that women need to own the room. And I love that, but I think it’s more impactful to say, let’s make room. Let’s make room for others, let’s own this room together. We don’t want to be lonely at the top … we have to be inclusive. We’re all in this together,” Levzow says.
For women out there like Levzow, who are embarking on the road less traveled, building a nonlinear career across all these different segments, her advice is clear: it’s scary, but feel the fear and do it anyway.
“Worst case scenario, you fail. But then you get up and do something else. People are scared to fail, but the truth is, nobody is going to remember. Oftentimes, we feel like everybody is watching us,” Levzow says. “But that’s never the case. Just take the risk. There’s always room for you to pivot and reinvent yourself.”
