A curated bench of practitioners built for real-world execution

Maurizio Landi is a hotelier at heart. Across twenty-four years in hospitality — from a family business, to the youngest general manager in his region, to fifteen years architecting service at Disney — he learned one truth he now builds his work around: world-class service isn't magic, and it isn't luxury. It's a system. Performance is not inspired. It is designed.

That conviction was shaped early. Long before he carried a title, Maurizio was already working — leaving school each day for the family business, learning that the work gets done regardless of who is watching. That sense of ownership became his foundation.

His professional career began at Marriott, where he absorbed what Bill Marriott called "the spirit to serve." Over nine years and four hotels he learned hospitality from the inside out — operations, food and beverage, housekeeping, bookkeeping, pricing, payroll, marketing, and group sales — and led the ground-up build-out, hiring, and grand opening of the Residence Inn by Marriott in Lake Mary. Just under thirty, he was recognized as the youngest general manager in his region.

In 2011, Maurizio joined Disney and spent the next fifteen years studying how the most admired service organization in the world actually works. He ran Concierge Operations at the flagship Grand Floridian Resort & Spa — ninety Cast Members across two club levels — where he built a Convention Concierge team, a welcome-amenity program, and service standards later adopted across Disney's deluxe resorts. Within three and a half years, the company honored him with its lifetime achievement honor, the Walt Disney Legacy Award.

Then leadership moved him to housekeeping at the All-Star Resorts — nearly 6,000 rooms and more than 400 housekeepers a day. He expected a different world from the flagship; instead he found the care, the genuineness, and the surprise-and-delight identical. What the team offered guests was vastly different. How they offered it was exactly the same. That was the moment the lesson crystallized: Disney's magic was never magic — it was a framework, a system of service that transcended department, rank, and geography.

Wanting to understand how that framework was built, in 2018 Maurizio left operations for the Disney University, leading onboarding and leadership development across Walt Disney World, Disneyland, Imagineering, and Disney Cruise Line, with work that reached the international parks in Paris, Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Shanghai. In his final four years, at the Disney Institute, he taught more than 100 organizations — airlines, hospitals, financial institutions, and nonprofits — the principles behind the magic, delivering in both English and Spanish for aviation and finance clients across Latin America.

There he identified the gap. Organizations left inspired, then went home and could not fit the principles into the systems they already ran. The workbooks went on the shelf. The missing piece was never knowledge — it was a system designed to make the right behavior the default.

That gap is why Beyond the Magic exists.

Founded in 2026, Beyond the Magic is a performance-architecture firm. It does not train culture; it architects the systems that make high-quality performance predictable, repeatable, and sustainable. Through its proprietary Name Tag Framework™ — built on Maurizio's twenty-four years in hospitality — BTM diagnoses the gap between intended and actual performance, designs the operational architecture to close it, and deploys measurable systems that hold.

Maurizio brings the rigor of enterprise operations, the depth of Disney-caliber learning design, and the directness of someone who has led teams at every level — from a front desk, to a flagship resort, to a Fortune 100 boardroom. His philosophy is simple: people are at the heart of every organization that thrives, but people alone are not enough. What you build around them — the systems, the standards, the accountability — determines whether performance is consistent or left to chance.

It is the same principle he teaches his two daughters. And it is the foundation of every engagement Beyond the Magic delivers.

Beyond the work, Maurizio's orientation has always been toward service. He is a proud member of the Clermont 100 — a chapter of the 100 Network, a community of men invested in putting their time, talent, and treasure toward local causes that matter. He has served as Vice-Chairman of the Board of Directors at Imagine South Lake Charter School — a 1,000+ student K-8 charter school in Lake County, Florida — since 2019. And he is a Founder and Treasurer of Arise Church South Lake in Minneola, Florida. Those commitments are not peripheral to the work — they are an extension of the same conviction that drives it. "I find it extremely rewarding when I get to serve others," he says. Whether that is a client organization, a school board, or a new church community, the posture is the same: show up with integrity, invest genuinely, and build something that lasts.

Dennis Hough has spent thirty years asking the same question inside every organization he has served: what separates the leaders who develop people from the leaders who simply manage them? The answer, he has found, is almost never talent. It is intention, investment, and the willingness to come alongside someone and believe in their potential before they might believe it themselves.

Educated as an Industrial Engineer at the University of Tennessee — shaped to see systems, diagnose gaps, and build solutions that hold — Dennis entered the workforce with a rigorous, process-oriented mind. Early in his career, working in quality management and operations leadership within a Fortune 100 corporation, he discovered something no engineering curriculum teaches: the most important factor in any system is the people operating it. That discovery became his life's work.

Dennis spent a decade at the Department of Energy's Y-12 National Security Complex — one of the nation's most demanding operational environments — progressing through roles in quality engineering, facility management, business development, and strategic program development. He helped launch the Oak Ridge–Huntsville Partnership Office, a multi-institution collaboration connecting national laboratories, federal agencies, and universities. Along the way, he was recognized as a Department of Energy Mentor of the Year Nominee and a Small Business Advocate of the Year.

In 2015, Dennis launched Affirm Consulting, building it into a respected organizational development and strategy execution practice that partnered with companies ranging from startups to $150 million enterprises. In 2022, he served as Chief Operating Officer at MacArthur Group, a behavioral health enterprise serving U.S. Veterans, where he grew the organization to $20+ million in revenue and rebuilt the executive leadership team from the inside out.

In 2026, Dennis joined forces with Maurizio Landi as Co-Founder of Beyond the Magic Consulting — bringing decades of operational strategy, leadership development, and organizational transformation to BTM's growing portfolio of clients.

What unifies every chapter of Dennis's career is not an industry or a title. It is a calling. He teaches. He mentors. He encourages. Rooted in his faith and his family, Dennis is a servant leader in every sense of the word — someone who has sat in the seat, made the hard calls, and consistently helped organizations and individuals find their way forward.