#109: Adam Fleischer (The Wine Spot & Entrepreneur's Organization Cleveland)

Everybody comes in they come in happy and they leave happier like you know it's a
good place to be making people happy like we like to say we are we are people's
happy place like you you never know what what has happened a person before they
walk in the door right and that's what we talk about as a team. Let's discover the
Cleveland entrepreneurial system. We are telling the stories of its entrepreneurs and
those supporting them.
Welcome to the Lay of the Land podcast, where we are exploring what people are
building in Cleveland. I am your host, Jeffrey Stern, and today I had the real
pleasure of speaking with Adam Fleischer, president of Cleveland's entrepreneur
organization and the founder and co -owner of the Wine Spot here in Cleveland
Heights. A proud product of Cleveland, Adam joined the United States Air Force just
after graduating from Cleveland Heights High School and spent four years there active
duty as a medic. After relocating back to Cleveland to attend CSU, Adam got a job
at a local hospital in Patient Pharmacy, where he began implementation of one of the
first clinical information systems, also known as an electronic medical record in the
whole country. With that experience, Adam was hired on by the company Cerner
Corporation, which was recently purchased by Oracle. And after 20 years of experience
in corporate America, he decided to shift his focus and energies on his passions,
the Cleveland community and wine. Adam and his wife Susan followed their dream of
owning their own business and being entrepreneurs by opening the wine spot in
Cleveland Heights on December 16th, 2011. From the onset, they wanted to be part of
the local food and beverage community and began partnering with like -minded
entrepreneurs like Restless Coffee, Brew Nuts, Mr. Biscuit, many local micro breweries
and artists all to create a relaxing destination where all feel welcome and can
enjoy the fine wines, craft beer, and cocktails. In addition, Adam is an active
member of the community as the creator and co -creator of the Heights Music Hop, the
Cleveland Heights Happy 5K and 10K, 46 and two brewing cold brewed coffee,
now part of Six Shooter Coffee, Bitcoin Boulevard USA, and the Wine Spot Salami. It
was a lot of fun to hear about Adam's journey to entrepreneurship, the work he is
doing at the Wine Spot, and understanding the role of EO, the entrepreneur
organization, which we have heard mentioned many times throughout lay of the land,
but are finally making the space to talk about specifically today. So with that,
please enjoy my conversation with Adam Fleischer.
I'm always thinking about where the best place to start these is. And for our
conversation, I had been doing a lot of thinking. I just finished this exercise
recently where I went back and I reexamined the first 100 episodes of the podcast
through the lens of, you know, what universal lessons can we try and extract from
the aggregate of all these amazing people building awesome things here in Cleveland
and throughout Northeast Ohio, you know, what motivates people to build? Where do
ideas come from? What makes for good culture and for leadership? And through that
lens, one area that I realize I don't think I explored very explicitly.
And we kind of touched on this just before we turned on the mic here is how
important support networks are, I think as part of the entrepreneurial journey. And
so I've been really looking forward to this conversation. We're about to have outside
of your own entrepreneurial undertakings, which we'll take our time to talk through
in a moment. But I know you have, I think, a relatively unique perspective through
EO and all that that entails, where you get to kind of work with so many
entrepreneurs, a few of whom who have been on the podcast here, who have pointed to
EO as something really fundamentally important to them and their journeys. And so
just looking forward to learning more about what's happening there and why that seems
to resonate with so many, so much. - Yeah, I'm super excited to talk about it. I
mean, it's been a very important part of my path, you know, the past few years.
I'm fortunate in that I had 20 years of corporate experience. And so that gave me
a lot of experience in different areas being a business leader, you know, experienced
with HR and legal and project management and employment, things like that,
it certainly helped me when I opened up my business. But even with all that, there
were so many things I needed so much help with, and didn't know where to go until
I sort of found these safety nets for entrepreneurs in Cleveland. So we're very
lucky in Cleveland to have all these organizations at our disposal to be part of,
to help us out. But it's been invaluable, and I do talk about it a lot. I like
talking about it because you're very fortunate that Cleveland has an extremely,
extremely strong entrepreneurial organization right here in Cleveland to take advantage
of it. So I'd love to talk about it. Yeah. Well, I'm looking forward to it. I
think we'll get there in your journey, but maybe it helps to start more
chronologically if you want to just kind of take us through a little bit of your
background, your path and interest in entrepreneurship, how you got to where you are
today. - Yeah, first and foremost, passionate about Cleveland. I'm from Cleveland,
from Cleveland Heights, from the East Side. Was not a very good student. I never
did anything terribly wrong. I just was your typical high school kid that didn't
care about school so much. So my grades weren't that great. Applied to some schools,
got into Ohio State even with terrible grades back in the day. It's very different
now. And just realized that if I went off to college, I really would probably just
get kicked out. So I decided to go into the military, went into the Air Force,
became a medic, which is an amazing, amazing experience. My first assignment was
labor and delivery. So imagine the stories, you know, me and my friends would tell
when I was home on leave, they were in college, I was helping to deliver the
baby's and then did four years active duty. I had always had work.
I always worked. I didn't really play sports. From junior high, I delivered papers.
I worked in a musical shop or worked at gas stations. I was either working or
keeping busy doing something else. And so I kind of had that idea that making money
was a good thing to have some money in your pocket. So that was always in the
back of my mind. And then after the Air Force came back, and then when I was in
the Air Force, I went to college. So it was either on duty or I was taking
classes. I got about half my degree done while I was in active service,
came back to Cleveland and graduated from Cleveland State. While I was at Cleveland
State, I worked full -time at Mount Sinai Hospital, which no longer exists,
but that was a very progressive hospital. And at the time just about i think i was
a senior in college about to graduate they got a clinical information system for me
system which was at the time. I heard of and because of my background as a medic
and working in the pharmacy i got asked to help implement this new computer system.
And that company needed people at these computers.
So I was going to go off to law school and decided, well, you know, let me go
get a paycheck for a couple of years and then maybe go back to graduate school and
got into what you might know as the electronic medical record field, you know,
and go see a doctor. Yes, yes. Everything in Mars. Yeah, in Mars. We'll put
everything in the computer, right? Well, not that long ago, it was all paper driven
and it was, you know, it was a huge opportunity there to change it. So a company
out of Kansas City by the name of CERN Corporation created the first electronic
medical record and I got in early on that and was doing implementation for them all
over the country all over the world and made my way up and spent 20 years in
health care IT and like I mentioned gave me a lot of great experience but and I
got pretty high up But there was a ceiling for me, you know, I didn't have that
degree from that great school and what have you and so in my mind a few things
that came together. One was I was never going to be a CEO of a public corporation.
I was married with young kids at the time us on the road all the time. And I
realized like if I didn't make a change soon, like my kids would never know me and
I'd probably die of a heart attack in some hotel room, in some foreign land,
you know, and so that was not the direction I wanted to go. So everything came
together. This was like 2005, 2006. That's when I started to realize like,
okay, we need to start planning for a change. And I didn't know anything but
healthcare IT, but I didn't want to do that. You know, I didn't want to get into
consulting or anything like that. with that. So regardless, what do we do? But we
always vacationed around our hobby, which at the time was wine. We traveled and I
traveled, went to all these cool places in New York City and Chicago and Paris and
London, whatever. And one of these spaces always thinking like, man, I wish we had
something like this in Cleveland. So that kind of sparked the idea of, well, you
know, let's at least try it, right? What do we got to lose? There's Cleveland
Heights is right here it's in our backyard let's do let's build a place that we
would want to go hang out you know and no experience whatsoever in beverage or
restaurant or retail I mean you talk about set up to fail like we were like okay
let's give it one year and see how it goes so I put together a business plan it
was like I don't know, 2008, right? None of those days, 2009. (laughing) We went to
the banks, and the banks was like, "Look, Desley, are you crazy?" Like, everybody
sells wine. I mean, you get wine at grocery stores and drug stores, not online.
So nobody wanted to fund us. And long story short, we just decided, "You know what,
we're gonna do this. "We'll self -fund it. "We'll start out small and kind of see
how it goes." and we got very lucky. We looked at a lot of places. We knew we
wanted to be in Cleveland Heights, but that wasn't given. So we're on Lee Road,
we're in what we call the historic Lee Road Business District. It's one of four
major business districts in Cleveland Heights. Lee Road is the largest one,
Cedar Lee Business District. And there's a building in Cleveland Heights on Lee Road
that was egg and hardware store for like 70 years.
And it was the most magical place. Everybody that grew up in the area like grew up
going there as kids with their dad on Saturday afternoons to buy stuff to do home
repair stuff. So everybody had five memory. I certainly came here growing up and the
building became available. Our landlord was perfect, small business owner, wanted
another small business owner and knew we didn't know what we were doing and was
there to kind of help mentor us. And so he was great, he structured the lease in
a manner that kind of made it somewhat safe for us. And that was 11 years ago, we
opened up in December, 2011. And never look back, giving up that corporate job that
paycheck was for me, like jumping off the cliff. Like I've been in a very safe
position for 20 years with young kids at home and going from stability to nothing,
scared that you know what out of me. And I can't imagine what my wife was
thinking, but she's awesome and she supported us. And here we are, 11 years later.
- Yeah, I don't remember where I heard this, but someone had told me that the
journey of entrepreneurship is after you jump off the cliff, it's putting the plane
together on the on the way down. Yeah, now you're in survival mode, right? It's
real. It's like, all right, we did this. There's no going back. I mean, I guess I
could, we could have stopped after a year and gone back to a corporate job. But
man, there was so many great things happening. They were just like, that's give
another year, let's give another year. And suddenly, our lease was up. And like,
what do we do now? Well, it's not a 10 -year lease, you know, so we're obviously
fully committed. There were a lot of things, I'd always worked for public companies,
and they were very good. I would not be here if it wasn't for the military and if
it wasn't for my corporate experience, but there is a lot about corporate life that
I never want to go back to, you know, and also program me for how I wanted to
run my business, you know, and for me, it was about people. So,
you know, taking care of your team and being a community was like at the very top
of our priorities because it's not always like that out there in the cruel world.
No, it is. It's not always just like that at all. Yeah. Take us through a little
bit of what that of what that first year actually looks like, right? When you're
starting it out, you're kind of feeling your way around and in the dark. How do
you piece together what the wine spot ultimately becomes?
- Well, so let me kind of start here and go back. 11 years later,
I have people still to this day, like within the past month come in and say, you
know, we came in when you first opened, and we thought for sure you'd never make
it. We have 4 ,000 square feet. Anybody that's been here knows we have a big
building, and because we had kind of self -funded organically, we had like wine in
the corner, you know, and we were a wine store. So I think people were coming in
saying, "Where is everything?" But listen, Cleveland is an amazing community.
Cleveland Cleveland Heights is amazing community Cleveland loves independent businesses,
and I do strongly believe that we're here because community went out of their way
to support us and So when we opened it was December.
It was a holiday. It's a busy time of year For most retailers and so we had a
little bit of wine and we sold all of it And then we brought more and we keep
and so on, the holidays were great, so much fun, we're back. And then guess what
happened? January came.
January, that's the worst month. And it's snow, and it's cold, and it's gray. So we
went from like the super high to the super low for the first couple of months.
There were days where nobody came in. It was a most stressful and agonizing time.
But, you know, You kind of go with it. Like I said, I knew enough to be
dangerous. So we were marketing Partnering with the community, you know being part of
the broader Cleveland business community was always part of the idea from the
beginning So we just reached out to people. I mean, I look back at some of our
partnerships early on I made a list But you know, we work, you know, we work with
a local coffee Roaster, Russ's Coffee is a Cleveland Roaster to do a wine spot
blend. We did some stuff with brunettes really on before they had their space,
Sausage Son, Clark Pope, we were the first retail location for Clark Pope's products.
So we just hustled, you know, we got an email list going right away.
Within a couple of weeks of opening, we started mailing emails out to people and
doing tastings. We just and whatever we could to get our name out there and just
organically kind of grew it over time. - No, yeah, I love that. In retrospect,
from perspective you have now, like what were the biggest challenges that you had
encountered along the way that you just couldn't have anticipated about this kind of
business, especially different as it was from, you know, your prior experience.
- You think if you build it, they will come, right? I was a wine geek for years
before I put up my wine store as a consumer first, and I would go shop in a wine
store. So I just thought went open the door, like all these wine geeks would just
sort of show up and buy wine from us. And the reality is they already have their
places, right? And so I think that was psychologically, that was a hurdle I to get
over, like it's not going to be easy, you know. And 11 years later, we're still
every day we come in thinking about ways to evolve and get better and make sure
that's part of it. You know, the seasonal variations that we still see is very
real. But for the most part, we knew everybody was selling wine, right?
And so we're just like, if we just do the best we possibly can, every single day,
we'll be okay. And what does that mean? That means being part of the community,
having great service, certainly having great products and we'd spend a lot of time,
we'd taste everything we bring in. We have great relationships with our partners, our
vendors to get the best wines and beers come to the state. But early on, you know,
we were strictly retail and that's a very low margin business. And so it was about
kind of just creating that demand to get people to come in and then And then what
happened was because we had so much space, people would come in and say to us, we
love this spot, but we want to hang out, we want to have a glass of wine, we
want to have a beer here. And so within a couple of years, we actually got a full
liquor license, which we never imagined, but it made sense. There's more margin for
the on -premise business, which is good, it'll help kind of bring some more cash
into the business. And so that was a whole nother part of the business that we
didn't anticipate, had no experience with, that we had to figure out. But we knew
that there were going to be challenges all the time. We just needed to focus on
being really good, the best we can, and just keep pushing forward. What do you find
are the things that you wish people understood about wine that they don't,
you know, the misconceptions people have. Oh, boy. So, that's a whole other
conversation. I was thinking about whether or not I should get into this in our
talk, but not all wine is created equal. Okay. I mean, Geoffrey, do you read the
labels on your food when it grows restored? You know, occasionally. A lot of people
do, they want to know what's in their food. With wine, they'd only have to tell
you like that. The level of alcohol plus or minus one and a half percent, they
have to tell you where it's from and they have to put the certain general warning
on there, but they can't, they don't have to tell you really what's in there. Most
people think like wine is basically a great crush fermented and bottled,
but it's not like that. Wines that you see everywhere, you know, you know their
names, where they're making millions of bottles, It's just like mass produce food,
maybe some factory somewhere, versus the farm to table food that we care so much
about. There's the same thing in wine. There's small family wineries in Ohio,
the United States, all of the world that are still growing their grapes responsibly
and making and the way they had been made for thousands of years, and that's by
crushing, fermenting, and bottling. And so those lines are what we focus on.
They're healthier for you. You feel better in the morning. So I'll leave it that.
I'm not trying to discourage people from drinking wine, but understand it's just
like, it's just like rude. And so if you care about what you put in your body,
and you care about your health and fine, fine wine or wine doesn't have to be
fine, not saying it's expensive. A little bit of research, go to your neighborhood
wine shop, you know, and get to know somebody and they'll turn you on to some,
some great wines, like craft beer, right? Craft beer, craft wine, cocktails, same
idea. Yeah, it was, it was just going to make that that connection actually. Yeah.
So I want to segue a little bit here and I think we can layer on On EO and just
you know go down a little bit of a detour You know both how you got involved with
it, you know at a high level what it is You know we mentioned at the onset EO
has made you know Somewhat of a recurring appearance on the podcast from a few
guests, you know Chris Snyder Aaron Grossman a whole lot and I want to take a
little bit of time to just go over actually what this organization is, and I figure
you'd actually be the best person to explore this detour with. Can we take it in
two parts? One is kind of my journey and how I found it, and then after seven
years, what I can tell you about it? Absolutely. Cool. So after having the store
for a couple of years, my good friend, Dawn Quintana, I don't know if you've ever
been to Quintana's barbershop and Speak Easy. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I have. They're an a
couple, their dear friends of ours, Dawn called me up and she's like, "I just went
through this Goldman Sachs program, 10 ,000 small business program, you should check
it out." Yep, yep. And if Dawn says, "I jump," and so she said, "Do it," and I
went to do it, and the program was amazing. It was at the time 13 weeks, I was
in cohort number five, and that is all about a growth plan, which is basically a
business plan to focus on helping your business and at that point like I said I
kind of leverage everything I do from corporate but as a small business like when
you need help and you need legal help you have to call an attorney you have to
call an account you have to come like they charge you a lot of money so half the
time most of time you don't do it unless it's an emergency yeah and you need
something else so all these other situations. So I kind of tapped out my experience
from the business world and realized like, if we're gonna make a go of this, like
I gotta get into some programs for entrepreneurs. And so we did the Golden Sacks.
Absolutely love the program. And a bunch of the people in my cohort, I became very
close with. And when it ended up, when we ended, like there was nothing,
we're done, right? and I had nothing to go to, which was kind of cool 'cause I
wanted to focus on my growth plan, which we put in place. But after a while, I
felt like I was getting back in the same old habits and I was talking with these
folks in my cohort. And most of them were in this thing called EO, Entrepreneur
Organization. And they kept inviting me out and I just, I'm like, all right, I'll
get to it. After about a year, I'm like, all right, I'm gonna go check this thing
out. And went to what's called a learning day, and I went to that learning day,
and the content was so amazing. I signed up that day. I'm like, I got my value
today. Like, from that one day, I got enough value. I'm like, sign me up here as
a check. I'm gonna check it out. I'm gonna give it a year. And so, that's how I
kind of ended up in EO. I realized if I'm really gonna go at this long term and
really grow and be a better business, I've got to find kind of my tribe. And for
me, because of my experiences on the sex, I realize that these are the people that
I need to be around. So what is EO? EO is Entrepreneur Organization. It's a not
-for -profit organization. It's about 30 years old. There's somewhere around 250
chapters around the world, I think close to 17 ,000 members. And the one thing we
all have in common is, we all are business owners. And so that's the connection,
right? And what I say is, we can talk to our best friends about certain things,
we can talk to people, you can talk to your spouse about certain things. There's
people that you can talk about certain things about, but when it comes to the
business, you don't always want to open up because there's a lot of stuff under
there that's not positive sometimes, you know, and you feel like they can't
necessarily understand where you're coming from, or they can't help you. And in that
case, where do you go to? And this is kind of that group. So EO is really
simplest form an organism is a network of 17 ,000 business owners around the world
that you can pick up the phone and get help from. So there's contact, there's
monthly forums, there's learning events, but it's about that And then I've been in
for seven years. I went through the accelerator program for a year. So Goldman Sachs
accelerator for one year. And then went into EO. I mean, I said I'm in my seventh
year. And like I've been all over the world with EO. I have friends now in EO
that own companies all over the world, certainly all over the country. I talk to
them regularly. And it's been invaluable for me. Because at this point,
there's nothing that happens in my business that doesn't one way or another go
through EO It's just the way it is. In fact, the story I tell is when I first
got in my wife would when something happened at the shop She'd be like, what are
you gonna do now? And now we happen. She's gonna be like, but she's like who in
EO are you gonna call? You know, she she gets it then. I guess I guess it's kind
of nowadays. So Yeah, it seems like the component of EO I find somewhat fascinating
and it's it's not Too dissimilar actually to you know some of my own motivations
for this podcast in the first place and it's you know Kind of through this lens of
to to learn and master The best of what other people have have already figured out
and I think one of the the most surprising things to me about the whole You know
higher higher -level look at businesses is the degree to which everyone's story is
somewhat unique, but how much of the problems are universal. All these companies are
solving very different things, but the crux of the different challenges you have on
the day -to -day, it's a very similar set of problems regardless of what you're
working to solve. Yeah. As a business owner, There's nothing that I haven't dealt
with or will deal with that one of my peers hasn't already dealt with probably
multiple times and whatever scenario they have gone down to get resolution,
like they're willing to share it. I'm amazed by the transparency of EO people.
So I never feel awkward or ashamed to ask somebody like a really stupid question
about how should I handle this or how would you handle this in the past kind of
an experience share and I told Stuart I got to go to a conference in Frankfurt
before COVID and I had dinner with guys from Hong Kong and Dubai and India that
were like B level businesses in EO and they First night we met,
they talked to me and treated me like an equal. We talked about a lot of really,
really open stuff. And how do you get to do that? There's not a lot of ways in
this world to be able to do that anymore. And that's kind of what it offered. If
you Google organizations for entrepreneurs, like EO comes first, it's very interesting
with the broad reach of this kind of global network that people in Cleveland, unless
you've had or to it really don't know about it. I'm fortunate this year I'm the
president of EO. I don't know how I got here, but I'm halfway through the term.
And we did our mid -year town hall yesterday. It was fantastic. We did it at Kota
and Tremont and had a great turnout. And it was just, it was a lot of fun.
We had a great time. It just amazes me how it's kind of the best kept secret for
entrepreneurs in the city. But we're going to change that. Right now, there's about
150 members. We've been around in Cleveland for 23 years, so 30 -year -old
organization. Cleveland's been around for 23 years, so a very strong organization.
Hundreds of people have been through it and have been helped. Like I said, close to
10 % of the folks that you have had on this show are EO members,
So, we're out there, you know? Yeah. No, it's amazing. It does feel like a very,
you know, I don't know intentionally or not, but it sounds like, you know, we can
spread the word, but a good kept secret. The cool thing about it is it's kind of,
you know, being on the board, I've had different positions and now being president,
you know, I've got a board and there's these 150 members and there's an accelerator
group and we have a one -year program. It's kind of overwhelming to think that,
you know, somebody like me running this really small business, this real -time tail
shop can lead a group of people, some of these people have been in the O for 20
years, highly successful, sold companies, you know, multiple times, much more
successful than me to be in this position, but it's been really great, a great way
for me to grow, you know, to be able to kind of lead a team of your peers is
not like leading your team, you know, because these are all leaders.
How do you motivate them to do things is something that's taken a lot of time
trying to preserve those relationships, you know, like we've got stuff to do on the
board. We committed, let's get it done, but at the end we still want to be
friends. And so it's a different Approach then when you've got your team in your
business and how you motivate them because we're all volunteers You know, we're all
on the board. We all pay to be pay to play. We don't get paid to do anything
We're all volunteering but it's it's it's kind of a way to give back But it's been
it's been fun You know my age after all my experience now to be able to still
grow personally and professionally through through the experience Yeah What would have
been in some of those learnings and takeaways in this kind of role. And then to
kind of layer back on the wine spot, how do you think about success respectively in
both of these worlds and the work you're doing? - Yeah, there's some really hard
driving CEOs in EO. If you've done like personality tasks and things like that,
we're definitely different. Their mo's are different and yeah, there's some people out
there. They're just like There's the hill. Let's charge and go get it, you know And
when you're working with them and you're working on a project and they're running a
business and they have a young Family and they have a lot going on like isn't
necessarily the top priorities But listen, we we make these commitments. So how do
we work together like Like I said, to get things done in a timely manner, because
ultimately we want to bring the best value to the membership, because people pay to
be part of EO, and it's our job to develop a program that's a high -impact high
value. So understanding how people are programmed to get things done and then working
with them. There's a personality test, I'm going to give props to is called culture
index. I know there's a lot of them out there. I personally love culture index. I
haven't heard of that one. You have not? It's amazing. It totally pegs you and
there's like 18 different categories of profiles. And so when we did our,
for EO last year, we did our strategic summit, kind of get everybody in your room
together and figure out what we're going to get done this year. The first thing we
did was we had everybody on the board, take the culture index test. And so the
very first day we're together, we had somebody that knows culture index that put us
in the groups of how we, like RMO, like some people are not to get too deep,
but very personal people, right? Very friendly, they're great social people,
they're great sales people, but they can't tie their Tyler Schulitz, right? Because
they've got so many ideas and their decisionaries and you know, what have you. And
there's other people that don't necessarily want to be parked, you know, in the
middle of a crowd, but they love getting things done, you know, they're very
detailed focus. So you have to, it was really helpful for us to understand as a
board together, like who fits into what category based on their role. And so when
we approach things and we ask people to do things or put committees together, we
have a balanced approach of people that are like, go getters, go getters, go getters
with the people that actually get stuff done. And so, you know, that's been, that's
been kind of cool. There's other traits, personality traits tests out there, but I
like culture index. Now, I imagine that's a particularly fun exercise with the,
the cohort of people that you're working with there. Yeah. Yeah. with there. Yeah,
so that was one way that we kind of level set things and kind of minimized any
tension or potential problems down the road with working together. And the reality is
we all have a blast together. We love getting together real good time. Do you find
through EO that there are particular sets of problems that are the most common,
you know, like, and maybe the flip side of that is like, what do you find maybe
is the most extensible company building advice, you know, as it relates to maybe the
most common problems are other things that just constantly come up. Well, I don't
know about that. But I think if you talk to anybody that owns their own business,
the most important thing that we deal with is our team,
you know, because they have their lives, especially coming out of COVID. I mean, the
world is tough enough before COVID. It's crazy right now. And so people are dealing
with a lot of things. And we all, when we get together, talk about just what we're
dealing with personally and professionally and our team members, and how to keep them
in a safe place, in a positive place, keep them motivated to get the job done,
I guess, and so having a balanced approach. When we first started, I saw some
things in corporate America that just made me shake my head about the way people
were treated. I'm sure we've not been perfect, but our number one goal from the
beginning was if we take care of our people, everything else will fall in place,
and it's even more important now is, first and foremost making a decision and as
much as we can in favor of our team, our people, so they're in a good place.
And I think that's probably the main thing that we talk about. And then you've got
everything else, right? Then you've got the marketing growing, how do we get funding,
debt, no debt, real estate, laws, accounting, the list goes on.
- Yes, it is an endless list. - Yeah, it's reliable, that's there too. - Well, I
wanna kind of go back to success from the wine spot perspective and just kind of
ask, what is the kind of impact that you're hoping to have looking back in
retrospect with it and through it? - I'd like to think that we're still here and
growing after 11 years because we're doing the right things. I do thank our
community, Cleveland Heights, and Greater Cleveland, Northeast Ohio for supporting us
going out of their way to support us. I'm hoping that our service that we offer is
great because that's what we strive for. I'm really super proud of what we've done
in the community. And that was really important from the perspective of being part
of the area. So early on, I got on the board of Future Heights. Like the first
thing I did after I opened the business was get on the board of Future Heights,
which is a local nonprofit that advocates for the community and the merchants. And
we did a few things as part of that that are still going on that I'm proud of.
So we created the Heights Music Hop, which hopefully a lot of people have heard
about. It's a music festival that happens every September. We, that thing took a
break for one year during COVID, but I was a co -founder of that, and that's really
great for our area. It brings a lot of people to the community. We started Bitcoin
Boulevard in 2014, which was a crazy experience.
If you want to talk about that, only the second art in the world, behind the Hague
in the Netherlands. And then we started the Cleveland Heights Happy 5K and 10K.
I think we're going into our ninth year. And that brings us funds for the Cleveland
Heights Youth Scholarship Fund. And that's been super successful. So those are things
I look back on that I think in the end I'll be most proud of is And then,
you know, working with schools and the churches and the synagogues and the book
clubs and just, you know, giving people a place to come hang out. Yeah. No, that's
amazing. I think the space is in the community around it. It's important. I'll bite
on the Bitcoin Boulevard. You know, what is that? Never heard it?
No, I actually haven't, but I would love to hear about it. So, a good friend of
ours who lives here in the area, and Nicky Chand, is a technologist and Nicky came
in, I think it must have been 2014, right around the time that we were kind of
getting our legs underneath us and he walks in with another friend who's one of the
council people and he's like, "Hey, I heard of Bitcoin." And he's like,
"Yeah, I've got this idea. There's a thing called Bitcoin Boulevard and the Hague
and there's all these people that have all this Bitcoin money and they have nowhere
to spend it and in the Hague they created the street where there's all these
restaurants and bars and all the merchants take the Bitcoin so people come from all
over because they've got this Bitcoin they want to spend and I know Bitcoin has is
kind of scarred right now with what's happened in the recent press but I at least
heard about it, and the catch was, if you talk to any retailer, one of our biggest
expense is credit card fees. It's thousands of dollars that come out of our bottom
line every month, and we really have no control. I mean, I think our credit card,
our transactions are probably 95 % credit card here. If I didn't take credit cards,
if we were a cash only business, We'd go under in a week. So it's like a
necessarily evil and the credit card companies change your fees all the time it's
impossible to keep an eye on it and What Nikki said was there's these exchanges you
can use that don't charge any money For Bitcoin transactions, you know cryptocurrency
transactions. So you could theoretically do Transactions and not pay any fees.
So in my mind, I'm thinking, this is a small business initiative. Like, why wouldn't
we as a small business want to do this? Right? So there was one thing that, you
know, if you have ever been involved in liquor, liquor licenses, they're very strict.
They're very black and white. You can't interpret liquor laws. You have to follow
them. So there was a little, little gray of there. But what we found out was that,
I don't know how deep you want to go here, but I could talk about this for a
while. Yeah, let's let's go down the rabbit hole. Okay, so we could take with an
app on our phone, a Bitcoin transaction. So Jeffrey, you walk in, you've got a
Bitcoin wallet, it's on your phone. I've got an app that's my exchange. You want to
spend $10 on a bottle of wine, you pull it out of your wallet, you connect it to
my wallet, and we get a transaction, and I'm guaranteed $10 in Bitcoin.
So I can do two things with it. I can either take the Bitcoin as Bitcoin,
or I can convert it immediately to US dollars. And so knowing liberal laws,
And the state hadn't addressed liberal laws yet with cryptocurrency. I set up a
silver account, and we just converted that money into US dollars immediately. So we
never actually took Bitcoin, but people with Bitcoin could come spend it here. And
to me, that was a way to do it safely. In the meantime, I contacted a good friend
who's a state rep, and I'm like, Jeanine, you got to know about this. There is
this thing called Bitcoin cryptocurrency. There's these exchanges like this is if I'm
in politics and I want to be pro small business like I want to get behind this.
And so she took it on. Unfortunately, the state of Ohio ended up after a few
months saying that that they didn't accept cryptocurrency because they were worried
that people they were worried they want you know they want the revenue and if sorry
I have a Yeah, they were thinking somebody comes in and spends their Bitcoin
currency at 2 o 'clock And it's $10 but Bitcoin crashes and the state only gets 30
cents They don't get the revenue what they didn't realize was no they're guaranteed
that money But I didn't want to push it so that's so so eventually we had to we
stopped it Incidentally the day after the state of Ohio ruled that you couldn't use
cryptocurrency for alcohol. The state of Texas released a press release that said,
unlike the state of Ohio, you can use cryptocurrency to buy alcohol in Texas.
But now I got it, you know, I understand we didn't wanna mess with our livelihood,
but we created the second, I think there were 16 businesses on Lee Road that set
up Full of art everything from restaurants to bars to coffee houses the chocolate
here chocolate here Mitchell's chocolate here, and we were getting people in from
Pennsylvania, New York Michigan coming into Leroy, Cleveland Heights to spend their
Bitcoin currency. We were on podcasts We were in Newsweek. We were on South Korean
television. We were on those on -core TVs on court I mean,
it really was very cool. It all happened because of Nicky having this great idea
And I yeah, I do think it is the future But maybe it was just a little bit ahead
of their time. That was super fun But yeah, if you Google Bitcoin Boulevard USA,
you know, it's still out there newsweek. It's still out there articles out there
Fascinating. Yeah
It gives you a sense is kind of the adventure you want adventure, you want to be
on the front end of the sort of, I guess, I don't want to call a risk taking,
but as a small business owner, you really shouldn't sit on the worlds, you know,
you got to make things happen and create things. What has you most excited looking
forward running with that theme? I don't know. Business is good. You know,
I'm having a super fun time with EO. We just, I'll get back We just did something
pretty exciting and didn't mention it. We just signed a lease for the first EO. We
called the EO to think big, be bold space. So we signed up for our very own
dedicated space. It's on Bolivar right by the stadium, Central Cleveland. So the
first time in 23 years, we'll have like a place to go hang out at and have all
our meetings. And so that's pretty exciting. So I think as that gets out in the
community, more people will be aware. So I'm excited about that. I'm excited about
growing my business, maybe another location down the road, but continuing to grow
what we're doing here. And we're just, we're just having fun. We're enjoying the
ride. That's, that's the most important part, right? No, yeah.
Well, I guess as we worked it to close out here, let's kind of
the reflections you have on any of it, you know, from the wine spot to TO, what
do you feel are the most meaningful takeaways that you're carrying with you as you
reflect on the experience so far? - Yeah, I think it's the relationships.
You know, ever since I started down the journey of being an entrepreneur, I've met
so many people that have done so make cool things I never ever ever imagined. It
is without a doubt a second chapter in my life and so that's been the biggest
surprise that I didn't anticipate and the most fun I've got like lifelong friends
now that didn't have 11 years ago and a lot of them you know so I kind of
cherish that. I mean certainly wouldn't be doing this if it wasn't for - Yeah, I
can know you wouldn't want to have me on. I had no story, so that's been fun.
So yeah, I think it's just the relationships. It's all about the people, right? The
relationships in life that you make. - Yep, it's all about people having fun along
the way. - Yeah, yeah. When you're on a live story, there's a lot of fun involved.
There's no stress, you know? There's no suits anymore. I wear t -shirts to work.
People come in. - Yeah, so - That's nice. - It's the coolest thing, like where we
are, it's a really cool mixed community, right? We've got the museums nearby, we've
got the hospitals, we've got the colleges. Our customer base is so diverse,
but everybody that comes in, they come in happy and they leave happier. Like,
you know, it's a good place to be, making people happy. Like we like to say we
are people's happy happy place, like you never know what has happened to a person
before they walk in the door, right? And that's what we talk about as a team, like
it could be somebody having the worst day at work, it could be the wife at home
that has three young kids, hasn't slept in days, they got a call from their spouse,
their partner saying, "Hey, I'm bringing some business So see it's home for dinner,
can you get a bottle of wine? Like people could be in a really bad state. So when
they walk in that door, it could be the highlight of their day, you know, coming
in here. That could be the one thing they look forward to. And so A, we got to
make them feel comfortable and welcome and make sure that they're treated right
because everybody leaves happy. - I love that, that's great. I'll have to come by a
little bit more frequently. You're always welcome. Awesome. Well, I'll close it out
here with our traditional closing question, which is for not necessarily your favorite
thing in Cleveland, but for something that other folks may not know about, that
perhaps they should. Well, I certainly thought about this, the other things I could
have talked about, but I was a lifelong runner, And as you get older, it's tougher
and tougher to run. So I switched over to mountain biking a few years ago. I think
one of the most special things about Cleveland is all the amazing mountain biking
trails we have, you know, the Metro Parks, that is just an amazing escape,
that you can be in the middle of nowhere on this bike, regardless of your level of
expertise. You don't have to be a super technical rider. You can just go for this
ride and just get away for an hour or two, get some great exercise, be out in the
open. And the fact that every year there's more and more of these beautiful trails
and Cleveland, like to me, everybody should be taking advantage of it. I know a lot
of people hike in the Metro Parks and would have you, but for me, that's pretty
special. - Do you have a favorite trail? - You know, Bedford is a great trail
because it's not very technical, but man, do the whole Bedford Trail. You have got
a great workout, a great workout. I've done marathons, I've done half marathons. You
can spend an hour on a mountain bike, or not even half hour on a mountain bike,
and feel like you've done a marathon. So Bedford is a little bit of everything in
that it's got some twists and turns, but you can just have a really Great ride for
a long time there Sounds awesome. Yeah to check it out. Well, Adam. I really
appreciate, you know, you coming on and sharing a little bit about yourself and and
the wine spot and yo, and so thank you Thank you, Jeff. I'm such a so grateful to
have an opportunity to talk with you and meet you and We'd love to host you here
one day. You get a chance I look forward to it. If people had anything they wanted
to follow up with you about, you know, read the Wine Spot, about entrepreneurs'
organization, anything else, you know, what would be the best way for them to do
so? I'm easy to reach. My email is adam @thewinespotonline .com.
We'd love to hear from you, especially if you own a business and you want to hear
to you. Cool. Well, thank you again. Good to talk to you, Jeffrey. You have a
wonderful day, wonderful weekend.