Episode 127 - Burnout, Barrooms, & Breaking Barriers: Chris Montana’s Path to Disrupting an Industry
#127 | Chris Montana | Du Nord Social Spirits | Burnout, Barrooms, & Breaking Barriers: Chris Montana’s Path to Disrupting an Industry
In this episode of The Curious Builder, Mark Williams chats with Chris Montana from Du Nord Social Spirits about his journey from being a lawyer to running Minnesota’s first micro-distillery. Chris opens up about the importance of work-life balance (especially after having two strokes!), why building a business with community and purpose matters, and how Du Nord’s story and branding evolved. It's an honest and inspiring convo about hustling smart, making a difference, and helping others see themselves as future business owners.
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About Chris Montana
Chris Montana is a husband, dad to three boys, and way into 90s music. He is a former English major who grew up in Minnesota with a love for hockey, rugby, Prince, and amateur meteorology. He worked as a congressional aide and as an attorney before his passion for science paired with a desire to create an inclusive, welcoming space took over, and he founded Du Nord Social Spirits. He is the former President of the American Craft Spirits Association, founding member of the STEPUP Foundation, and currently sits on a number of boards including his alma mater, Mitchell Hamline School of Law. He enjoys baking impractical cakes and spending time with his wife, Shanelle.
Resources:
Visit Du Nord Social Spirits’ Website
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Christopher Montana 00:04
We've got to do something long term about getting these communities to see themselves as part of the business community. I come from a political background and my understanding, but my understanding of what makes a society run are three legs of a stool. There's a business community, there's the people and there's government, and anytime two of them agree on something, stuff happens.
Mark D. Williams 00:31
Today in the podcast, we had Chris Montana in from do Nord social spirits and amazing episode, a little different tact. I wanted to go with a story here, and right out of the gate, we talk about balance and working. And Chris had two strokes by the time he was like 32 because he was working too hard. And if you've been listening to the podcast for a while, you know how much we talk about wellness and trying to get balance. I think this one's gonna touch the heart and hopefully inspire everyone to take a look at their business and see what they can do to have a better life and to run a great business. Without further ado, here's Chris Montana. Welcome to curious builder Podcast. I'm Mark Williams, your host today, I've got Chris Montana on in Minneapolis for du Nord. Social spirits. Welcome to the show, Chris. It's
Christopher Montana 01:15
good to be here. Thanks. Thanks for having me. Yeah. So you're
Mark D. Williams 01:19
kind of a unique flavor. I mean, I just love entrepreneurial stories, as those that listen to podcasts would know, and yours is really unique. We had a mutual friend. I'm blanking on who even it was that reached out to us. It might even been your PR team A while back, because, you know, obviously your company is outside of our normal demographic of architect, designer and builder, but I just think that there's so much in your story that I want to dive into, specifically your branding. If you haven't been to this website, we'll have it in the show notes. Your your website, and I love a good quote. I mean, I ran out of room on my notepad because you have like, 50 quotes. I'm gonna have to make an episode just on quotes. You have just some baller quotes. And anyway, we'll dive all into that later the episode. Why don't you give the audience a little introduction of who you are, where you came from, and we'll just talk in a little bit of, you know, how do Nord started, and kind of your evolution of where you where you're at now,
Christopher Montana 02:12
yeah, absolutely. And this, I just backing up to a comment you just said, I also, I went to your website, and I was looking through and I was like, Yeah, I might be a different flavor for this crowd, because I, you know, I don't have, I'm not an architect. I don't, I don't build buildings. I've been involved in some development, but really, I have, I have a somewhat winding path, which is fairly typical for distillery owners, or at least distillery owners of my generation. You know, I've done a lot of things from, I suppose, I worked at a Jimmy John's once, but I also I had a brief career in electoral politics. I worked on some campaigns, ran some field operations. I worked in DC for a little while as a legislative aide. I was an attorney for a period of time, and there's a lot of ex lawyers who are making booze these days.
Mark D. Williams 02:59
Reasons for that. That's so funny. You said that weird. I had, I've had my lawyer on a few times, and we were talking about, like, different connotations of, you know, like a builder, and we were talking about stereotypes for builders, and he's like, Yeah, have you ever seen a movie where a lawyer wasn't in a bar? Like, the stereotype of alcohol and lawyers is such a strong correlation. And anyway, you were a lawyer, and, you know, now you have on a distillery, you took it
Christopher Montana 03:23
to, things overlapped for me, yeah. And it is a true and sad fact that lawyers have an extremely high rate of chemical dependency. And, you know, alcohols in that, in that group, but you know, the same time when I was, you know, when I first started, I'm, you know, I'm in a large law firm, is great firm, but I didn't see myself having the kind of life that I that I really wanted. I went to a guy's retirement party. I'm a young associate, right? And so you're just trying to rub elbows with with other attorneys who might give you work. And so I went to a guy's retirement party. I didn't know the guy from from a boot but, and the his quote, speaking of quotes, that stuck with me, is that he finally had time to spend with his daughters. His daughters were in the room and were in their 30s with kids. And, you know, I had kind of an interesting childhood. So I didn't really get a dad till I was adopted at 14. And so the idea of and I had a young son at that point, just one at that point, three now, but the idea of working in a career that wouldn't allow me to really be the kind of present dad that I wanted to be, until my kids were in there, until they were parents themselves, that just didn't sit well with me. And so I was looking for something else that I could do, not where I could work less, because that certainly is not the path but but where I could control my my calendar, and I was already a booze nerd, right? Like I brewed beer. I was a fastidious Brewer. I had a guy in law school who brewed with me once, and he said it was a worse experience. Experience he ever had brewing with anyone. Because I'm, I was that guy where, like, if you drop a spoon, I'm like, that spoon will never come near my anything again. It's like, it needs to be clean, sanitized, you know, dried, like, all that stuff. And he was more into the magic of booze. I wasn't. I was into the science of it, and that's just what tickled me. And so it just kind of made sense that, you know, whiskey is what beer wants to be when it grows up. And so I was like, why not? No one was really doing it. So in Minnesota at the time, we were way behind because we had really bad laws. And so the rest of the country was craft distilleries were kicking off, and we we didn't have that. Well, that got changed by a piece of legislation that Minnesotans know as the surly bill, but it actually had a piece in there that opened up the door for micro distilleries and lowered our fee, our annual fee, from $30,000 to a grand. And that's what really kicked the door open. And the last piece is the longer answer than you wanted, but the last piece that really let me go forward with it, because I have ideas all the time, and I'm always I'm the risk taker of the relationship. My wife is the one with sense, and she usually says no. She said yes. And I think part of the reason why she said yes is because this was the distillery, was a place where we could join our backgrounds. You know, I'm a city boy who, you know, nerds out on glycosidic bonds, and, you know, whatever. And she's a country girl, and this was a literal opportunity to bring those two worlds together, where you could use corn from her farm bring it into the city, or at least the farm she grew up on. So my father in law was my farmer, to bring that into the city and really physically connect those two pieces. And so much to her detriment, I think over the, you know, subsequent 12 years, she said yes, and so I left the best job that had ever paid me. Eventually, I worked both for a while, but and did this.
Mark D. Williams 06:52
I mean, I there's so many parts of that story. I mean, the first part is, I assume just reading, I read a little about your wife's bio too. You guys probably met at Hamline. Would be my guess. You guys were both at law school there or no no so
Christopher Montana 07:03
she was. We both ended up going to Hamlin, but I was at the University of Minnesota. Though my time at the U of M was mostly spent having fun, very little school involved. I would eventually graduate from the University of DC after I was working as a congressional head. So technically, from start to finish, took me nine years to get my undergrad. But it's neither here
Mark D. Williams 07:23
nor there, extended study. Yeah,
Christopher Montana 07:24
exactly she was. She did her undergrad at Hamline. And, you know, my wife is like, has the resume, like the perfect resume. She was, you know, was it class president, all of that, right? She was the student in undergrad that I absolutely was not. But after she graduated from there, went to American University and got her Master's in Public Policy, then I finally realized, okay, I need to get my act together. I need to actually get a degree. So I got my degree at University of DC, and then came back to Minnesota to go to Hamlin for law school. So thankfully, there's only one lawyer in the house, very few households with two work out,
Mark D. Williams 08:02
right? That's interesting. So, I mean, imagine in arguments, regardless of who the lawyer is, the wife probably wins.
Christopher Montana 08:08
Well, that's kind of the rule. And it's, it probably would be good. And I, you know, you hear that, and it's somewhat, you know, it's obviously patronizing, but, but I never really taken it to heart. I think that's one of the best things about my wife, is she didn't really want to push over and neither did I. And so no, a lot of our friends are like, we don't understand how the two of you work. We're like, Yeah, this is the only way that anything ever could have worked for us. Because if you, if you read up on her bio, on Chanel, Montana's bio, she's a Chief Development Officer for a renewable energy company is putting up billions of dollars worth of renewable energy across the country, and she's worked over, she's overseas, she's here. She's a lot cooler than I am. So your audience, I'm sorry, but you got me.
Mark D. Williams 08:56
I think, I think they'll do just fine there. I was gonna say I used, I've used this analogy a lot like as being a builder, I was remodeling our own personal home, and we got into a decision where my wife, there was the these sconces, and I'd never weigh in. And I said, Hey, honey, I think would you like my opinion? I said, People pay me for my opinion. She goes, I'm not paying you. That was like, Well, fair point. That's actually touche. I did not see that one coming. One of the questions I had was, you know, I want to go back to the beginning, when you said you realized so you had, you had a young child at the time. How old were you when you realized that the path of, you know, of of working, and where I'm going with this is, I've talked a lot about wellness, and I think wellness takes on a lot of different factors. I think wellness, you know, what your food, what you eat, what you drink, how you exercise. But like life, your My favorite quote last year is boundaries create freedom. And I think there's certain boundaries in our life, depending on what's important to you. Everyone has their own value system, but you know clearly for you, it was, I don't want to be, I don't want I don't want to be 50 or 60 or however old I am. And then finally, have time to spend with my 30 year old daughters, like or son or however old, would you but was it a son at the. Time you said, yeah, yeah. So how old were you when that, when that, when that dawned on
Christopher Montana 10:06
you? I was about 3029, 30.
Mark D. Williams 10:09
Okay. I mean, I asked for perspective, just because I think that's, I mean, you're pretty young to realize that, honestly, because a lot of people are in their 40s and 50s before they realize it, or maybe they never do. And so I think it's an important message as business owners, you know, it's pretty easy when you love your job, or you get kind of into the grind. Because sometimes I feel like when you start your own business, and I'd love to hear kind of why, you know, as you go down this to do Nord, and we'll go through that next. But you know, it's like for myself, it's easy to work. It's not hard to work. I love what I do, and so the hard part is setting a boundary of when to stop. And I came up with this analogy yesterday. I was talking to another builder, and he has a hard time stopping, and his daughter actually wrote him a letter and put it on the garage. And he came home late one night, and you can imagine, I said, Dad, how this hits you. And the letter was on the garage, and it said, Dad, when can I schedule time to get on your schedule? I'm just about broke my heart listening to it. And you know, there were some tears in the interview, and it was really real and raw, and I really appreciated his authenticity and just vulnerability and sharing that story and and just because it's so easy to sort of get lost in the daily grind, and you know, you've got your anvil and you're hitting it, but you know you got to set the hammer down, because the anvil is going to be there tomorrow, but like, your kids need you today. And I just think it's an important message that I know I need, and so I keep on trying to share that story, because I just feel like I constantly need a reminder. After that kind of epiphany hit you when you're 30 with your son, walk us through, like, when and your wife said, Yes, walk us through those couple years of, okay, I'm going to start a distillery. Like, how does one do that you mentioned, like, a build out. Like, did you buy a building? Did you start in your basement? Like, walk us through those first couple years, because you've been in business now for about 12
Christopher Montana 11:46
years? Is that right? Yeah, that's right. And, and I at the at the risk of not answering the question you just asked, it jogs my memory, as you're talking about the wellness side, because my own kind of personal journey through both career and just figuring out what kind of business owner, and then later what kind of employer I was going to be, are largely informed by getting the wellness side wrong and and I won't you know this is probably not what your audience is looking for, but I'll just give you kind of the Reader's Digest version of this. I mentioned before that I worked on campaigns, and in the last campaign that I worked on, I was putting in towards the end. I mean, they're 20 hour days, and I was, you know, you sleep at the desk, you eat whatever you can. There's a bunch of cranberry sauce. It was on clearance, and I bought several flats of it, and I had cans of it underneath my desk. And I ate cranberry sauce for weeks because I could. I had a I had a can opener there because I did not leave my desk like I was constantly working, constantly working. And in my head, you know, I've always, at that point in my life, I said, The X Factor with me is that I'll, I'll work anybody, right? And so we're going to win this thing, because I'm not going to get beat and so, and we did win it, right? And I'm very proud of that, but it had a cost. Right after that, when I went out to DC at 23 years old, I had a stroke and was in the hospital, could hardly speak, couldn't walk, couldn't hold a glass of water. And my girlfriend at the time who would later become my wife, you know, had to watch that happen, and it was terrifying. And through all of the tests in the world, the only thing that ever came back was, you know, this is how your body reacted to that stress, so you need to keep that in mind. Well, I didn't fully learn that lesson when I opened the distillery. I again, I, you know, now it's almost a joke around our house, but I told my wife at the beginning of it, I was like, I need five hard years. So give me five hard years, like, let me put this in, and then it will, it will get better. But I need, I know I need five hard years. And the distillery is as old as our oldest son. So at two years in to that we were expanding from not just having the distillery, but also adding in a cocktail room, which wasn't legal up until that point, we actually changed it. That's my wife actually is the one who changed it and lobbied for that. And I had stroke number two, because I was in there working, and now I had, you know, a guy who was going to come on and help run the bar, and my wife was also there for that and saw that. And now I'm off to the hospital again. Now I can walk, talk, play, rugby, all those types of things. And so I'm a very lucky guy. But I've come and I've had enough doctors tell me how close I was to not being on this earth anymore that I realized that, you know, and eventually the second one kind of got the message through that it just isn't worth it, right? And the kind of dad that I wanted to be is why I left law so I could be present. But if in doing that, I was going to work myself to death, then that really wasn't going to make any any sense at all. And so each of those, you know. One of the reasons why I changed my career path in the first place, from politics and all that was, I was like, No, I need to work in a less stressful situation. And then I said, What's less stressful? Well, being an attorney, of course. And then from there to being an entrepreneur. And then again, I got so after that second one, that's when said, Ian, there needs to be some limits. And the the last kind of, the third, the third strike was That was when my kid was getting old enough to know I wasn't there at as a baby, he didn't really care about me, right? He wanted mom. And he would kind of stay that way until he was about seven, but, but he didn't even know if I was home or not. But when I was coming home, and he would come screaming, you know, daddy, like he knows I'm not there. And so if you put the health pieces together, along with just the family and life piece, that's what really got me to say. You wanna know what? Yeah, I could do all of this, but I probably could hire some people too, and all the roads don't need to go through. Me, I probably need to let go of some of these things. And like many entrepreneurs, you think that you're the only one who can do it right. And once you get to that point where you can release the reins a little bit, you come to find out that if you work with really cool people right, that they are better than you. And really the collective is what your job is to build. You're trying to build that team. And so now that's what I do, is I just try to work on building the team, because the team is better than I ever was by myself. But that, that is not the question that you answered, but but the wellness side, I think is really important, because I think people can work themselves into an early grade. It's not hard to do.
Mark D. Williams 16:39
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Christopher Montana 20:30
Yeah, so the, it's funny, you mentioned the agency, and for whatever reason, the there's a group that we work with in Minnesota, and their name is escaping me, and I hope that I remember
Speaker 1 20:39
you talk about it, because they were
Christopher Montana 20:41
great, but actually my in house team was really the ones driving it, but so the we did business and fast forward, right? So rookie entrepreneur had no idea what the heck we were doing. We're we knew that it was a new industry to the area, and we knew that we didn't have enough money to do it. And so what could possibly go wrong? So I had the idea in February of 2013 and really it was fed to me. I was in a agricultural law class, and one of my buddies I was talking about this brewery I wanted to start up. And at that point, there was a brewery opening up every other weekend. He was like, you're thinking the wrong way, man, what about a distillery? It's like good idea. And by August, I had a lease on a place and was buying equipment. And, you know, it so in between there, by the way, I had to pass the bar, so graduated law school, immediately went on a road trip, went to every distillery that I could between here, and basically take i 94 West and so I, you know, hit everything I could, saw lots of and it was great for me, because I saw everyone's eventually getting to this bottle that has a spirit in it, but the path that they're using to get there was disparate. There was all over the place. People had very fancy setups. People had, you know, stuff you'd see on, like moonshiners. And I could one of the most refreshing things, because I knew I wasn't going to have a fancy setup, is that the quality didn't really depend on how much money you spent. It was about how much care you took. And that was, again, going back to, I won't be out work that that I thought was going to be my x factor. So I went to a lot of distilleries, saw a lot of different ways to do it, met a few people that would later be, you know, suppliers of mine that would help me build stills and put things together and tried to raise money, which didn't really work out. We, you know, a lot of people hadn't really, had no idea what our industry was about. And, you know, every step of the way was excruciating, from permitting to finance everything. We never really were able to raise that much money. And I don't come from money. My wife comes from a farm, which farmers are asset rich but cash poor, so we didn't have any money to do it. So all I could get was $60,000 from our eventual landlord, Seward redesign. Now they're just called redesign. That was through a city program, a 2% loan program, and 60k is not enough to start a distillery. It wasn't enough to start a distillery, then it's not enough. Now, to put that into context, I think the next cheapest distillery that opened at that time was something like a half million dollars. And I'd say a half million dollars isn't enough to open up a distillery.
Mark D. Williams 23:17
Are they? Are they still around the other one?
Christopher Montana 23:19
No, actually, I don't think they are, but we had 60 grand and a lot of arrogance, and so use that 60 grand to buy equipment. And I was just like, yeah, that's no big deal. I'll just work two jobs. And so when we started off, one of our early pictures is of me with a Baby Bjorn with my son, Eli, in it, while I'm standing next to our first still. And, yeah, I was lawyer Chris during the day, and I'd have my suit and everything. And you know, then I was distiller Chris at night, and the distillery was once. I was in my car. The distillery was eight minutes away from from the office, and so I can if I knew a delivery was coming. I ditched my jacket. I have a pair of coveralls, like right inside the garage door, and so I could roll up there, put the coveralls on so my suit pants wouldn't get wrecked. I could take a delivery, right and then get back to the office, and pretty quick, that wasn't going to be sustainable at all working, you know, six until seven as an attorney, and then seven until six. Distiller distilling at night, I actually got used out of extra those baby monitors. I would set the baby monitors up because I had a couch in the distillery that I would sleep on. And I would set the baby monitors up to face the control panel of this map, and I could look, just look over at a monitor to see make sure my temperatures were in the right zones. So yeah, did that for quite a while again. Hadn't quite learned that lesson from stroke number one, and yeah, just kind of grinded out until I reached that point where I realized there isn't, I can't have. One foot out right? At least for me, I thought if I want this to really work, I need to be more scared than I am if the distillery didn't work out, I'm still an attorney. I just walk away from it and it's no big deal. And I felt like that was kind of holding me back. At the same time, I lesson I couldn't see my future in the law in the same way, and that was weighing more and more and more on me. And so eventually, about a year in, said, Nope, I'm gonna walk away from the best job I've ever had, right? This is a kid who grew up eating government cheese, right? So I was making six figures. So this is a big damn deal, and most of the credit now I'm the risk taker. Most of the credit for that actually goes to my wife, because she's the one who said, Okay, and so she's she okayed it, and I walked away from law and came into seller full time. You
Mark D. Williams 25:55
know, it's gonna be interesting. I should ask this question more, because what you what you just shared. I think I shouldn't say every but I would imagine that most entrepreneurs at some point face a you call an all in moment. Excuse me, Ian, I'm thinking about the conquistadors when they come over from, you know, Europe to South America, right? Famously, they they burned all the ships so that no one could have the idea that they could return. The only path was forward. And for my own career, I won't go into it now, like in 2008 nine and 10, when it was really bad for builders in general, I remember when the trapeze net was sort of taken away from me, and it was really at that point in time that I thrived, because I, you know, failure does some interesting things, or I should say, the thought of failure. First of all, I think failure is sort of a construct. We're doing a series right now on Thursdays that losers are winners, because I'm convinced that you can't really win unless you fail. It's all part of the process, and we keep going through it again. It's a it's a human thing. I don't even think it's an entrepreneurial thing. I think it's just part of life. And so the sooner we sort of realize that failure is just the next building block to success. You know, I'm not gonna say you start looking forward to failures, but you start pushing those boundaries. You start pushing yourself in a different way. I have a friend of mine who used to say that when people fail, his response was good. Now you can get up and do it again and inspire some people, including yourself. And I always found that, really, I didn't understand it at the time. This was a long time ago, and I was like, now, when I think of him saying that, I'm like, Oh, wow, that was pretty prophetic at the time. So I can definitely, I definitely resonates when you say, like, Hey, I'm all in now. So when you're all in one of the you know, everyone needs sales, regardless of what you're doing. Someone needs to pay you for your time. Who were you selling to at that time? Or what was the market like?
Christopher Montana 27:37
Well, at the very beginning. So go back to 2013 the laws were such that the only people you could sell to were distributors. So we have a very highly regulated industry. And I don't expect that that your listeners are going to be that familiar with a three tier system, but the short version of it is that post prohibition and kind of a somewhat like an antitrust type of a piece of legislation is not federal, but it's state by state. Every state instituted some version of what we now call a three tier system, and three tiers are production, distribution and retail. So if you're in one of those tiers, you can't be in another one. So if you own a so I'm on the production side, so as a producer, I can't also distribute my product. So I can't take it to a retailer, right? That's a distribution function. I have to sell to a distributor. And then a retailer is anyone who sells to someone who doesn't have a license, so a bar, liquor store, what have you. So when we first started that hadn't been eroded at all, as I'm describing, that people might be thinking, Well, I've been to a cocktail room, or I've been to a brewery tap room. Well, those are all erosions of the three tier system. But like any law changes, there needs to be a constituency behind it. We were in the first wave of distilleries. There were no distilleries when we started up. There was no one to get that law change. And so all we could do, we could serve 315, milliliter samples, and we could sell to a distributor. That's it. So those first years that our customer base, it actually exploded, because there was no craft vodka in state of Minnesota, no one had ever made one before. And so we suddenly had all these accounts, and we had a distributor. We've taken 400 accounts, but I was the sales guy, the janitor, the distiller. I was guy who ground the corn. I, you know, put the labels on. We would have people come over and do like bottling parties, which we were late, later found out were illegal, but I didn't, there's no way that I could get to all of those accounts. And so we learned the lesson that, you know, originally thinking, hey, so many accounts, this is a great thing. It's like, no, it actually isn't right. And what we did is we came out of the gate and we suddenly, in my. Been so big, and then we immediately contracted because we couldn't support them. And it's like most industries, it's about relationships. And if you get in front of people and build those relationships, and you're gonna lose them. And I couldn't get in front of people and also be the distiller and also be the lawyer and, you know, try to be a dad on the side.
Mark D. Williams 30:19
How? So those first five years, did it? Did it take? So you had the So, where in the continuum, here are you, where you had, you know, this five years that you needed, and then the stroke.
Christopher Montana 30:32
You know, the stroke was two years,
Mark D. Williams 30:33
oh, the stroke was two years in. So you did in the
Christopher Montana 30:36
first year. That's when we first came out of the game. You know, we're getting these accounts. I hadn't reached that point yet during this time, by the way, we're lobbying constantly and also trying to create the Minnesota distillers guild. There were about five of us at the time, and my wife and I, and my wife was the first president of the distillers Guild, and really it was just herding the cast to try to get some positive legislation passed. So she's up lobbying. And if she's lobbying, then either I'm distilling with a kid strapped to me, or she was going up and lobbying with a kid strapped to her. We actually have a picture of one of our early tastings, and there she is with little Eli strapped to her, pouring vodka for people, right? So, yeah, this is, this is at that early stage and what we were trying to get to, because we realized really quickly that there's we had no chance of breaking through the marketing that's out there for spirits. There we were, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny. And we're fighting against giants, the Tito's, the gray gooses, all of those companies that people actually know the name of, and so winning on the shelf was going to be a slog, and particularly when you didn't have any sales staff, and we weren't making enough money to hire any sales staff. So we're kind of in this spot where, how do you move forward? The cocktail room was the saving grace, and so we were working very hard to get that cocktail room which would allow us to serve cocktails in our own facility, only with spirits that we made. But still, that's that's retail money. So when you see a bottle of spirits that we just use round numbers, it's sitting on the shelf. If that bottle costs $30 the actual money that the distiller is going to make is probably less than five. Most of the money along the way is going to the other tiers, because, remember, we're required by law to sell to a distributor. They then are going to add their markup to it, and then they're going to pass it along to a retailer who has to have their markup to it. So by the time it gets to a consumer, it's usually around twice the cost that we sold it for, but we had to make it. And so we have all the cost of goods. We have everything else wrapped into that
Mark D. Williams 32:40
bottle. Now I'm just so interested, and I understand a lot of this maybe doesn't make sense, because, as an entrepreneur now, it's like, Wait, this is a crazy law. I understand it was some prohibition. What was the go back for a second, like, use your law mind, like, educate the audience. Like, what was the point? Why did they have it in three tiers? Was it to fracture, you know, in the 1920s and 30s and during Prohibition? Like, what was the point of having these three different things? Because I'm thinking like, what if, like, a builder, you know, I'm just trying to relate it to my own industry, right? Like, you know, if you just had to do all these things to actually build a house, it just makes building a house so much more difficult, and i e more expensive, and it just becomes difficult. Was it deliberately meant to suppress the industry?
Christopher Montana 33:20
Well, it would later have the effect of suppressing the industry, but originally it probably had the reverse effect. So the the basis of the three tier system is what existed before, which was what we would now call a tide house. And a tide house was a if you had a brewer who also owned the retailer and for people who are in our distilleries in Minnesota, they're all of the old bars that existed in Minnesota were all tied houses, like something close to 100% of them. And so if I own brewery a and I also own the the bar that is selling my beer, I have no incentive to allow in brewery B, and so brewery B now has to open up their bar. And so that's what you would get. There still is one that carries the name that is in downtown Ian. I don't know if it's still there, actually, now that I think of it, but there used to be one called Glicks, right? Well, Glicks was both the brewery and it was the bar, right? But all of the bars were like that, and so you were either the bar for this brewery or for that brewery. And there were a lot of breweries, but because of the tide house, there was no way to break in. So if you were a new brand coming into the market, you had nowhere to sell, because there is no retail opportunity for you. So what the three tier system was designed to do was to try to break that apart so that way the producers couldn't also own the retail arm, the distribution side of it. And why that's in there? I think there. There are a number of reasons for it. Yeah, but what I will tell you is that all of the major distributors everywhere are all family owned businesses, and many of them know some things or have rubbed some elbows with organized crime, and so you weren't going to get rid of that. And so they still had to exist. The teamsters union was also very powerful, right? And so they wanted come from, wanted certainty that they wouldn't be cut out of this deal. And so now you've got tier one, two and three. The distributors can't be eliminated, right? By law in every single state, there are little pieces that have been moved here and there, but it's to keep it from being harmonized and then forcing out small brands. Now that made a lot of sense for a period of time, but as soon as craft came onto the scene, you have this fragmentation on the producer side. And those producers, because you think of a small producer, they don't have the money to run the trucks, right? It doesn't it doesn't make any sense. They don't have enough places to go. I jokingly, when I would talk with the Teamsters and we were trying to get things done, I say, Listen, I don't want to start a trucking company. I have how many clients? It doesn't make any sense. I'd be driving a truck across town to go to one place and then driving it right back across town to go to one other place. You guys have the market cornered on that. I don't want that. It doesn't make any sense. But if someone walks into my shop, I do want to fail to sell them a bottle right, to let me get my legs underneath. That's when it started to suppress industry. And that was just wasn't anything that was foreseen in the 1920s when they put in Thank
Mark D. Williams 36:39
you. That's, I mean, it's just really interesting. I'm kind of fascinated by it. This episode is brought to you by Pella windows and doors. I've used Pella for 21 years as the exclusive window company on every one of my builds. When people ask me who I trust for windows and doors, it's Pella every time. Their craftsmanship, their innovation, the top tier service, make them a no brainer for any custom home builder or designer who demand the best, whether you're designing something bold or building something with timeless elegance, Pella has you covered. They're also the only window company that has a lifetime warranty on all of their windows. I've gotten to know all their people at Pella corporate, as well as locally. Here at Pella Northland, I'm proud to call them our partners and our friends. Visit pella.com to learn more and connect with your local reps today for more information, you can also listen to episode one, where I interview the Pella Northland founders, as well as episode 109 where we talk all about their latest innovation with the steady set window. For those that have been listening to curious builder podcast, you know how much I love the contractor coalition Summit. It's been the single biggest force multiplier in my business over 21 years. We're excited to announce again that we're coming back to Chicago November 7 through the 10th. All the details can be found at the contractor coalition summit.com and under the promo code for a $2,500 discount type in curious builder. We'll see you in Chicago. One thing that I'd like to maybe shift a little bit to branding, just because your stuff is just so top notch. Color obviously pops out. The quotes pop out. And lately, I've been obsessed with storytelling and branding and knowing your why. Simon Sinek made it pretty well known with his book know your why. But I was just reading one of your quotes that said distilling is a is a thing down to its very essence. That's your why. Distilling, literally, is your why. I just think that's kind of an interesting parallel to, you know, what you're doing. You're distilling things down. I mean the word, and you've obviously made a, you know, a drink out of it. And it's a process. One, when did you realize, or how did you go through the process of knowing what your brand was like. Was do Nord like? When did the name come along, and when did the graphics and the color and sort of the story that it embodies sort of take a level up where the story itself was selling your product? Yeah,
Christopher Montana 38:54
it's, again, there's kind of a theme here, but we, I think we're doing it right, or much closer to right now. And we're doing that because we did it wrong before the the name. So starting at the name because that one, I think we actually sort of got right when we started the company, my wife and I kicking around names, different things we could call it. Actually one of the names in the running was North Star, but we ended up abandoning that because of the North Star bartenders guild. And we thought that was, you know, probably not. And every other thing in the state is called North Star, but we knew that we were going to have a marketing challenge on our hands, right? We were underfunded. We had no our bottles, our original bottles, the labels, everything, all the design, we spent $600 we had. So we knew this was going to be a challenge, and we thought, well, one of our X factors is none of the other brands that people know are made in Minnesota, and so we need to come up with a name that people in Minnesota are going to know so that way they can say that is a local brand. And I want to support. Local brand. We were relying heavily. That's where we rolled the dice, is people are going to support a local brand. So in coming up with a name, we tried to come up with something that was just quintessentially Minnesotan. And we thought, what is more Minnesotan than the actual state motto of Minnesota, which is litual denorg. And so our first product was called La 12. So our first vodka called La 12, and we named the company du Nord, thinking that people will be like, Oh, du Nord. Lat, state motto. Fun fact in Minnesota and everywhere else, no one knows their state model, that initial gamble of this will make us more Minnesotan very much backfired. People thought that it was a foreign thing. They thought that it was French. They thought, well, maybe this is a Canadian thing, right? Maybe it's, you know, from Quebec, or something like that. They couldn't pronounce it, let's wall. No one could pronounce the toilet. So it didn't really work. But now, even even after going through a rebrand, we held on to the north because we wanted to, we wanted to keep that that route back to Minnesota, but we did have to go through a rebrand, because the other thing that we thought when we were starting off is like, wow, we're What does a What does a distillery label look like? And you have the advantage now I've seen what our labels look like today, but if you search enough, you'll find what they used to look like, which was this somewhat plain white label over a very tall bottle and tall bottle, so that way it wouldn't fit on the middle shelf, so that way people would
Mark D. Williams 41:34
have to put it on the top. Oh, that's a that's a hot take. I like that with the
Christopher Montana 41:38
higher, higher cost products, but we thought it needs to look like. It came from a 1920s apothecary, because that's what we got when we looked at some of the other brands. What we weren't doing, we weren't saying, Well, who are we? We were saying, Well, how can we look like what we think we have to look like? So for years, that's what our product looked like. It had this kind of nondescript the names were Minnesota based. So our Gen used to be called Fitzgerald, right for F Scott. Fitzgerald. I'm an English major, and so I had to fit it in somewhere. And our original still was named Zelda. So it was, it was all based on this idea of what, what are Minnesotans going to want? What are they going to want? Fast forward to the point where we get to a rebrand. And we knew we needed a rebrand, because more and more I was looking at these, the bottles and the branding and everything, and I was like, You know what? We are an action. We're actually an interesting company, and we have some, some parts of our ethos, which are, you know, that really don't come through people that aren't if you were to look at us on the shelf, you would not connect that to who we actually are. And I am very much pro diversity in the broadest interpretation of that word, and so I but I looked at our bottles, and it's like these are pretty bland. So we went through a process, and we had some help in that we were working with the team at Jack Daniels, who had a very macro look at us, which at times was difficult, but it also was very helpful to get us to organize our thoughts. And we created a brand triangle, right, starting from the bottom. Kind of, you know, who are you? And you work up, right? And, your pardon, the distill comes up a lot, but it's just a useful term. We were distilling it down as we climbed up, the layers of that triangle getting more and more and more specific. And as we did that right, we this is how we eventually would land on this idea of the North Star and follow your own North Star, and that we're that we are not a brand that is picking a side necessarily, that we're pro people, and we're pro people in all of the diverse ways that they show up. Be you conservative, be you liberal, you know, white, black, whatever. And that's reflected in our staff. That's reflected in how we try to show up in the world. But we needed our product to also look like that, and so, you know, we work with a firm still haven't remembered it. It might come but out of St Paul to help us kind of come up with some iterations of this. But I did have an advantage, because we had started this process before being introduced to the team at Jack Daniels through what would later become called the nearest and Jack advancement Initiative, where they helped us and helped us fund this rebrand. Prior to that, I've been introduced to a woman named Kelly McManus who runs shop McManus creative. And she would she came on to help us start the rebrand, which we then had to restart when we did the nearest and Jack initiative. And Kelly, instead of doing it all herself, she then switched hats and ushered us through that whole process. And so while I'm blanking on the name of the firm that she would eventually work with, the quarterback for that whole process was McManus creative, and she's she works from home, but her home's in Minneapolis, so I. As we say, that they're out of Minneapolis, yeah,
Mark D. Williams 45:02
how did, how many years in we were just talking about branding recently. I think for myself, I'm in 21 years I've done, obviously, the original one. I think I've done three rebrands. It's like every, I feel like every five to six years, you sort of and I think what the the catalyst for me was one day my wife came in and she said, you know, the homes that you're building and the clients that you're building for are different than what your brand is saying you are. And basically, we needed update. We had the homes that we were building were exceeding what our brand represented. How did you know that you needed a rebrand? How did you What was the sort of the catalyst that said, hey, I need this to happen. And have you done it just twice? I guess you sort of spoke to it. The the plain white bottle needed an upgrade. Maybe that was the the key for you.
Christopher Montana 45:47
Well, we, before we've we finally said, we need to make a real hard turn. We made little tweaks along the along the way, you know, adding the flirty here, taking it out, getting denord. We, we created a product, and no one knew that it was made by denorg, because it didn't say denorg anywhere on the bottom right. So we, we've made little tweaks along the way. But 2020, is when the beginning of 2020, is when we started this process of saying, No, we really need to change this. We we have, we need an entirely new look. And we, we kept some of the names, like Cafe Frida because it's named after Louise Borman. Goes by Frida was a teacher of mine. And we also kept mixed blood, but we're like, the names don't really make sense. People aren't connecting to that either, like it's not really describing what it is or why it is right. Foundation vodka, well, we started the foundation in 2020 so at the beginning of 2020 we started that process. It got short circuited because everything blew up in 2020 between covid and George Floyd, we had a pandemic. We had our city on fire. We had our distillery on fire. We everything had to take a little bit of a pause. And when we came out of that and were able to restart that process, we were a different company entirely. And that's when, that is the first time that any marketing of any kind in our company mentioned the fact that it's a black owned company. Because I was incredibly resistant to ever mentioning that on anything that we did. And we came out of 2020 saying, okay, there is a and I, perhaps I'm using the royal we here, but I at least realized there's a reason to tell that part of our story. And on top of that, like we do have, there is a social mission here, and we need to be talking about that, and that needs to be a little more front and center. We can't be behind the scenes. My grand plan of diversifying the industry by hiring people on who are not represented in the industry, training them up and then having them leave and become my competition, really wasn't working. People weren't leaving, right? And so that wasn't going to actually move the needle that we needed to do more. We needed to be more visible. We needed to be more active. And that's what I think, kind of kicked us over into saying, if we are a company that has this social aspect to us, how can we how can we talk about that front and center? And that's also why the company moved from being du Nord craft spirits, which is what it was up until 2020 into 2021, when it was du Nord social spirits, and we brought that social piece in.
Mark D. Williams 48:31
I mean, I love the social tie. I mean, just the or the fabric of our community, you know, tell me, from that perspective, what was it about that messaging or that, you know, your perspective, like, why was it so important to empower people that didn't have a voice, you know, before, either within the company or just even within the community?
Christopher Montana 48:50
Well, I think one of the one of my lessons from 2020 and there are many, but I had a front row seat to everything getting set on fire. You know, I was there every single day. And I also grew up in Minneapolis with a general understanding that businesses were bad and that they were owned by people who didn't care. These soulless, you know, people somewhere, and they all had tons of money, were balling out of control, you know. And it's easy to to learn that and take it as the truth when you don't have examples that would challenge that, right? That's why absolutes are so easy to break. All you have to do is find one example. But if you can't find that one example, you take the absolute as a truth, and so it as I watched those crowds, and I watched what was happening, and I watched a corridor that was inhabited largely by business owners of color, many of whom, and I remember what, what that Lake Street corridor looked before they came in and invested and worked so hard to build their businesses. It was a it was a trash heap, right? Lake Street in the 90s was not great, and as I watched that go up in flames, like you all know, what this anger, I don't think people understand. And who's on the other side of this? And I also, how can you blame them, right? Who's given them an example of, do they see themselves in the business community, right? Does that young black boy who's growing up wherever in the Twin Cities, does he see himself being that business owner at some point, does he see himself being a perpetual employee, and what are we going to do about that? So that that became a a big part of what? So we have to do something to address that. So when we started our foundation, it was we got a couple things we had to handle right now, we got people don't have food, they don't have grocery stores. We're gonna work on that, but we raise a bunch of money. We try to get it into some of those communities hands so that way they could rebuild their businesses, much more important than a distillery, but perhaps not getting as much press. But then that last piece was, we've got to do something long term about getting these communities to see themselves as part of the business community. I come from a political background, and my understanding, which has evolved over time, but my understanding of what makes a society run are three legs of a stool. There's a business community, there's the people, and there's government, and anytime two of them agree on something, stuff happens. And so if you want to be a part of one of, you know, the most important, powerful, foundational pieces of our country, you've got to be in that business community, and you can't see it as a boogeyman. And so that's that informed a lot of what we did then, and continues to inform us today, and the initiatives that we're working on today, and you know, our branding points towards that right follow your own North Star. Well, I want people to be able to do what I did, and I also want it to be a little bit easier, because they shouldn't have two strokes and work 20 hour days and all of that, just to be able to squeak through right and still then be likely to fail, it should be a little bit easier, and so we're trying to make it that little bit easier for them on the front end, so that way, hopefully they can be a success story. And some kid who's growing up will look at them and their community and say, you wanna, I could be them.
Mark D. Williams 52:17
I think that mission is really powerful, regardless of which lens you view it through, what does it mean? On your website is looking at the foundation a little bit immediate relief, long term investing in entrepreneurs and business leaders of color. Like, what does that actually look like in real terms? So the foundation gathers money, either through donations or sales of product, or however it accumulates, and you're then identifying almost like a scholarship of business. Or, like, what is the practical I feel like, just how articulate that sentence is, there must be. What are you actually doing in this case? Like, I love the vision. I'm not minimizing the vision by any means, but I'm curious. Like, what does that mean? Someone comes along and says, Hey, Chris, I love what you're doing. I'd love to, you know, I'd love to start a business. Or, obviously it's empowering. You said your original dream was to empower people within your business to leave, but they love the culture so much they stayed. So you had to do it differently, like so what does it look like when you invest in people? What does that look like in practical examples?
Christopher Montana 53:12
Well, within Minnesota, one of the first things that that we realized, and I started with this, right? I'm not a huge supporter of the just nonprofit industrial complex. I think creating nonprofits for the sake of having a nonprofit is a waste of people's time and money. And so if we were going to exist, we need to be doing something unique that other people were not doing. And there are two initiatives that we're working on now. We actually the immediate relief part, that side of the foundation is, is done that goes back to we ran a community market. It's kind of a free, free market for people to come and get food and supplies. We ran it for two years, but that, that side of it, we are past now. There are two initiatives that we were working on, both of which I have some experience with. So one is, you know, kind of a pitch day type of a thing. And the idea there is that we're going to go out look for within communities of color, for people who are interested in starting their own business, but don't have any capital with which to start. And I think sometimes we we overlook. Maybe you have a network. Maybe you know somebody who has some extra income and so they can help you on your journey. If you grow up in the hood, you don't know anybody who has $2,000 that they could potentially invest in your company. If they've got $2,000 that's all the money they have in that bank. That's their rainy day fund. If they get laid off of their job or whatever happens, you don't have access to even the smallest pots of money. And so created a pitch day. That's the first thing that we are working on right now, where we can give out awards of, you know, 10, $5,000 and bring people in. And there's two real audiences there. One. In the process of doing it, of creating a business plan, right? Giving them resources. So that way they can do that. If you didn't win the pitch, you still created the business plan. You still went through the process of learning how to do that, learning that, you know, a business plan includes toilet paper, right, like all these things that you don't think about, right? And so that way, even if you didn't win with us, you're gonna be in a better shape to actually get that thing funded. I mean, my hope is that we get people win or lose to a place where they could walk into a bank and at least have a fighting chance. The other audience for that particular initiative, though, is the audience. It's the people who are be in the room watching those pitches. Because not, yes, it's true that you may not see yourself reflected in the business community, but you also just don't see yourself reflected in the type of people who are making these pitches, right? It's turn on Shark Tank, right? And if you don't see yourself there, or, first of all, you have to turn on Shark Tank, which, but the people in that room can see people get up and you know, you've gotta, you gotta defend it, right? And they're gonna see people get up and defend these business plans and say, This is why I think that this business can survive, and that's why it's worth this funding. And I think that is maybe not equally as valuable, but it also has value, right? 50 people sitting in that room watching that, I don't know which one of them is going to be the next one is going to step up and say, you want, I, I'm going to do that next time around. The second thing that we're working on is partnership within the schools. And I just want to start earlier, like I'm about the on ramp at this point, one of the things that the Twin Cities has that now, you know, as I've lived a lot of different places, there's a lot of money and resources in the Twin Cities, like an unreasonable amount, and there are a lot of nonprofits that are doing incredible work. And so from that point of I want to start this business, and I've got a plan from that point forward, there actually are a number of resources that you can get into, but you got to get to that first step. And so that's the pitch day is grabbing somebody who's already thinks maybe I could be that entrepreneur, and we just want to go a step below that. I want to talk to middle school kids, and I want to get them to run a small business for a short period of time. And my experience in this is that I did this. I went to Marcy Open School, and Marcy had a business day, and he had a budget. It was like 20 bucks, and you had to make a product. You had to make a plan. And I mean, these plans are written like in hard, barely legible, on like a single sheet of paper, right? But you still, you had to come up with something. You had to have a plan. How are you going to make it? What is this? What does it cost you to make it? What are you gonna How are you gonna sell it, right? What are you gonna pay yourself? All those types of things. And then we had an opportunity to sit in the hallway, right and make these things. And I made and sold caramel popcorn, right? And even though like that, do I own a caramel popcorn company now? No, but I remember that business day. That's the first time that I ever saw myself as a business owner, because for one day I was and so even putting that little nugget into kids heads that hey, maybe I could be right, at least thinking about it, I think that's also worth it. And the follow on from that is that that nugget stuck around. Didn't stick with caramel popcorn, but by high school, I had decided I was going to open up a restaurant called Montana's got a fabulous rib crib not impressed with the rib situation in a Twin Cities. Still, I'm not outside. 19th hole didn't do that. But the point being, that's putting that little seed in, even if it only takes root in a couple of people, is worth it.
Mark D. Williams 58:33
Well, I mean, you said something earlier, and I think most entrepreneurs can relate to this. I mean, I used to joke all the time, and I have largely undiagnosed ADHD, like, I feel like most business owners, it seems like, but it's like, you know, Monday you come up with 20 ideas somewhere around Wednesday, you got to shoot down by, you know, the majority of them, if it gets to Friday, and that idea is still rubbing around, like you're likely going to start a business the following Monday. And so it's like, the problem is, is, once you start iterating and start visioning and start thinking, it's no wonder that, you know, serial entrepreneurs become a thing, because what, what I think ultimately marks a good entrepreneur is probably two things. I mean, right? It's chicken egg, but it's vision and then the willpower to follow it through. And, you know, when I was a kid, we used to always it was a family debate around the dinner table that was always sort of enjoyable. What's harder to dream or to achieve? Yeah, let me ask you that question, because it can go it's more philosophical. There's no right or wrong. Like, if I was to ask you that question, is it harder to dream, or is it harder to achieve? What would be your answer?
Christopher Montana 59:32
I Well, the lawyer in me wants to give you the answer that you give to everything, which is, it depends go with your heart. On this one, I think it depends on on who's around you. I think if you have support, then probably the dream. I think if you don't, then the achieve. And I where I would like people to get to, the point is they, they have the support, right? So that way, if they get the dream, they. Feel like they have a chance of actually achieving
Mark D. Williams 1:00:03
it. That's really well said. I've never heard anyone say it quite like that before. I like that a lot. I used to always argue. My dad used to always argue in agreement against my cousins. Famously, we get to these for decades, we'd argue that it was harder to achieve or to dream, because if you didn't dream, how could you achieve anything? But you know, as I've gotten older, like a lot of times dreams happen and then it's the willpower behind it, but you've had to your point, you've had either support or success or self confidence, whatever it might be. I guess it translates to all kinds of things. If you're good at whatever sport you're good at, or writing, or whatever it is, you're more likely than to try something that's in a similar vein or just one step off of the main thing. And I think a lot of is just confidence. Going back to where we started with children, and one of the things that left you on your journey, my wife and I, we have three young kids, and I was remarking to to my wife the other day, I said, You know what? As you they're nine, seven and five. And so I remember asking my parents, thinking that we had a good childhood. And I said, Dad, what he's like? I don't know if we did anything right or wrong. We just did the best we could, and we loved you and tried to do the best we could. And as a dad, that gave me a lot of I say this because I think it's also true. As being a business owner too, is like providing an environment that is nurturing, that you can provide feedback, you know, that could be correction, that could be supportive. It goes a number of different ways, but then also the support to fail. And some of the most important things that have happened in my life when I've fallen, you know, it's like someone was there support. You know, to your point about support, that's why it hit me kind of hard when you said it that way. It just that there are people around you that even if you fail. And I mentioned before about that trapeze net being taken away, and that's when I took off. It was actually my dad who sort of gave me the permission to fail, which sounds weird, but he was the one that reframed it. He said, like, what is failure? And I remember, like, to me as a 23 year old kid who had a business, it was like, well, failure is going bankrupt. And he's like, that's not failure. That's not and it was like, you know, at 23 what do I know? But now that's why I like to share that story, because, you know, failing your business is not failure. You just found a way that it didn't work, and you got to find out another way to do it. And I've just found it so encouraging, but I just really what you said, it will resonate with me for a while, because that, without that comment at that point in time from someone who did support me, my dad, in that case, it kind of give you the confidence to be like I can fail. So anyway, going back to my own kids, I told my wife, I said, You know what? As parents, if I can do two things, if I can teach my children that I love them, and if I can give them confidence, that's all as a parent, I can really hope to do. What more could I possibly do better than those two things? Because then, when they're alone or wherever they are, if they feel loved, if they feel confident, which is another word of saying supported, then then they're you know, they can go where they need to go. And so I think it's applicable to business too. I just find that there's so many parallels between being a dad and being a business owner and being just a good person in your community. Honestly, I completely
Christopher Montana 1:02:52
agree. It's all the same. We might be doubting from the same.
Speaker 1 1:02:56
Wait a minute. Wait a minute. You got a book with your kid? I don't get a book with my kid. What's going on
Christopher Montana 1:03:01
with me on day one? But yeah, I completely agree. And the only, the the only thing that gives me any kind of pause, and this is, this is why we do the foundation, this is why we do some of this work, is that you it's really hard to dream about something you have no exposure to. Like, I don't dream in German, right? Because I don't know the language. But if I did, I would understand some different things that I couldn't possibly understand without knowing it. And so having that exposure, it matters, right? You have, there has to be a way that you can see yourself somewhere and so that that's that one piece, but, but, yeah, I think support is, is key if you want to actually go from having the dream to actually achieving
Mark D. Williams 1:03:40
it. You know, just to kind of wrap up the interview here, to respect the audience's time and yours as well, we're at the one hour mark. If people want to be a part of the foundation or things like that, I assume they can just reach out on your social channels. Or, yeah, absolutely,
Christopher Montana 1:03:53
yeah. So yeah, you can find us. We're we're pretty easy to find. I notoriously haven't made a social media post in like five years, right? Because I kind of hide under a rock. But the two organizations do not. So that you can get onto the Googles and find us at du Nord foundation. You also can find us at dunorg. Social spirits, those two will lead you to each other. And, yeah, I mean, sign up. Get on, get on the I don't know, follow Like, I literally do not do social media. Awesome. It's probably coming across right now. Yeah, but, but, yeah. Like, check in with us, because there we have a lot of fun things that are coming up. We just finished up doing the crew to Nord, which is a big festival that we throw to try to get people to come into the Lake Street area, kind of support some of the businesses along that corridor. There's, there's usually something fun going on. And, if nothing else, it's a spirit company. We know how
Mark D. Williams 1:04:41
to throw a good party. Yeah, sounds great. Well, we'll have everything in the show notes, and I want to thank you again for coming on and sharing your story, and hopefully the audience found it helpful and inspiring, and we'll see you next time. Thank you. We've had the podcast now for two and a half years, coming up on three, and I get questions all the time through DM. Is on Instagram, emails as well as to our account. Maybe we've had a guest on where a question has come up that really triggers an idea for you. If you didn't know, we have a one to one consulting session through the curious builder platform on our website, curious builder.com or curious builder podcast.com you can click on the one to one and schedule one hour of my time, and we will simply just sit down, have a virtual call, and we'll talk about any business idea that you want, marketing, branding, operations, really, anything that helps you and helps your business. Maybe it's a guest that you had on that you want an introduction to. Maybe it's a guest we've had on and they brought up something about scaling, or hiring and firing, or anything that might resonate with you as a business owner, that you want to expand and talk on. We'd be happy to do it again. That can all be found in our consulting page. It's really been really enjoyable for me as well to work directly with people. We've had probably 10 or 15 of these over the last year. A lot of times it's contacts or people to set them up in a way that makes them successful. And so if you're interested in that, please reach out to us at the curious builder podcast.com. Thanks for tuning in to curious builder podcast. If you like this episode, do us a favor. Share it with three other business owners. The best way that we can spread what we're doing is by word of mouth, and with your help, we can continue to help other curious builders expand their business. Please share it with your friends. Like and review online, and thanks again for joining.
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