Latest / The Inspired Stories Podcast / Michael Dorf on Building City Winery Into a 15-Location Music and Wine Experience Across America

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Michael Dorf on Building City Winery Into a 15-Location Music and Wine Experience Across America · The Inspired Stories Podcast

• 0:04
  Welcome to another edition of the Inspired Stories podcast
• 0:08
  where leaders share their experiences so we can learn from
• 0:12
  their successes and be inspired by how they've overcome
• 0:15
  adversity. As you listen today, let one
• 0:17
  idea shape what you do next. My name is Anthony Cotispodi and
• 0:21
  today's guest is Michael Dorf, founder and CEO of City Winery.
• 0:26
  They are a unique hospitality company that combines on site
• 0:30
  wine making, a full service restaurant, and an intimate
• 0:34
  performance space to bring people together for great food,
• 0:37
  wine and music. Under Michael's guidance, City
• 0:41
  Winery has expanded to multiple cities since its start in 2008
• 0:44
  and has heard praise for concerts, creative wine
• 0:48
  offerings and charitable initiatives.
• 0:50
  Before founding City Winery, Michael started The Knitting
• 0:54
  Factory, producing hundreds of recordings and organizing
• 0:57
  benefit concerts that showcased his passion for philanthropy.
• 1:02
  Michael is also known for his willingness to experiment with
• 1:05
  new ideas, whether that's opening new locations or
• 1:08
  collaborating with artists from around the world.
• 1:11
  He has also published a book called Indulge Your Senses,
• 1:15
  Scaling Intimacy in the digital World, and he speaks at
• 1:18
  conferences worldwide, sharing his insights on music, business,
• 1:23
  and community building. Now before we get into all that
• 1:27
  fun stuff, today's episode is brought to you by my company,
• 1:29
  Add Back Benefits Agency. Listen, if you run a business,
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• 2:19
  All right, back to our guest today, Founder and CEO of City
• 2:22
  Winery, Michael Dorf. Thank you for making the time to
• 2:24
  Share your story today. Thank you.
• 2:27
  And I got to say, we got to talk about that health program.
• 2:30
  I'd like to save $900.00 an employee if if my math is
• 2:35
  correct, with 1500 employees that would be a lot of money.
• 2:41
  Your math is potentially correct, Michael.
• 2:43
  We will set aside some time afterwards, but let's focus on
• 2:45
  you for the moment. All right, I thought the extra
• 2:48
  plug was nice. I do appreciate it very much.
• 2:51
  Hats off to you. You founded the Knitting Factory
• 2:54
  back in 1987. You were 23 at the time.
• 2:59
  And we alluded to this in the intro, but this, you know,
• 3:02
  despite what the name sounds like, this wasn't a textile
• 3:05
  company. Can you tell us what this
• 3:07
  company was and the inspiration behind starting it?
• 3:11
  It was a avant-garde jazz and rock club on Houston St. between
• 3:16
  Mott and Mulberry in the East Village during a pretty
• 3:21
  exciting, vivacious time. We're about three blocks from
• 3:25
  CBG. BS It.
• 3:28
  It was an incredible opportunity.
• 3:32
  I was managing a band right before opening the Knitting
• 3:38
  Factory. We were struggling to, to, to
• 3:42
  have any success. And rather than go back to
• 3:46
  Wisconsin with my tail between my legs as an unsuccessful a
• 3:51
  music manager guy, I found an old Avon office and opened up a,
• 3:57
  a performing arts space selling coffee and tea and, and biscuits
• 4:02
  and muffins. And you know, my, my parents
• 4:07
  actually came to visit after we finished a rough construction
• 4:11
  and they wanted to know how much we're paying in rent.
• 4:13
  And I said it was $1800 a month. And my parents being from
• 4:18
  Milwaukee, my mom started crying because she thought I'd lost my
• 4:22
  mind. She's like $1800.
• 4:25
  Do you? That is ridiculous.
• 4:27
  And I'm like, what are you talking about?
• 4:29
  Look at this beautiful 1500 square feet, you know, right on
• 4:34
  Houston St. you know, and they're like our son, you know,
• 4:39
  dropped out of law school and this is what he's doing.
• 4:42
  You know, they were really concerned.
• 4:45
  And luckily, you know, it turned into a a very important part of
• 4:51
  the music community at the time very quickly.
• 4:55
  Simply having a fair door deal with the talent coming in really
• 5:01
  helps spread the word more than anything else.
• 5:04
  I mean, 87 you have to remember there was no Internet.
• 5:10
  We collected mailing addresses to send out bulk mailing to
• 5:16
  reach people. You know, we'd put posters on
• 5:19
  the street with a phone number and we will get phone calls, you
• 5:23
  know, and have and have to answer the phone one person at a
• 5:28
  time. I mean the, the marketing was,
• 5:31
  was different, but the same as we're doing today.
• 5:35
  We, you know, it's always word of mouth, you know, whether it's
• 5:38
  digital word of mouth. And now you can really reach a
• 5:41
  lot of mouths with one post, one tweet, however you want to reach
• 5:45
  people. But at the you know, it's, it's
• 5:47
  the same, but just digital today.
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  And and anyways, yeah, it was a great fun start.
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  So you started out trying to manage a band and not going so
• 5:58
  great. So you kind of pivot to this
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  cafe performance, kind of set up, run out an old space and.
• 6:07
  We got a a beer and wine license at at first when we started
• 6:12
  making so much noise at the restaurant below us complained
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  and they had a full liquor license.
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  And in New York, the laws where you could only have one full
• 6:23
  liquor license per address, that was good news for us on one
• 6:30
  hand. But the landlord, of course said
• 6:32
  you're going to take over that rent now that you've kicked, you
• 6:35
  know, made that that restaurant really inoperable with your
• 6:39
  noise. So we, we doubled our space,
• 6:42
  tripled our rent, but we got a liquor license and and that was
• 6:47
  the first big piece of growth. Then the next one was the 10 and
• 6:51
  above us. That was a family.
• 6:54
  They quickly handed their keys back to the landlord and we were
• 6:59
  forced to take that space, which became office and dressing room
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  and before you knew it, the only four story building, the only
• 7:09
  tenant left besides us was the landlord on the roof.
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  We kind of were forced into taking all the space in the
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  building. Tell me about the fair door deal
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  that also helped you to take off.
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  Well, maybe because I was from Wisconsin and I was managing
• 7:25
  abandoned and trying to get them work at all the venues in New
• 7:29
  York and Philly and Boston. Very familiar with the different
• 7:33
  kinds of deals and there was a lot of pay to play going on.
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  I had a very simple formula, which was 7520 five, 75% to the
• 7:44
  artist, 25% to the house. So if it was a $10 ticket and
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  there was no such thing as service fees and digital was all
• 7:53
  like, you know, either pay it to door.
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  Eventually we did some tickets that you had to buy in house,
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  but it was 75% of $10. And if 100 people showed up,
• 8:04
  which was about our capacity in the beginning be $1000, the ban
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  will get 750 and we would get 250.
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  And I didn't steal 1 ticket. You know, it was truly, you
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  know, and the artists were we're going, wow, this guy is a fool
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  because he's completely honest and we're we're actually getting
• 8:27
  all the money. He said that that hasn't
• 8:29
  happened in New York for a long time and that that word of mouth
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  spread amongst a lot of different artist communities.
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  So went from going to some, some independent rockers to some
• 8:42
  bigger rockers to, you know, some of the blue chip
• 8:45
  avant-garde players to people like Philip Glass and and Lori
• 8:51
  Anderson and John Zorn. And we had Beck's first concert
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  and the Indigo Girls. And so the world actually
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  started. It was like a a black hole.
• 9:00
  Everything started coming our way, but it started because we
• 9:03
  had this disintegrity around a very fair and simple door deal
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  in the word spread. What were other people doing at
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  the time? They they would promise one
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  thing, but then till there's more of the money.
• 9:16
  Yeah. And there was complicated deals.
• 9:18
  There was stuff that would say, you know, we let's say we have
• 9:22
  100 capacity or 200 capacity venue.
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  The 1st 50 people goes to cover the houses expenses, the sound
• 9:29
  person, them marketing they did. And then the next 50 to 100
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  paid, we're taking 5050 And you know that could be one deal or
• 9:40
  it could be a like $100 guarantee.
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  So a band takes the gig, but then the next 60% will go to the
• 9:49
  house and so they'd only make $100.
• 9:52
  Whereas if it was a straight 7525, they would have done
• 9:55
  better. But you know, it's there, there,
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  there are many deals in the business.
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  I just went with the simplest 1 and it was, you know, that it
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  does rely on trust and, and thank goodness at the level we
• 10:11
  were then that was all that was needed.
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  And as we built relationships with some of the bigger best
• 10:18
  agents, some of which I still have today, guy named Frank
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  Riley, who runs one of the biggest talent agencies in the
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  US and some of the greatest, you know, acts from the Violent
• 10:30
  Femmes to, you know, Husker do at the time, to, you know, Sonic
• 10:36
  Youth, he trusted because of empirical evidence that we were
• 10:43
  honest and and we got great talent to come our way.
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  So the question that's rattling around in my head is when you
• 10:52
  guys went from one floor to two floors, when you've got live
• 10:55
  performances, people want to be on the floor with the artist,
• 10:59
  right? Yeah, so let's be clear.
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  The the we still had music only on the one floor.
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  The floor above was offices in the dressing room and where a
• 11:11
  bunch of us moved into because before that I was living with my
• 11:17
  futon under the desk on the on the one floor.
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  And I highly recommend this if you have no family and no
• 11:27
  responsibilities. If you can find a local gym
• 11:31
  that's near where you work and you want to put your futon under
• 11:35
  the desk. Every morning I would go to
• 11:38
  Pineapple Fitness and it was only 2999 a month.
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  And I would go there and shower, brush my teeth, and there was
• 11:45
  always a clean, fresh towel. Occasionally I did a schvitz or
• 11:49
  a sauna, never lifted weights. And I would be in and out of
• 11:53
  there and, you know, always had a clean towel.
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  And it was quite a life for about a year like that.
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  I love it. OK.
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  So you became a very important place, you know, like a black
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  hole, like everything was just sort of getting sucked into you
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  because of the way that you're running the business.
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  It became such a big attraction. Were there any bumps in the road
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  along the way where you thought this this might all just
• 12:19
  completely fall apart? Well, let's see.
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  About 4-5 months in, somebody busted a hole into the wall.
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  Literally through the exterior wall into our place and stole
• 12:36
  the sound system. 4th the 4th month, 5th month and we were
• 12:46
  without a sound system and you know by the Showtime within a
• 12:51
  week we held a huge fundraiser at the building next door, which
• 12:57
  was the puck building, which is today the a the REI store on,
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  on, on Houston St. and the lounge lizard played and John
• 13:10
  Zorn and a few others. And we raised enough money to to
• 13:13
  buy a better sound system and actually found a sponsor as well
• 13:19
  who wanted to help us out. So we in the end, the, the, the
• 13:23
  adversity of losing the sound system gained us much higher
• 13:28
  quality sound system. So that worked out, you know,
• 13:33
  actually fairly well. It actually got us a, our first
• 13:37
  blurb in the, in, in the New York Times around that benefit
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  for our sound system. So it actually also got us some
• 13:47
  incredible positive PR. So we were able to, you know,
• 13:51
  spin it, you know, in a positive way.
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  But I would say every four months was something, you know,
• 14:00
  just challenges, you know, continuously and, you know, you
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  had to. I kind of look back at that
• 14:09
  whole first 7-8 years of going down the Rapids very quickly,
• 14:16
  fully dressed and, but going feet first and just bouncing off
• 14:22
  the rocks and just try not to have your head hit, you know, a
• 14:27
  rock and, and, and go with the flow and enjoy it.
• 14:32
  And I wish I could remember more of it.
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  It was quite a time. I mean, I was young and, and,
• 14:39
  but it was so exciting and it's, it's, it's hard to explain how
• 14:44
  vivacious the community was, the artistic community then.
• 14:49
  That was a time when real estate prices in New York weren't so
• 14:56
  weren't going crazy like they did in the 90s during sort of
• 15:00
  the irrational exuberance in theinternet.com boom.
• 15:04
  And so you had a music scene in lower Manhattan and you had a
• 15:11
  burgeoning one starting in Brooklyn.
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  And so in in, you know, within a walking distance of, of where
• 15:19
  the artists were living were 5060 locations to manifest the
• 15:26
  creativity that was happening in the area.
• 15:28
  I mean, true, you know, if you will synergy of, of real estate
• 15:35
  and, and, and, and the expression of art happening.
• 15:40
  And it was, you know, fine art and dance and performance.
• 15:44
  And the Knitting Factory was trying hard to to be that
• 15:49
  platform or stage for a lot of it to come out.
• 15:51
  So we were doing a lot of really cool pre rap poetry and just
• 15:57
  some extremely experimental film.
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  And it was, it was just this time where everything was
• 16:03
  meeting as real estate started to take over and price it priced
• 16:08
  out live music and, and, and the smaller experimental kind of
• 16:15
  theaters and studios and stuff moved to Brooklyn and out, you
• 16:19
  know, to Bronx. And then now that has been
• 16:22
  priced out as well. And it's gotten so dissipated.
• 16:25
  The Internet has helped on some level create communities that
• 16:29
  you don't have to physically necessarily be living with your
• 16:33
  neighbor. But it's a different kind of
• 16:35
  vivaciousness than it was when you truly connected by a
• 16:39
  neighborhood. Why did you get out of the
• 16:42
  business in 2003? Post 911, which we were a few
• 16:51
  blocks away from the Trade Towers at that point, we had
• 16:54
  moved to Tribeca in in 94. And so, you know, 911 happened.
• 17:05
  I was losing my hair. I had my first children in 98
• 17:11
  and I had taken on investors. The first time I had outside
• 17:19
  money was in 96, so 10 years really after starting.
• 17:22
  And I did 5 rounds consecutively of of baseofthe.com money.
• 17:29
  Some people call them VC's venture capital, I call them
• 17:33
  vulture capital. And I didn't really know what I
• 17:37
  was doing. I formed NIT Media, which was
• 17:40
  the parent of the Knitting Factory.
• 17:42
  And you know, this was a very heady time.
• 17:45
  One of my interns took a concept and went to San Francisco and
• 17:51
  went public with the with it and became my first intern turned
• 17:56
  billionaire, you know, and a lot of my peers and friends were
• 18:00
  doing lots of stuff in the.com. We were very experimental with
• 18:03
  the Internet and trying to expand and go beyond the walls
• 18:08
  of, you know, my small venue with what we were doing with
• 18:11
  media and I basically diluted myself out.
• 18:16
  So between maturing and 9/11 and really losing my company from an
• 18:23
  equity standpoint, I made a decision to to leave, you know,
• 18:29
  mutual, I should say, I mean, to the, the, the last round of
• 18:34
  investors weren't thrilled with the founder at this point and
• 18:38
  had some. And since I didn't have the
• 18:40
  control, they were able to really create a wedge.
• 18:43
  And, and ultimately I I left and, and, you know, one of them
• 18:49
  said something to me that he didn't mean in the same way, but
• 18:52
  he's like, you know, this is going to be the best decision
• 18:55
  you've ever made, you know, and I'm like, well, can you swear on
• 18:58
  your show? Yeah.
• 19:00
  Go for it. So what should?
• 19:01
  Be I said fuck you, motherfucker.
• 19:03
  You know, like, you know what are you talking about?
• 19:05
  Like, you know, you're, you're, you're basically trying to kick
• 19:09
  me out of the company I started here.
• 19:13
  But in the end, he, he was right.
• 19:15
  Not that he knew what I was going to do, but being able to,
• 19:20
  to start fresh and start a new company, think about everything
• 19:26
  I want to do right with, with the, with the next business.
• 19:32
  How to build a team, you know, how to create an org chart that
• 19:36
  really is functional, how to how to treat everybody right,
• 19:42
  employees, staff, public, you know, and, and, and really think
• 19:47
  of it as a true business allowed me to create City Winery And I
• 19:52
  think, you know, a a much healthier, more functional
• 19:57
  organization. So I mean, you had a ton of
• 20:00
  success with Knitting Factory? See, you know, this is I want to
• 20:06
  hone in on the word success a little bit.
• 20:08
  Some people, you know, define success as financial.
• 20:14
  And if you go that route, which are that's a fair definition.
• 20:20
  I had no success with the Knitting Factory.
• 20:23
  I never made, I never made money.
• 20:25
  I left with no nothing. Now, would I change the 12 years
• 20:33
  or you know, 15 years I had? Absolutely not.
• 20:37
  I was incredible. Again, I wish I could remember
• 20:39
  more, but it was an incredible learning opportunity and
• 20:45
  relationship building. The the, it was famous
• 20:49
  worldwide. You know, I, I did a trip with
• 20:53
  my family to Poland, you know, few years ago and met a guy in a
• 20:57
  very small part near Lithuania, you know, north of Bialysta.
• 21:02
  And he thought I was a God because he knew the Knitting
• 21:05
  Factory never travelled outside of, you know, gone past Germany,
• 21:10
  but he knew of the Knitting Factory.
• 21:12
  He thought it was the most important music place in the 80s
• 21:16
  and 90s in all of New York. I mean, what a, what an
• 21:19
  incredible honor to, to hear like.
• 21:21
  So that was successful, but I didn't make a dime.
• 21:26
  Yeah, you know what? Thank you for pausing and
• 21:29
  redirecting for a moment because I think this is something really
• 21:32
  valuable for so many folks to hear.
• 21:34
  I've been in this position before, started a business.
• 21:38
  There are some things non financial that went really well
• 21:42
  and learned a ton, had an impact in its own corner of the world.
• 21:46
  And I look back on it and I'm like, you know, the financial
• 21:50
  side of it, though, wasn't successful.
• 21:52
  And I hang that sort of guilt or that shame around that
• 21:55
  experience. And here you are shining a light
• 21:57
  and saying, hey, there are different ways to measure
• 22:00
  success. Right, precisely.
• 22:03
  And you know, I, you know, when, when, when a young person, and
• 22:08
  I've enjoyed going to some universities of late and
• 22:12
  talking. And you know, on the same, the
• 22:16
  same philosophy just applies to just what you're doing in life.
• 22:20
  Like, you know, do you, are you working just to make money or
• 22:26
  can you be working and, and really trying to be happy and
• 22:32
  satisfied with how you're spending time on this planet
• 22:35
  that are you, you know, you go to your grave.
• 22:39
  You know, who, who cares what your net worth is?
• 22:41
  Or you know, but what did you do?
• 22:43
  What did you accomplish? What did you get done?
• 22:46
  And were you happy? You know, did you enjoy what
• 22:49
  you, what you do? And you know, I, I, I, I want
• 22:53
  nothing more than people to be happy with what they do.
• 22:57
  I love that. So in 2004, you made a barrel of
• 23:02
  wine in California. Tell us about that experience
• 23:06
  and how this led to the idea for City Winery.
• 23:10
  Well, I wanted to be happy, so I needed a lot of wine.
• 23:15
  Sorry to segue, I couldn't help it.
• 23:18
  I, I did three things in 2004 that were really kind of small
• 23:25
  inflection points for me. I, I, I always had a hankering
• 23:30
  and a love of wine. It never made any.
• 23:34
  My brother, who was living in San Francisco, was friends with
• 23:37
  a winemaker at Ridge Winery, and they do this famous brand of
• 23:45
  wine called Montebello, really great Cabernet.
• 23:49
  And they had a glut that year and extra grapes.
• 23:53
  And a guy named David Tate called my brother and says, hey,
• 23:56
  do you want to go in on a barrel?
• 24:00
  You know, I'll make it. You just pay for the grapes.
• 24:02
  And my brother was like, I don't know, I mean, not for me, but my
• 24:07
  brother would love that. And he called me and I was like,
• 24:10
  100%, I'm in. This sounds great.
• 24:13
  And it was really, really an eye opening experience to, to see
• 24:19
  the progress of, of the grape from the moment it was crushed,
• 24:25
  aging in a barrel, going into a bottle, seeing how it's still
• 24:30
  alive in the bottle and changing over time.
• 24:33
  And it just opened my eyes to, to whine in a different way than
• 24:38
  just being a, a lush and, and drinking it.
• 24:41
  That same year I started a Hebrew school in, in New York
• 24:46
  called Tribeca Hebrew. I did it really because I'm not
• 24:50
  religious, but I wanted my kids to have some sort of secular
• 24:55
  connection and cultural connection to their their
• 24:59
  upbringing and heritage. And and somehow like it
• 25:04
  connected with many other families in Tribeca.
• 25:08
  And so I, I took a risk and I rented a space again.
• 25:12
  He's sort of see a running theme here.
• 25:13
  I rent a space, put a sign up and people come.
• 25:17
  So I was promoting like this after school Hebrew thing for
• 25:20
  young kids and made a cool logo called Tribeca Hebrew.
• 25:23
  The next thing you knew, Jews and non Jews wanted to to attend
• 25:27
  this after school program because they were all having so
• 25:30
  much fun and it grew. So year 1 was like 35 kids, Year
• 25:34
  2 was about 100, year 3 was 170 and I was not going to be a
• 25:39
  principal of the Hebrew school. So very, you know, found another
• 25:43
  way to to move that into something else.
• 25:46
  And then I started a a concert series at Carnegie Hall same
• 25:50
  year as a fundraiser for music education programs and all three
• 25:56
  things became kind of important for me and interconnected, You
• 26:01
  know, I was felt a part of the community in Tribeca.
• 26:05
  I love the, the craft of wine making and I really enjoyed the,
• 26:11
  the idea of using the skills I'd accumulated in the Rolodex that
• 26:16
  I have accumulated in the promotional chops and put on a
• 26:20
  show to raise good money, you know, for a great cause and feel
• 26:24
  like a big deal, even though I'm just a catalyst, you know,
• 26:28
  putting the parts together, you know, so every year it raises
• 26:31
  $100,000 net for a bunch of nonprofits.
• 26:37
  And, you know, I'm, you know, people think of me as a
• 26:40
  philanthropist. You know, I'm not really writing
• 26:43
  the checks and I don't make enough money still to this data.
• 26:46
  Just write, oh, here's, you know, $100,000.
• 26:49
  But I put on a show and raise money and, and, and, you know,
• 26:54
  count the nickels correctly and, and, you know, do it right so
• 26:59
  that it actually makes money for a good cost.
• 27:01
  And I've been doing that for 21 years now.
• 27:03
  And it's, it's, it's remarkable. But that all happened in 2004.
• 27:10
  And by 2006, I realized, you know, how do I mash it all up
• 27:15
  into a new business plan? And it created Citywiner.
• 27:20
  And so how did the first location come to be?
• 27:24
  I, you know, convinced Trinity Church, who are the third
• 27:30
  largest land owners in Manhattan after NYU and Columbia.
• 27:39
  And that's a long story you got to read about, you know, the
• 27:43
  Queen's, you know, allocation of land to to the church in 1650 in
• 27:50
  Manhattan and you know, the trades they did.
• 27:53
  But yes, they're big landowner downtown in particular.
• 27:57
  And they had an old printing building right basically on the
• 28:01
  on the Holland Tunnel area. Bad traffic.
• 28:05
  And I'm thinking to myself is a beautiful, you know, old
• 28:09
  building and and perfect for a music venue has no neighbors.
• 28:15
  No one has disturbed. And I, I, I thought a lot about
• 28:23
  the more adult customer. I thought about how are we going
• 28:28
  to make wine? We needed more factory type of
• 28:31
  setting, you know, industrial. So I had all the components to
• 28:34
  be a combination winery, musicary and restauranteurie,
• 28:41
  you know, all in one building. And so just so I'm clear, who's
• 28:46
  making the wine on site? Can I come there and make my own
• 28:50
  wine? Or is this you guys making your
• 28:52
  own wine, bottling your own wine there?
• 28:54
  Well, it depends how clean your feet are, but we, we do have
• 29:01
  programs for your, for customers if they want to make a barrel of
• 29:05
  wine to work with our wine team and, and actually go through the
• 29:11
  whole process from fermentation all the way through bottle it.
• 29:15
  And it's, it's, it's, it's not the most popular of our ways of
• 29:24
  moving wine today, but the whole original premise started with
• 29:29
  that. So, you know, you talk about
• 29:31
  mistakes that lead to success on some level.
• 29:35
  The original business plan was Anthony and 250 people like you
• 29:43
  can, can you come in and make a barrel of wine for $15,000 And
• 29:47
  we'll, we'll put your own label on it and you'll have the whole
• 29:51
  experience. And, and it's, it's an
• 29:53
  interesting concept. We launched City Winery and that
• 29:59
  idea, which was going to be our wine making the same week we got
• 30:04
  our first grapes was the same week that Lehman Brothers went
• 30:07
  out of business in 2008. And that was a financial crisis.
• 30:12
  And it was not appropriate for those with with wealth to put
• 30:19
  their name on a on a barrel of wine in lower Manhattan in the
• 30:24
  fall of 2008. So that program evaporated and,
• 30:29
  and it was scary business for me because that was, you know,
• 30:33
  multiply. We had capacity for 300 barrels
• 30:36
  at $15,000. It was a lot of money and we had
• 30:39
  invested in high quality grapes, high quality wine making by a
• 30:44
  great French wine maker who still are founding wine maker
• 30:47
  today, David Lecompt. And, and by the spring of 2009,
• 30:54
  we had millions of dollars of wine, you know, subterranean on
• 31:00
  on Varick Street right by the Holland Tunnel, where some
• 31:06
  expert wine makers were saying, you know, the vibration of the
• 31:10
  subway might actually be an interesting formula for the
• 31:14
  barrels that are supposed to be resting, you know, in dark,
• 31:17
  quiet in a cellar. And you know, it a lot of
• 31:22
  theories about wine and vibration and even some of the
• 31:25
  greatest wines like Petrus in from Bordeaux, you know, sells
• 31:29
  for $1000 a bottle. The winemaker plays classical
• 31:33
  music pretty loud. So sound waves create vibration
• 31:37
  in the barrel. So there's a degree of truth to
• 31:40
  to to that story. But it was a very challenging
• 31:45
  spring of O 9. And you know, when you've
• 31:50
  started a new business, cash flow is very, very important.
• 31:53
  And we had none coming from the wine.
• 31:57
  And I talked to David Lecompt, the wine maker.
• 32:01
  I was like, David, we got to do something with these barrels and
• 32:03
  we got to start bottling and and selling.
• 32:09
  And he's like Michael, you know, the TTB approval on the label,
• 32:13
  it's going to be 6 months till we can do you know, and I'm
• 32:16
  like, you know David, we got it. Can't we just tap these barrels
• 32:21
  and let's go? And he's like, oh Michael, you
• 32:24
  stupid American, if you put gas on the barrel, it'll blow up
• 32:29
  because but if you, you know, put the wine, which is getting
• 32:33
  some of the wine is starting to show and be ready.
• 32:36
  If we put it in a stainless steel kegs like beer, then we
• 32:40
  could put on, you know, on a tap and we could start moving it.
• 32:44
  And we still have to, we'll expedite to TTB, but we don't
• 32:47
  have to bottle and we don't have to go through the process of
• 32:49
  those labels. And so we started putting wine
• 32:52
  on tap in this in spring of O9 really out of necessity.
• 32:56
  Is that something people were doing at the time?
• 32:57
  People were not doing it and. You did it to cut through the
• 33:01
  red tape that was involved in bottling it or?
• 33:04
  Some red tape, some cost savings, but speed, cash flow.
• 33:09
  I'm like, we got to start moving some wine and we started.
• 33:12
  So we, we hooked up some traditional keg taps and started
• 33:16
  pouring wine. And you know, when you use argon
• 33:18
  gas, you actually can preserve wine by the glass that way very
• 33:23
  nicely. So instead of opening a bottle
• 33:25
  and serving 2 glasses and then maybe pumping air, doing all
• 33:29
  kinds of things, this is a really good way to preserve wine
• 33:33
  by the glass, a great way to count.
• 33:36
  And our cost of goods was less. So all of a sudden instead of
• 33:40
  spending 25% on our wine costs, our wine costs are now 1516%.
• 33:46
  So smart idea. The beauty of what we started
• 33:51
  doing was I, I, I was like, wait a second, we're actually saving
• 33:56
  a lot of bottles. Wow on a nightly basis work and
• 34:00
  this is 1 location early on early days.
• 34:02
  I'm like, well, you know, we last week with, with the wine
• 34:07
  from Argentina and Australia and stuff.
• 34:09
  We, we, we on a good Saturday, we went through like close to
• 34:13
  100 bottles while we're saving 100 bottles a day.
• 34:18
  Whoa. And then as we started putting
• 34:21
  the taps behind barrel heads. So that had a little more
• 34:25
  authenticity in terms of look, not like a beer from the bar,
• 34:28
  but now it's behind a, a barrel head and, and all of a sudden
• 34:34
  our sales started to go up and I was like, whoa, we, we might
• 34:38
  have something here. So when we opened our second
• 34:41
  location in Chicago in 2012, we built a beautiful bar with all
• 34:47
  barrel heads and the whole real tap system and realized that,
• 34:53
  wow, we're 70% of our sales now is wine by the glass through
• 34:58
  this tap system that looks really authentic and tastes
• 35:02
  really good because it's fresh and we have better cost of goods
• 35:07
  and it, and it's super authentic and real.
• 35:10
  And actually, you don't have to add sulfites when you're
• 35:13
  basically going from the barrel straight to a keg.
• 35:17
  And, and because it's not being shipped, you know, in glasses
• 35:20
  and, and having the chance of environmental infection, which
• 35:25
  is why you would add sulfites generally.
• 35:27
  And so all of a sudden we had this like natural wine, better
• 35:32
  cost of goods and we're saving the planet, you know, 1 bottle
• 35:35
  at a time and realize that wow, we've got environmental friendly
• 35:39
  program that's better for business.
• 35:43
  You know, it was a wonderful sort of, you know, epiphany, if
• 35:49
  you will, or, or solution to what was a terrible situation.
• 35:53
  You are the guy that makes lemonade out of lemons, right?
• 35:57
  Like I I'm thinking back to the the story in the first four
• 36:00
  months of the Knitting Factory. Somebody breaks in through the
• 36:03
  wall, steals your sound system. What comes out of it in the end?
• 36:07
  Better sound system, better publicity, You know, you raise
• 36:12
  some money and same thing here. You're facing, you know, the
• 36:17
  financial crisis of OAO 9. What are we going to do?
• 36:20
  We've got all this wine and you come up with a solution that
• 36:24
  again, just like really sweet lemonade coming out of it.
• 36:28
  Is there something you think in your internal makeup?
• 36:31
  Because there's some people that, as I think back to the
• 36:33
  Knitting Factory, when somebody busts through their wall, steals
• 36:36
  their sound system four months in, may have just been like,
• 36:39
  well, this wasn't meant to be like, let's move on to something
• 36:43
  else. I should go get a job.
• 36:46
  I, I, I there is there, you know, something you called
• 36:51
  internal makeup, you know, yeah, I think there's some, some
• 36:55
  survival DNA, businessman sales ego thing in there that my
• 37:04
  grandparents and whether that's from, you know, surviving, you
• 37:09
  know, Europe and, you know, but there's, there's something
• 37:13
  there. I think there's also in my own
• 37:16
  world wanting to, not to not fail, you know, to, to want to
• 37:23
  achieve, you know, success, whatever that might look like.
• 37:26
  Certainly if it's not financial, surviving is the first step
• 37:33
  towards success. And so not giving in.
• 37:36
  So yeah, there's a a built in tenacity that I have that I
• 37:41
  don't want to fail. You know, I feel very lucky to
• 37:46
  have a support system around me, family and friends, you know,
• 37:54
  that has always been part of just a reliance system to, to go
• 38:00
  to. I feel very blessed.
• 38:04
  I, I really like a board of directors.
• 38:06
  Some people will go like, oh, you know, bored, like, no, I, I
• 38:10
  like the discipline of, of reporting, of, of, of getting my
• 38:15
  ducks in a row, thinking through things.
• 38:18
  I, I, I, I, I like getting counsel, you know, from friends
• 38:24
  and, and wise elders, You know, I wish I had more mentors out
• 38:29
  there over the years because I, I, you know, it is easy to throw
• 38:36
  in the towel and, and, but you know, I, you know, I, I do
• 38:43
  Wordle. I don't get every Wordle.
• 38:45
  I'm, I'm like a 98% or something.
• 38:48
  But you know, I'm not going to give up.
• 38:51
  I'd rather just make the worst guesses and lose then then quit.
• 38:57
  Yeah, I'd love that. So we've talked about the wine,
• 39:01
  talk to us about the food, and let's hear more about the music
• 39:06
  performances that take place. Sure.
• 39:09
  Well, that those are a bunch of subjects.
• 39:11
  I mean, the food is on one hand easy and very hard.
• 39:17
  You know, we all love to eat, you know, we all of our favorite
• 39:22
  foods. We're, we're trying to make food
• 39:24
  that goes well with wine. You know, the, the labor costs
• 39:29
  and the, and food costs are, are, are high.
• 39:33
  The, the, the profits are in liquor, you know, and in our
• 39:38
  case, you know, majority of the liquor we sell is wine.
• 39:42
  And so we're, you know, our model is what's going to make
• 39:45
  you drink more basically. You know, I wish I wasn't as
• 39:51
  crass as that, but you know, so we're trying, you know, we want
• 39:54
  you to enjoy your two hours with us, you know, different than a
• 40:00
  true culinary hospitality experience.
• 40:05
  We've got the magic sauce. I like to think with it to our
• 40:09
  food, which is not. You know, something that's done
• 40:13
  in the kitchen, but it's done on the stage.
• 40:16
  You know, when we're when we're delivering the best experience
• 40:21
  we can, it's everything that's happening in our venues, you
• 40:25
  know, and that starts with the stage.
• 40:28
  It's on the table, it's in the glass and it's on the plate.
• 40:32
  And you know, we would try and look at all of these details,
• 40:35
  the service obviously, and hospitality behind it.
• 40:38
  And if that is all working together in perfect
• 40:42
  synchronicity or some are alchemy, you know, we've created
• 40:47
  a two hour, 2 1/2 hour magical positive memory for people and
• 40:53
  they go home and you know, people give in.
• 40:56
  Give a little bit on on any one of those ingredients a little
• 41:00
  bit like if you can have all of them working and server could be
• 41:04
  really in a bad mood and it kills it all.
• 41:08
  You know, the food doesn't have to be, you know, the best, you
• 41:12
  know, three star Michelin, we'll get a little leniency.
• 41:17
  You know, if everything's working really well, it tastes
• 41:21
  better. You know when the sound is
• 41:25
  better, right? The sound is better and the show
• 41:29
  is better when the food was delivered hot and on time and,
• 41:32
  and you know, to your temperature, the food tastes
• 41:37
  better if it's paired well with the right wine and wine served
• 41:40
  in a real glass, not a plastic cup.
• 41:43
  So all of these things together are what we're trying to go for
• 41:47
  in terms of our, our culinary, our overall experience.
• 41:52
  And, and so it's a lot of ingredients.
• 41:55
  It's not just what's in in the kitchen to that's part of our
• 41:59
  delivery, our product if you will.
• 42:02
  Sorry, go ahead. Do you have some partners in
• 42:04
  this? I know you said you didn't come
• 42:06
  out of Knitting Factory with a lot of money in your pocket.
• 42:10
  How did you fund this? So I have a lot of silent and
• 42:19
  not so silent but you know, investors.
• 42:23
  But no, I have no partners. I some of them call partners.
• 42:28
  I'm not a fan of the word partner.
• 42:31
  Partner to me really means you are sharing the
• 42:37
  responsibilities, both financial and liability.
• 42:43
  If we get sued, I'm the only one who's on the, you know, named in
• 42:49
  the lawsuit besides the corporation.
• 42:51
  If this, God forbid, you know, goes bankrupt, you know, I'm
• 42:56
  holding the bag. Not any of my 74 limited
• 43:01
  investors. None of them are institutional
• 43:04
  right now. You know, we've had, I've been
• 43:06
  very lucky with incredible partner, like investors who are
• 43:13
  wonderful and they they're helpful and, and want to help me
• 43:17
  think through things beyond money, you know, as capital,
• 43:20
  true human capital. But in the in the end, you know,
• 43:25
  it's not me and Joe or somebody, it's it's me.
• 43:29
  And I feel responsibility to have them get a ROI on their
• 43:33
  investment. But I'm holding the back.
• 43:37
  Then there's, you know, a, a strong team of people and I
• 43:42
  think of all of them again, in a partnership type of way.
• 43:45
  I want them to share a sense of ownership with the entire
• 43:51
  executive team. I want our every general manager
• 43:53
  to feel a sense of ownership, right?
• 43:55
  Like feel a sense that you should pick up the, the, you
• 43:59
  know, the toothpick that fell on the ground and, you know, the
• 44:03
  way I feel compelled to do and let's, you know, So how do you
• 44:07
  get to a sense of ownership of being a partner without
• 44:11
  literally, you know, having a financial stake, you know, in,
• 44:15
  in the business? And so, you know, there's,
• 44:17
  there's a psychology of partnership and there's the, you
• 44:20
  know, liability partnership. And, and so you, you, you want
• 44:26
  to create a little bit of the, the, the feeling and sense
• 44:30
  around, around connecting people, both, you know, all
• 44:34
  stakeholders, employee stakeholders and the financial
• 44:36
  stakeholders. I want to talk about the
• 44:39
  employee stakeholders because it strikes me, Michael, that you
• 44:42
  certainly learn a fair bit about leadership at your time at
• 44:46
  Knitting Factory. And, and you're very hands on,
• 44:50
  right? You're there, you're there all
• 44:52
  the time. You're there every day.
• 44:53
  And same thing when you open the first location of City Winery in
• 44:56
  New York, you're there, you're trying to, you know, iron out
• 44:59
  the wrinkles, figure out how do we make this work?
• 45:02
  But now as you've grown to, we're at 12 locations now,
• 45:05
  correct? Yeah, we actually have 15
• 45:08
  kitchens, but we have three at the end of this pier, so it's
• 45:13
  12, yeah. 15 kitchens, but three of them are sort of combined
• 45:19
  together. We'll get to that in a second.
• 45:21
  But what I, what I want to hone in on is for you to go from like
• 45:26
  super hands on one location to now 12 to 15 locations.
• 45:30
  However, we wanted to find that like your style of leadership
• 45:34
  has to adjust to, to allow for that kind of growth.
• 45:40
  I'm curious how you made those adjustments, what you learned,
• 45:46
  who mentored you how, How did this happen?
• 45:49
  Yeah, you know, there's there's an African proverb.
• 45:55
  If you want to go fast, go alone.
• 45:57
  If you want to go far, you got to go as a team.
• 46:02
  You know, without knowing that proverb when starting city one
• 46:07
  or I knew that for this to work, I needed a killer team.
• 46:14
  There's no way I can do this alone.
• 46:17
  I needed a really partner like chef.
• 46:24
  So how do I both compensate and build in, you know, options and
• 46:29
  and and an important role for the on the culinary side.
• 46:35
  As I said, David Lecompt, who's our wine maker.
• 46:38
  I didn't know how to make wine. You know, having participated in
• 46:42
  a barrel but not being the winemaker, just the financier of
• 46:46
  buying grapes does not qualify me to be, you know, making world
• 46:50
  class wine. So I need a great wine maker.
• 46:53
  How how do I partner with that side of what we do?
• 47:00
  I knew programming and I mentored a guy named Shlomo who
• 47:06
  is still with the company to this day.
• 47:08
  He started as an intern. He does the programming and
• 47:12
  overseas a team of programmers in all of our locations.
• 47:15
  So knowing that if we wanted to, to, to go far, we need I needed
• 47:21
  a killer team of experts in each of the areas and, and and and
• 47:27
  make the team as cohesive as possible.
• 47:31
  One of the first things I did as an organization was was doing an
• 47:37
  off site and you know most of the names you hear about off
• 47:42
  sites. If you know looking online and
• 47:45
  trying to what what, what makes good team building and an
• 47:49
  offsite, everyone calls them retreats.
• 47:52
  I don't like the name retreat. It's the wrong direction.
• 47:55
  You know, if we're, we're trying to grow this business, you know,
• 47:58
  we want to go forward, not backward.
• 48:02
  And while you want to have a little self reflection, you
• 48:05
  still want to go forward. So I call this off site base
• 48:10
  camp, which to me is a much more appropriate term.
• 48:15
  You're looking at the peak and the summit that you want to get
• 48:18
  to in a safe place. And you talked about your plan
• 48:22
  with the team. Maybe you have to get rid of
• 48:24
  some of the weak links because they're going to, they're going
• 48:26
  to straggle the rope team on your way up.
• 48:29
  But you know, you, you plan your, your ascent with the team
• 48:34
  in that safe place and, and then try and get over the mountain.
• 48:40
  And so we've been doing base camp every year from day one and
• 48:44
  help develop our mission, our mantra, our core values go over
• 48:49
  our SOP's and, and, and have developed our, our best
• 48:53
  practices in each of the departments.
• 48:55
  And it's again, to me, making the investment in building a
• 49:02
  great team was the only way to get to scale.
• 49:06
  And it continues to be the only way we're going to be able to
• 49:09
  get from 15 to 30 or 40 or 50 locations is having a a killer
• 49:15
  team that all, you know, rose in the same direction and has a
• 49:20
  company DNA that you know, needs to come from a, a nucleus.
• 49:27
  Did you arrive at these strategies, these ideas mostly
• 49:31
  on your own in terms of leadership and how to build the
• 49:34
  team, or did you have some guidance along the way?
• 49:41
  You know, the, the, the team thing simply was a, I mean, for
• 49:47
  all that, that, that you don't need to be that smart to, to
• 49:51
  know that, you know, it's good to have a strong team around
• 49:55
  you. You know, I think you nailed it
• 50:00
  first by saying, you know, I, I, I was not a very good leader of
• 50:07
  the, of the Knitting Factory. You know, I, I, I wasn't, I
• 50:12
  wasn't really empathetic to, to a lot of the people around me.
• 50:19
  You know, I, I, I wasn't a good leader.
• 50:22
  I wasn't, I wasn't building an organizational structure that
• 50:28
  could really scale. And so that was learning by
• 50:33
  trial and error. No question about it.
• 50:36
  I read a lot of books, you know, because you don't learn this in
• 50:44
  Business School. You know, they're not teaching
• 50:47
  really how to build a company. I have friends who are CE OS
• 50:53
  and, and others that, you know, learn from.
• 50:55
  But there there was. And then the one mentor I had on
• 50:58
  the music side of my life was a guy named George Ween, who
• 51:03
  started the Newport Jazz and Folk Festivals.
• 51:06
  And but he gave me counsel not on building a company because he
• 51:12
  didn't really do a very good job himself.
• 51:15
  He was an impresario in an incredible promoter of these
• 51:20
  festivals, but he didn't build a great organization necessarily
• 51:27
  around him. He gave me a lot of life lessons
• 51:31
  on how to deal not just with artists, but being the decision
• 51:37
  maker and ultimately the person responsible for having to say
• 51:42
  no. What it's like when you then get
• 51:45
  deeply criticized by a lot of people and, or even say not just
• 51:53
  negative things, but false things because you're the man
• 51:57
  you know. When you're the man he used to
• 52:00
  say when you're the man you know, you're the man when people
• 52:04
  are talking down about you and you, you don't know what they're
• 52:07
  even thinking. You know, you're you're then the
• 52:09
  man, you know, and it took me a long time to understand what he
• 52:15
  was really talking about because people will just say shit about,
• 52:20
  you know, sometimes it's valid. The current leader of the United
• 52:25
  States. Yeah, we got some issues there,
• 52:28
  you know, in politics and we're not going to go into politics.
• 52:30
  But, you know, there's a lot of binariness to that world of and
• 52:36
  everyone's complaining about the other.
• 52:37
  But in an organization where it's not binary, it's one leader
• 52:42
  or 111 company, one organization, you're going to
• 52:46
  have a lot of people who are going to be frustrated because
• 52:50
  they heard, no, no, you can't do this.
• 52:53
  No, you're not going to get a raise.
• 52:55
  No, that's a bad idea. Whether you know or you know,
• 52:59
  you just, and so it's hard to say no, right?
• 53:03
  Steve Jobs, I read thought that was the most important words in
• 53:08
  his, his vocabulary. So, yeah, I know where all this
• 53:13
  comes from. You know, when when you get to
• 53:15
  be my age, you pick up a few things.
• 53:20
  You don't forget everything. I don't think there's a high IQ
• 53:25
  up here. But, you know, I've developed a
• 53:28
  pretty good EQ and developed some wisdom over the years,
• 53:33
  mostly from the school Hard Knocks, but like from, you know,
• 53:39
  being around and experiencing things and, and so, yeah, I, I
• 53:43
  would say that the base camp, the importance of base camp,
• 53:47
  we're we're the only music venue I've ever heard of.
• 53:51
  It does a company offsite like this.
• 53:53
  I don't even know a lot of small companies that, you know, will,
• 53:58
  will earmark, you know, real money to fly 150 people to, you
• 54:05
  know, another city in order to, you know, inspire them.
• 54:09
  But if you think about turning everybody's volume switch from
• 54:14
  7:00 or 8:00 to 10:00 or 11:00, what effect that has.
• 54:19
  And for the next few months at least, you know, if a landlord
• 54:25
  puts in a really hot amenity in their basement ground floor,
• 54:33
  they can increase the rent or the prices of 400 units above by
• 54:38
  some factor. And it's a really good
• 54:40
  investment because they built this thing that makes the rest
• 54:43
  of it appealing. So if we can take a few days and
• 54:47
  get everyone on the same page and get them to feel better
• 54:52
  about what they do in their job, maybe they work a little bit
• 54:57
  more, maybe they work a little more efficiently.
• 54:59
  Maybe they're just a little more Zen about their decision making.
• 55:03
  And you multiply that by 120 people in the room, and all of a
• 55:07
  sudden we're a better, more efficient organization.
• 55:10
  Of it. Let's shift gears into that
• 55:13
  school of Hard Knocks, though, Michael, I want to dive into a
• 55:17
  particularly serious challenge that you've overcome in your
• 55:19
  life. Besides the pandemic and the
• 55:24
  financial crisis and global warming and and and hurricanes
• 55:32
  and tornadoes and earthquakes and floods.
• 55:36
  There's lots to choose from, I know.
• 55:39
  What do you want to talk about? Whichever one comes to your mind
• 55:43
  and your heart right now. Good.
• 55:47
  This, there's no question. The single hardest moment came,
• 55:55
  you know, the third week of March of 2020.
• 56:00
  You know, I'm, I'm opening the kimono too much here, but like
• 56:03
  our payroll at that moment, not too dissimilar to today's, it's
• 56:09
  about a million a week. I mean, we are a job creator.
• 56:16
  We're, you know, we're, and we had whatever that second or
• 56:25
  third week of March was. Well, $1.7 million in the bank
• 56:31
  account. You know, we, we don't, we don't
• 56:33
  keep a lot of money in the bank. You know, it's, we're, we're
• 56:37
  hand to mouth like most now, hopefully more than the payroll
• 56:44
  comes in every week by smidgen because we got other bills as
• 56:48
  well. But like, you know, but there we
• 56:52
  were faced with you've, you're mandated.
• 56:58
  Now, we didn't have a place in Florida, you know, or Texas,
• 57:02
  where there wasn't such a thing as the global pandemic.
• 57:05
  But in the rest of this nation, we were kind of forced with
• 57:11
  complete closure. You know, concert venues, places
• 57:15
  of assembly were the first to close, and then they were the
• 57:18
  last to reopen. So we were mandated to be shut.
• 57:24
  Therefore no money was coming in.
• 57:27
  This is before PPP loans is before and, and there I was
• 57:33
  going like, if the machine is turned off, I've got one week of
• 57:42
  payroll in the bank and then the next week I, I, I, I don't make
• 57:47
  payroll. I, I, I, you know, I got to let
• 57:50
  everyone know they don't have a job anymore for the indefinite
• 57:56
  future. I mean, maybe it's only going to
• 57:58
  last for a few weeks, but it doesn't seem like it just looks
• 58:01
  pretty bad. And so letting you know 14190
• 58:06
  people go in one day was by far the hardest, hardest thing I've
• 58:14
  ever had to do. But I didn't, there was no
• 58:17
  choice. I mean, it was, it was clear as
• 58:19
  day. There was no choice.
• 58:22
  Did not know that they're eventually in a month or two
• 58:25
  would be some PPP loans or SBA opportunity.
• 58:31
  It took me 3 months to very quickly sell some air rights we
• 58:37
  had in Chicago. It took me 6 months to sell
• 58:42
  historic tax credits for our upstate, you know, property.
• 58:47
  Took me two years to to sell our Nashville building, go into a
• 58:50
  sale, leaseback. But these were all the things
• 58:54
  that we had to do to survive. You know, from 2020-2021,
• 59:01
  2022-2023, we lost money. We lost a lot of money.
• 59:07
  And if it wasn't for, you know, the NEVA organization and what
• 59:12
  became the shuttered venue operating grant, SVOG grant, we
• 59:18
  would probably not be here today.
• 59:20
  What are those organizations? What are those things?
• 59:23
  So very quickly the there was an assembly of independent venues
• 59:30
  called the Neva National Independent Venue Association
• 59:35
  have formed, you know, 3000 live music venues got together for
• 59:42
  the first time. I mean, you have an industry
• 59:45
  which is controlled by Live Nation and AEG, basically two
• 59:49
  £900 gorillas, a duopoly and they control 90% of the concert
• 59:55
  business. And they got hurt just like we
• 59:59
  got hurt. But they had more money in the
• 1:00:02
  bank than we did. And, and, and we being the other
• 1:00:08
  3000 independent venues, luckily this organization came together.
• 1:00:15
  It was some absolute miraculous hard work by a bunch of people.
• 1:00:21
  I was not involved in in that. I was too freaked out and
• 1:00:27
  frankly, you know, in an existential crisis myself.
• 1:00:33
  But this organization formed, they got a couple of important
• 1:00:38
  senators to take the bill to Congress and, and literally got
• 1:00:42
  grant money for live music venues if you weren't public or
• 1:00:49
  had a certain capital structure and were, was, was, was a
• 1:00:54
  lifeline to, to these organizations.
• 1:00:58
  In addition to that, there was the federal PPP loans, the
• 1:01:03
  Payment Protect, Protect protection plan, which was a
• 1:01:07
  loan that most about 90% got waived in terms of paying back
• 1:01:16
  music venues. Unfortunately, since we couldn't
• 1:01:18
  reopen, whereas a small business could reopen and pay, we
• 1:01:22
  couldn't because we were mandated to stay closed.
• 1:01:25
  We weren't eligible to to get those forgiven.
• 1:01:28
  So we're still paying our PPP loans every month back, low
• 1:01:33
  interest, but you know, we're paying it back.
• 1:01:38
  So yeah, it was. And then in 23, I would say, you
• 1:01:42
  know, we might be out of the pandemic and social distancing
• 1:01:46
  might be a thing of the past and mask wearing not there and we're
• 1:01:51
  vaccinated. But employees in the hospitality
• 1:01:56
  world, we, we, we had our own employment crisis.
• 1:02:01
  And this was across all of hospitality.
• 1:02:04
  We lost a lot of people who, when they lost their jobs,
• 1:02:08
  decided to go work in tech, go work in other industries.
• 1:02:14
  Hospitality became not where they wanted to be in this
• 1:02:18
  customer facing public scenario, which is hard work, pain in the
• 1:02:23
  ass. And so we, we lost a lot of life
• 1:02:26
  lifers in the hospitality space. And that on top of a mentality
• 1:02:32
  of, you know, working from home, where some people, I I had an
• 1:02:38
  experience in 24. I'll share.
• 1:02:42
  I'll. I won't say his name.
• 1:02:43
  Let's call him Frank. I'm walking through one of our
• 1:02:47
  venues and a young, young Frank comes up to me goes Mr. Dorf.
• 1:02:55
  I'm like, yeah, hi. And he's like, I'm Frank.
• 1:02:58
  I'm like, how you doing? You know, how can I help you?
• 1:03:01
  He goes, listen, I wanted to talk to somebody.
• 1:03:04
  I was hoping to, I could start working from home on Fridays and
• 1:03:09
  I'm like, well, I'm not the person to talk to.
• 1:03:13
  You should talk to Nicole and blah, blah, blah.
• 1:03:15
  But Frank, what do you, what do you do here at City Winery?
• 1:03:20
  You know, I mean, great to meet you, but what, what's your job?
• 1:03:23
  Because I'm a bartender and I'm like, oh, OK.
• 1:03:27
  And I, I'm remaining calm and I'm like, so Frank, your
• 1:03:31
  bartender, what? What exactly do you want to do
• 1:03:36
  from home? You know, bartending for us,
• 1:03:41
  he's like, well, you know, I know, you know, you're really
• 1:03:44
  into wine and, you know, and I've been wanting to study
• 1:03:48
  mixology. And so I thought I could, you
• 1:03:51
  know, do some study at home. And I'm like, yeah.
• 1:03:54
  But you think it's appropriate that, you know, we're paying you
• 1:04:00
  to do that. You know, on Fridays I'm like,
• 1:04:03
  and why Fridays? Like, why are you?
• 1:04:04
  He's like, why? I have a bunch of friends that
• 1:04:06
  are, are able to work from home on Friday, you know, and they
• 1:04:09
  get to do things together. So I'm like, oh, they're,
• 1:04:13
  they're actually not working on Fridays.
• 1:04:15
  No, no, no, I think they're working like he caught himself
• 1:04:18
  and and I go, where do these friends of yours work?
• 1:04:22
  And he goes 01's at JP Morgan, the others at Bloomberg.
• 1:04:25
  And I'm like, so they're not are tenders.
• 1:04:28
  They're in the financial industry.
• 1:04:31
  Those two friends here goes. Yeah.
• 1:04:33
  I'm like, man, listen to a bit of advice here.
• 1:04:36
  You know, I don't ask Nicole to work from home on Fridays,
• 1:04:41
  please. I I don't think it'll go over
• 1:04:43
  very well. Think about if and if you want
• 1:04:46
  to work from home on Fridays, maybe you should consider a
• 1:04:49
  different, you know, Trey Frank. So there's a, there was a
• 1:04:52
  mentality long story to just on top of this, trying to find a
• 1:04:58
  pool of, of, of culinary workers again, back house and front of
• 1:05:03
  house. You also had this mentality of,
• 1:05:07
  you know, how do I, how do I do what I was doing?
• 1:05:11
  But three days a week or four days a week.
• 1:05:13
  That's, you know, come back a little bit, you know, but I'm in
• 1:05:17
  a Google building here right out this window, 400,000 square feet
• 1:05:23
  of supposed to be 1500 Googlers and they're not all back.
• 1:05:28
  You know, I, I think Jamie Dimon has said he doesn't ever expect,
• 1:05:33
  you know, the world of, of white collar work to go back to five
• 1:05:37
  days a week, 5 1/2 days a week in an office.
• 1:05:40
  You know, while the work might be 5 or 6 days a week and
• 1:05:44
  intense and hard, it's probably not all going to take place in
• 1:05:47
  the office. And, and so work from home is a
• 1:05:51
  legitimate, you know, part of the world we're in.
• 1:05:55
  Technology is a part of it. And so like, you know, we need
• 1:06:00
  to deal with that. And that was a tough part coming
• 1:06:03
  back, sorry. I was.
• 1:06:06
  You're doing great, Michael. So talk to us about where City
• 1:06:13
  Winery is going. We went through some really hard
• 1:06:16
  times. You know, 23 things started to
• 1:06:18
  come back to normal. You guys are still paying off
• 1:06:20
  some of the loans. Here we are in early 2026.
• 1:06:24
  What does the future look like? Where you guys going?
• 1:06:26
  So look at I'm a I'm a huge believer in the value of live
• 1:06:35
  entertainment. In fact, I've got a new tagline
• 1:06:39
  we're starting to work on called Live, Live or Live, Live or
• 1:06:45
  live, live. It's the same word, LIVE, live
• 1:06:49
  and live. And the idea is you want to live
• 1:06:53
  your life live. Do you want to live your life,
• 1:06:57
  you know, on a screen? Do you want to only order
• 1:07:02
  DoorDash at home or do you want to go out and be with people, be
• 1:07:06
  with friends, take a yoga class with people you know?
• 1:07:13
  Do you want to only look at art, you know, in a book or do you
• 1:07:16
  want to go to a museum? Do you only want to, you know,
• 1:07:20
  listen to Spotify or do you want to, you know, see your favorite
• 1:07:25
  artists and if possible up close, not through a mega screen
• 1:07:29
  at a giant festival. And so the, the human connection
• 1:07:35
  and the value in them of intimacy is, is something that
• 1:07:41
  cannot be replicated with technology.
• 1:07:46
  They're we're getting closer and you know, it's amazing what's
• 1:07:49
  going on in AI. And my next book is going to be
• 1:07:52
  called 10,000 bottles. And it's, it's, it's, it's the
• 1:07:58
  same premise on some level, which was indulge your senses,
• 1:08:01
  the importance of this human connection.
• 1:08:04
  But as AI is getting really smart about large language
• 1:08:09
  models and you can take the words that I'm giving you and it
• 1:08:13
  can go into this computer to get to you, but it could be soon
• 1:08:18
  more articulate so that your listeners are hearing me, but
• 1:08:22
  with more precision in my words because AI can enhance that.
• 1:08:27
  That's, that's interesting. That's maybe a positive step.
• 1:08:31
  Maybe AI simultaneously is going to put more hair on my head for
• 1:08:36
  the visual and you know, there'll be some young ladies
• 1:08:41
  out there. I think not only am I really,
• 1:08:43
  you know, clever, but I'm really handsome too.
• 1:08:46
  And they're going to but like those those things that are AI
• 1:08:50
  enhances are, are really great, but AI has not gotten to the
• 1:08:54
  senses and it so it's gotten sound, it's gotten language,
• 1:08:59
  it's gotten sight, it hasn't gotten feel, smell or taste.
• 1:09:04
  And so I, I believe those sensory components are still why
• 1:09:11
  you're going to have a real sommelier need to explain
• 1:09:15
  because of wisdom, what the right wine is for you at that
• 1:09:18
  moment. And at the AI with the deepest
• 1:09:21
  of knowledge of history of wine given to you by a robotic, you
• 1:09:26
  know, person who could spit it up is not going to be as good.
• 1:09:29
  And that the need for that human connection and in particular
• 1:09:33
  live entertainment, live sports is never going to go away.
• 1:09:39
  You know, the the problem with the film industry is that, you
• 1:09:43
  know, film as a technology, as a moving picture on a screen was
• 1:09:49
  already a technology. It wasn't while you're with an
• 1:09:51
  audience experiencing the technology, it's not the same as
• 1:09:57
  Bruce Springsteen on a stage 10 feet away from you.
• 1:10:01
  And that can't that the value of that can never be replicated.
• 1:10:05
  So in that sense, I feel very optimistic about what I do.
• 1:10:11
  You know, and it makes me think of what my wife calls the single
• 1:10:15
  best night of her life. I wasn't there, by the way, but
• 1:10:19
  she got to meet her favorite band and talk to them and take
• 1:10:22
  pictures with them, and she'll still single greatest night of
• 1:10:25
  her life. So that's exactly what you're
• 1:10:26
  talking about. I love it.
• 1:10:29
  Yeah, and so you got to live life.
• 1:10:31
  You know, so one more question for you today, Michael.
• 1:10:34
  But before I ask you, I want to knock out a few quick things.
• 1:10:36
  First of all, to get in touch with Michael Dorf. 2 options
• 1:10:41
  here, citywinery.com, super easy to remember and his e-mail
• 1:10:45
  address. We've got permission to hand out
• 1:10:47
  Michael at citywinery.com. If you forget that, we're going
• 1:10:51
  to have it in the show notes. Don't worry.
• 1:10:53
  And also, I just don't go ahead. I've been, I work hard.
• 1:10:56
  Every couple weeks I put some thought into a short essay and
• 1:11:01
  I've been pretty good about my sub stack.
• 1:11:04
  If you look at it's just called, what is it called, Michael Dorf
• 1:11:10
  Uncorked or something like that. And I write on a lot of subjects
• 1:11:15
  and I'm pretty proud of most of the writing.
• 1:11:18
  Some of it is really bad, but yeah, check that out.
• 1:11:22
  And where can folks find your book, your senses, Scaling
• 1:11:25
  intimacy in a digital world as well as the new one that you're
• 1:11:27
  talking? About indulge your senses.
• 1:11:28
  Well, the new one I got to write.
• 1:11:31
  So I have notes. I have a lot of notes.
• 1:11:36
  So where can they find indulge? Your senses at michaeldorf.com.
• 1:11:39
  And then I can, but it's on Amazon.
• 1:11:42
  Great. Although, you know, I, the
• 1:11:45
  publisher owes me money, man, I, I got to, I got to reach out to
• 1:11:48
  them. All right, so if you're
• 1:11:50
  listening to the show today, you're enjoying this, you're
• 1:11:52
  having fun, please take a quick moment to subscribe wherever
• 1:11:55
  you're listening. It sends a signal that helps
• 1:11:58
  others find our show too. So thanks for taking a quick
• 1:12:00
  moment to do that. And as a reminder, and I know
• 1:12:03
  Michael's going to appreciate this, he got so excited hearing
• 1:12:05
  that in the beginning. You can get more hospitality
• 1:12:08
  employees, access to therapists, doctors, and prescription meds
• 1:12:11
  that, as paradoxical as it seems, actually increases the
• 1:12:14
  company's net profit. So reach out to us today at AD
• 1:12:17
  back benefits.com. So last question for you,
• 1:12:20
  Michael, a year from now, what's 1 specific thing that you hope
• 1:12:25
  to be celebrating? A year from now, I hope we have
• 1:12:33
  shovels in the ground, metaphorically speaking, because
• 1:12:38
  a lot of our new buildings are adaptive, reusable buildings.
• 1:12:43
  But we'll have a few more locations getting close to
• 1:12:49
  opening our doors and and booking.
• 1:12:51
  I, I, I really do get off on the thought of every night we can
• 1:12:57
  have in 10/11/12, hopefully someday 2025 locations, 300
• 1:13:04
  people meeting their favorite band, like your wife while
• 1:13:09
  consuming, you know, wine on tap, eating some good food and
• 1:13:14
  having this great memory created.
• 1:13:16
  And so you multiply 300 people in one room times 20 rooms, you
• 1:13:21
  know, you start to realize you're, you're affecting a lot
• 1:13:23
  of people. And so I, I love the idea.
• 1:13:26
  Keep building, keep building this thing and scaling City
• 1:13:30
  Winery. Can you give voice to where
• 1:13:33
  those new locations are coming? Yeah, I would.
• 1:13:36
  We we own some property in Columbus, OH that we are
• 1:13:41
  developing. What right here in my backyard?
• 1:13:46
  We also have some property now in Detroit that we're very
• 1:13:51
  excited about near the the old train station, which is now the
• 1:13:55
  Ford Innovation Center in Cork town.
• 1:13:58
  And we have recently sound signed a ground lease in
• 1:14:02
  Scottsdale, AZ, which is our furthest western place.
• 1:14:09
  But I think that's a, an, an, a pretty vibrant community that's
• 1:14:14
  that's really starved for some live entertainment.
• 1:14:18
  And they love their live entertainment and they like they
• 1:14:21
  live live. But they need more music rooms.
• 1:14:26
  Michael Dore from City Winery want to be the first to thank
• 1:14:28
  you for sharing both your time and your story with us today.
• 1:14:31
  I really appreciate you being here.
• 1:14:33
  My pleasure, Thank you. I'm glad we could get this
• 1:14:35
  together even with the whole Indonesia craziness.
• 1:14:39
  That'll be a mystery to our listeners, folks.
• 1:14:41
  That's a wrap on another episode of the Inspired Stories podcast.
• 1:14:45
  Thanks for learning with us. And if one thing stood out, put
• 1:14:47
  that into action today.