E164 Dave Nitzel and Dave Domzalski

This week's guest star Dave Nitzel and Dave Vumsowski, who had offers the book Hospitality BNA that was released earlier this year. David Dave interviewed, at least an award-winning industry talent from around the globe to find out how they operate in the foreign restaurant business. Together with the interviews and their own research, Hospitality DNA is a compilation of storytelling chapters of great challenges and achievements woven into meaningful business lessons. We talk with Dave and Dave about their long history working together, how they came up with the idea of this book, the challenges encountered along the way, and the many lessons learned.

We had a great time speaking with Dave and Dave and make sure you check out their latest book, Hospitality DNA, available in hardcover, ebook, and in audible format on the usual sites such as Amazon, Kindle, Apple Books, or check the show notes for all the links. Thanks again to Dave Nitzel and Dave Vumsowski for sending us a copy of the book in advance and for being great guests. Enjoy the show. We're back with another episode of the industry podcast.

I'm Kip, this is Dan. What's going on? I'm still hanging up here. No change there.

I'm staying in the office. I'm just going to last couple of weeks of the summer while I'm kind of warm. What about you? How are things going with you?

Summer's still? Wait for Dan. People are going to stay in town and go on the bars again. Yeah.

I noticed the highways. Well, he's going to work in the morning here. It's definitely I can get there on time now, but that'll change about two weeks time. We'll do all the systems.

So we need to. Yeah. Bad for you. Great for me.

Yeah. First of all, probably. Exactly. Exactly.

And if you are coming back into town in the fall or sticking around, you should check out some of my businesses. There's a should-run downtown Kitchener. The Speakeasy. We have Burlesque at the last Friday of every month and we have Santa Comedy every Wednesday, featuring Olivia Stadler from Letter Kenny.

So you want to check that out? Uptown. It's Babylon's sister's Wine and Spirits Bar and we have DJ Ben every Friday night. DJ Nana at the end at the last Saturday of every month and we have DJ Penny every Thursday starting next week.

So stay tuned for that. And then of course, if you're in the Crescent Cambridge area, the place you want to be is the Argyle Arms Live Music Thursday, Friday Saturday, Wednesday, trivia nights and Sunday. Starting this weekend is music bingo. So yeah, you're going to want to check all of that out.

Great new menu there from Chef Dennis Hernandez who was on the last show actually. I think that's about all I needed to all the self promotion I need to do. Yeah. It's about it.

We should just mention it if you like what you're hearing on the show here. Subscribe, review helps a great deal. And always a great big shout out to Zachana at Zachana.co for the fabulous work he does for us on his grand page. Anything else you want to blammer about?

No, I got not too many first world problems this week. That's good for attention. All right. It's opposite.

Yeah. So let's bring in our guests. They are the co-authors of the book Hospital Hospital DNA Dave Nitzel and Dave Domzalski. Mr.

Domzalski is coming from Miami. Mr. Nitzel from Atlanta. Thanks for joining us gentlemen.

What's your name here? Yeah. Thanks a ton. So these guys were nice to send me the book to read, which I did devour a few months ago and I thought it was super informative.

I also lots of great stories, lots of great interviews with some famous and many of the people in the, if you're familiar with the service industry world, if you're not, you might not know all the names, but it's worth a read anyway. So before we got recording, I was asking you guys, you guys kind of like, how are you connected now? You wrote the book together. How did that come to happen?

And also sort of what is your role as a, what are your roles as themselves? Yeah. I'll try to be brief. So Dave and I both own bar metrics franchises.

Bar metrics is a liquor inventory brand. So we find ourselves in bars and restaurants every single day. And we're both fortunate to have some really great employees that allow us the time to do some coaching along with the inventory work. And as things progressed in our businesses, we found that we had a little bit more time to coach and have conversations with owners that were meaningful just beyond, hey, what's missing in the business and how do we get you some more profit, which is obviously great.

We all want profit at the bar, but we found we were having more in depth conversations. Dave and I are also coaches in a program run by Sean Finter called Accelerate that folks come in from all over the world for a two and a half day intensive. It was leaving one of those intensives one time as a coach and I was thinking, you know, I'm learning so much alongside, you know, being a coach. Sometimes people think the idea is just to dispense knowledge, but you're also gaining just a ton from the folks you're having conversations with.

And I thought, you know, there's a lot more to be done here. And Dave and I had that conversation and we said, Hey, let's write a book together. So we wrote our first book called the bar shift. And it was a surprise success.

I think we invested about $1,500 in that book and it just sold all around the world. It's a real simple best practices book. So we did that work. And then we, COVID hit and I needed something else to do.

And Dave had decided to start a couple of other businesses with his wife and I was mowing the grass three times a day and I got to do something else here and I'll be struggling the driveway. Yeah. Right. So what we decided to do is take advantage of some of those contacts that we had made in the coaching program and take the bar shift maybe to a whole other level and explore the idea of what it really means to have hospitality DNA.

We thought we were going to be on the sidelines for a while during COVID and we were. I mean, it was, you know, it was really bad if you were a bar in restaurant dare I say it was even worse if you were on the support side of a bar in restaurant wanting to count inventory. We had a really long tail in terms of getting back into action. So we decided to take on a really big audacious three year research project to define what it means to have hospitality DNA.

And that's how we got here. And how did you select the people that you interviewed in the book? Like, how did you sort of curate the guys you wanted to, the men when you wanted to talk to and sort of flash out their experiences? Well, we started out with, you know, we had a short list of people we knew who had a ton of experience or award winners already.

One of the early ones that we spoke with, Angus Winchester. And he sort of helped us, you know, aligned other people. I have connections to Julia Comrada as Dave as well. And that's how we sort of started.

And each time we talked to somebody at the end of the conversation, you know, we'd always ask who else should we, you know, who should we talk to? Who's somebody who, you know, exemplifies what we're looking to find? That actually, it took us a little while to get to the right question because initially, initially we were looking to write a book on what is hospitality on an international level has it changed for different places to go. Dave is a world season traveling bar customer.

He has been to more places, more bars than I would probably hope to go. And so we had this, you know, conversation on it, talking to a couple of other friends that we started making along the way that, you know, we want to do this international book about, you know, what's it like to have, what's hostile like in Australia versus Canada versus US versus Hong Kong. And it felt flat. So as that wasn't working, I'm leaving out some detail there because it's a bit of deep dive that I'm going to be boring.

We've also figured out that we had some amazing content in how these people were achieving what they achieved. And it would just sort of like what's the question, tell us your story, how'd you get started, where'd you go, all this stuff. And once we asked that question, they probably started the second and third interviews. And we started really going, okay, we had about three or four at the beginning, so it's like just to hit.

And we said, okay, who should we talk to who's done this, you know, how stories, and we just go for this and went from there and started reaching out and getting all those, there's one really fascinating person on the list that Nitzel dug deep into LinkedIn. And just would not stop asking. It's a little of Elle of Coyote ugly to say, I need to talk to you. I need to talk to you.

I just just like, okay, okay. So there wasn't that one too. Yeah, we sort of found that most people in the hospitality industry are pretty open to like talking to us on the show and certainly probably for you guys to book. And I think it's like a lot of people just don't ask, like, you know, people aren't asking people in the service industry if they want to tell their stories.

So I find there a lot more eager to do it. And what surprised me on that side, and by the way, Lil is incredible and has been incredible advocate for us. She's an amazing person. Almost not also a lot of them.

I don't know if it was all Davey, you can remind me if you have a better memory, but many of the people we talked to were small surprise that somebody wanted to discuss what they did. Even though we're talking Jack McGarry, the most award-winning pub in the world, you know, we got Holy of the Brearies when somebody was a celebratory customer, kind of Resi, page and a half of his or me, which is like a title in Italy. And still they're like, oh, thank you so much. This is a, you know, how would you want to interview me?

Because you're fascinating, you know? Yeah. Very, very, a lot of humility there. It's pretty cool.

And so you set out the right sort of one book and ended up kind of morphing into writing a different type of book. Just as a process question, how does that develop as you're like at one point, you realize you're going to sort of switch stream and move in a different direction. And then we can talk about your helix model and how you develop that. Yeah, it was a little terrifying.

So we started off down this journey and we had invited, you know, we had several interviews in the can, as they say already. The question we were asking people, as Dave mentioned, was this sort of culture based on your geographic location and it just wasn't landing. Like it was a bad question because people couldn't answer it. So we were asking the wrong question, but the other thing we were looking for that we were asking to say, what's your superpower?

What makes you special? People are reticent to answer that question. They just don't like to tell you why they're awesome, which makes perfect sense. So what they would do is they would sort of counter with what they believe in.

So then we started getting these answers that were kind of like their personal manifesto of what they believe in and how they got to where they were. David and I would have this amazing conversation after what we felt like was a failed effort on our part. We didn't get what we wanted. But wow.

And then it didn't take us that long. I mean, we're not completely stupid. So we did figure out after about the fourth interview that we're getting gold here. Let's just mine it and let's go for what people are telling us.

Like we don't let's just write the book that they're giving us. Not not the one that we feel compelled to write because this was just a research project. Let's go where the research is taking us. And that's how it morphs.

So we were very open minded to where the information was taking us and it was taking us down a path of they're giving us insights into their DNA, like what they're truly made of, what drives them, which was that was so much more interesting than what we were going to write anyway. And so that's how the metamorphosis took place. And it was wonderful to be honest. So that's kind of like just a good tip to anyone else who's trying to write a book just go where the people are taking you rather than trying to force your idea into the book.

It's almost like opening a restaurant. You know, you find the same thing. You know, you can say, Hey, I have an idea that I want to impose on the community or Hey, the community really needs something. Let's put what the community wants out there and is it life so much easier.

It's no different. You guys living in different states, is that a little bit more challenging to collaborate on that book or is it just got used to like collaborating online all the time? Not at all. As Dave said, after each after each one of these calls, we would talk for upwards of two hours each time and take notes and so on.

If we needed to do a call like this, a lot of it happened on the phone, he would write, he actually had to drag me through it. So so he mentioned earlier in a good way, he mentioned earlier that my wife and I were launching another business and it was my job was promoted with her. I wrote the business plan on the numbers guy. She had the knowledge on how to execute and I had to, you know, do a ton of work up front.

So Dave said, Hey, man, we're going to write the second book. We're into the interview session. I can't. And he came back and they later said, Well, you're gonna.

And he's like, look, I, he said, I'll do the front work and I know you'll catch up and I did. So once once I was in more, I was dabbling here and I was there for almost all the interview so it's a couple I could make. Then it was, you know, I had at first it was two, maybe three chapters, I think it was three chapters right on my own that he wanted me to pilot for certain reasons. I had to rewrite it chapter because we have somebody bow out, so do a completely rewrite.

And then once that was the editing started, that's where we became extremely collaborative. So the initial part was just fun. How many conversations? Like, that was amazing.

She would listen and like that was incredible. Like, you were talking, that was so cool. So we had something outside of that. We thought it was interesting.

A person she's hotels. The first outside of the restaurant said, Yeah, this is good shit. By the way, glad I didn't have to watch my language so much. No, definitely not.

But it was it was the rewriting and the editing that for me was more exciting and I just say exciting typing keyboard. I would read his stuff and do some work. He would read my stuff and do some work. I would read my stuff.

He would read his back and forth and back and forth. And what I was saying, look, I'm stuck. I need to take a look or whatever. So because it's, you know, I think we met once maybe twice in person and it wasn't as necessary as you would think.

It was very easy to do virtually. Most of it being like keyboard and Hey, Matt, I rewrote this. I need to read it. Okay.

I read it. I found these three things. You want me to get it? Just change it, fix it, whatever you got it and add your voice.

I'll have mine and so on until it was complete. I'll get one more process question for you and then we'll get to like sort of the meat of the book. But like when you're, when you're talking about like, Oh, you were writing one section. Other day was writing another section.

How do you guys come to those decisions? Like who's writing which parts of the book? I might be the only one who finds that interesting, but I do. You know, that's a great question.

Thank you, Dave. It really is. It really is. Dave and I don't have a lot of ego in this.

So it was literally Dave could write a chapter, send it to me and I would say something like Dave, this is terrible. I need to totally rewrite this. You get to keep your interpretation, but we need to make this doesn't make sense in this respect. And I would rewrite something and it would always come out better and the reverse is true.

I would send a chapter to Dave and say, Dave, take a look at this and say, Dave, like you have 12 run on sentences here, like this doesn't work. This language doesn't work for the industry. I'm a bit of an industry outsider. So Dave helps guide me through some potential pitfalls when it comes to the verbiage I choose or the lexicon of the industry to make sure I have it right.

I've been doing this 10 years, but still I feel a little bit like an interloper. And then what's really interesting, maybe the most fascinating part of doing a project like this, a research project, is how you interpret the data. So you and all four of us could hear a story. Let's say we hear someone's life story and what they determined to be, what they consider to be the keys to their success, but you have to sort of pull it out of the story.

They don't just say it. It comes in nuggets. At the end of that, you have to decide, hey, what's your opinion of what we just heard? What was the most important points do you think and you have to be able to delineate between what struck you and what would be most relevant to a larger audience?

What would impact others the most? So there's a lot of debate would happen. And we go back and forth on what we just heard, what matters the most, how do we interpret that? That's not easy to do.

And I think for Dave and I, we have very similar ethics and values. So that made it easier. Then we could just argue about a matter of opinion, but not where the book was going, but that makes sense. So getting to the Helix points, we had some really lively debates in the end, more so than the chapter writing in the beginning at the end when we were trying to string it all together to define hospitality DNA, that was tough because that's what we were doing.

Like it's one thing to write chapters and business lessons, but then to say, what are all these having common? That's what we owe the reader at the end. That was tough. And it's still open to debate.

You could read that and we welcome it. You and Dan might read that and say, you know what, I come to different conclusions at the end of this. And that's awesome. Like if you just read it and then come to your own conclusions, no sweat.

Like that's fantastic. And so when I got your book, I really didn't know what to expect. I didn't know what it was about specifically. And I was like, oh, it's probably like, there's a lot of books about the service industry out there.

A lot of them tend to be very similar. I was expecting more of a straight interview with just bartenders and much like we do on the show, right? And then I was kind of surprised once I got into it about how it's almost how to manual on how to open your own business. If you look at it from that perspective, and it doesn't even necessarily have to apply specifically to the service industry.

Although a question for you might be, do you feel like the service industry opening bars and restaurants is different in a way than opening a retail shop or another kind of business? I mean, it's a very, very, very, very different. I think I'll jump first, Dave, and then you fill in the blanks. I come from outside the industry.

And so that's part of my fascination is I'm in awe of you guys. And I'm not kissing up. I mean, I really am. I come from a place where I had responsibility for 3300 stores, $3 billion in revenue, over 10,000 employees.

And but I was, I had massive amounts of support everywhere. I looked. Every angle of the business was covered with a vice president of expertise in some form of fashion. When I got into this, I was blown away that all that expertise landed with basically your local bar and restaurant owner trying to be the real estate guy, trying to be the HR person, trying to be marketing, trying to be operations, trying to be startup.

It's a ton. And I looked at that in awe. For me, that's a huge inspiration for the writing of the books was to say, how can I take a little bit of what I think I know, not insult the industry and the people that are busting their ass and doing this right. But there's something there that I think we can share.

And if I can interpret it right and get that mix of what I did in a previous life, bring it in here in an applicable way, which is why Dave's vital to everything that we do. And then give it to someone like you and you read it and go, yeah, you know what, this is helpful. That's it. If you get one thing out of that and go, that really helped.

That changed the way I look at something, then mission accomplished for us. Sorry, Dave. I jumped in. No, you're fine.

I would add one sort of a side piece that's on the caveat side piece in terms of small business. I don't think I don't think this applies to it too many. And I can tell you, I have several family members in different service industries. My wife, like I said, no, Taliesin on who's she's in her 70s.

She started the largest massage therapy school in Michigan and practice. And she read the book. She wrote us a wonderful review on it. She said, you're wrong.

This is an hospitality industry. This is service. Anybody. And she didn't say wrong about the book.

She said, just what you think it is. Does anybody in service, whatever that service is, this applies. And I would say knowing what she went through as a business owner, it's similar to a restaurant owner. She had to learn everything.

Her and her husband built an entire facility. It was a geo. She was like, I started a TV. You're not like literally a TV and went to a house and they built this center.

They had to learn every piece contracting all that. So while I do have my own, there's a place in my heart for the restaurant industry and there's more complex I think than any other industry in the world in terms of small business, especially because you get past the service I still have. You have to deal with food and spoilage and cost and customer strong people and all that, just adds layers to it. I think that overall the journey, and by the way, I'm really happy you noticed that in the book because it was designed at the very end, we designed the chapters to flow in a way that's like, this is the journey.

This is the story. If you look at it one person, like gain knowledge, build your vision and so on and as you're starting to operate, it's like pre-work operations and so on. Yeah, I think it does apply to many different industries. Yeah, I agree as well.

And I did find as I was reading through it, I'm like, wow, there were many times where I was actually reading it and I was like, wow, I wish I had this information when I started my first couple of businesses, right? And so I can't recommend it enough to anyone just thinking about opening any kind of small business, go get this book. But there were lots of times too where I was like, now I'm on my fourth business that I've opened now and I'm reading along and I'm like, yeah, this is some of the stuff I learned along the way, but I had to learn it the hard way. So it's great that you guys have given us a manual, so other people don't have to make the same mistakes.

But let's talk about the helix sequencing and like that model and how you came up with it. I developed it for anyone who hasn't read the book yet. They're pretty much at the end of every chapter. They apply this model to what they just talked about in the previous chapter, which I found super helpful.

So I felt like I came up with them. So it was themes coming out of the interviews. So when I first started off, Dave was present for the interviews, but afterwards I had to do a lot of the analytics and figuring out of things. So I still have, I got a whole bucket full of sharpies right here.

And so I would color code themes. And I had my office was just covered in poster board with all these different colors. And what I looked for was like, for example, travel was orange. So I would look at this poster board and what did I see reoccurring colors coming out of all my notes and the things that just kept coming up over and over became the themes.

Now this was before we decided to go with this sciencey hospitality helix and all these things. And we found that there, well, originally we found three themes that were really strong that jumped out to Dave and I. And then the hard work was on the last two. And we had Dave called me on one particular occasion and had a Eureka moment and we talked about it.

And I thought he was right. And that was on the H. I had one on the E, which we can talk about all these things. They just don't want to spoil the surprise at the end.

Right. So it was the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the key links, which are the five reoccurring themes that we reveal at the end. Um, it just, those were the things that kept coming up over and over and over again. We said, if, uh, the large majority of everyone we interviewed kept coming back to these same things consistently.

Um, and they're not, they're not connected. We wanted a very global book, by the way, too. So these folks are all over the world. They're in different roles.

We have bartenders and bar owners, um, and brand ambassadors. We have a lot of different people in here because we wanted to be well represented because we think that's part of being, we think that's a big part of what hospitality is too. So all that stuff being true. Uh, we ran with the five things that just kept coming up and everyone's story or belief systems.

Yeah. And I think it's kind of, I found it super helpful because it almost, it's, it's a, I don't want to give people the wrong idea that it's like you're reading a textbook because it doesn't read that way at all. It's super fascinating. It's, uh, you're reading like interviews with, like you said, incredibly interesting people from all over the world, but then you sort of tie this kind of science gimmick to it as a way of like getting sort of a, like I said earlier, how to manual on how to get this stuff done.

And so it's sort of very entertaining and very informative at the same time. It's not always easy to pull out. So congrats on that guys. Yeah.

Thank you very much. We, um, that was a big deal to us. We had time. So the folks we interviewed made storytelling easy.

I mean, the journeys of these, these folks you've had, uh, cat on. I mean, the journeys are unbelievable. The hardest thing about writing this book, it was getting, doing their journeys justice. Yeah.

That was also, I mean, man, you read it. I mean, some of these stories, there's heartbreak, there's tragedy, there's great triumph and success. There's all these things in there. Um, doing that was the scary part.

We could, David, I can write business lessons. Um, we're coaches. So in the end, you know, we have to be able to coach out. What did we just hear about?

What did we learn? How do you, how do we interpret that and then give it back to people in a way they can use? That's the, that's the beginning of the book. And then the back end is what are they all having common, what's hospitality, DNA, mean, but we're not writers by trade.

So it took a ton of work and some professional help to get the, to really get those stories. I mean, I think David and I both agreed when we set out to do this. We said there's two things that have to happen at the end of this. One is we have to do the people we interviewed justice that has to happen.

And two, we just need something we're proud of. If we sell one book, I don't care as long as we do right by the people that volunteered their time and effort and that it's something that we can hold our heads high at the end and say, you know what, we did that. And that's it. Everything else that happens after that is just bonus.

Right. I was struck by when you mentioned the stories and some of the heartache and all that stuff. A lot of the, a lot of the stories, there's definite periods of failure in the interview ease interview ease, uh, story and experience. And I was wondering, do you think that that's almost a vital part of ending up with a successful business?

Yeah. You know, you know what, man? I had to fail a lot and I wish I had this book. If you had this book to fail in different ways, one of my favorite quotes, I want to say it's either Eisenhower's wife, if you're not failing and not trying hard enough, uh, there's different versions that I've heard, but that's, that's the gist.

And now having, having started three businesses, I've got, you know, bar metrics, I've got the one with my wife and I've got the book with Dave, which is, it's a whole business. We have, we're going on around that. I feel constantly, I'm trying new stuff. I'm busting, I'm trying to figure it out.

And I feel it's something, but then you learn, you go back, you grow, you do it again. Um, you shift. It's almost like, you know, scientific method. Here's my hypothesis.

I have to work. Gasrate. Did it not work? Okay.

Let's rework the whole process. So I think it's a critical part of the comments that have successful and I think, I think if you asked any truly successful person on any level, however you want to define that success, if they had significant failure along the way and they said no, either they're lying or they are godly. I don't know. The one in the millions.

I don't know. The one in the millions. In a nothing man, never again. Yeah.

Yeah. Branson, Richard Branson. I feel constantly super successful. Yeah.

What's important in note kep is in the, I think in the helix, which is part of the hot what we define as hospitality DNA. is a domitable spirit, which is the inability to be defeated. What is so special about these folks and the ones that are the high achievers or let's call, we used award winners because we needed some point of differentiation. So what was so unique about these award winners was, they came through adversity, they have grit, and tenacity and all that, but they came through it with a smile.

They came through it with a spirit that is somewhat hard to imagine, given some of the tragedy that they experienced, it didn't affect how they felt about life, I suppose. And to see them just deal with it and move on and still want to give to others. They just have a certain DNA where they want to give to others, make people happy, give those experiences, they live for it. And I think it's an incredible trait.

I'm not sure I possess that trait. I can get a little pissy about things. These folks aren't, and we've been asking, are they, is it optimism? I'm asking, it's not optimism.

Because they do have, they do have a, there is a pessimistic side, but it doesn't show up in the business. It may show up somewhere else in their personal lives, but it doesn't seem to show up in the business. We found that fascinating because you would find the reoccurring themes of failure overcoming it. And you say, well, how do they do that?

But that's how they do it. They overcome it with attitude. And there's, I don't know who another saying, right? His life is 5% about what happens to you, 95% about how you respond to it.

That absolutely is in the indomitable spirit piece of the DNA. Yeah, it's funny you said that just even listening to you talk about that, and sometimes it's hard to self reflect. But like, when I think about my experience in the opening of the business is it's, like it's just so hard all the time, right? Because the margins are so thin in the service industry, and it's like, it's just really hard to make a goal of each one.

And sometimes you really feel worn down and get negative thoughts. But then when I enter my businesses and they're being run in the way that I visualized when I open them, then it's almost like all that stuff watches out of you. And it's hard not to feel positive. It's like, look what I've done, you know?

Yeah, that's it. That is absolutely it. So I don't want to get way too much of the book. Obviously, we're allowed people to buy it.

Oh, maybe this is a good time to mention where they can get the book. They can get the book on Amazon. It's available in hardback, paperback, Kindle, and in Audible. You can also go to Drake Direct the Audible to get the book.

The audiobook. OK. Well, everyone, I honestly am not just blowing smoke up your asses. I really think everybody should go out and buy this book.

If you have any designs on opening a business. Or if you just want to hear some cool stories from people in the service industry, and I assume if you listen to this podcast, you probably do. So yeah, I'll post links to that in the show notes as well. If anyone wants to check it out.

That's a completely impartial third party. I agree. It's amazing. I have no dog in this fight.

So again, I don't want to, but maybe it's a little teaser to give people an idea maybe who are not necessarily interested in opening their own business. Or maybe you're not interested in the service industry. There's a really fascinating story that you guys tell about an event you did at a race track. So I don't know if you give the whole thing away.

Obviously maybe you can get those little teaser of that story because it was hilarious. I'll let Dave run with it. But I will tell you, if you have no worries, there's so much content in there. So don't worry about it.

We'll answer it well. If you want to talk about it, you talk about what we're answering questions you got. OK, well, let's talk about that story. Because I was like I said, it was hilarious and tragic at the same time.

So yeah. It is to this day at RC, man. So leading up to me moving to Florida, I knew this guy and fascinating human being. And brilliant man, so many skill sets.

And without, I had to be careful what I say, because we changed all names and so on in the book. For good reason. So he was sitting at this event, said, hey, man, I need your help. And everything was going well.

I said, I need to design my managerial strategy and my training book and cocktails. And just set this. I don't have the operational side to do it. He had his own venue, but it was a very small bar inside of a much bigger entertainment complex.

So he didn't have a time experience with it. And my first red flag should have been when about maybe a month down, he's like, hey, remember I said, oh, I need this. Well, I kind of need to run and manage the whole thing, too. And instead of running like, she has to run anyway, I was like, sure, no problem.

I got this. And I talked to I've been talking to Dave about it and it's all about it. And he realized well before I did that, if I didn't have help, I was I was off the creek. So when the earlier times I talked to it and it's like, look, man, I think I got this not a big deal.

It's only 27 bar stage bar stations in the main tent. So we're just going to bring in 40 bartenders to rotate through and train them from scratch inside of eight hours. I can take care of this. And he told me I was a fool.

And so I need his help. And I did. But I didn't say I was a fool. He let me know carefully.

And thank God, by the way, I think as I get into the thing, I get there and the whole thing is it's a story. I roll up to the guy's just able to get this house for you, saying, don't worry, it's like house, I'm like, great. And so I roll up to the house and he's like, pick a room. You're the first one there.

Don't want to pick a room, whatever you want. I said, no, I'm sure. And I walk up and I go to the house. There's no furniture anywhere, not a mattress, not enough.

And I call it to him and I'm, where am I supposed to sleep? He's like, oh, the mattress is in the garage. There's a stack of mattresses that look like they came out of like a flop house somewhere. It's like, just pick one.

I'm like, oh, geez Christ. So I'm calling this whole like, hey man, I don't know about this. So as we're, as we're, you know, people are coming and are flailing out the house, I also find out that a good, I don't know about 10 or 15 of the bartender's he got were working gentleman's clubs. Yeah.

Yeah. And so Nitzel's coming in from Atlanta with his wife. And I'm like, you might not want to stay here. I don't know if, I don't know if she would appreciate the clientele house.

So we shipped out that again, more red flags coming in. The eight hours I was supposed to have to train a staff turn into about a two and a half hour rush through. Because again, he said, yeah, this is what's going to happen. Find a down moment, a huge brand, a huge liquor brand, had a 10 across the way, didn't have somebody run that.

And said, hey, can you run this? Like, OK, so Nitzel shows up. And I'm calling him, no, he doesn't show. I'm calling him about every hour for the drive down from Atlanta, it's where we're at.

I'm like, dude, can you get faster? I know you have a guy's wife, I'm like, dude, fucking get your fucking step on the gas. I need you here faster, man. It's a race track.

You'll have one once you get here. And he shows up and he's a disaster. There's like, I don't know how many guys were running security. It was like 2730 guys, maybe 10, 15 people.

It looked like it looked like prison guards managing the most, you know, high security prisoners, most dangerous people on the planet. And he and I have very different skill sets. It's just vastly different. It's part of the swing.

You mentioned before we started to say the partnership chapter, which I'm very passionate about. As Nitzel said earlier today in this conversation, our ethics and morals are aligned. We're very, very clear on that, what you want to have in a partner. But our skill sets and knowledge bases are vastly different.

But you also want, and that works out. I'm operational. I'm a number of us. I'm an organizational that he's human people culture.

So I have, I have at that time when he got to about 30 women at the bar, half of them were fighting with each other. They all come from like Ohio, Indiana, Florida, all these different states brought together. Don't know each other. But there's clusters like three that will know each other.

Three here, three there. Not a good situation. I'm just like, dude, fuck, I don't know what to do. Fix it.

Watch around the room. 45 minutes later comes back. It's like done. It's fixed.

We're good. Like what the hell should do is I just talk to him. I'm talking to him. I'm talking to him.

I'm starting to be going great. Now, as I mentioned earlier, the owner, the guy who started this whole thing, one of his skills is marketing and being a personality. So he was a globalist. You're a globalist.

He was excited to know. He was a globalist. We wanted to talk to him the other way. He was a globalist.

And all these different things. He was like, oh, man, he's really different. He was a globalist. I'm probably going to start by doing all these different things.

I'm literally trying to figure out what he was right here. We were doing the same thing. And we didn't work together for the first time. We didn't work together.

We were going, we were trying to do it. We were doing this based on our team. promoting this whole time. And as this is happening, it just starts devolving bit by bit by bit.

First, it's, hey, you've got to use randomly finds this woman. Hey, you got to slide her into the bar of meditation, nestle handle, sad, he's like, I'm going to deal with it. And various, various other things, you know, bartenders are disappearing for whatever reason, again, usually he's involved. So why think there's this?

There's a bikini contest for, you know, we were trying to talk about it. He's like, no, it's got to go on. It's got to go on. And what we did, we're like fine, you know, it's off of the stage, maybe 20, 30 feet away.

There's this huge field next to our restaurant, which by the way, incredible. There was an asphalt slab a day before we got there. And I watched this thing, you put up like I said, it's a full 27 station bar, TVs, kitchen in the back, cranking within 24 hours. It was amazing.

All this work. And this is not discipline, right? We did all sort of then and then just fell apart because I've been, oh, it's because I was constantly says, Dave, what the fuck am I bartenders? I said, what do you mean?

I think it was like five or six of them, right? Or maybe it was like 10? Yeah, it was five of them. Just five of them.

We're about five, six deep. And he looks like our cricket, we're on our way to do, we're supposed to do, if you read the book, we're supposed to do 200,000 and we were on our way, like we were easily on our way. And all of a sudden, five artists, people are getting pissed. And he says, fine, my fucking, but he's pissed.

So that we didn't know this is complete the shots as we knew the contest was going to happen. We were already like, this was other stuff. And I don't want to get too much of a story. But he took five of our tenders and convinced them chemically to get sick.

They're done. They're a wreck. They can't come back. They can't work anymore.

They're just out of their minds. And that was, you know, there was a chunk of people who went to watch it. They kind of didn't come back a bunch of other people left because it could get service anymore. Later on that night, I think that was the night when you were like, dude, I'm out.

I can't like he was like, I'm done. There's no more to do here. The bars did. I'm going to go sleep.

We had to select for 24 hours this point. No, I was working those working 20 hour shifts. And this guy's too old to be doing that. He wasn't failing.

He was just not. No, I was a man. Dave's leaving out like God. We want to be able to read the whole body.

To set the stage a little bit too. So there's about a football, this is about the size of a football field space. There's seven, this guy's organized seven concerts. So we've got concerts go rotating through bands rotating through nonstop.

When the concerts aren't going on, we've got racing movies playing on a Jumbo Tron. We have maybe the largest Akila brand in the world with a tent who they're completely pissed off at this guy because of an arrangement that he screwed up. And then this is a pop up that we're going to do, like Dave said, 200,000 in a couple days at one of the biggest race events in the world. And if done right, there's the contract to do two of the biggest race series in the world, you know, every week or every other weekend.

So you got a you got a you got a lot of money on the line. And so the moral of the story is it's really about it's about discipline, the way we name the chapter, but it's really about motivations. And this guy was dealing with some stuff personally that he would decided he was going to work through in this event, right, which had to do with divorce and women and some get some payback, let's say. And he went berserk.

And look, the best laid plans of my son, this guy had planned this thing to the tee. And you've never seen a greater implosion in your life. So crazy to think about because like the amount of work it must have gone into playing the whole fucking thing. And then just like not be able to keep it together.

When it's the one in time CEOs, executive level people convinced people who thought like there's no fucking way and he got to the belief, and then just all you have it, like two, three more days, then we'll celebrate three, three days. No, it's all about knowing when it's time to do your celebration, how to discipline to see you through. And I watch him, he was having a great time. It was a fantastic time.

Yeah, but maybe if that's what the experience we want, maybe just go to the festival rather than organize the whole thing. You know what, Camp, that is right. And here's what you're on to it. So he had done that like his whole life.

So he was a local. And so for the locals, it was kind of like the local Mardi Gras, this race was and then you had your race sort of hardcore race fans. So he wanted to be king of the local party. I've seen it so many times.

Yeah, that's what happened. Crazy. Well, again, the book's hospitality DNA. You're gonna want to pick it up at all the locations anywhere you can get a book, I guess.

But before I let you guys go, obviously, there's just a ton that anyone reading this book can learn. I would like to know what each of you felt you learned. Give me one thing that you specifically learned of the super valuable one through the writing of the book. I'll go first.

Yeah, you're first. If it was, that's a great question. That's one. It wasn't just one thing.

That's for sure. Because there's a lot of. I'm sure it's times, but yeah. We had a 60,000 word deal with the book and we were at 75,000 and our publisher was like, hey, man, you guys have to stop writing.

And so we've actually built some coaching and I'm not pitching anything because it's not even something really that we sell. It's something that we do. So we've built some coaching programs and some speaking engagements off threads from the book, like The Inception archetype, which is one of the neatest learnings. I'm blown away by that in the book.

It came from Dave Kaplan and the death and co-team. So that was like an operational learning that I got from the book. The bigger answer would be the willingness. This is amazing.

This industry is full of amazing people and the spirit of giving the willingness to tell what's essentially a total stranger, your secrets to success, your greatest failures, your triumphs, just open up like that. A guy coming from Fortune 500 corporate America, that is not how we operate. It's not an opinion. And so to watch people do that for someone like me, I'm just, I'm in awe.

Like, I'm like, it's part of what inspires me to write. Now, you guys probably like, yeah, that's every day. That's all of us. But for me, I'm blown away by that.

And so maybe I had a hint of understanding of that, but after the book, totally different, like just amazed at the willingness to share and give essentially to the competition, like in a way, you know, but that's not how the industry views it. The industry views it itself as a community, not as competitive sets. And there is real beauty in that. So that would be my answer.

Yeah, I come from a very different direction. I've never, well, I worked corporate briefly all-quality of doing speaker status engineer. So I don't have that experience. And as Dave said, you know, that's something I would, or we would be, you know, comfort with.

That's what I knew growing through the industry is that's people that share. I see one or something together, helping each other out all the time. Well, all the time, a lot. From mine, I would extend the sharing thing.

There's two, there's two pieces, one small, I'm surprised, or a little bit not surprised, but it was delightful to see and not, you know, it was surprising that we recently had an amazing gentleman by Neil Denny Olden, and Evievsky. Yeah, we had him on the job. I'm hoping I'm saying his name right, I need to ask him. Nibs, yeah.

Nibs, yeah. Nibs, Nibs. He read the book and put together this incredible post. I mean, he's putting his spin on our concepts.

It's just amazing size on Instagram. And I got people engaged in Europe and our book and they're buying it and I'm like, holy shit, I asked for nothing ever turned, nothing. And that was in watching, I don't know him, so I'm not making a comment on who he is. But I see he's got $76,000, I know he's doing brand, revving and stuff.

And to be like, I get money elsewhere, this is important. That's what we said, this is important. That was huge. To see people and more and more people saying, you guys have written something important.

That's been, I don't know if I can find the right word, that's hitting me in a very deep level. To my core, to be able to have created something that people are holding up that way. And I have a hard time with looking at that success and being like, yeah, I'm proud of what we did. But the comments are higher, their compliments are higher than I expected.

And that comes out of the other piece, which is I didn't know I had the discipline to spend three years writing a book. And part of that, what's that? It's fucking hard. I've given it a shot.

Part of that, very rare. Honestly, this is the last book I'll do for partnerships. I don't think I would have done it or been able to continue through without an insult or a diet, there's a guy who might do like a fucking tire, I can't do it, he can do it. So, you know, watching our relationship with him, this is to be open as we are in the industry.

This is the first adult, like real adult friendship I've made outside of like actual work in my life. I had the last like really close friend I made, I was fucking my friend from eight years older college, college, the last one. It's been a huge for me. It's been very, I talked about the other day.

So those things together, it's just the personal thing more so outcome of what we created is just is hitting me in a way that I never fucking would have imagined starting, you know, barbacking 20 years ago, quoting an engineering job, you're like, I'm gonna go bar back. I never, if you said, man, you're right of looking, people are gonna love it and they're gonna say this is really important and you're gonna make a really close friend out of it. Fuck you, whatever. Well, I will say, I echo Daniel's sentiments.

I know he put a little blurb on the back of the jacket as well. It is one of the best books I've read about the service industry. You guys did a great service here. And it's not just for people who are interested in the service industry.

It's not just for people who are interested in starting their own business. It's an amazing read, no matter what your interests are, but specific, but if you are in the service industry, it's a must read. So gentlemen, congratulations. Thanks so much for doing the show.

And yeah, keep us in the loop on anything that's coming up. And so you guys got to keep writing. So thanks for having us.