How Lisa Jaroscak Created Hospitality Brand Shore Club to Fill a Gap on Chicago's Lakefront

Runners on the Lakeshore Path spend miles with their noses down, but starting August 2017, there was a reason to look up just north of LaSalle Street. The Shore Club is an oasis on the Lakefront that Lisa Jaroscak and her two partners - Robbie Schloss and Nick Thayer - helped to create. The day that this location opened its doors, Jaroscak told us that she accomplished a big goal that took months of hard work and endless creativity. She talked through what that meant for her on this week's episode of our podcast, #WeGotGoals (a live episode that we recorded at the new Moxy Chicago). That goal and its achievement may seem like a departure from where Jaroscak started her professional journey. Just five years ago, Jaroscak graduated from college with formal training as an operatic soprano. But as any musician learns, getting paid to perform your craft comes with a lot of hustle. And that hustle propelled Jaroscak to find opportunities - opportunities to book other artists and to eventually produce music festivals and events. When she found the site that would become The Shore Club, her eyes were already open to opportunities and she was willing to put in the work to make it happen. The rest of the pieces fell into place after Jaroscak trusted her gut and charged ahead to bring her project to life. Listen to this week's episode and you'll hear Jaroscak discuss how she met her partners, the inspiration for the Shore Club, and who you should never ask an opera singer to belt out a note for you (she never actually discussed that, but I did ask her to sing a note and realized to my horror that it was like asking a sprinter to run their fastest 40-meter dash, totally cold). And if you enjoy #WeGotGoals, subscribe anywhere you get your podcasts and leave us a rating or a review on Apple Podcasts. ------- JAC:Welcome to #WeGotGoals, a podcast by aSweatLife.com, on which we talk to high achievers about their goals. This week's episode is a special episode. We recorded it live at the Moxy Hotel Chicago, which just opened up so you may hear a little bit of background noise and a little bit of music, but that's really just the ambiance and the fun of the Moxy coming through on this episode. Let's get to the show. I'm Jeana Anderson Cohen and with me I have Maggie Umberger and Kristen Geil. MU:Hi Jeana, how's it going? KG:Hey Jeana. JAC:What's up, goal-getters? MU:Jeana, this week you spoke with Lisa Jaroscak of the Shore Club. JAC:I did, so Lisa does a lot of things, the Shore Club being one of them. And I say a lot of things because it's actually sort of staggering. She currently is involved with, a partner of or leading at four different companies across Chicago. Everything from the seasonal work that's involved in the Shore Club, which is a restaurant located on Chicago Park District land right on the lake shore. It's really beautiful and one-of-a-kind. She's also involved in some planning and event logistics and operations, so her work really spreads from that sort of hospitality mindset. MU:So the Shore Club is newer to Chicago even though people have been running on the lake shore path for a very long time. This is a new addition to what tourists and locals can experience alike, and I think it's a need for the lake shore. So when Lisa saw this space, she almost became obsessed with the goal of creating it and creating that opportunity for people to experience what she had in her mind. JAC:Yeah. She's absolutely a fixator, which I say in a way that is incredibly positive because I too am a fixator and when I say she fixates, she talked about how she saw the space on the lake shore path that would become the Shore Club and at first, she saw it as a perfect venue to host an event for one of her clients and then as she started to dig into the logistics of actually opening a restaurant or an event space on Chicago Park District property, she realized really quickly that it needed to be open and available and accessible to all Chicago residents. So a restaurant was the clear way to go. JAC:The Shore Club is inspired by beautiful beaches across the world, how Lisa puts it, and really when you see it, it makes sense because it looks like something you could find in Greece. It looks like something you'd find in the south of Italy or France or Croatia, wherever you'd want to go to a beautiful beach with great beach food or snacks to share. This place really represents that and I. But I think what's most striking, even though the design is incredible and even though the place is remarkable, I think what's really striking about it is that Lisa is so young. JAC:She's out of college in a handful of years, so she hasn't been in the workforce for a super long time. Her professional training was in music and she sort of had this idea, had this dream, had this vision and found the people to help her execute it. And when that vision was like create this beautiful place that was healthy, that that really reflected the lake rather than taking away from it. What she created was truly remarkable, especially given her age and experience. KG:And it seems like in your interview, even though she's so young and she's already accomplished so much, she stayed really humble throughout it all. JAC:She's super humble and I'm going to point to a couple of things for that, one being just the hard work that goes into event production in general and hospitality in general. Sometimes when you hustle all the time, it's hard to sort of spend a lot of time on ego. And the other one being where we're both from. JAC:So we're from Minnesota, she's from a town that borders mine. I'm from Anoka, she's from Coon Rapids and we are a hardy stock, the Minnesota people, we work hard and we do not take compliments well. So when you hear her sort of speak to her own accomplishments, it, it's sort of those things where it's just she's put her nose down, she's worked really hard probably for her entire life. And now you're really sort of seeing that pay off. MU:On this podcast. We get to talk to high achievers and how and talk to them about how they approach goals in general. And some are really opposed to thinking far ahead and they really like living in the present moment, but it seemed to me like the way that you talk about, uh, how hard she works in what she's doing. It doesn't, doesn't leave her much room to talk about the big goals in the future. It's really just driving forward and kind of digging down into that hard work. Would you say that that sort of her mindset about goal setting in general? JAC:Yes. And she also knows that she wants more of these restaurant brands. She wants to be a restaurant group and have a restaurant brand that's known across the country. So I, I think that she's present in the work that goes into making a successful brand, but she's not removed from the path that leads you to future growth. KG:Another thing Lisa mentioned in the interview was how important it was for her to find the right partner for the Shore Club. Can you talk a little bit more about why this was so important to her? JAC:The partnership was incredibly important to Lisa in creating the Shore Club because she needed help in areas where she hadn't had experience, so when she started to get connections and pointed towards people who were a friend of a friend or were from where she's from or went to church camp with her in one case, she started having these conversations about the vision and the dream and and sort of was able to see the synapses fire in other people and the connections get formed. JAC:You'