John Heers: How to create Community with any Group of people

In this episode of the Coherent Business Podcast, host Aram DiGennaro sits down with John Heers, founder of First Things Foundation and Keipi Restaurant in Greenville, South Carolina, and one of the best-known tamadas leading traditional Georgian feasts, or Supras, around the world. John traces the Supra's origins to his years in the Peace Corps in the Republic of Georgia during its civil war, where communal meals amid hardship became a vehicle for spiritual renewal, and explains how that experience led him to found a nonprofit, open a restaurant, and now bring the tradition into companies and CEO communities across America.John unpacks the role of the tamada as a leader who elevates conversation toward life's highest themes — love, death, family — while deliberately balancing gravity with levity, order with the "chaos agents" (melequipes) who pour the wine and stir the table. He discusses why Supras resonate especially with younger, single professionals starved for authentic connection, how the practice equalizes powerful people like CEOs and public intellectuals rather than letting any one voice dominate, and the concept of "cumpanis" — the Latin root of "company" meaning "with bread" — as a case for recovering communal eating as a company's true founding purpose rather than merely a means to sell products. The conversation closes with John previewing the Tamada Vineyard, a training initiative to cultivate more tamadas for restaurants, conferences, and corporations, and his upcoming visit to lead a supra for a CEO community in Virginia.Key Topics: the origins of the supra tradition in Georgia, the role and training of the tamada, balancing seriousness and levity at the table, the melequipe as a "chaos agent," equalizing powerful people around a table, bringing Supras into companies and CEO communities, the concept of cumpanis and the true purpose of a company, communal eating as a path to spiritual wealth, the Tamada Vineyard training project.Resources:What is a company? Substack Article by John Heers: https://johnheersftf.substack.com/p/what-is-a-companyFirst Things Foundation Website: https://first-things.org/ Keipi Restaurant: https://www.keipirestaurant.org/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aram-digennaro/Coherent Business Project Website: https://coherentbusinessproject.com/ — For leaders, thinkers, and builders who believe business can be more than just efficient — it can be whole, human, and meaningful.