Austin Smith

00:00We all know that there are things that you can potentially save money on. One of the areas you don't want to skimp is when you have your hoods cleaned. Kitchen fires can put you out for weeks and weeks and weeks and having somebody come in at a cheap price so that they can do a subpar job just isn't worth it. That's why we are recommending Kitchen Guard. Kitchen Guard's been operating since 2009 and are the trusted experts in the kitchen exhaust industry. They service all of Nashville in the Middle Tennessee area and they can do a free inspection and consultation. All of their cleanings are done in accordance with strict NFPA 96 guidelines. You get professional service every time. They have properly trained technicians to keep your equipment and restaurant clean, safe, and compliant. There's pre- and post-inspection reports for compliance, full exhaust cleaning from hoods to fans. They exchange filters and they clean the filters. They do repair and maintenance services, clear and consistent communication with every service.

01:05Call Kurt Kowalski with Kitchen Guard. He will get you set up. He'll come in, check it out, take pictures, and let you know what's going on. You can call him at 734-344-2010 or you can email him at kurt.kowalski at kitchenguard.com. Welcome to Nashville Restaurant Radio, the tastiest hour of talk in Music City. Now here's your host, Brandon Styll. Hello Music City and welcome to Nashville Restaurant Radio. My name is Brandon Styll and I am your host. We are powered by Gordon Food Service. So excited to be here today. We have Austin Smith as our guest. He is the COO of Honky Tonk Party Ventures. He is the founder of Party Fowl Hot Chicken Concept. And at the end of our last episode, I said, what is going on with Party Fowl? I know that they went bankruptcy and all these things. Somebody get a hold of me. And here we go. This is the founder, the former owner of Party Fowl. And we talk about it. We get into it.

02:28But we also get into a lot of other things. I've known Austin for a long time. He's been on the show before and really kind of a heartbreaking story about Party Fowl. And you know what? With everything in life, like I always say, it's for your learning. And he has emerged from this thing. He's doing great. And we get to talk about softball and all of the things in the past, because that was a big part of our past together. He used to have the Party Fowl softball team, and we played against him all the time. Big rivals. So it's a lot of fun to catch up with Austin. Really excited. Hitting up the NRA show this weekend in Chicago. So if there's anything that you want me to come back and learn about while I'm there, feel free to send me a DM and say, hey, learn about this. Find out about this. We're going to try and find the biggest trends. What's happening out there so that we can be the eyes and ears for all the local restaurants in Nashville? Yeah. And so I don't have a whole lot here. On the 19th, we are going to be at Tennessee Flavors. And we are going to be giving away some tickets to Tennessee Flavors. We need to follow our socials this weekend. And we are going to be giving away about three pairs. So six different tickets. Follow us at Nashville underscore restaurant underscore radio.

03:53Hey, go give us a follow at NARA Nashville, too. And whatever you're listening to this on, click the subscribe button, because then you'll get notifications when new episodes come out. And our next episode is going to be with Billy Deck. He is the owner of Sunda. He is also the star. And he made a documentary called Food Roots. And it is really good. I really enjoyed it. You can watch it right now on YouTube. We are interviewing Bill Miller from Icon Entertainment on Monday. We've got all kinds of stuff coming up, guys. Thank you for sticking around. We love you guys. We're going to jump in immediately because I've got I've got we just got to roll right now with Austin Smith. You are listening to Nashville Restaurant Radio. Super excited today to welcome you to another episode of Nashville Restaurant Radio. We are joined with Austin Smith. Austin is the CEO of Honky Tonk Party Ventures. You may know them as Honky Tonk Party Express. You may hate them as Honky Tonk Party Express. Welcome in, my friend.

05:03Crowd loves you, man. I love it, man. What a welcome. What a welcome. How the hell have you been, man? I'm blessed. You know, I have totally changed my my whole career path a little bit. Yeah. Still industry adjacent, though. Still industry adjacent. Three healthy kids all doing well in school. Coaching Little League Baseball this week. Oh, teacups. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I don't know how old they are. How old are your kids? So my oldest daughter is 13. My middle child, she's she's 12. And my son is 10. And they're all about to go on the little birthday thing. We did it all kind of back to back to back. There's no break. It's birthday, birthday, birthday, Christmas, you know. Well, you were you're 10, 12, 13. I'm 10, 12. I just don't have the 13. Yeah. The 13 part is what I'm starting to get into. I got the 12 year old whose voice is changing and he has lots of emotions and he is now trying to figure out where he can push back and where boundaries live in his own individual expression. And it's like, Jesus Christ, who are you? Yeah, no, we started that early. We're good. 13 year old. She's brilliant. Like just so is my 12 year old. Yeah. And that's a blessing and a curse at this age right now, because they're tracking you. Well, you're just going about your day being busy trying to be dad. They're going, OK, he let me get away with this. He pushed back here. I got to go back. I got to go back.

06:38They're going, OK, he let me get away with this. He pushed back here. I got some wiggle room here like they they are tracking you. Do you know what's even scarier is chat GPT? Yeah, they have a eye. My son will come to me with a plan. Right. And it's like debt. So there's this bike that I want and I want to tell you about it. And he'll go through the safety features and he'll go through why this is a safe bike and why this, this and this, why it's affordable, the specs of the bike. And then you go into his chat GPT and there's a question. How do I talk my dad into getting me this bike? How do I talk my dad into letting me get this bike? And it's like and then there's a detailed action plan as to how parents may think and what he needs to approach me with. And it's like, oh, I never had that. I just figure that out. That's it. That's what I'm not. I'm not just fighting a 12 year old who wants something. He's now straight. He's come up with a sales pitch and a plan that is strategized by chat GPT. Yeah, it's tough out there. It's tough out there, brother. Yeah. And you're like, now what is what is genuine? I don't know. No. And see the chat GPT when that came out, that's when I realized that I'm the old guy who talks about old technology in the good old days. I'm still not in on chat GPT. What? I still don't use it. I still do all my business models, you know, without it. I still do everything from scratch with pen and paper and my Excel spreadsheets. I am still the guy who's left behind. Oh, there would be no Nara today if there was not chat GPT. Wow. I mean, you can ask it to do and it's like having an assistant that is really smart that will tell you anything that you need to know. It's it's pretty impressive.

08:36I think it's just getting into it. Maybe some anxiety about just starting the process of trying to figure it out. I don't know. Also, before you leave today, I'll show you some prompts. Yeah. And I'll get you started and you'll go, oh, I didn't know it did that. Let's do that. I'm going to show you. I'm going to introduce you to A.I. today because it's if you're not on it, you're behind. I mean, because every everybody is now that's there's no more Google. It's your chat, your teeter, Gemini or Copilot or whatever it is you're using. But there's a million different ways. And it's pretty, yeah, pretty intuitive, too, is the thing is it learned me. Listen, one of our owners, Grant Rosenblatt, he swears by it. He uses it all the time. And I've been working a lot of contracts and things lately, and he'll send me a draft in five minutes and then I'll go through and tweak it, you know, and I'm like, oh, nice. That's quick. That's good. How'd you do that? Yeah. Well, you can you can somebody send you a contract. You can put the contract and go, where am I exposed? And it'll go in thirty three seconds, three seconds. It'll go spit out every detail of the contract. Oh, but what am I going to do with all my extra time that I gained back, Brandon, like time with your kids, man? That's all I do. That's all. Yeah. Yeah.

09:52Well, OK, so if you don't know Austin, Austin and I, we've been friends for how long? Well, we played in that I was in that softball league for the restaurant association for 13 years. I've known you for probably 20 plus. It's been a long time, a long time, a long time. Your brother, of course. And yeah. And Justin. Yeah, I. But you're one of these guys who I just love. We've always had a great relationship. I love hanging with you, working with you. And you're one of the smartest like restauranteurs that I've met. I mean, like expert, you're the former owner of party felt that hurt for me to say those words right there. You're the former owner of party foul. How does that land? I don't say it that way. How do you say it? I say I'm the founder of party foul as the founder of party. And so I'm never the ex founder. You're always going to be my business partner from back then. Nick Jacobs and I, we founded party found 2014.

10:52You can't write that off the map. So hurt, you know, but yeah, no former owner. No, that hurts. Party foul was my baby. Party foul was an inside joke between me and my dad. It started in 1999 and everything in that building was designed by myself. Bart Pickens, my chef, Tiffany Thompson, we sat in her dining room in Murfreesboro and planned out the look of the plates, the paint colors, the the menu items like it was now. It's crazy to not be a part of it anymore. And so I read in and I know this isn't what you're here to talk about, but I think I would. I don't know like what happened there. I'm you know, I'm I'm seeing you open. I'm at the Destin location texting you a picture of me going, do this is freaking awesome, man. You know, I mean, you have that 8th Avenue location. You guys were just great. You're opening locations right and left. And then I see party foul files for bankruptcy in the Nashville Business Journal. And I'm like, what? Yeah. What? What? I don't know what you can say, but what happened there? That's a tough one. So I can say this.

12:12Past the pandemic, we operated through covid so well. My staff agreed to work at half salary on the management side. We provided shift meals or not shift meals, but family meals one to two times a day for everyone in our all our employees households. All they had to do was show up and we'd give them a bag when we ran out of the ability to make full meals. We gave them groceries. And when we came out of covid, when everyone was searching for staff, we had like ninety seven percent retention. So we had a full team. So when they opened the doors back up, we were ready to go and we killed it. You know, we had some of our best years ever, 21 to 23 in there. And we had some big projects that were about to hit. You know, in twenty twenty one, we opened Chattanooga, which opened to great fanfare, but one shooting and two stabbings in general vicinity of our of our place in the Hamilton Place Mall. It kind of messed with the foot traffic a little bit. We were doing ninety thousand a week right out of the whip on the back of a mall. And it was crazy. We had three hour waits and we had people walking around the mall with buzzers waiting to get in. And we had a couple of incidents happen at the mall that weren't at party foul, but they were near it. And it definitely affected some things.

13:32Then we opened up Destin and Destin was a dream for me, you know, and I knew the location so well. I brought Nick and his family down to see it and they were like, oh, this is this is great. And I was like, yeah. So we built a beautiful restaurant there. But during that time period between twenty one and twenty three, we were profitable on paper, but we didn't our operational capital wasn't available for us to do the things that we needed to do and to finish some things that we needed to finish, things that were earmarked for were depleted. And so at the end of the day, we opened up with basically no marketing budget and Destin. And I will say that you thought twenty twenty and twenty twenty one were tough because of food cost and gas. I mean, eggs and chicken went through the roof. And what did I sell? Brunch made of fried chicken and fried chicken. Like it was it was a tough time. We had made it through. But what really sucked was as we got into the middle part of twenty three going into twenty twenty four, you know, in-house dining was just dropping. And I know a lot of people in the industry who saw that, too. It was it was really hurting. People were being a lot more careful with their money. There weren't as much. There wasn't as much stimulus money going around at that point. You know, that had kind of dried up and people were back to going. What's happening now? And am I safe to be say it'd be spending money right now. The stimulus money helped a lot. It helped a lot. And it rejuvenated the restaurant and the bar industry. I'm telling you, some of the best years we had were during that that twenty one, twenty two, twenty three. But it fell off a cliff really quickly. And we had a couple of stores that were struggling and the other stores were trying to pick up the weight. And with our operational capital not there, we were not able to float that anymore. And I spent about two years meeting with private equity groups and private buyers and attorneys trying to bring some folks on

15:34to extend that life, relieve some of the pressure that was on us at the time. And it just it just didn't ever come to fruition. And so we ended up filing the bankruptcy and party found up selling in a three six three asset. So I can't even tell you the total because I'll vomit of what it was purchased for. But before we got to the finish line of signing the papers, well, we didn't have to sign anything. The court and the new owners signed the papers. I had to go close a few stores and fire some people that I cared a lot about. That was the toughest part for me. It wasn't I mean, losing the business and my baby, my dream, this thing that my dad and I had kind of thought about doing since before 2000. The hard part was all these people. I had two rules that party fell. Rule number one, we're a family. Rule number two, don't poison the well. And I meant that, like, come to work, be a part of this. We want you to be part of it. Like we promoted from within and we grew people and we wanted them to go with us as we were going. So, yeah, I had to go down and close Destin and then in very short order, like within hours, close Chattanooga. Then we went and closed Cool Springs and we weren't going to close Murfreesboro at all. It was actually a profitable unit, but the staff got scared because they knew we were closing those other locations and they looked around and thought it was a little slow. They just didn't know that our overhead was lower there and that we were actually doing well. And so on I think it was July 3rd, I had just gotten back with another box truck from closing Cool Springs and no one showed up to work and we ended up having to close Murfreesboro because I had no staff, not because they weren't successful.

17:22So at that point, Murfreesboro, Donaldson and Nashville were still profitable. We had the airport, which was a licensed deal that we had money coming in from. And I mean, it was set up to be successful when we walked away. Very excited to be partnering with C&B Linen. If you know me, it's my number one topic of conversation is linen companies and how shady linen companies can be. I am just disgusted with how the business practices work in this industry, which is why I was so excited when I found C&B Linen. They're out of Waynesboro, Tennessee and they don't charge any fees. So the linen price that you have, whatever that first linen price is, that's your price. And so you may say, well, every year they must raise the price on the seven year contract, right? No, because they don't do any contracts. There's no gas fees. There's no clean green service fees. There's no replacement cost. There's nothing. The only price you pay is the price that you pay for the actual product.

18:35I know it's too good to be true. No contracts. They do formats. They'll make custom formats for you. They do fresh linens, cleaning supplies. And guys, I just did a tour of their facility and it is immaculate. It is state of the art. I'm going to post pictures on my Instagram. You can go find them and you can see how absolutely gorgeous this is to the point that they even wash and sanitize every one of their used laundry carts. It's just absolutely amazing. If you're looking for a linen company you can trust who wants to earn your business every single week, go back and listen to our episode with Jason Cruz, the owner of CMB Linen. You hear it from his, straight from his mouth, exactly what they do. Or you give them a call at 931-722-7616. Or you can DM me at Brandon Styll on Instagram for my exclusive pricing through the Nashville Area Restaurant Alliance. Hey guys, today we are talking about Robbins Insurance and restaurants carry a very unique set of risks. We can customize a menu of insurance solutions to meet your specific needs.

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22:56It was set up to be successful when we walked away. Okay, I have a lot. I know that there are things you cannot talk about and I understand that in legal proceedings. I know you're a really good operator. I know how well your numbers are. I feel like there's more but I'm not going to press you. I appreciate that. I'm not going to press you. When I hear this, I hear operating capital and I'm like, but I know you operate it really well. I know that you know what you're doing. It sounds like there's more but I'm going to hang back on that and just say, I'm so sorry, man. Thanks, brother. I know how much you love that and I know how passionate you were about your team. When we played softball back in the day, your team was always like, I mean, you guys were like a family. Yes. It was all the party foul people and it was like a party. I remember because I drank back then.

24:01I drank back then. You had like a Gatorade container that was full of punch and it packed a punch. Don't give me that much credit. I didn't have a Gatorade cooler. What did we sell a lot of? Hot chicken that comes with dill pickles. Those were five-gallon pickle buckets. It was a dill pickle bucket. I know it was a massive- No matter how much you rinse those buckets, there's still a little hint of pickles. You play the punch to the pickle, right? So it just can kind of blend in there. But yeah, I always tried to make a different punch and I always shared with the other team. Oh, yeah. I brought like a tall boy and then I was like, hey, man, I have this big cup here. And you're like, hell yeah, brother, get after it. That's it. That's it. And you and I were both the pitchers. And the home run hitters. We would get up there and it was always a battle. Every time I was like, all right, big boy, let's go. And we had so much fun. I'll never forget the day. We showed up for the championship game because Mary Bull was in the championship game. I don't know who we were playing. It wasn't Party Fowl, however. But we show up to the field and lo and behold, Party Fowl, the team is there having a practice. You're on the field next to us, but you guys had a special guest.

25:17We walk over and I'm like, what the fuck is that? And you guys are on the field playing softball with Shaquille O'Neal. And I'm like, that is Shaq. What is Shaq doing up here in Madison at this softball field? How did that come about? So during my time with Party Fowl, we actually filmed 17 TV shows. We've done everything from Food Network, Travel Channel, A&E, HBO. And that was a funny one, but it still irked me out. You have to look that one up. What's the guy with the British accent? John Oliver? Yes. Okay. He featured Party Fowl's Brunch for Two on one of his rants, but he also was talking about the politician who got busted spending campaign funds there. Oh my goodness. At Party Fowl? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was like $183, but they made a big story about it. And then texting about having sex in our bathroom and doing cocaine. And John Oliver does this rant about this political thing and he goes, but whatever, because they have a 55 ounce Bloody Mary with two old fried Cornish game hens, two Scotch eggs, eight fried okra. And he's like, who cares if they clean their bathrooms or if Mr. Sixty Seconds is in there with his girlfriend.

26:37Yeah. Anyway, so no, we did a lot of publicity. It was great. At first I was angry. Nick's mother literally sent me a message. He goes, do we not clean our bathrooms? I was like, we clean them every 15 minutes. I was like, but we ran out of paper towels and soap in between when they checked it. When this person who gave us a one-star review, because he went back through all of our Yelps past all, we're a 4.4 rating on Yelp. He went all the way past all the good ones and found in a five-year gap, two one-star reviews that said they were out of soap or toilet paper, our paper towels. And he used that as part of the whole, this guy had sex in the bathroom and the bathrooms are dirty and he was just having fun. So I literally was getting questions. I almost, my PR team knows this. I almost made John Oliver printed toilet paper with his face on it, urinal cakes. And I was going to send him a brunch for two and some of the new cleaning supplies that we're implementing at Partyfowl with a stack of my invoices showing how much I spend on toilet paper, paper towels, and soap. I wanted to do it. A couple of people said I shouldn't. Everyone who watches John Oliver said he would have had you on the show. He would have loved that. And so big miss. Big miss. I mean, it's national and it's anybody who's there would, John Oliver has a huge following. He does. He's funny as shit. Last week tonight with John Oliver, it's on Sunday night at 10 o'clock on HBO, free plug for him there. I watch it almost every week. I think it's season six, episode 13 or 19. All right. I'm telling you, you will belly laugh.

28:18It is fantastic. I won't have to watch it, but fantastic. So you did all these shows and daily shows. And then I got this message on Facebook shack, uh, was creating a Facebook series. Um, there were a few of those that came out during that time period where people were trying to launch a show with episodes on Facebook. It was early on in that whole thing, but we were like, I don't care what platform it is. I get to meet Shaq. I've collected his cards forever. Like blue chip is one of my favorite, like, come on, man. Shaq. I saw him play at Vanderbilt when he was at LSU. Like that dude was right. So it was, uh, it was my middle child, Ellie Kate, it was her birthday. And so she was with me and my wife and we came by just to be there for the filming that day. And I'll never forget. Cause that was right after I tore my calf muscle, playing you guys and not making the championship. Uh, oh, is that the reason why it was, it was because I had a, I had a torn calf, but I put a boot on and played right through it for the third year in a row. I tore three calves three years in a row, almost the same day. And always trying to leg out a triple when I weighed 365 pounds, it was insane. How many people got hurt? Yes.

29:30Like trying to leg out like an inside the park. We don't stretch. We think we got it. I was like, dude, if you just hit it over the fence, you don't have to run. It's much easier. Had that luxury. Like we did. It was like, who's going to hit more me or you did. So anyway, they reached out, we go in there and I'll walk up to Shaq and I go, Hey Shaq. And they've got the cameras rolling. I'm Austin Smith. He goes, I know who you is. What'd you do to your leg? And when he hugged me, he put his arm around me. His nipple was at the top of my head. And I am not a small man. No, I'm not. I mean, Brandon, you're taller than me. So is your brother. But Shaq made me feel like a little child. And, uh, so he held my daughter. We took some pictures during the process of, of locking the show in and doing this episode with him. Uh, the producers were talking with me and the PR team. And I was like, you know, the most party foul thing you got to meet chef. Cause that's where we get our little Louisiana kiss. You got to meet that chef, Bart Pickens, my man, uh, RIP. Uh, I won't go too far into that yet.

30:33Cause I'll start tearing up. You can catch that one in a little bit. But, um, anyway, I said, but we have been, we were a softball team since 2000 and my business partner played with me at Paragon mills as party foul back in the early two thousands. And for like seven years, we joked, wouldn't this be great if we turn this into a chicken joint. And so, um, yeah, I said, we, you should come to our soft. We practice every week. Now here's the truth folks. No, we don't, no one practices. So pitch softball, you might go to the, get some BP in. We don't have practice. I knew that the championship and Brandon squad was going to be out there. And I was still butthurt that we had lost and that I was injured. So I scheduled that filming so that I would have Shaq out there on one field while y'all were playing your championship, but also so that I brought punch that day for the filming too. I think I dropped it off at y'all's field before I walked over. That's why we won. That's right. We won the championship that day. I know it was the juice. I know you did. And so we ended up filming this thing. I'll never forget the two chefs, uh, that Shaq had hired for his big chicken Shaq is what it's called in Vegas.

31:45Um, they were all having a hard time hitting the ball. And I was out there in my boot pitching to him, by the way, I did make a custom softball Jersey for Shaq, uh, for our team. And as a joke, I did it as number eight, um, because him and Kobe were beefing at the time, RIP Kobe. But I, I gave it to him. He goes, I wear this. And I was like, okay, but I bought him a Kobe Jersey for party foul. And, um, he was having a hard time hitting the ball. I was just pitching to him and his crew, uh, at first. And, uh, they made a deal because Shaq doesn't eat spicy food does not will not refuses to, um, so he ate everything on my menu, except our hot chicken. And, um, so they made a bet because Shaq wanted to put, he didn't want to do, I think it was banana pudding popsicles where they actually make banana pudding, form it and freeze it or something. And there was something about crumbling cheese. It's on his Mac and cheese for his new concept. And they made him a deal like, uh, or he made it with his chef. If the chef who was not very athletic, if he can hit it out of the infield, he'll let him put this thing on the menu. And on the last pitch he did. And, and so it was fun. Um, Shaq went out there and hit a couple of line drives and then I went up to hit and Shaq pitched to me and he goes, how are you going to go up there? You're going to tear your leg off. Boy. I was like, I'm good. I've done this for three years. I always play with a boot on. Everyone just kind of knows that's what I do. And I hit one as hard as I could at third base. It was a line drive and his buddy was playing third base through his glove, 10 foot in there and said, I'm out. He was like, Nope.

33:22Cause they didn't know how we swing out there. It's slow pitch. We've been doing it a minute. Yeah. Oh, when you, I'm still doing it. You're still playing. Yep. Thursday nights over at two rivers and a mid state complex. I got to get a NARA team. I played worlds a few years ago. I went and competed in the worlds. You know, when I was, that was when I first started at Maribor, they had the team before I started. And that's how I, I literally met the people that worked at Maribor. Steven was like, Hey, show up there for the game. You can be on the team. You play. And I'm like, yeah, I play like, what are you talking about? And so I said, I like to pitch. He goes, cool. I was the pitch. You can take my, my place. And I showed up that day. I remember David Forte, who still works at Greenhill squirrel. Nice. He was like the, you know, Forte, he was the, and he's one of the guys that got hurt one day, but he was there. He's like, Hey man, who are you? And I go, Oh, I'm Brandon. I'm a, I'm new at Maribor. He goes, you play softball. And I go, I mean, you know, I haven't played in a long time. He's like, all right, you're batting seventh. Then I was like, okay, I was, I'm the pitcher. He's like, can you pitch? And I'm like, I mean, I don't know, man. Like he's, you know, he didn't ask me anything else. It was all about softball.

34:26And then my first at bat, it went about 20 feet over the fence and he goes, the hell was that man you're batting fourth. And I was like, well, I didn't know if I could still hit, but nobody knew like, Oh, you're the new boss. Like you're the new director of operation. They didn't know who I was. I just was just a random employee or you're batting seventh, you know, the whole thing. And then all of a sudden Steven got there and like, Oh yeah, that's the new, they get in there. Like, Oh shit. Like this is the guy and he could swing and he could, Hey, he could play. So that was a really cool introduction for me at that job, showing up, not coming in as the boss. Yeah. I'll bat seventh. Yeah. I'll do this. I'll do this. And then going yard, my first at bat was like, okay, you can hang. We like this name is daddy. That's what you said. I was like, here we go. Yeah. And then we show up to work and it was like, I knew half the people there when you walk in, everyone's like, they're like, dude, this guy can hit the ball. And it was like, all of a sudden it was like this really cool credibility that I wouldn't have had without, then we played for multiple years after that.

35:27And it was like a whole thing. And we had a team and it was great. Yeah. We won the championship two years later. Uh, me. No, I said, I think we won from that first day. Okay. It was our second year that we won the championship. Y'all were always giving me fits like, cause y'all have some speed. Y'all got a couple of hammers before taking smash. Uh, Jonesy and Jonesy Jonesy had legs. He'll never be healthy. You know, he's one of the fastest people in the league if he's not limping. And so, and I've known him since little, little, um, but yeah, we ended up y'all won that, that year. We want it the next year. Then the league ended. Um, I still have that guy died because New York died. I still have that trophy in my honky-tonk ventures office upstairs. Uh, yeah, I still have it. Cause we were the last, we had it for a year. I know we had it for a year. It was special. We had it right at the front door too. It was like the whole thing, man. I'll tell you this. It was so funny. You said that, you know, when you walked in, the first thing they asked you was, can you play softball? My team used to laugh so hard. Cause when I'd sit in interviews and I sat in almost all of them, I'd be like 40 times. And if I saw on your resume that you like played ball in college girl, boy, didn't matter. We played Cohen. I had this one girl came in and it said, uh, all region Scranton university. And I was like, um, I would imagine that softball.

36:46Right. And she's like, yeah, I was like, that's great. We play on Tuesdays and Thursdays, you know, and I started picking you're hired. Congratulations. Someone came in and was like, Oh, you know, I'm 19 years old. I'm looking for a job. I just graduated high school. I'd be like playing sports in high school. And my team would just start snickering because they knew what I was doing. I was getting some youth on the team, getting some speed. Uh, yeah, man. So when I hired sales, people always asked if they were athletes because I wanted competitive people who wanted to be outside sales. No, I never played any sports. I'm like, it's you'd be good for a desk job. But if somebody was like, I played competitive, this, this, this, I ran track. I did this. And I was like, good. What does it mean to win? And they're like, it's everything. You're like, okay, good. That's, that's, that's the, what, that's the inner side that I want for an outside salesperson. That's it. Um, I loved, and we'll, we'll get off softball. We can do this all day. We can do this all day. But my favorite thing about that was being the pitcher because you were the commander and that whole thing. And I would talk smack to every single play. You would get in their kitchen. Everybody like, where do you want the ball? You want to hear? And then some, sometimes a woman would come up to the plate and they would, they would go, don't swing, Annie, don't swing. Just stand there. We need to get on base.

38:02And I would go, I'm going to strike you out. I'm going to throw strikes. So I would swing Annie and Annie's like, looking back and thinking, I'm like, Annie, don't look at them. Look at me. You need to swing the bat. You didn't show up here to stand in front of the plate. And then the first one's like strike. And I'm like, you know, they got one more, you and I'd start swinging the bat. You're going to, you're going to go sit down. They might not have told you, you start with one in one hunt. Yeah. And you just sit there and talk smack to every person. And it was so, it was just, it was just all because it went both ways. You would do the exact same thing. Yeah. I, my favorite part of pitching is the talking fun trash. Like I'm never going to MF. Yeah. I'm never, no, nothing like that. But I'm like trying to get in your head and then I'm going to serve you a cup of punch. And then I'm going to tell you what I'm going to do to you. And then I'm going to hit one out and stare at you, you know, like I love that part. And right now on my team, I've got a, a C-class pitcher on my team. So I gave up the mound. I'm back in the outfield, which is fine. I missed the pitching though. When we get up, I'm like, I'm going back in.

39:03Yeah. I want, I want to be there right in the middle of all the action. So we've established, we have a lot of history. Correct. We've established you're a great operator. You had some unfortunate situations happen with party foul. That is in the past. What was that period like after all of this kind of, I don't know if it's even over yet, but like once it ended and you start looking for a job, what does the job market look like for somebody like you? I'm just going to tell you, I, with our success at party foul, I did not think there was a chance I would ever be looking for another job. I really thought as my kids got into their teenage years, they'd start working there. And eventually one of my kids would fall in love with it when I take it over and we were going to keep growing the thing. So, you know, when the new guys started to communicate with us who were going to be purchasing the thing, they told me they were going to build it around me. And there was two sides of this group at that point, and they were going to build it around me. I was the face. I was who everyone knew and I knew the ins and outs. I've been doing it for a decade. And so I went around and did all the things they asked me to do to prepare for them taking over. And then two weeks before the documents were signed, I was let know that they were moving on from me. No severance, no nothing. They gave me a date where I could meet with all of my staff and tell them goodbye. And I was asked to not come back for a few months while they get their changeover. And I understood that because everyone looked to me for the answers would come to me with what's going on. And that would have been very difficult for them after 10 years of the culture that I had built there. So it was really hard to walk away that day. That was one of the saddest days I can imagine. And, you know, the one blessing I do.

40:44I'm a big believer in God. You can't stop me. It's just that's that's my heart. That's my soul. And I don't believe he makes mistakes that the four months that I was unemployed were during the holidays, which are big for our house, big, like huge, like I'm a psycho for Christmas. I decorate November 1st dead on. Andy Williams is blasting at 1201 as soon as Halloween's over, like I go hard. And so I got to have four months where I got to work on my house, things I never could get to. I got to clean some things up, reorganize. I was still getting in shape. And so I just put all that energy into my home, my family and my body. And when it comes to the job market, it was crazy. You know, I was I was really toying with going back into the wine and spirits industry, which I had been a wine and spirits distributor for five years before I opened Party Fowl. I was with Athens Distributing here locally and had 140 something accounts that I worked with. And so I went hard at that. I was interviewing for multiple supplier level positions. I got to the fourth round of interviews with two of them. And but during this time, my friends, Grant Rosenblatt and Forrest Broyles reached out to me because they had always kept in touch. We've known each other 20 years and they knew I was going to be walking away from Party Fowl and and they knew that I was going to be out there looking for something. And so we started meeting and I think I met either both of them or one of them at a time, at least five times between October and Christmas Eve. I'll never forget my you know, it was hard out there for the jobs. It's like, what do I fit? I've been the I've been the CEO, president, director of operations kind of mold. And there just wasn't a lot out there that was screaming that this is for you. So I got toward I guess it was right after

42:49Thanksgiving. My son very excited. He's my youngest. He wrote a letter to Santa and put it on the mantle. And my wife one night broke the seal where he couldn't tell and read it. And it said and my kid is a selfish kid. He gets it very honest as a kid. I wanted it. Me, me, me. I want everything. I should get the biggest portion like he has that. I don't anymore. And his his Santa Claus letter said, Santa, please bring my daddy a job. I know he's sad. And man, I was like, first of all, most touching thing ever. Second of all, I don't know what I'm going to do. I had prayed about it every day. I just didn't know what I was going to do with my life because I don't do anything half speed. If I do something, it's full pedal, full floor. I'm all in. There's no like partial this and that. Well, I told that story in one of my meetings with the boys. And on Christmas Eve, Forrest reached out to me and goes, hey, I know it's Christmas Eve. I know you probably got family coming over. I really want to meet you today. So he drove from Franklin out to Hendrick out to Hermitage and met me at Starbucks. And he had a Christmas present bag with him. And it was addressed to Gary from Santa. And it was an offer letter to go work with honky tonk party ventures.

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47:56It's interesting how the energy of the world works sometimes. I agree. You know, people know where I'm going with this because I do this all the time. There's things you can control and there's things that you can't. I think part of my stress in life is I want to control everything. Sometimes, you got to put it in God's hands. I don't mean necessarily. I'm not saying this in a Christian way. Whatever your God is, I'm not saying that this is the one God, whatever you like. Yours may be the Judeo-Christian God. Mine is. But when you can't control something and you know and you put it in God's hands and you wait for that thing to present itself, it's kind of magical because the stress level of what am I going to do? I mean, there's a point where you have to get up and get shit done. But for the most part, I mean, for me, whatever happens is going to happen and everything is for your learning. There's nothing good. There's nothing bad.

49:08That's one of the things that got me through, man. I'll tell you, before I opened the first location in 2014 of Partyfowl, for about six months, I had the same piece of prayer every night. It was, if this business is not going to be a blessing on my life, my family's life, and the people who work here, don't even let me experience it. Don't let me touch it. Don't let me taste it. I don't even want to know what it feels like. I prayed it away. If this is a mistake, I don't want it. Every time we came up against this huge hurdle, this insurmountable thing, we'd make it. So we went forward with Partyfowl. What a beautiful chapter of my life. Really, it's 12 years of growth and relationships. During the end of that Partyfowl thing, those two years where I was fighting for keeping us alive, fighting for financing, fighting for money and investors, I would pray the prayer that basically said, if this isn't what I'm supposed to be doing, make it to where I don't have an option, take it out of my hands. But you are going to have to strip this from me because I don't know how to quit. So I'm going to keep fighting every day.

50:19You have to let me know when I have no chance anymore. And when you trust God and you follow him, the stress levels do decrease if that's your belief system. I will tell you that people ask me all the time because not only did we file bankruptcy for Partyfowl, I had to file personal bankruptcy. I didn't know if my kids could stay in their school. I didn't know if I'd lose my home. I had never done this before. I was terrified. It was so much work. It was during a time when I'm trying to reset my life and figure out a whole new chapter. But I prayed that. He did make it to where I couldn't. I had exhausted every effort. I did not lay down on that. My team that was working with me on the corporate side at that time, we'd tell you some days I had four two-hour private equity meetings back to back to back to back saying the same thing, answering the same questions, pitching the same business that I know how wonderful it is, but no one can see past the current hurdle. That helped me through that.

51:27I believe that if you wake up every day and do your absolute best at whatever you're doing, then you're on that path. He'll let you know when it's time to veer. So in your new venture, how has everything that you've learned helped you be better at what you're doing today? I say everything is for your learning. There's nothing good. There's nothing bad. Everything in this world is something that is a lesson. I think so many times in the moment we look at it and go, God, I hate this. This is terrible. This is happening to me. We live in a victim world. This is happening to me. But also every single time something like that happens, there's learning in it for you. So going into what you're doing now, what have you taken from all this and how have you grown? I must say this. There's no growth without challenge. Your muscles don't grow without repetition. And so I learned a long time ago, if I'm praying for something and something gets tough, I'm about to learn what I prayed for. Be careful what you pray for because there's no switch on your back that God's going to flip and you just automatically are what you wanted to be. You're going to have to have an experience. You're going to have to have a challenge. You're going to have to overcome. And if you can do those things and you can keep your head on straight, you can be successful. To answer your question, what lessons did I learn along the way that are helping me here? I am an impatient human being by design, completely. Everyone knows it. It's a running joke. I always say I'm a self-aware man. I know what I am and I'm fighting it.

53:05Waking up for over two years every morning, not knowing if I can pay payroll or open my doors, that taught me patience. Spending two years fighting and trying to find every way to keep a business alive taught me patience. There was no immediate gratification. There was just grunt, like get in there and do it. I would say I am a little more methodical now. You know, stepping away from my first long-term venture that I operated and was an owner in, your eyeballs change a lot. Everyone thinks about what's the ROI on this expense and everything. I'm like, not just the ROI, but there's so many other layers. It's an onion. Everything that you do when you have a business, it has tentacles. That's what I tell my staff all the time. It's got eight tentacles. You fix one thing, but what's happening over here on all these others?

54:07If we haven't already answered those questions before we implement something, then we're setting ourselves up for a shit show. Patience is one. Man, it's funny. When I had Partyfowl, Tiffany Thompson, my VP, she was my handler. It was a joke. Everyone knew it. She wouldn't let me and Neil McCormick have a meeting without her because from Yazoo back in the day, you know Neil real well. Oh, I know Neil real well, yeah. A little bit, right? Neil's one of the reasons I even have a podcast. She wouldn't let us when he was still right up the street at Yazoo from the Partyfowl. We couldn't meet without her there because we had planned a big wheel race down a hill in the gulch. We had a bouncy ball run where there was going to be a gold ball that was worth money and we would drop a literal dump truck full of bouncy balls down this slope. We were going to have net, like baseball netting on the sides, and you had to run full speed down there, be the first to the end, and have tried to find the gold.

55:12We were crazy. Tiffany was my handler. She's like, liability, insurance, are we going to be able to raise money for this thing? And blah, blah, blah. I am now, I think, a lot more like she thought, like Bart Pickens, my chef thought when I opened, we'll get to that in a minute, but the cantina inside of our new business. The people that I had around me when I started Partyfowl shaped the hell out of how I look at business. I have still got the way that I always had that drive and everything, but I gained so much knowledge from Tiffany and from Bart and from Hutch and from my GMs over the years, and I just feel like I'm a lot more well-rounded now. I will say that. I love that you found balance in a lot of different ways. You've seen other perspectives. Oh, buddy. Thank you for, I know that that was a 30, 40 minutes of, hey, I got to cover this, and that's not what you were here today to talk about. Maybe it was.

56:18Maybe it was. Who knows? But now you are the CEO of Honky Tonk Party Ventures. What the hell is Honky Tonk Party Ventures? I'm going to take this story back to probably the spring of 2013. I was sitting in the 8th Avenue Partyfowl that I hadn't even, no, it was 2012, that I hadn't even started demoing yet. I had just gotten the keys, and Grant Rosenblatt, like I said, we've known each other over 20 years, he walks in and goes, I heard you got a bar. I was like, yeah, man, here's what I'm going to do, and I told him all about Partyfowl, and he said, I'm about to buy school buses, chop the top off, put some cool, and I'm going to make the first open-air party buses in Nashville. He told me before they actually had gone and done it. At that time, I think he was working with Joyride, and before that, I know he had been in commercial real estate and whatnot, but I remember us sitting there at the birth of both of our businesses having this like bro talk about what we're about to do. Man, Honky Tonk Party Express is a 10-year-old business, started by loading and unloading, I'm pretty sure on Broadway. I knew for a while they were at Redneck Riviera, and started with a bus, and Bertha is still in our fleet. Bertha doesn't run very often, but Bertha is still alive. She was our first bus. So 10 years we've been doing this, and I came on last January, so I've been there a little over a year, but it started with just some buses that did some little party trips. Then they got their depot, and they had a little bar outside and a container bar, and they did their check-ins. They bought a few shuttles, started shuttling people, and then expanding the shuttle business. Before you knew it, I'm telling you, they have built this incredible business model. So we are the number one permit holder for party buses in Nashville. All of you locals, I know how much you love us, and you'll need to come check one out because it's a lot more fun when you try one, I'm telling you. So we have 17 buses.

58:23We've got, I think, actual 12 official permits. We can't take one bus out until our last bus that's permitted is in the gates. We have rules on how many vehicles can be on the road at a time. So we have the most permits, and I think our nearest competitor has four, and they don't give them out anymore. It is very difficult to buy them. You can never buy 100% of one. Is it like medallions? Because we just had Barrett Hobbs on, and he was like, I said, what do you think about the transportainment industry? And he goes, I mean, there was too many at some point. He says he thinks that they need to do medallions, where there's so many medallions. They've already done it. There's no more permits, and you can't buy 100% of someone's permit. They have to stay on as a partner if you want to bring them into your company. Well, that's nice for you guys. The city of Nashville, they restrict those buses hard. It's the only business that I can think of in the world, or at least in our country, where you're allowed to operate when they tell you you can operate. Even bars, you have to close for eight hours if you serve alcohol before you can serve alcohol. Again, there's things you can work around here. It's just you can do this and this, and that's it. Anything else, and you're going to get a fine or get closed down.

59:33It is the most regulated business model I've ever seen, and I have run multiple businesses. So we've got the 17 buses, 12 of which are in constant fleet. The others are backups and such. We have a shuttle fleet of five. We do corporate events. We do weddings. We do proms. We do all that stuff. We do airport pickups, one-ways, back and forth, vineyard tours, brewery tours, all that stuff. Then we also have, it's now called the Honky Tonk Hideaway and Cantina. Y'all come check it out. We have a mechanical bull. We've got a great jukebox. We've got shuffleboard. I've got an AstroTurf. I call it the Oasis area. It's got AstroTurf outside, cedar fence all the way around, an extra bar out there that serves glitzies and nachos. Take an elevated concession stand out there. Where is it? So we're actually off of 4th. We're over in the WeHo area near Geodes, is a good way to put it, off of Lewis Street and near 4th Avenue. So you wouldn't know it's there. It's building up around us, but we still aren't visible from a main thoroughfare yet. That is going to change, and we are working toward that as we speak. So anyway, we've got the Hideaway, which has the two bars now, inside and outside. Then this last fall, we opened up the Cantina. So we've got loaded burritos, Mexican pizzas, walking tacos, chips and dip, all the fun stuff.

01:01:06What is a Mexican pizza? Is it like Taco Bell's Mexican pizza? It's a lot like that, just a little more elevated and more delicious. Anyway. It's a bold statement. That's my favorite thing at Taco Bell. I'm going to have to come try that. You got to come try it. It's one of those things that I wanted, so we put it on the menu. It was funny. The first weekend, we had this group from Murfreesboro come by. First time they'd ever been there. They were just on their way to Broadway and saw there was a Cantina. They had no idea where they were going. I'm sure they thought they were going to get murdered as they were driving down Lewis Street. But they ended up ordering, like three or four of them ordered the Mexican pizza out of the group. One of them loved it so much, ordered some to take with him in his car. So when they got done on Broadway and went back to Murfreesboro, they could eat some more Mexican pizza. So we've got the Cantina open now. Right now, that's only on the weekends, and it is on DoorDash, so you can get your taste on DoorDash. So on weekends, do you guys get a big bump when there's a soccer game? Not yet, but we just got some good news on that. A fun pregame kind of a thing? Yeah. Actually, I've got some of my old Liverpool group from my party foul days coming for the match Saturday, and we're going to shuttle them to and from Geotis because we now have the rights to drop off at Geotis and pick up. Nice. So we worked that out. So on top of those other things in the Cantina, we also have Honky Tonk Hat Bar and Boutique. Our Honky Tonk Hat Bar, we do custom trucker hats and custom cowboy hats. We do branding on leather. We do custom denim jackets. It's one of those things that once you go and you know it's there, it's like, oh, this is really great. We even have a separate little room called our Cowboy Hat Speakeasy, where it is just everything you could do to a cowboy hat in this private room behind our main hat bar.

01:02:48So we've got that going and also Honky Tonk Party Promotions, which is our advertising leg of what we do. You say advertising leg. You have a bus, and on the side of the bus, it says All Red. The whole bus is like an All Red bus. All Red pays you to put their logo. That's the promotion side of it? The way I tell people is this. There are no billboards in downtown Nashville. Anything around the downtown quadrant is going to be a minimum of $5,200 to $5,400 a month. For 40% less than that, I can take a billboard with your brand that's 40-foot long and running up and down Broadway all day. Bless you. We've got this great ability where we have access to Broadway, and these brands enjoy that. So all of our buses are fully wrapped. And now we've also got an Anakista military truck that is completely tricked out. It's got diamond-plated base on the back of it, a 20-foot by 8-foot double-sided billboard, and has 12 LED lights on each side and eight huge speakers hanging underneath the main platform blasting.

01:03:59And it is just gorgeous. I'm not going to lie to you. It's just fun to drive around. And so we have that aspect. And then we have Honky Tonk Party Rentals, which is a smaller fraction of what we do, but it may grow. And right now, it is just our mechanical bull. And that's for liability reasons that it's separated out like that. But we're potentially going to be growing into more of that as we go. So I wear seven hats, and there's never a boring day. Wow. Yeah. I have so many follow-up questions. Bring it. Well, I mean, the overall culture of Nashville and what Nashville is, you guys are just really leaning into there's all these people here for the weekend that want to party, and you're giving them options. Yeah. Whether you want to party or whether you want to look good when you go out to a concert or whatever, we got everything there for you, and we can get you there and back. Bless you. And if it's your first time in Nashville, one of our party buses, it's no different than taking a sightseeing time. If you're wanting to go see downtown but not have to go stand in the line and pay $30 for a vodka Red Bull, we got you. Can you serve alcohol on your buses? So we have bartenders that are slash DJs on the back of every bus that service each group. But what we do is the group buys their alcohol from our cooler area because we're not allowed to have BYOB access since we have a full service bar. So we have our own beer walk-in beer cave. People go in there and buy all their stuff for the bus. Our bus bartender comes in, loads it on ice, has it separated out by what your tour bracelet color is so they know whose is what.

01:05:38And then during your trip, you just walk back to the back of the bus. They'll get you another one of your drinks that's fresh out of the ice, change the song for you, blow bubbles at you, take pictures of you and your group, whatever you want to do. And it's really just a party on wheels and a great, great scenery. People hate party buses. So here's my take, and this is what I told Barrett the other day. People in Franklin hate party buses who come to Nashville once every six months. They come there and they go, oh, the damn party buses. It's because you were told to think that they suck. When I drove Uber back in the day, because I drove Uber for like a year and a half, because I wanted to kind of do some of what you're doing. I wanted to meet people and just drive. It was just fun to be like a representative of Nashville. People loved being in my Uber because they were like, oh, my God, you're so informative. This is great. Thank you. And I would drive by and you would see the people on these party buses, and they are having the absolute time of their lives. And you'd get people in my car and they would go, what do they do if it rains? And you go, oh, they're doing it. That's like gasoline on a fire. When it rains, you get a bunch of bachelorettes that would normally just be dancing, but now it's pouring rain on them. It's like it's flash dance. It's like a white snake video. I mean, it's like they go crazy in the rain. It's warm outside. It's raining. They're all covered in water and they just dance even harder. I love that. I love seeing people happy.

01:07:20I am not a person that gives a shit if you put pineapple on pizza. I don't care if you put ketchup on a hot dog. I don't care whatever you do. It makes no difference to me. Who gives a shit? Yeah. There's no things that have to be a certain way. That's the way. I like lemon head candy, but I like lemon head candy. Like when you drive to Florida and you pass through the little tiny towns, I stop at the dingiest gas station I can find. They have the 20 percent lemon heads. They're all stuck together. I like old, stale lemon heads. You like the orange peanuts too and the Boston peanuts with the red candy? Yes. I buy the vintage candy too. I want like the old ones. I don't know why, but my wife's like, that is so disgusting. And it's like, I'm not making you eat it. Why do you even care? And it's almost like that's a mentality that I have with these things. I get if you live downtown and you're trying to go from one place to the next place, or if you live in one of those buildings and at two o'clock in the morning, there's an Anakista bumping eight speakers and you're like- We quit at 11.

01:08:23I'm just saying, but if that is something that bothers you, you move there. That's not a secret that those things are happening. You do that. I get people who work downtown, live downtown. If you're having a meeting and you're there on the second floor and there's some people driving by and they're dancing, it's distracting. I will hear that argument all day long. But if you live in Mount Juliet and you go downtown once every couple months and that's something that you hate, get over it. This is what Nashville kind of is. People come here to let their freak flag fly and do that. And this is a safe way for people to do that. It's Jeannie's 40th and we're going to go party. We did my mom's 65th birthday on one of these, and she had the best time. We got to pick her music. So it wasn't like, oh, it's just in the club over and over. No. I mean, she got to tell what she wanted. We were vibing with that. We listened to James Taylor and Paul Simon up there.

01:09:26All day. Fleetwood Mac. Let's rock it out. And so I will tell you, every single weekend, I have multiple groups that will come up to me and go, I've heard so many people talk bad about these things, but I had the best time on your bus. And some of those people who are local have come back and ridden it two more times since then. And I try to soften that blow. And when I brought the PR team, I told them, this is the biggest thing that we've got to squash. It is not holding up traffic. We are, we are street tested for a certain mile per hour. And I'm going to tell you, if my bus isn't on Broadway, your car's not going to get up Broadway any faster than it already is. It's not causing that. Where was I going with this thought? People complaining about traffic. Your buses don't cause the traffic. Yeah, they don't. They don't do that. And we were very conscious of that. We're not allowed to stop and drop off and pick up. We have to leave our depot. We stop at a bathroom break and then we go back to the depot. Other than that, we're in motion and we are moving. Like we're not holding things up. So a lot of people think that. Do you hear people fall over?

01:10:32Oh yeah. I've had a couple, but it's when they're doing stuff they're told specifically not to do. So I wanted to soften the blow and I wanted to introduce more locals to our party buses and what they actually are. So during the winter, we actually enclose them with plexi and we do a big Christmas pop-up. I mean huge. This last year was Merry Elfing Christmas and everything was Buddy the Elf themed. We had murals. I had a little menu with Papa Elf dippers. I would expect nothing less from you. Right? We had all these cool little drinks and cocktails and I had Christmas themed trivia every Thursday. So you get to double dip, go to a pop-up and get to do Christmas trivia. Part of it was if you show up and you buy anything, we're going to run a free one hour party bus and we're going to run one every hour on the hour and we gave people a free glimpse of it and they got to request their favorite Christmas songs with the DJ or if they wanted not Christmas and the buses are all decorated out. In November, it was a little slower because a lot of people aren't like you and I. They don't get into it until December. So we would cancel a bus every once in a while but we were still sending them out. During December, it was almost every bus was at full capacity and you know these aren't all tourists because it's the middle of December.

01:11:45It's leading up to Christmas. It's cold outside. They might be here for a ball game but probably not to watch the Titans. They might want to wait until this next season and see if we get it right finally. But it's been a while. A whole other hour conversation. So anyway, we did the free rolls and a lot of people saw that it's not this bad horrible thing. Instead of sitting at a bar and having your drinks, we're serving them to you on the bus, playing your music, and showing you our great city. That's all it is man and people overthink that. The politicians are pretty tough on the regulating but we're hanging in there. I would love to do a NARA event. How many people does it hold? 25. Now I can push that but 25 is comfortable. I would love to get 25 restaurant owners, local restaurant owners, and do a downtown tour just so that everybody can. I think there's a lot of opinions about it but I think it'd be really fun to do like a NARA Connect event because one of my main things for NARA is just bringing the community together. But that would be so outside the box of let's get a bunch of restaurant owners on a party bus and drive around just so they could experience it one time and how fun would that be? What the hubbub's all about. Listen, if you come into my place on a weekend and you're in a bad mood, you just are a bad mood type of person. It is so fun. Everyone who's coming there is having one of the best weekends of their life. It's their anniversary, birthday, retirement, bachelorette, bachelor party. It's not just all bachelorettes. We have so many.

01:13:23I have people come in all the time in their 50s and 60s and go, I know I'm probably a little too old for this. I was like, no. My mom's 65th birthday was on one of these buses. This is where you need to be. They're celebrating one of the best weeks of their life or best trips of their life. And like I tell my staff at pre-meeting every day, I'm like, all you have to do is not fuck it up. They're already there. They're already ready to have the best time. You just have to keep the wood on the fire, man. Just keep throwing kindling on it. And when you see that, it's so fun. Then we'll have people who we'll try to get them to ride our mechanical bull, which is a PBR, real mechanical bull. And they always are like, I don't really want to do it. After you come off the bus, it's about the bull. They're coming right back in. They're like, where's the bull? They got a little liquid courage. They're ready to do it. And then we've got the tacos. We've got the outside area with cornhole and we've got this new basket toss game, which is like basketball cornhole. Have you seen it? It's addicting and you're probably going to want to set for your house. I'll get the real name for you and text you. But yeah, we've got this great space. So that's one of the things I want to challenge more people to do is before you just take a shit on it, come check it out. It's really wonderful. The weekends are great.

01:14:34And if you don't like the party bus thing, come make hats. We make great hats. And I'll tell you, we're doing 600-person events, 1,000-person events, traveling to New Orleans to do big things during Mardi Gras. We're all over the place with this hat bar. It is so big and Nashville doesn't even know it's over there. Everyone just goes to 12 South and mails it in and stops at one of those spots. Where is the hat bar? How do you get to the hat bar? It's all attached to us. When you walk into our campus, everything, there's no walls dividing it. Where's the campus? So it's at the end of Lewis Street. Okay. End of Lewis Street. Lewis Street, right over here. And it's in WeHo technically. For those of you who don't know WeHo, that's Wedgwood, Houston. Now, they're building three high-rises around us now. We've still got a little bit of cleanup area over there, but I think we're probably two years from completely rejuvenating that little area that we're in, in that WeHo district. Once you pull up into the property, it's all right there. You enter in through our cedar gates. You're in the oasis. You go up the stairs into the building and right in front of you is the bar. Right to the right is the bus check-in and the cooler area.

01:15:46We've got the hat bar right back to your right. The cantina is right behind the bar by the bull. When you go in there, it feels like one experience where you can do so many different things. And it's fun. And we're just now, after 10 years of being in business, I told them when I started, I said, you have one of the best corporate event spaces and rental party spaces in Nashville, because once we clean this thing up, which that's what we did in 2025, we've renovated. It's beautiful. So we can pick you up in a shuttle, bring you there, get you drinks, get you fed, make you a hat, take you on a lap around Broadway in a bus and shuttle you back to your next destination. And we've got A.V. So we can do big meetings. And so in Q4, I told the boys we were going to do it in Q4. We were up 114 percent. We were doing big events and our pop-up bar was on fire all through December. So it was really, really good. Man, that's amazing. I love hearing about the success that you're having fun. I have had so much fun doing this. Am I stressed to the max a lot of days? Yeah, I've got seven companies, but I have a great team and I've got great support from the ownership. And we all work together. If I'm tackling something here, Grant and Forrest are tackling something over here and my managers are tackling over here. It's been great.

01:17:08Seeing the changes you make work is my high. It takes a while to get those things done. My first year in the business, I changed their bar program and optimized some things in operations. We cut a quarter of a million in operational dollars and we actually beat our annual goals. That bar program, year over year, was up 58 percent over its own self. And then this year, we're tracking for almost double that growth. And the hat bar is over 150 percent up year over year. And no, I mean, listen, it's such a cool business model. And I don't even think we've scratched the surface with what all we can accomplish with what we do and the different arms and legs of our company. Are you seeing more or less travelers? A lot of people are saying sales are down, tourism is down, people aren't coming to Nashville like they used to. Are you experiencing any of that? We trended down three years in a row between 12 and 14, 16 percent, something like that, in bus guests, just bus. And for the first time in three and a half years or so, we have been up eight of the last nine weeks in bus reservations in the year over year. And we're starting to chase some really crazy numbers. And like I said, the other legs of our business are all up higher than they've ever been. So I don't think that it's dropping off.

01:18:40I think that Nashville just has so many options now and that we've maybe overbuilt the restaurant, the bar scene, that there's just so much saturation. There's so many people coming here and so many more. But for every extra hundred thousand people that travel to Nashville, we've got 18 new establishments. And so I think it's just trying to find that balance of what is our tourism and where's our capacity. But that's up to the independent entrepreneur to make their leaps and everything. But I do feel like it's about the competition. I saw that with Party Fowl toward the end, too. Now, when I say the competition, are you talking about other local restauranteurs opening spaces around you or are we talking about big corporate chains coming in? All of the above, whether it's local, private, or whether it's coming in from other states, which is droves, droves. I've talked to three or four different franchises out of California that their first site outside of California is going to be Nashville, Tennessee, and they're opening this fall. We're building because Nashville is one of the only cities in America where alcohol sales are actually up where most of them are down. And we do what we do in Nashville. I mean, let's just say what it is. We holler and swallow, buddy. And so at the end of the day, I feel like we've got so many bars. And because of the success of the bars who are already here, more, more, more, more, more, more, more restaurants are doing the same thing. And we're going to get to a point where it's not that we have less travelers and less tourists. It's that we have so many options that the impact for the individual business owner is just not going to be the same. And when they start developing the East Bank, I'm concerned about Broadway and the rates and the taxes they're paying for those leases. I think that the new shiny penny to a lot of our demographic that comes to Nashville, they're going to go over there by the new stadium. They're going to go check out the new spots. And I know they're going to limit that over there. I know that they're not trying to build just a bar and restaurant scene around that thing. There's going to be

01:20:42very selective spots and more corporate residential. I've seen all those models. But I do. I see Nashville kind of outgrowing its tourism for now. I think that that could change very rapidly. I think that this 2030 announcement about the Super Bowl is definitely going to ramp things up. I think when we start to get more World Cup and we start to get Final Four, we start to have another WrestleMania or two. I think that as these things continue to build, it won't be as much of an issue. But right now, I think we're overbuilt and we're still seeing tons of tourism. There's just so many options out there. That's just a theory. But I saw it from my restaurant side and I'm seeing it from my outside view now. I am so excited to tell you about this new company. They launched this is a brand new tech company and they are called One Tap. You can visit them at OneTapFix.com. They are built for you. One of the questions I get all the time is, we need a handyman. We need somebody who can fix refrigeration. We need a plumber and we can't get anybody to come out. This is built for any type of owner. Owning the property is hard enough.

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01:26:16Yeah, no, it's a thing that I think everybody's really curious about right now. And then how do you think that affects like the suburbs? Because this is the conversation that with Barrett was downtown. He says downtown is the economic engine of the state. You know, this is where 85% of the tax money for schools comes from. And between Second and Fifth Avenue is the tax capital of the state. Like that's where the money is made. And he wants more people downtown. And those buses are a big part of that too, just going to tell you. It's a lot of tax dollars in them buses. Yeah, no, all of it. But I'm looking at so many restaurants in the outskirts that don't get a lot. And there's so much saturation that even now it's affecting everybody who's a local restaurant. It is, but there's some that are still thriving. I mean, my wife and I, we go, we live in Hermitage. So we tend to either go into Donaldson or Mount Juliet, you know, or Hermitage, like we're in that quadrant over there. And you go to Jonathan's at seven o'clock on any given night and walk in anywhere. It's packed. It's full.

01:27:26You walk into Longhorn, it's full. They're on a wait. Like I think a lot of it when you get further out of town, that's not where all the new people from out of state are putting those restaurants. It's still our local teams and our local operators and things of that nature. So I don't think they're having as much of the competition issue as once you get into that three miles from the center of Broadway in a big circle, like once you get out of that, you might have a better chance. But I think in that it's fierce. It's fierce. Like, and there are people winning, but it's fierce and you know it, you know, it's tough. I'm hearing it every day. I'm hearing it from, and I'm talking to more people. I've never really cared about downtown because it's just downtown. Downtown does what it does. It's a machine. It's how does it affect everybody else? We have to protect it because if we overbuild on the East bank and in a close proximity to that downtown area, it could kill something that's very, very influential to our success as a state. I do agree with that. I think that that's how we're able to do the things that we do. I think we should be doing more, but I think that's, you know.

01:28:35What if we came up with a really good way to get people across? Barrett said, again, I loved some of the things he said. I don't just, I wasn't unilaterally agreeing. I liked some of his ideas. He said he would like to see a really cool like gondola system, like they have like a Telluride or something, you know, that goes over the Cumberland and takes you to the East bank. And it's like five bucks to ride, but you can ride this thing. And maybe it goes from the East bank to downtown to the Gulch. And it's way up above in the air. Haven't they discussed that before and had like some renderings of that? I feel like I've seen it. I don't know. It'd be really cool. They've talked about some interesting ways for pedestrians to move around our downtown quadrant easier. And I've seen a few things behind the scenes and that's an interesting one. I think it would work. It's just, when are we done building tall buildings in that portion of downtown to where you would have the confidence to build something like that, that could be stunted at some point with a buildout, you know. But I think it could be creatively done maybe alongside the bridge or something like that, where it's not going to impact any of the other buildings. And that's cool. All right, Barrett, I see you. I love the Hobbs boys.

01:29:46There's some interesting ideas. I love the interesting ideas as to how to do all this stuff. I think the East bank's just going to bring, I mean, I don't think the city's close to being done with its growth. I mean, especially with the Super Bowl coming. Yeah, no. What a big announcement. The hotel, I kind of knew that we were probably 2030. I'd heard some rumblings. And when I heard Dan Patrick say that, the first thing I got was a text from Grant Rosenblatt over at Honky Tonk. And he goes, dude. And I was like, yes, finally, we got it. It's happening. That's going to be massive for your business. It's going to be massive. I mean, we're already planning, like, how many more billboard trucks do we need to build? And we know they're going to shut down Broadway, so alternative routes. And what do wraps cost during the year that we have the Super Bowl compared to now? What do my billboard ads cost compared to now? We've also got Airbnbs. I forgot to mention that. And we have one that's themed Dolly, one that's themed Johnny Cash all the way through. Honky Tonk party. I don't even know the name of that one.

01:30:51Honky Tonk party rentals. No, rentals is our bull. No, I just, for some reason, just slipped my mind. Anyway, it's in my phone. I can look at it. But no, so we've got that too. And so what are the rates going to change to not just for hotels, but for excursions, for advertising dollars? Like, it's a whole new world. And I played with this at the draft when the draft came here, got sued by the NFL multiple times for that one. But it's a crazy world. I'm going to Orbitz right now. Oh, yeah, let's do it. And I want to see what the prices are for like that week. I wonder if it's already- If it's already updated. So what, like somewhere between February 2nd and 10th, did they announce that? I don't know if we have a date yet. Yeah, I'm just going to look at that. First two weeks of February, 2030.

01:31:52I wonder if you can even look at those dates. Two, you can't type in a date. You can't go past September of 27. What about Airbnb? If you're smart, you lock in all the Airbnbs right now, and then slick people for cash to sleep in the houses you've rented. That's what I'm- That's what I'm- Like the masters, 50 grand for the week. Yeah, that's what I'm thinking. Can you check in dates? Pardon me. Let's see how far you can go out. Will it go? So Airbnb, we're in 27, 28. Does it do it? They're going to cancel it if you get it. They're going to be like, I know what you're doing. Thank you for reminding me. I got to block that off or raise the rate. You can only go, I mean, you'd think you could do like a couple years. I'm in September 27. All right, I'm in January 20.

01:32:57February of 28, as far as you can go. Oh, man. So yeah, we're still two years from being able to even see those rates. But yeah, those are things you have to think about when you work. I'm like, because I'm going to go ahead and start renting Airbnbs downtown right now for those days. I'm going to get 20 of them. Yeah. And I'm going to retire. Yes. And get them at $400 a night and just, yep, I've got all the spaces on 2nd Avenue. Yep. They're mine for the whole week. We're good. Business ideas for people out there. If you can find those spaces now, do it. Yes. It's going to be a big deal. I'm pumped to see what that's going to look like to our city. I think that driving to work and home from work every day during that time period is going to be horrendous. See, I think that they know that there's things that could pop up so they don't rent. I'm like, what is Hilton.com? I'm like, I'm here going, wait a minute. There's got to be something for those dates. Yeah. And I want to know what they're charging right now. You can't type in dates anywhere. It's all you have to go through like a calendar.

01:34:03While you're looking that up, shameless plug. So while we're trying to get into the last So while we're trying to get into the locals for Honky Tonk Hideaway and Cantina, our bar and restaurant, if you're local, you come in, tell us you're local. We're going to give you a laser picked key chain with our logo. It's a leather key chain with our logo on it. And every time you show it, you get like 25, 30% off everything. But we're starting Sunday Fundays and got some big sponsors on board for that. And we're doing, it's 12 to 6 p.m. every Sunday. We've got live DJ, 1230 to 430. Usually play in 90s, 2000s, but does take requests and we'll play with you a little bit. We've got the cornhole set up and two for one tall boys of beer and seltzers, $5 tequilas. It's cheap, cheap, cheap. And if you come in, let us know you're local. We'll give you the key chain so you can come back anytime and you just get discounts. That's awesome. Yeah. It's just something fun we're trying to do on a low, Sundays aren't as busy for us, but I think there's opportunity there. And we do like 100 to 500 guests on a Sunday, but we're trying to get to where there's more going on. So I'm actually potentially looking at a Pilates class that will be nine to 10 with a group that does that around town.

01:35:15And then we go straight into our Sunday Funday. And then I've got an adult cornhole league with mid-state sports leagues that I'm finalizing details with that will start at 4 p.m. on Sundays. And it's an actual league. Are you really good at cornhole? I'm not bad. I think from all of the pitching and getting in that one, I'm stupid good at cornhole. Cornhole, beer pong, darts. These are my things. Things you can do while drinking. That's it. I get better when I'm drinking. Unfortunately, I don't drink as much as I used to. You call it aiming fluid. That's right. We got a little aiming fluid in you. But I think from all my softball, cornhole to me is just like it's a natural motion. And somebody's like, oh, you're tall. You have long arms. It doesn't make a difference. It doesn't. It doesn't make it. It's all in knowing how to throw. Anyway, Austin, we've been talking for an hour and 20 minutes. Wow. That's how fast this goes.

01:36:17It does. Anything else you want to leave us with? Anything that's a final thought that you might have? You know, I think I pretty much said it all right there. But to recap it, you know, no matter how hard it gets, you know, you've got something else good coming. There's a reason why you're going through something if you're going through something and pay attention to it and be diligent about it. And also don't hate party buses and come see me at the hideaway. I love it. Great job. Thank you for coming by today. It was so good to catch up with you. And guys, go visit Honky Tonk Party Express. I think that locals should go do this. They think locals should go try it. You know, I've never done like a Nashville, like a local tour. It drives around like the stars houses. Like, I don't know any of this stuff. I don't know where the stars live. I think they'll be pretty cool. We don't point that out. We will take you past the Ryman. We might take you past Broadway. But as locals, we don't do touristy kind of things.

01:37:18It's true. And sometimes it's fun to go experience that kind of go. Hey, I'm going to have a little staycation and go do something that people pay a lot of money to come to Nashville, do this stuff. And we all take it for granted. This is happening in our backyard. I do it all the time. And then on a day off when I'm not having all the pressures of what I've got to accomplish during that day, and I just enjoy it. It's like, man, I need to go on a trip. I need to go do something like that. My wife and I haven't gone downtown and done anything. We finally did two weeks ago. And it was eye-opening. It was fun and exciting. But yeah, I agree. We've got all this stuff here. If you want to try out a party bus, but you don't want to admit it, you can email me at Austin at honkytonkparty.com. I'll get you a discount if you're local, and I'll put you on a bus with a group of friends. We'll have some fun. I promise you that. And if you're a member of NARA, I'm going to talk to you after we hang up here. Yeah. Hang up. After we hit the record button, we've got to figure out a NARA party night, like something that's going to be super fun.

01:38:19And we're going to get a bunch of restaurant owners out there, and we're going to experience it together. I have a big influencer event coming up in May that we haven't sent the invites out yet for, but that one might be a good day to tag team on that. Come out, because we're going to do buses. We're going to have tons of free booze and fun. It'll be fun to introduce a bunch of restaurant owners to a bunch of influencers, too. Yeah, I know. That's what I'm saying. It could be good. Synergies. That's right. I love synergy. It's a good thing. Anyway, it was a pleasure being here today, man. Thanks for having me. Thank you for coming. Thank you, Austin, for joining us. That was just a fun one. I want to say thank you to all of our sponsors, because without you guys, we cannot do this. Please, if you heard a sponsor today that you're interested in, please give them a call or reach out. Go to naranashville.com. These are all NARA official members, vendor members. If you own a local restaurant and you would like to be a part of NARA, go to naranashville.com and click that submit application button. It's free. We would love to come talk to you, see how we can help your small business.

01:39:24It is now time for the Gordon Food Service final thought. This one is a little different, because I keep saying I've known Austin for years, yet he went through all this stuff with PartyFowl, and I didn't talk to him. I didn't talk to him for a long time, and that's the way it is sometimes with people. I think that there's people all the time like, man, how you been? I haven't talked to you in forever. So my final thought today is call somebody, text somebody, reach out to somebody who you would consider to be a friend that you've just kind of lost contact with. You have no idea what people are going through. And just a message saying, hey, I'm thinking about you. Just want to check in. One of my New Year's resolutions this year was to grab coffee with anybody. Every time that I said, hey, we should grab coffee sometime, or hey, we should go grab lunch, is to actually say, OK, get out your calendar. Let's do it. And I've probably had 15 coffees or lunches with people that otherwise would have just been a nice comment to somebody.

01:40:28But no, I've made that connection, and I've sat down with them, and I've had lunch, and I've connected with people. And this conversation with Austin made me realize how much really good friends, how many people are out there who would like to hear from you. So make that time today. Make that time today and get out there and call somebody or text somebody. Go grab coffee with an old friend and catch up. You have no idea what they're doing. And sorry, that was repetitive. Thank you guys for listening today. And as always, we hope that you are being safe out there. We love you guys. Bye. Bye.