Damien + Jess Zouaoui – Oakwell Beer Spa- Sold Everything, Traveled Built a Million-Dollar Franchise

So as soon as we opened our booking system, we had 2 1/2

bookings per minute for the 1st 24 hours.

Our servers crashed, the website crashed.

We have so much traffic. I had always wanted to flip a

coin to determine the next destination, just like, you

know, being spontaneous about it.

And so we decided, OK, let's flip a coin.

Heads we go to Eastern Europe, tails we go to China.

And so we ended up flipping the coin.

It landed on heads. So Eastern Europe.

First stop was Poland. And that's where we discovered

the idea of the beer spawn. Zacopani, Poland.

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one for me. I have a couple that I have

admired from afar for quite some time joining us, Damien and

Jessica Zowe. I'm sorry guys, can you help me

with the last name there? Everyone, it's a good shortcut

Zuwa we. Zuwa E OK, Damien and Jessica

are the husband and wife founders of Oakwell Beer Spa,

one of the most unique hospitality concepts in America.

After leaving corporate careers in New York City, they sold

their belongings and travelled through 25 countries over 14

months, set out to find an innovative business idea they

could build together. Their search eventually LED them

to a beer spa in Poland, inspiring them to create a new

category that combines Wellness, hospitality and craft beer

culture. Since opening in Denver in 2021,

Oakwell has grown into an award-winning business, expanded

into multiple locations and begun franchising nationwide.

Their story is 1 of entrepreneurship, calculated

risk taking, resilience, and turning an unconventional idea

into a scalable business. So guys, I'm so excited to hear

all about your business, where this idea came from, and the

adventure you guys have had building what appears to be just

an incredible business. But before we dive into that, we

like to learn a little bit about our guests.

And so we go clear back to the beginning.

Do you guys want to each take a moment and tell us a little bit

about your childhood growing up and then maybe how you guys met?

Absolutely. OK, I'll start.

So I'm originally from Orlando, FL.

I grew up in a, I'd say upper middle class family, you know,

both had two working parents. My mom was in the IT field.

My dad tried to be an entrepreneur several times,

never really stuck with anything that much.

But my mom was definitely the the breadwinner in the family.

She was working corporate jobs since she was in her early 20s

because back then, you know, people had children really young

and had a mortgage really young. So, you know, typical family,

but really early on I had this entrepreneurial bug and I

remember getting a book when I was in elementary school about,

you know, starting a small business.

And so I decided to create a lemonade stand.

And it wasn't going to be just any lemonade stand.

It was going to be the best in the neighborhood.

And so, you know, I made business cards.

I looked at, you know, the traffic flow on the, on the

street coming into our neighborhood and how to attract

people from the main road and get them in.

And, and my dear, I was in like maybe 4th or 5th grade at the

time, I put up flags directing people how to get to our

driveway. So really I've, I've always

grown up loving figuring things out, problem solving, inventing

things. So I ended up going to college

at Florida State University. I studied neuroscience at the

time. My plan was to be a research

professor. I, you know, had a dream of of

winning a Nobel Prize. I really wanted to just study

neuroscience, but I ended up not getting into the specific PhD

program that I applied to. So I decided to take some time

off and join the corporate world and then my plan was to to

reapply for the PhD program. But I ended up really loving the

job. I, I joined an IT staffing

agency, started out as a recruiter, worked my way up into

stales and then into management. And really I, I learned so much.

You know, I was at the time in my early 20s and I was

interacting with these IT directors of Fortune 500

companies that, you know, were way older than me, like way more

business savvy than me. But it really allowed me to cut

my teeth in the corporate world and learn all the, the lingo,

the acronyms, the org structure and gave me a lot of great

knowledge that I've been carried forth to, to Oklahoma Beer Spa

today. But it was after being with that

company for four years, they offered me a role in New York

City. So at this time, I had only

lived in Florida. They offered me a year long

contract in New York City to come get that office in shape.

It was the worst performing in the country.

So I said, hey, I've never been to New York before, but I'm in

my 20s, and this sounds like a great opportunity.

And about two weeks into living in New York City is when I met

Damian. Yeah.

OK. OK, my turn.

So my name is Damian. I was born in France, grew up in

France. So I was born in Paris, but grew

up in southwest of France, very close to Bordeaux.

My childhood was very close to my brother.

He's he's as one entrepreneur on his own.

I grew up in the family that was creating their own business.

Mainly successful or not, that's a very different story.

But I'd say that the whole environment was to be a self

starter and obvious shoes are very focused on the education.

We were up in a way in the environment where school was

extremely important that if you're not bringing back

straight A's, we have a different rating in Europe and

France. It's you can have a you can you

can spend a bad evening or ever. The weekend can not be fun.

So anyway, focus on the education and then we moved back

to Paris when I was a teenager and you know, Paris is a very

international city. And I always knew since day one

that I wanted to, you know, be a a pilot or I wanted to sell oil

or water. I don't know why such a 2

important commodities, but I wanted to do that.

So with that in mind, unfortunately pilot wasn't an

option for multiple reasons, mainly economic and I want to

get into the Army. So I had to make a choice and

the choice was to do a business call, a business call over five

years period that will really help me to understand what I

want to do and what I want to sell them.

If I really still want to sell water and oil, which of course,

you know, when, when you're younger, that age, you, you have

dreams, you, you, you, you're clueless.

But Business School was very helpful for me to put off my

thought process and how to become my own boss more informed

in the future. And this started with first of

all, focusing on learning a different language in those

countries in, in Europe, there's a lot of countries that

translate everything or even have a very strong language.

France is one of them and the English you can learn English at

school, but this is not enough. So I had to self teach myself

English in order to really open myself new doors.

So of course with the support of my Business School in the

curriculum enabled there, but as well-being able to open yourself

doors by you know, getting scholarship and and studying in

different countries. Europe is a village.

There's so many different programs.

So Denmark was one of those country, Finland, one one of

those country, Vietnam, Australia.

And you know, I started at the, the least the, the, I think the

last person in the classroom in year 1.

And by year five, I was the best non-native English speaker in my

school, which was for me incredible.

Now to that point, learning English has led me to meet

someone in Paris at the time he became my motor.

He's he's an American businessman, very successful.

He sold his business, bumped him in a in a bar during a soccer

game, because we know our soccer.

It's it's a it's a religion there.

And, and from that moment, he kind of like motor me.

This is something very popular in America, but there is no such

a monitor sheet mindset in France culturally.

So he he kind of like took me under his wing and, and, and

help me to to create myself opportunities in the US by

opening his company to me has almost like a the first ever and

the last intern that went there for about 6 months in a specific

industry was in the travel industry.

And from that moment, I knew that I wanted to create my own

business. I had to first make mistakes,

learn with the money of others, other companies, right?

And and then hopefully one day made the big jump.

I came in America in the US in 2013 for the first time, then

spend my time between the, in North America, between the US,

the Caribbean and Mexico because I was working in a travel

industry. And then after that episode,

that chapter, I made my way to New York City on my own, helping

a small boutique travel company that was focusing on creating

experiences in New York City and I had to learn from scratch

everything. I had no budget.

Fun fact, I think my my boss took a line of credit to sponsor

me and take a bet on me in order to afford me.

Not that it was expensive. It's just I think I was the last

chance for her before she closed her business and, and Madras in

New York City very quickly after I started as well.

And, and meeting just has definitely being life changing

personally, professionally and has helped as well to, you know,

build confidence at creating your own business and as well

build confidence on making sure that when you create something,

you have a positive impact on others.

I can spend hours talking about myself.

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Well, I know you guys both mentioned a value in education,

that that was a big thing to your families.

Jess, you talked about pursuing APHD.

Have your views of education shifted at all?

Do you still feel a traditional education is as important today

as it was then? It's a.

Great question. I don't think school is valuable

for the information that they teach you necessarily.

So, you know, I don't think knowing trigonometry is

something that's going to value most people in a professional

career or biology, right? But I think what school does

teach you is the commitment is having a schedule, having to,

you know, wake up, study, go to class, be somewhere at a certain

time. It's more the process of

learning that it is the actual content that you learn in

school. I do think there are some career

paths where an education is absolutely necessary.

If you want to be a doctor, a lawyer, there's some things that

are quite niche and specific. But you know, we hear it all the

time, entrepreneurs and and business owners in specific that

never went to school and that, you know, went to the school of,

of Hard Knocks or whatever you want to call it.

I think that can be just as valuable as long as you have

something early on that teaches you, you know, to be responsible

for yourself, to show up, to work hard and to be committed to

something, whether it's in a formal school environment or

not, that depends. But I definitely don't think

it's as necessary as it used to be.

Like our parents generation. That's the first thing when

you're getting hired that people used to look at was what degree

do you have? What school did you go to?

But especially, you know, coming from a recruiting background

that has become less and less important nowadays, people look

more at your work ethic and look at your experience rather than

the degree that you got or the school that you went to.

Do you agree? Yeah, I mean, I, I think it

really depends on the countries and, and continental, you know,

there's, there's countries where it's very crucial to still as of

today, if you don't have a bachelor degree or master

degree, you're not going to get this job just because there's

zillions of people who have committed to getting a specific

diploma. I think school gives you a

baggage, luggage full of foundations.

Those foundations are very important.

As you mentioned, it teach you curiosity, it teach you

resilience, it teach you commitment, which often you

don't get, you don't get anywhere else.

You know, it can be a sports class where you coach ask you to

run 20 minutes non-stop, you know, and you want to do it, but

the coach is the coach and the teacher are here to train you on

that. Of course it depends you have,

you can have a different level of maturity at that time and you

might not know that you don't want that, but it is important.

So overall, you know, I think school would always be here,

should always be here. We're not going to get

political. There's a lot of things to

improve at school. Maybe shifting priorities today

take AI and all of those tools that are available to you.

But you know, back in the days when the computers went out and

we were at school, the computers wasn't here to help you to cheat

on it, to look at the encyclopedia in a matter of just

a few seconds. I think it's, it was a tool to

help us to go deeper into a research and maybe ask questions

that the teacher couldn't answer at the same time because they

were not in a classroom with you.

Well, today, I think it's the the the most important thing is

to go to school and have the school teaching, teaching you

how to use those tools available to help with that critical

mindset. And I think secondly, school of

should maybe think as well as teaching you some sorts of

topics that helps you in real life can be financial literacy.

It can be, you know, the simple equation of do not spend more

than what you win, because if you spend more than what you

win, I don't know the things that I go wrong and you only

have five or ten chances to make it right.

So start now, right? All of these things I think are

still very important and hopefully a few teachers I'm

sure in this country are maybe drafting away from the typical

program curriculum and and teach you those those things.

But school are very important today.

I think this is something we should teach our kids to stick

to it, to commit with, because what else do you have to do

between five years old and 16 or 18 years old, You know, honesty.

I think going to school and, and, and creating us all those

friendship, those friendship that will often last forever,

that really help help you to create your own identity.

You make a lot of mistakes to meet a lot of people in your

life. And the only chance you have to

make mistake and learn from it is to do that between five years

old or until you're 18, because at 18, then you go to

university, you make friends, but it's a very different path

because you travel from Colorado maybe to New York State to

study. And then after that you go to

ends of you get a job. That's a typical path, right?

And you then start to realize, Oh my gosh, I'm paying tax.

I have a job and my disposable income is now to pay back my

loan or have fun. So make those mistakes, go to

school, commit to it, show you prove to yourself that you can

last as long as we see about your school.

Of course, if you're an athletes, if you're the best

chef in the world, if you're the best Baker in the world, I think

you should split your time between 5050.

Make sure you leverage your skills where you're really good

at your practice and improve yourself while making sure that

you back yourself up with the right foundations to understand

how mathematics and geometry. I do it all of that works in

order to, to, to have a, a critical mindset and way of

seeing things and approaching things in life for the future.

Sounds good. Yeah, I can agree with most of

that and appreciate that stance. So you guys brought us up

through you both got to New York and met each other after each of

you'd only been there a short time.

Did did you remain in New York long after you had met?

Yeah, about three years, yeah. So it's quite funny, we we both

moved to New York City within a few weeks of each other.

Obviously we didn't know each other at the time and we met and

a dating app we met on Bumble, which is kind of a fun tidbit

that we don't tell many people. But at the time, you know,

dating apps were at their in their prime.

We both didn't know many people when we moved to New York City

and really it was we headed off and suddenly, I mean, from the

time that we first met, we became pretty much inseparable.

And you know, we we continued working our jobs.

I was just there for a year long contract after which the deal

was OK. You can, you know my company

said they. They they would allow me to stay

in New York after the year where they would move me back to

Florida if I wanted to. So I knew I had that predefined

time. But really quickly Damien and I

knew we wanted to open a business together.

We're both very entrepreneurial. We have backgrounds that are

very complementary to each other.

So Damien is the sales and marketing guy.

He's very extroverted, he's great with tech.

And then I'm on the other side more behind the scenes.

I love analytics, I love HR, legal finance.

So we knew that we have really had all of the bases covered and

that we had both always dreamed of owning our own businesses.

Previously we thought we would do it, you know, on our own.

But then after meeting, you know, really quickly, we we knew

we wanted to open a business together.

So it's just a matter of figuring out what that was.

But at the time, we were still working on our our corporate

job. So we'd get off of work, we'd go

to the nearby wine bar or beer garden, we'd have a pint or a

glass and we'd brainstorm business ideas.

You know, we're really passionate about hospitality,

but we knew we didn't want to do a restaurant.

We didn't want to do a coffee shop.

I had grown up working in restaurants all through high

school, you know, and college. So I, I knew I didn't want to go

into that industry in specific. But Damian, you know, being from

Europe and I was fortunate enough to travel internationally

at a young age. We started talking about, you

know, there's a lot of interesting things that exist

out in the world that just haven't necessarily been brought

to the United States yet. So we thought of the idea of,

hey, what if we travel now while we're still young?

We don't have kids, we don't have a mortgage.

Yes, we have our corporate jobs. But at the end of the day, you

know, what's the worst that could happen?

We can always get a job again. We feel like we're, you know,

fairly employable people. And so if we're going to take a

risk, now is the time to do it. Let's go and and travel the

world and and find the concepts that we really identify with.

And that we also think we could scale the United States because

we also were thinking pretty big together.

Like we didn't want to be a mom and pop business owner for our

whole lives. We knew we wanted to find

something that we could scale and grow into a national brand.

So we took about a year of, you know, planning and plotting our

escape from the corporate world in the month after getting

married. We pulled the trigger and we we

quit our jobs at the same time. That's awesome.

And yeah, it's hard to go wrong when your business partner is

the little girl that analyzed traffic patterns when setting up

her lemonade. Stand.

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So this wild 14 month trip around the world, did you guys

set out with kind of that time frame or that location in mind

or did you just kind of freeze really work your way around and

how did you prepare for that? Did did it take some planning

and funding that or what did that look like?

Yeah, it's quite funny. You know, I'm a little bit more

of a a planner I think. And so for me, the idea of just

like, quitting our jobs and having this open-ended trip of

not knowing how long it was going to take or where we were

going was, was a little frightening.

So my plan at first was OK, we can like, let's just book our

main flights like to each continent every, you know, few

months. But Damian was like, no, like

how do you know that you're not going to get somewhere and want

to go somewhere else or you really love it and want to stay

longer? So he's like, we're just going

to buy a one way ticket at a time.

Like let's just plan the 1st place.

Like we have nowhere to be, no one to report to.

So why plan this all out? You're going to, you know, put

us in a box. We need more freedom.

And so he, he talked me into the idea of just, OK, we figure out

where is the 1st place that we're gonna go, which ended up

being Moscow. Not, not so much that we thought

we'd find a business there. But, you know, it was just an

interesting place to stop. So we just thought a one way

ticket with no real plan for where we would go after that.

But during that year that we were still in our corporate

jobs, there was some planning. You know, we saved as much as we

could from our corporate jobs. But at the end of the day, we're

still living in New York City. So our expenses were high.

So one of the biggest things, though, where we got turned on

to the idea of credit card points.

And fortunately, I was in a role where I was taking a lot of

people out to happy hours and to dinners through my job.

And they would allow me to just then submit an expense report

for reimbursement. So I strategically signed up

with credit cards that I could get, you know, earn high points

for dining and these different types of expenditures.

So we ended up saving close to 1,000,000 Chase points over that

year that we then used to fund our travel.

So almost all of our flights were completely paid for with

points. Some of our hotels were as well.

But I did want to point out this was not a, a luxury travel

experience. We were truly backpacking,

staying in shared rooms and hostels, you know, staying this

one hotel I remember in the beach in Thailand had

cockroaches everywhere, but it was $7.00 a night.

We ended up checking out at like 4:00 AM because I'm, I'm just

like, I hate cockroaches. And so we had to sleep with the

lights on and we're like on top of the covers because there were

just bugs crawling around everywhere.

So, you know, once you make the big flight like from the US to

Europe or over to Asia, travel within specific countries is

pretty affordable. And thankfully, we're able to

get those long haul flights covered with the credit card

points. OK, interesting.

And so you said you started with Moscow, You mentioned Highland.

I know you wound up in Poland. How did you decide where to go?

I mean, when you're in Moscow and you feel like you've seen

Moscow, where do you go next? Yeah, this the, there is a

couple of things that we wanted to do from a a personal

perspective during this business travel.

So I had always really wanted to get my yoga teachers

certification and naturally that should be done in India, right.

So naturally we're going to India for a month to the birth

place of Ashtanga yoga, which was the style of yoga that I

practice. And so, you know, Moscow to

India was like kind of next doors.

So that was the the next place that we went.

Danian had his scuba diving certification already, but

that's something that I wanted as well.

And so again, naturally you go to Kotal, Thailand to get your

scuba diving certification. And so but you know, there's a

few things like that. We had a few weddings of friends

and family that made us travel on very like nonsense

directions. We were in Asia.

We went to Australia and then back to Asia and then to France

for another wedding and then to so you know, it was not in any

sort of linear fashion, but one of my favorite stories is when

we were in, was it do you mom or Thailand with the coin in

Thailand. I had always wanted to flip a

coin to determine the next destination, just like, you

know, being spontaneous about it.

And so we decided, OK, let's flip a coin heads we go to

Eastern Europe, tails, we go to China.

And so we ended up flipping the coin.

It landed on head. So Eastern Europe first stop was

Poland and that's where we discovered the idea of the beer

spawn Zacopani Poland. But it's so funny because if we

would have had the coin flip in the other direction on in China,

which we didn't end up going to China, but we probably would

have skipped Eastern Europe and we likely would have never

discovered the idea of a beer spot, which is what we've, we've

built our whole business around now.

So it's quite funny in hindsight how that one coin flip really

like decided the the fate of, you know, quite a few years of

our lives and, and what we're still living today.

That's incredible. What a great story and what a

great experience. So when you visit this beer spa

in Poland, when you guys got there and and kind of saw that

idea, did you know right away that was the idea you were going

to walk away with or was there more exploring after?

That no, I mean, I, I think well, first of all, for the

context, it was a rainy day in the middle of the summer in June

in Poland. So we just got here.

It's a middle of the, it's, it's a Mountaineers region.

And I was like, OK, maybe we go for a hike or we get, we go get

out and get some fresh air, but it was raining.

So we're like, well, what, what can be?

What can we do, you know, not another bar and sit and have a

beer. It was like, let's do something

fun. So just goes on TripAdvisor and

and and look at things to do and one of those things to do with

ABF Spa. So it was like, that's very

entfingering. So let's let's let's go and and

try to get in and three minutes later we we're checking in.

It's very rustic. It's very bohemian.

It's it's, it's very different than what you would think.

Actually. There is no expectations to have

from ABF Spa. You, you always question

yourself, what is this? And yeah, we, we gain, we, we

get into this tiny town room, there's a plastic shower, there

is this tiny little tub, there is a bed of hay, there's a

fridge next to you. And, and you get access to that

room for about an hour, I think an hour and 30 minutes.

And, and you can drink as much beer as you want.

You can lay on the bed of hay between your shower and the

silk. And, and it was, it was, it was

very interesting. But the really, the odd moment

was when we actually get into the tab, there's no bubblers.

It's very quiet. It's a tiny little small tab

that we, we fit together because we're, we're pretty, I guess,

sharp and small. And I fell asleep about, in, in

about 3 minutes. It was the most relaxing

experience I ever had. It was I wasn't I just I might

have sick a little bit of beer, but nothing like crazy.

And and when I was asleep, just starting to really go big and

strong. And this is this is I think this

can be done. This can be done.

I think we should do this. We should bring this back.

I think this is the way this is we should do that.

And she splashed me. I wake up and he tell and say,

all right, I think we should do this.

I said, what do you mean we should do this?

Well, we should bring the various file back to the US and

make it happen and say, OK, well, you know, we're very

analogical. So I had to talk to her about,

you know, the importance of a business model, financial model,

marketing model, nothing too crazy, but something just to

help us to put your IDs into paper because it's such a unique

business ID. And yeah.

And since then, since this time, we promised ourselves to try as

many spa concepts in Eastern Europe and all around the world.

So we started to, of course, do all of the beer spas out there.

There's Meaty .1. They're very popular, they're

very party oriented, They're clean enough.

I don't know this is on them, but it is.

Those are very different according to countries.

You go, there's Germany, Austria, there is, there's Czech

Republic, Poland, there's Hungary.

All of those countries have a very developed bathing culture,

but still there's spas are very popular, but still quite unique

on their own. We need those wine spas in South

of France, north of Spain, within the stylist.

So therapy on the Atlantic Coast of of France and South of France

where you pretty much leverage seam water and create those

hydrotherapy surgeries for your own well-being.

See water has a lot of benefits for you.

We did those German spas that often people don't mind to be

naked while drinking a beer in front of you.

We went to Japan and South Korea where we tried the instant

ginger band. All of those are multi level

building with the scenes of of Sauna's team room bath and you

know, above all of that. But we really realized that a

day spa is a place to reconnect, a social place in most of those

countries. There's obviously a strong spa,

a ticket. You know, some countries you

cannot talk in the sauna. In some countries, no, you can

talk in the sauna. You can can even drink vodka in

Finland. When I was in Finland, people

were drinking vodka in the sauna before going to jump in the lake

or in the cold bath, you know. So overall the spare ticket is

different. It is a social place.

People go to the day spot to reconnect to each other.

It can be a funny time where in Japan you, you see that whole

family, grandparents, parents, kids, grandkids are all going

together for a few hours on the Sunday and Saturday.

And what they do is they spend quality time together and

relaxing. But as well, meeting in that in

the middle of all of that is a cantina where you can buy your

beer, slurp both noodle and Wellness. well-being goes hands

to hands with with all of that social aspect or that

hospitality aspect. You know, when you go back to

the USI think the moment was as entrepreneurs is how do you can

really land in the market where you don't try to disrupt it, but

you shake it up. There's already a strong

following on days past, but that's often targeted towards

women more than anything. It is often stuck in the past,

very, very transaction based, you know, and focus and targeted

towards a specific audience. And Jessica and I really wanted

to shake this up and, and make it more fun and make it more

approachable, less intimidating and, and mainly very and most

importantly, being able to attract any type of audience can

be woman, it can be men. This, this was very important to

us with a big sense of hospitality.

You know, when you go to your day spa, this is very easy.

You need to live, relax, happy and often.

You need to feel during your experience.

You need to feel safe. It needs to be clean, it needs

to be pleasant, it needs to smells good and we've worked

very hard on that and all of that created that moment for us.

It sounds like even more than shaking it up, you guys are

almost creating a, a whole new industry here that, you know, at

least my very limited experience, my wife probably

knows more just what you said that the spa experience here in

the US, you get your treatments lined out, you schedule your

massage or whatever, and you probably have some time to relax

in the spa. But it it's very transactional,

it's very focused. You have specific things that

you're doing and it sounds like you guys have a little bit

different view of Wellness as a whole to incorporate create

relaxation and even social engagement and bringing in that

that social aspect of Wellness. Is that an accurate statement?

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

You know, in, in, in, in some countries, you know, staying in

France or in Italy, you know, taking a seat to enjoy a glass

of wine and watching people walking in the streets or even

in after a long day could be considered as of course, it

might not be advice from your physician, but you know, it's,

it's a time where you sit down and reconnect with someone else

or your your inner self. And we knew that in the US, like

this is something that people want.

I've been going to spas since I was young with my mom, with my

sister. And you go for, you know, a

mother or daughter experience for Mother's Day, for example,

or later on, you go with a partner for a couples massage.

And you were going with someone intending it, intending for it

to be this, you know, moment of reconnection and socialization

and spending time together. But the spas are very conducive

to that. You get your couples massage

your face down on a table in the same room.

And then typically all of the amenities, the saunas, the tubs,

etcetera, are in gender separated areas.

Or if there are common areas, it's really quiet, right?

Like there's maybe some rain forest sounds going on in the

background. Some people are there by

themselves reading a book and like, if you're talking with

someone, everyone can hear every word that you're saying.

I mean, I've been one of those people that's reading a book and

you see a Bachelorette party that's in the hot tub, and

they're all just like, laughing and having a good time.

And you're like, OK, I'm trying to relax here.

So then there's often like, conflicting motivation.

Some people are there to socialize.

Some people are there to have a solo meditative experience and

then just the environments are not conducive to socializing the

the background music, the seeding, the gender separation

of the areas. But yet we still continue to

spend all this money in the United States going for couples

massages and going for girls days at the spa.

But there's never really an appropriate environment for

that. And so, you know, we felt like

if we do this right, we we can create the privacy that

Americans need by having these private spa suites where you're

just there with your group, so you're not interrupting the

group that's in the private spa suite next door that may be

there for a very different reason.

They're one group's there to socialize.

The next one's there to, you know, really relax after a

stressful week, and both people can have their own experiences

without interrupting each other. But then you create this

communal space, this tap room, which is meant for

socialization. There, the music is upbeat.

We play bossa Nova, we play French pop, we play R&B, you

know, all different kinds of upbeat music.

You know, the lighting, the scent, everything is really set

up to more reflect A boutique hotel lobby than it is a spa

waiting area or a spa. Relaxation area and we found

that, you know, people are coming time and time again for

their monthly date night to celebrate birthdays, to

celebrate anniversaries because the environment is just way

better suited to being there with someone else.

And 95% of our guests are coming as as two people, as either

couples or two friends. And so our environment is really

just cater to that, which again is something I think that that

we want in America. And we already spend money going

on spas trimming to find, but it's just never in other places

set up appropriately. Yeah, that's fantastic.

It sounds like you guys are really on to something there.

Could you walk me through what does an experience at an Oakwell

spa look like from from the time you arrive to the services you

offer and and that experience that you would get there What's

what is? That yeah, yeah.

So we, we, well, obviously you make your reservation online,

right. So the idea is to make sure you

have a pleasant experience, which is why we often consider

ourselves as almost a tech company just because we really

with a lot of time and energy on the booking flow, on the

experience you have on the website, the quality of the

information and when it's signed to come.

Well, we ask you to come 30 minutes before just because we

want to ease you into relaxation.

There's a a minimal checking process where we check your IDs.

There's obviously beer, wine, cider and like beverage on tab.

So the law requires to check your ID.

You send a waiver or two making sure that you're aware that

there's no lifeguard on duty and that's you.

You need to stay responsible because there is there is

alcohol if you want to drink it. And then we starts the

experience. We scorch you to a beautiful tap

room. We have a why it's called a

beer. Well, so it's a tap wall with

different select selection of curated beer, craft beer from

Colorado. We have sours, IPA, Dingle say.

So it really depends on the pretty much the season and the

breweries we have on top. We have cider and non alcoholic

beverages that we have wine for the ladies or the guys.

We want to take a break from the beer and we walk you through

that whole selection. And of course you have a little

tasting if you'd like to. And we teach you how to pour

yourself a nice drink. Often people tell us they know

how to pour, but we're, we're very we, we love teaching.

So often we we show to people how to for a perfect beer and

when it's done, we invite you to take a seat somewhere in the in

beautiful tap reimagine that it's it's not your typical tap

room. I want actually we we could call

the lounge almost like a hotel boutique hotel lobby lounge

where it smells good, the music is nice, there's the decor is

really helping you to ease into relaxation.

We have topic cards in the middle of each tables where you

can put your phone away and really start to reconnect when

you're sitting in order with all of those table topics.

That's a brand if they listen to us.

Thank you. You just reconnected a lot of

and when you take a seat and you have you start your CPR beer.

We usually want some have someone else from the team kind

to introduce you to our bath selection so you're able to

select one of the three bath. We offer those bath on the main

with real beer for wanted beer. No, it's a button.

It's a botanical and holistic approach to bathing whenever

each different fresh herbs such as hops and barley which are the

ingredients of the beer and different other ingredients.

It can be lemon grass, Bourbonna every time or mess.

You have a master or values in house that helps us you come up

with all of that, but every time it change, it's always you.

Most of the time we're actually right now working on the wine

bath as well. And anyway, you select your

wine, your bath, your beer bath or your future wine bath.

And when you have made your selection, you have about few

more minutes to ease into relaxation by drinking and

taking pictures in your fun social media tab.

And then when it's time to go, we have a beer therapist.

This is the legal name of the legal title of our staff

members. They give you a tour and escort

you to your private specialist. So get into your private

special. It's it's very large, it's

beautiful, it smells good. It has been cleaned and

sanitized. So no one you don't have that

feeling that someone else has been before you.

We have the large hydro therapy tub, the rain shower and the

soda and we suggest you start a circuit with a 1520 minutes of

infrared soda to really detox. Let go everything, sweat as much

as you can. Of course you can drink your

favorite beer in the soda. We have those triple insulated

seamless steel Tumblr that you can use.

We have water of course available for you.

Then it's time to take a cold shower.

For a few seconds you really shake up that body and and and

help you to keep your blood flowing to then jump into this

beautiful large bath. As I said, the bath is not made

with fermented beer, so imagine yourself really smelling what it

would smell when you walk next to brewery that is currently

brewing. Must like worse, right?

But this is all very horrible. The temperature of the tub is

not what you would expect from a tub of oars.

This is not a hot tub. It is more like between 95 and

100°F. This helps you to really stay in

the bath, soak in the back as that as much as possible and and

it helps you not destroy till the benefits of those fresh

ingredients we have. We have a room service button in

case you want to have a refill in.

Just ring the bell. I often want some joke.

If you ring twice will run faster for you to bring your

favorite drinks, you can add a banana spray, pink wine.

There's different package with the chocolate artisan chocolate

Bumble. Anyway, you can probably make

this experience your own celebration, anniversary,

birthday. But that's not just a simple me

time for yourself or yourself and a good friend.

We have as well a mini bar, we call it the cosmetic mini bar,

similar to what actually one of those hotel chain just launched

a beauty bar. But we, we've, we've launched it

five years ago and imagine that it's it, it works exactly the

same. Like it will work in the hotel

room, but instead of having vodka champagne available, you

have those cosmetics project that helps you to elevate your

experience in the room. So we have a beer air mask, we

have a face mask. We have similar bath bombs.

We have bloody lotion and I'll just bring it out here to help

you levate your experience as well.

And you know, but that time it's been an hour and a half.

So you're about to leave your room and we have a beautiful

Ventura where you can freshen up and and and get ready for your

next for your next adventures. We have what's called the

cooling down areas. It's a it's a large where after

we experts, we really suggest you to take it easy and take a

good 1520 minutes to cool down. Take it easy, have another beer

cider. Often the beer a cider takes

better after the experience. And then we have this wise this

experience called a zero gravity massage experience.

So those are high technology piece of equipment.

You might think those are massage chairs, but that are not

your typical massage chairs from the mall.

Other airports that you see there are high technology piece

of equipment that scans your body for 20 seconds when you sit

in them work like you like an astronaut is taking off.

So like Jeff Bezos going into space, right?

And and that's that technology start from top to bottom and

give you a full body massage for 1530 minutes or an hour.

Those are very popular. We we realize that the markets

in the in the US is very similar to specific markets like in

Japan or South Korea, where people don't like strangers to

touch them or being, you know, natural when a strangers

touching your body might not feel good.

So leveraging technology to deliver massage experience has

been changed your success and actually has made your concept

more popular. This is a this is a a very

successful competitive basin builder, planet builder, as I

like to call it. They know what they're doing.

They know their technology. And and yeah, so about an hour

and a half from the private spice sheets, maybe a 1530

minutes an hour massage on top of that with 30 minutes checking

in, it's about two hours and a half to three hours staycation.

And often what we hear from the guests coming in is this is the

best date night we ever had. We're about to reconnect.

There is no distraction, no screens, no games, no waiters

disrupting or conversation, no table next to us that is

annoying, right? Or even trying to discuss with

us. It's, it's really it's, it's

almost a mini vacation. It's, it's a mini vacation.

Some, you know, some feedback or I cannot believe I'm in Denver.

I cannot believe I'm right in the middle of right now with

five points. I cannot believe that for just

three minute massage, I feel more relaxed and and happy.

So so we're nailing it at that point.

I'm devouring happiness through Wellness.

Man, that sounds fantastic. I am even looking more forward

to coming down to Denver and checking it out.

We've been trying to make that happen for a while and I just

haven't put a trip to Denver together.

But I want to shift gears a little bit from the the

experience and talk a little bit about your guys's experience

building this business. What was the most difficult step

getting Oakwell off the ground? You, you had this great idea.

You explored the world and got inspiration from a lot of

different cultures, a lot of different experiences.

What What was the hardest part in making it a reality?

To paint the picture. So we have decided that we

wanted to open a beer spa. We spent the second-half of our

travels putting together financial projection business

plan and then we had to decide where we wanted to open this.

We had been living in New York City previously.

As much as we love New York, it's really expensive.

It's over saturated when it comes to tourist activities.

So we wanted to find a market that we could make an impact in

more quickly and that was also a bit more affordable.

So we did a ton of market research again while we were on

the other side of the world, just, you know, on our computers

looking up a craft beer city is looking at Wellness oriented

cities and have really narrowed it down to Boston, Denver and

Portland. Denver ended up winning.

We had never been to Denver before, but all of our market

research is saying, hey, Denver's the place where you

should launch this. We were really interested in the

franchise model. So we knew we wanted to scale

this into a national brand by franchising.

There was a lot of really successful franchises that

started in Denver, Chipotle, Quiznos, other companies like

Crocs, OtterBox, you know, it's, it's really a great hub.

We also found that Denver had a lot of financing programs for

small businesses that can't get traditional funding.

We had a little bit of money that we had saved up from our

corporate jobs. But again, we had just been

traveling for a little over a year.

So we we didn't have much left, but we didn't want to take

outside investors. We didn't want to give away any

equity. So we needed to find a way to

get a loan. Even though we didn't have a

house, so we didn't have collateral.

We had a tiny bit of money to put in, but we knew that it'd be

challenging to find funding. What we didn't anticipate

though, was how difficult it was to find a commercial space to

put this. So we flew right to Denver after

traveling. We still had our backpacks on

now business plan in hand, right?

We didn't know anything about Denver, like the neighborhoods,

where to go. So we ended up on this site

called Trusted House Sitters, which we had used while

traveling as well, which you can basically stay for free and

people homes in exchange for watching their homes or pets

while they're away traveling. So there's about 3 or 4

different houses that we stayed at.

We watched this one lady's cat while she was on a cruise.

This other lady went to New Zealand to visit some family for

a few weeks. So we watched her.

She had three dogs and two cats. Like a lot of animals watched,

but so we were sitting in these places for free, like trying to

get a feel for Denver Also started going and pitching

banks, trying to find a loan. We went to over 40 banks.

We went to all the big ones. We, you know, Chase, Bank of

America, Wells Fargo, we went to your small local Rocky Mountain,

you know, credit union type of things.

And really quickly, you know, we found out we weren't going to

get a loan from a traditional bank.

You know it, We didn't have the collateral, we didn't have the

cash to put in. So we ended up getting connected

with the City of Denver, the Office of Economic Development,

which we had read a little bit about these programs when we

were travelling. But we ended up being able to

get a loan because all of these banks said no to us.

And we're able to bring them the rejection letters from these 40

banks. And we had a pretty good, you

know, a very comprehensive business plan and financial

projections. But one of the caveats of

getting a loan from the Office of Economic Development was the

business needed to be physically located in a specific area.

So they had this map of these neighborhoods that they were

trying to redevelop essentially. So we weren't going to be able

to go to the hip and trendy, you know, Cherry Creek or Low High

or these neighborhoods in Denver that, you know, already have a

lot of businesses in them. We'd have to kind of be in the

outskirts in the areas that were maybe a little bit sketchy, but

they were the city was trying to put some money into.

So when we were looking for commercial spaces, this was in

2019, you know, Denver had this big boom because of marijuana.

And so the vacancy rate for commercial spaces of the size

that we were looking for was 2%. So 98% of these, you know,

buildings that kind of fit our specs were already occupied.

So we had a very limited pool, plus then you take into

consideration that we have to be located within these specific

neighborhoods in order to get this the funding that we wanted

to. So one of our biggest challenges

was actually finding the commercial space, which we

thought like, yeah, we're going to be able to sign a lease.

It's going to be so easy. Like, we're going to have a

really hard time finding the money.

But the the opposite was actually true.

We got the funding really quite quickly within a few months of

being here, contingent upon finding a space.

And finding a space took us about, we moved here in January,

ended up signing a lease in October.

So it took us 10 months. You know, a lot of the landlords

wouldn't even show us the space. And mind you, they didn't even

have to do anything. They have real estate agents

that would show the space for them, but they didn't even give

us the time of day to show us the space because they wanted a

proven tenant. They didn't know a what a beer

spa was. Also like, who are these young,

you know, 20 something year old kids?

Like they're not going to be able to pay this rent.

Like I'm not even going to waste my time.

I'd rather have a 711 or a Chick-fil-A or some proven

concept. So that was really surprising.

We ended up finding a space that is in it's a neighborhood called

Five Points. It's right adjacent to the

Brewery District, but it's definitely not in the hip and

trendy area in five Points. Is has historically been a

pretty sketchy neighborhood in Denver.

I mean, even 15 years ago, it's like you don't walk around at

night alone in Five Points. The block that we went into have

been vacant for several years. And so there was a lot of, you

know, on unsavory characters that would hang out in the

parking lot and on the block. So it was a big risk for us

going in there. But we saw that it had a lot of

potential. We loved the building as well,

had a lot of character to it. So we we ended up doing the

construction there. But that was definitely the

second part that was the most challenging was the build out.

We were very underfunded even though we got a loan.

You know, we did our construction budget based on

like, what's the average construction cost in Denver per

square footage, right? And so we're like, OK, $150.00

per square foot sounds great. We didn't realize, you know, the

building didn't have enough electrical service.

We had to upsize the electrical service.

The water line was 1/2 an inch lead pipe that was installed at

1896. You know, we have high water

needs for our tubs, so we had to upsize the water line, which is

really expensive. There was no heating or air

conditioning, so we had to install 2 new five ton rooftop

units for HVAC. All of these things that

definitely was not captured in our $150.00 a square foot

construction budget. So we had to get really creative

and even finding AGC that would work on our project with that

limited budget was challenging. We, we found a guy, his name is

Ron though. And I mean it wouldn't have

been, it wouldn't have been possible without him.

He gave us his toolbox, like brought all of his tools there.

He would teach me how to to install cabinetry, how to mud

drywall, how to do some minor electrical work and plumbing

work. And you were doing things that

we absolutely had no business doing.

But, you know, it was the only way that we could get the the

project done and open. And so it ended up taking two

years to do the construction because we had to do a lot of it

ourselves. And then for our equipment as

well. It's like a wok in cooler cost

$20,000 brand new. We didn't have that kind of

money, you know, fortunately for us, so this was during COVID and

so a lot of businesses were going out of business.

So Ron had turned us in, turned us on to the concept of business

auction. So there's a couple of business

auction houses in Colorado that basically when a company goes

out of business and they get reclaimed by the city or

reclaimed by the bank, they put all of their equipment and

furniture up for auction for other people to bid on.

So we ended up getting over 50% of our furniture, fixtures and

equipment used from these auctions.

Like our walk in cooler came from a subway that was going out

of business in Fort Collins. That was a 20 year old walk in

cooler, but it still ran. It was like all corroded inside,

lots of rust, like in very rough shape, but we ended up getting

it for 200 at auction. We paid another $200 for a

moving company to disassemble it in Fort Collins, drive it down

to us and put it back together. We ended up pressure washing it

to get the rust off. We got some sheet metal to just

put on the inside. So the health department didn't

see that. It's like actually like rotting

on the inside so we could pass our health inspection.

You know, there's so many stories like that of just how we

had to get creative, you know, Facebook Marketplace, finding

things that were broken, like light fixtures that were.

Broken and then, you know, bribing our electricians with a

beer to fix the wiring so we could use the light fixture.

But it was definitely a really challenging time.

I mean, Damian and I were were, you know, we have no other

outside income at this time. So we also have to live really

cheap. We in between doing this

physical construction work, I would go and sell my blood

plasma. I had gotten COVID during this

time as this is when they were wanted to do research on

people's blood so I could get 100 $300 per session to to sell

my blood plasma. We use you know, we got as many

0% APR credit cards as we could get approved for.

We learned the trick of if you apply for a bunch of credit

cards on the same day then they won't know, you know, it hasn't

showed up on your credit report yet.

So you just apply for, you know, 5 or 10 credit cards with no

interest rate for the 1st 12 months and just Max all of those

out. Fingers crossed that you'd be

able to pay those off before interest kicks in at the end of

the 12 months. We then get credit card points

and convert those into Walmart gift cards that we could buy the

pillows for the couches in the tap room.

Damien drove for lift. So all day we do construction

and then at 11:00 PM, he'd start driving for lift and he would do

airport rides because that's where he could get the most

money. And he would use that as a time

to do market research. He would ask the guests, like,

you know, that he's driving around like, hey, I'm opening a

beer spa. Like how much would you pay for

this? How long would you want to spend

in the private spa suite? Like, what do you think about

this? And it was a great, great time

to get a real life sampling of the general public and ask them

a bunch of questions about our business concept, which funny

enough, few. And then actually came to the

spa later on and was like, hey, Damien was our Lyft driver back

in the day, you know, we would walk dogs on Rover for 10 or $20

to do a quick 30 minute dog walk around the neighborhood.

So we had to get really scrappy. There was a lot of, yeah,

tensions were high, not a lot of sleep.

We were very poor. But but eventually we got it

done. Oh my gosh, yeah.

That is quite the adventure. At what point in that were you

most afraid? Was there ever a point that you

didn't think you were going to be able to pull it off?

I'm not sure, don't have a friend.

I think I want you know you're building the ID that you you're

taking on the world. I think it's small, the market,

the map, the project slash service fits the market.

Is that the right timing? I know you're saying all that

energy time and you wonder if everything, all of the decisions

you're taking sometime on the fly are makes sense and is this

will serve the main goal of shaking in that marketplace.

You know, and, and, and I think the second part is if, if you're

just specifically talking about construction, is that obsession

of opening day, you don't know the date, but you need to strive

on that goal. We need to open.

We need to open. There's no, we're not building

all that. We're not buying all those

things to not open, which means the translation is running out

of money. Well, we didn't have any.

So running out of money, we don't have to open the business,

which often is, you know, what can you leverage credit cards

driving lift all of the side gigs that really helps you fuel

and many as well. Most importantly, the trust and

the confidence you have from your GC because during that time

the GC was, I mean, he was the one who was helping us to make

this happening. So how do you manage your

subcontractors? Him sometime, you know, people

come from different walk of life.

They have different way of reaction.

You know, I, you know, you come in the morning at 6:00 AM, you

say, hey, this needs to be done today, you know, and you're

just, you know, sometime at 20 miles on something at a time.

And that person would build hundreds of hundreds of

thousands of square feet through the carrier.

You can have some clash. So how do you make sure that the

project stays on track when managing the relationship,

managing the resources and making sure that you stay

focused on this opening time, that opening day that should,

you should get closer as soon as you start, you're actually

getting closer. It's like a marathon.

It's, it's, you're getting closer to your finish line and,

and you need to stick to that no matter what.

And you need to be very strong. You need, you need to, you need

to really sometime stay clueless and just believe that this is

going to happen, even if you feel like the sky is falling on

you right now. What Eric, One of the A Funny

Story that I think you know speaks to this.

We were two weeks away from our grand opening.

So this is like end of construction, right?

We had we're finally we've made it.

We've set a date for our grand opening and we go to test all of

our tubs. We had installed this tankless

hot water heating systems. We have like very expensive 3

tankless hot water heaters that are kind of wrapped together in

a loop to, to provide us all the hot water that we needed to fill

our tubs that are like 200 gallons per tub.

We have 4 tubs and we're filling 27 times a day.

So we're like pumping through a lot of water and we needed to

test it before our grand opening.

So we go and we, we fire up the, the tankless hot water heaters,

we start filling the tubs and we keep getting an error message on

the tankless hot water heaters that we don't have enough gas,

there's not enough gas, there's not enough gas.

Like we can't work. And they keep shutting down on

us. And we're like, Oh no, what is

going on? Like we, we just installed all

of this brand new. Like, how can this not be

working? We're of course getting like

really pissed off at our general contractor, like saying all

sorts of things to him. And so Damien had this brilliant

idea of like, OK, we don't have enough gas.

Like maybe there's a, a gas leak or like maybe just the

building's not getting enough gas.

Like we, we need to get Excel energy out here.

And Excel is the local, you know, utility authority.

So he ended up calling the emergency XL line saying that

there is a gas leak to get someone to come out to just like

help us figure out what's going on.

Because you can't just call him and be like, hey, will you send

someone out, like, help us troubleshoot our construction

job? So he's like, yeah, there's a

gas leak. Like, you know, and they send

someone out with their, you know, little sirens on, like

parking on the sidewalk, thinking that they there could

be a gas explosion or an emergency.

And the guy's like, yeah, I don't really smell any gas here.

I don't know what you're talking about.

Like, I get that your water heaters aren't working, but

there's not a leak here. And as he's walking out of the

building, he sees the gas meter outside.

And he said, hey, like, did you know that your gas meter is

sized for like a single family residential unit?

Like this is not a, a commercial gas meter.

There's no way that this gas meter is letting in the flow

through to feed this commercial hot water heater system.

Like you need to upsize the gas meter.

So we're like Microsoft pissed off at our GC like how did you

not like we did all we redid the piping inside the building to be

large enough for the gas that we needed and just didn't check the

gas meter, which you know, all the gas flows are in is

restricting the flow and no one thought to look at that.

We have opening in in two weeks. And so we asked the guy from

Excel and we're like, Hey, how long is this going to take?

And he's like, oh, that's, that's it takes months.

Like you have to get permits, you have to apply for, you have

to get engineering drawings, like there's calculations to be

done. The equipment is, you know, back

ordered. And we're like, oh, no, like

everything is done. We're ready to open.

Like we have a ribbon cutting ceremony with the mayor

scheduled. Like we cannot wait months for

this. This is horrible.

And so that was one of the times that we thought like, Oh no,

like we we may not open on time. This could be a disaster.

And so another stroke of genius from Damian is after calling the

main line and getting just the same rejection of like, no, no,

this is like a multi months process.

Damian was like, I need to find someone that can push this

through. So he went on LinkedIn and

looked at profiles of anyone that works for Excel, like

within Denver. And there's these little, you

know, add-ons that you can have on your browser like rocket

reach or contact out or something that will scrape the

LinkedIn page and give you the personal contact information of

those people. So I forgot what this guy's

actual name is, but we'll call him Tim, right.

So Tim, like we found he's the director of of, you know, gas

services at Accel Energy. He finds a phone number for him

as of calling his phone number, it's his landline, like it is

his home phone. And so he picks ups like hell.

Whoa. And there's children screaming

in the background and Damien and his French accent just like, oh,

hello. Like I'm Damien.

We're trying to open this fierce thought.

We have this emergency. Like we have a grand opening.

The mayor's coming in coming. We need to upsize our gas sign.

The guy's like, how did you get this number?

And he's like, whoa, you know, I found it online.

And he's like, this is my personal number.

Don't ever call me back here, but let me call you from my work

phone in a few minutes. So you know, he's a little

pissed off but his interested I think.

So he ends up giving us a call back.

Damian explains the story and is like is this an emergency?

Is there anything we can do? And he somehow ends up

convincing this guy to expedite it for us.

You know, I think he could hear the desperation in our voice and

ended up getting us a new gas meter, correctly sized installed

a week later. You know, just in time for grand

opening. And so, you know, everything

worked out at the end of the day.

But that was definitely one of those times when, you know,

after so much hard work and you're thinking the finish line

is right there. Like, then it just feels like

it's gonna all slip through your fingers.

But thankfully we we found a solution.

My goodness. And So what was that timeline?

You said you moved to Denver in January.

You finally got into the building in October.

You guys have leveraged everything you've can.

You've borrowed money anywhere you possibly can, including

credit cards. You're just driving Lyft,

walking dogs, trying to get this paid for and finished for

opening day. What?

How long was that entire process?

Yeah, from from landing to then to the grand opening.

Two years. Yes, 2 nails.

We moved here January 1st, 2019 and suddenly in October 2019 and

ended up opening in February of 2021, so it was like a year and

a half of construction. And so it not only, I mean

you're funding this build and the construction and trying to

make the business go, but you guys had to fund your life for

two years, yeah, as well driving lift and walking dogs and doing

all of these things. So you're you're pushing this

construction while also trying to make life happen.

Exactly. Yeah, it was it was a stressful

time for sure. It tested our relationship.

But you know, after travelling the world backpacking on a

shoestring budget as well for 14 months, you know, we, we've, we

learned how to work through some, some tough times together

for. Oh, man, anybody that you know

has a negative opinion of business owners or entrepreneurs

or those that have made a success of themselves, they,

they need to have that experience.

You guys had that? Absolutely.

Yeah, that's, that's an incredible story.

So I'm guessing you know from your story here, you're, you're

launching the business with quite a bit of debt.

You've leveraged everything you could possibly leverage to make

it happen. And Fast forward to today, you

guys have multiple locations are starting your journey towards

franchising and and really going into the national brand.

What did that look like? I mean, was it kind of a success

from the beginning? Was there still a juggling act

going with all the leverage and the debt you guys had?

What were those first months, first years like?

I mean, you can call it a success from the level you

started, right? That's very subjected to call it

a success. But yes, for us it's a success

because we're about to open and prove ourselves that the

business model can be replicable with a second additional store.

Their success as well building a strong team.

You obviously don't open a second store if you have not

built a successful first team. And I think, and and I think we

think that from day one, we were so obsessed with delivering what

we think is your. The core mission is to help the

humanity to relax and feel correct and connect and feel

good. And that simple maybe foolish

statement but you know after five years two stores well

obsessed with guest feedbacks on making sure that the guest needs

happy, which translates into great usually reviews online or

as well building that community around that really want to come

and and and be a member of of Oakwell.

We have a membership program now has shown that this is this is

successful. Now, you know, we are not

thinking that way. I think we're still as of today

in survival mode. I mean, you know, waking up in

the morning has a few entrepreneurs thinking that the

Skype might fall on you and you need to be ready for that.

You cannot anticipate it. Of course you can as much as

possible, but you cannot control everything.

So making sure that you never stays, never stay grounded on

your today. It's easy.

You know, there's always chances in place that we work on.

I must say we have the best team ever right now.

So Jessica and I can focus on more like the bigger picture

going Nationwide, Building a strong of franchise that wants

to jump into this bandwagon that they are they they love to get

some something new that has been proven here in this market.

And and that's what we're doing now.

And while the team in Denver and Highlands branch are managing

the day-to-day operation, of course, we're extremely

involved, but at a very different degree.

We spend our first three years and a half, seven days a week

focus on our operations. We think that we're at a real

good stage today to let our managers shining, having them

the responsibility to do good, to stick to that mission

statement to for us to be able to now spread the whole

coordination. But I have to say, going back to

2021 when we first opened, the timing was perfect.

You know, COVID was just ending. People had money, they wanted to

get out, they wanted to do things, but they were a little

apprehensive to go to their normal spa to go get a pedicure

or to go get a massage or a facial where you're interacting

with the service provider in close quarters.

So our concept was really well adapted to these this post COVID

world of, you know, we had these private spa suites.

They were clean, disinfected after each use.

You're just spending time with the person that you can't with.

You're not really interacting with staff you know in in any

sort of close manner. So as soon as we opened our

booking system, we had 2 1/2 bookings per minute for the 1st

24 hours. Our servers crash, the website

crash, we have so much traffic and it's so funny that the

business model was that Damien and I, you know, thought we were

going to slowly get busier overtime.

We'd have a few appointments a day at the beginning and it

would like slowly ramp up. So we have no intention of

hiring anyone at the beginning. We thought we were going to run

the spa, the two of us for the first year at least.

So all the sudden we are booked out at 100% occupancy as soon as

we open the booking system, like from the day that we opened and

we're open seven days a week, 8:00 AM to 10:30 PM booked

solid. So we very quickly realized that

we needed to hire a team. We had about a week in between

when we open the booking system and when our, our first

appointments actually were. So we, I very quickly, you know,

thankfully I had a recruiting background, so I very quickly

put together a job description, you know, started inviting

people in for interviews. But this was when stimulus

checks were going out. And so half of the interviews

wouldn't even show up because people were getting free checks

from the government. So recruiting was really

difficult. And basically it was like anyone

that showed up, you know, semi on time to the interview and

could hold the conversation that we were like, can you be here on

Friday? We had no training material yet.

So I had to very quickly put together some training

curriculum, define, you know, who was doing what.

We have no like opening or closing tasks.

We, we had nothing because we were just gonna like figure it

out as we went along. So, you know, and fortunately

our, our first group of employees, like we're very

understanding that we were kind of throwing it together and

yeah, we were just absolutely slammed.

And we were to Damien's point, like so focused on the guest

experience and really, really willing to go above and beyond

anytime something happened, which it did.

Like we were slammed from the beginning.

Like we forget towels in someone's room, right?

So they're like getting out of a shower dripping wet and there's

no towels for them to use. Or we have an automated filling

and draining system for the tubs where, where when the session is

done, the tub should automatically start draining.

And that's the indication that it's your time to get out of the

room, that you have 20 minutes to like freshen up and exit the

room. Well, we'd forget to set the

timer on the tub and so you'd be in the tub for 5 minutes and it

would start draining on you. So all these things would

happen. But we were like really quick to

a like, OK, you're not paying for this experience and we're

giving you a gift card to come back and try it again so you can

experience it as it was intended to be.

Because we've seen so how many businesses open and you start

off, you know, with a some negative reviews and all of a

sudden you're at a 4.8 and then you're at a 4.2 And then now all

of a sudden you're at a three something and like no one wants

to go to a business that's a three-point something rating,

especially when it's like already a beer spot.

Like sounds kind of weird. I don't know.

So there people are already a little apprehensive.

So we were very focused on maintaining, you know, positive

reviews, making sure that if anything went wrong, like we the

guest didn't pay for it, we invited them to come back.

And so we've maintained A5 star rating for our first 2 1/2 years

in business. We're at a 4.9 now, which we're

very sad that we went down to 4.9, but it's been five years in

business. We have over 3000 Google reviews

and still a 4.9 rating, which at least in Denver is is pretty

unheard of. That is incredible.

That's an awesome story. I just, I can't get over it.

The the risk you guys took, the leverage that you took and then

forget to take off like that. That's incredible.

That's you guys have something special.

And I just keep going back to the girl that was analyzing

traffic patterns for her lemonade stand.

You've taken that level of detail, that level of attention

and brought it to a market that needed shaken up.

Wow, You guys are doing it. You're making it happen.

So I'm guessing you guys lived on the cheap for a very long

time. You, you went from two, I'm

guessing well paid corporate jobs living in New York, the New

York lifestyle to living out of a backpack around the world,

kind of roughing it and then bootstrapping this business.

What has the last five years looked like?

What what is capital investment look like for you guys?

Are you still putting everything you've got back into the

business or have you hit a point where you can reap some of the

benefits and enjoy that life a little?

Bit yeah, I mean, we, we, we definitely give ourselves a bit

of salary, but must under resources generated or reinvest

it back for the next steps. I think we're still very early

on in the, the lifetime of the company.

I think there's still a lot of necessary investments.

The most, the first one that comes to my mind is marketing.

I mean to educate the market about a concept like or stakes

so much resources, you know, franchising is another big

bucket that demands a lot of investments upfront to see

results way later. And as you know, you know, when

you build those type of spas, those are brick and mortar,

they're very capital intensive. Don't only you need to building

a second one in a matter of within within five years in

business was, you know, from some institutions pretty risky,

but we've proven the business model.

But now you know, how do you plan the future with thinking of

remodeling the first bar, which we're doing now because we build

it ourselves. But now it's time to remodel it

to bring the level of comfort you have with the new from the

new store we've built. Supporting our franchise, your

future franchise is key. This is what really makes

franchise sales system successful is this level of

support and you cannot be cheap. You cannot, you cannot.

You know, we, we've never been in business.

We've never created a business to it's mine and it's thank you.

You know, now we, we, we, we want our team to be good.

We want our managers to make it a carrier.

We want our team members to see the, the project themselves

within the company. And, and this takes time and

resources. So most of the proceeds right

now are being reinvested. We're fortunate that both of our

locations you know we're cash flow positive since day one of

opening both locations making. A new appointment every What was

it 2 1/2 minutes? Exactly.

Yes, Yeah, no, two and. 1/2 That's incredible.

Yeah. OK. 2 1/2 bookings per minute.

That's incredible. For 24 hours.

So the businesses are are extremely profitable and you

know, for a franchise that decides to invest in US and open

their own oak, Well, I mean, you can live a very good life just

owning and operating one. Whereas a lot of other concepts

like you go and do a quick service restaurant or maybe even

a more like a the Massage Envy or the now or the smaller

massage chains, you really have to own multiple units because

the average revenue per unit and the margins are relatively

small. You know, our, our revenue is

fairly high for the industry and our margins are pretty high for

the industry. So you can make a good living

just having one location. But for us, to Damian's point,

you know, we've, we've never been in this for the money and

we want to grow this into something big.

So, you know, well, yes, we're, we're not, you know, staying in

people's homes for free anymore. Like we, we're, we're still

renting, right? Like we don't even own a home.

We're still renting an apartment.

Thankfully, you know, we've, we've been able to have a little

bit nicer of a lifestyle than we were when you were backpacking

the world. But it's really our choice to

reinvest everything to grow this into a national brand because

things like, you know, the remodel and franchising, we've

been able to save up enough cash that we're able to self fund a

lot of these things instead of taking out additional loans and

increasing our debt. So, you know, while location by

itself, if you just own and operate one location, it's a

very profitable business, but we've just made the decision to

reinvest all of our profits into making this even bigger.

That's incredible. I love it.

You guys are the epitome of the entrepreneur.

Just your, your personalities, the experiences you bring to it.

I I hope this takes off in a way you can't even imagine.

I'm, I'm so impressed by your story.

I love it. So I know you guys are launching

the franchising operation is kind of a new thing.

Can you give me some of the details about that?

What, what would be your ideal franchisor and what kind of a

commitment does that take from them?

And, and what does that process look like?

Yeah. So our our ideal franchisee is

going to be someone that has some sort of experience in the

hospitality industry. You know, we're a hospitality

business at the end of the day, guest service is really

important, but also employee happiness I'd say is of the

utmost importance. And you know, hospitality,

hourly hospitality employees are much different than folks that

you'll find in the corporate world.

So someone that is just leaving a corporate job wants to start

their own business. It can be a hard adjustment

then, and it certainly was for us.

You know, now having employees that were servers and bartenders

previously, they have different ambitions, different things that

drive them. The work ethic is different.

It's just knowing how to connect with and motivate this, you

know, specific type of employee is really important because if

your employees aren't happy and you just come in and you manage

them like you would a team of software developers at your, you

know, Fortune 500 corporate job, it's not going to go over very

well. And if your employees aren't

happy, than the guests feel that.

We've all been to a restaurant before where it seems like

you're inconveniencing the server by being there.

And no matter how great the ambiance is or how great the

food is, if the service doesn't feel great, then it's not going

to be a good experience and you're not going to come back.

And so having someone that has some experience in the

hospitality industry, they don't need to have owned a restaurant

before, but even just working as a server or bartender when they

were younger, just understanding that mindset, I think is really

important. We really love immigrants as

well, right? Like Damien coming from France,

I, I really appreciate people that move to the United States

to make a life for themselves. The, the, typically the work

ethic is there, right? They work really hard.

They want to provide for their family.

And the fact that they moved all the way to the United States and

put all of their eggs in this basket to create something for

themselves really speaks to the type of character that they

have. And so we, we really love

talking to people that, you know, you know, aren't

originally from the United States.

And then of course, people that are looking to maybe change

their career like they've been in, in the corporate world for

their whole life, or maybe they've owned other types of

businesses and they're looking to diversify into something a

little bit more fun or into something that's newer is, you

know, all great things that we're looking for as well.

And in terms of cities, you know, we've mapped out 100

target markets within the United States, really mid to large size

cities. So typically nothing smaller

than Denver, Co, with the exception of high tourist

cities. So places like Asheville, NC or

Palm Springs, they're smaller cities.

The population count isn't quite as large, but you get a lot of

visitors to those cities. I think would work really great

for an Oklahoma beer spa as well.

OK. And and what is the, I guess

what commitment level are you looking at for the franchise or

what does that look like? Yeah, how did they get started?

Yeah. Well, the first that they have

to understand is the investment level.

So it's anywhere between 1.3 million to 2.6 million to create

an Oak Well beer spot depending on the city that you're in,

right. The range is really high because

2.6 million accounts for New York City or LA California where

construction costs are really high.

If you're in a smaller market, it'll be on the lower end of

that. So first is, you know, someone

that has the capital to be able to, typically it'll be a

combination of funds like liquid cash that they have available in

addition to a loan. You know, we are on the SBA

franchise registry. And so an SBA loan is a route

that people often take. But how the process works is

it's really an it, it, it needs to be a mutual fit.

Both we are selecting them and they're selecting us.

So the first step is filling out an inquiry form on our website,

soitsoakwellfranchise.com. Then they'll set up an

introductory call with Damian and I.

We'll kind of get to know each other, talk through what they're

interested in, why they're looking to invest in a

franchise, what city that they're looking to open in.

You know, we've had some people expressed interest, like they're

really excited about the concept, but the city that they

want to open this in is really, really small.

It's like 2 hours away from any sort of major city and

unfortunately, you know, we just don't feel like the population

count will be able to support a spa, at least at the beginning.

So making sure that the, you know, city and state that

they're looking at aligns. And then there's several

different education calls that they go through.

So we walk them through what the construction process looks like,

what support we provide in construction.

We walk them through the marketing program, you know what

national marketing support that they'll have.

We walk them through the financials.

You know, here's how our 2 corporate owned stores have done

from a revenue and expense and a net profit perspective.

Here's what you can expect in your market.

And then the last step is for them to come out to what in the

franchise world we call Discovery Day.

So it's basically they get to meet us in person, enjoy a spa

experience. We do some behind the scenes,

like here's what a day in the life of running a spa looks

like. And then after the Discovery Day

is we both make a decision. Like we make a decision on if we

think this person will be a good fit for our brand.

They also make a decision if this is a concept that they want

to invest in. And then you get into, you know,

legal, legal documents from there and bring them on board.

But the process can go as slowly or as quickly as the person

feels comfortable with. But on average the whole thing

takes, you know, from filling out the form to actually

signing. Can be a 60 to 90 day process.

OK, I'm going to shift gears here a little bit.

Again, I know you guys both had some big dreams when you were

younger, had some pretty specific goals with a PhD

program, being a pilot, you're a long ways from those goals.

Is there any regret with that? If you could go back and do it

all over again, would you rather be where you are today, or would

you rather chase those dreams you had early?

On no regrets at all. I think we're we're needing the

dream. I mean, you know, we have a

beautiful company. You know, it's summer, early

days. I think, you know, maybe if you

think about regrets you have is to maybe not, you know, sometime

during the same sword. Maybe you didn't believe it

enough in you man belly today, looking back and tell yourself

to the you know, young young men or young women you wear out is

that hey, don't worry, everything's going to turn out

great. Stay resident, be resident, be

focused. Stay, stay, stay staying strong,

assuring yourself with the right people, the road's not going to

be easy, but even if it's about to be arrived, it's worth it.

And and that's the way personally I look at, you know,

the past, the present and the future.

And you know, often if you focus on the best, it's like, you

know, a stuck in newspaper, you cannot change the headlines.

You cannot change anything. The only thing you can do is to

learn from it and, and, and, and change the course of your

actions for the future. And, and this will likely impact

your life in the future or your business or whatever, whatever

current stage in your life you are at.

But no regrets at all. For sure.

I still, I can still become a pilot when you know, I can still

try to sell water or who knows. I don't know about a pilot.

This is a debate though that we have.

Damien still dreams of getting his pilot's license.

And I said this is the the one thing that I forbid him to do.

There's a reason why you can't get life insurance if you have

your pilot's license. I'll get him a very nice flight

simulator, but I think that's about it for if we'll get with

with flying. Well, Jess, what about you?

Do you ever regret not pursuing your PhD?

No, no, never. You know, you of course, at the

time it was devastating, right? Like I really had this one

school that I wanted to get into my whole life, like I had been

working towards this. I loved science.

I worked in rat labs in school, dissecting rat brains.

Like I had done all this work to get into this program.

But you know, looking back, if I wouldn't have gotten rejected

from that school, I wouldn't have joined the corporate world.

If I didn't join the corporate world, you know, I wouldn't have

gotten this experience and recruiting and with HR and, you

know, especially with this company, I would have probably

never moved to New York City if they hadn't.

I mean, I'd never wanted to live in New York City.

It's just they asked me and I was like, sure, why not?

But it's never something that I thought about before.

So I would have never met Damien if I wouldn't have moved to New

York, like we wouldn't have gone on this world tour together, you

know it all. And then the coin flip that

ended up bringing us to Poland, you know, now we're in Denver.

Like we have a family, we have two kids.

Like all of these things. Like if I would have never, if I

would have gotten into that PhD program, my life would look very

different today. And I love how things have

turned out. And I have absolutely 0 regrets.

So, you know, in the moment, of course, things can feel

devastating or really upsetting when life doesn't go the way

that you planned, but you just need to make the most of the

options that you have and keep, you know, moving forward.

And you never know where that will bring you.

You could never foresee, you know, that day that you get the

rejection letter in the mail from this college.

You know, how that would, you know, impact and lead you to now

having a beautiful family and a wonderful business and all of

this, you know, incredible life experience of having travelled

the world. Like how would I have ever

thought that that one thing would have gotten me to to where

we are today? Oh man, that's awesome.

I know you know, with every podcast I have to come up with a

title and there's just so many. I just listening to your story

that the risk you've taken, the success you've had that the coin

flip that the decisions and how everything has come together,

Man, it's just such an incredible story.

So I know you guys bring a lot of really unique experiences, a

lot of unique expertise. Like I keep going back to the

the lemonade stand you had and the the work that you put into

that it Damian, your experience with taking your education so

seriously and growing up in a family that that pushed you like

that the entrepreneurial spirit, both of your attention to

detail, your commitment to that customer experience and taking

care of customers. If you guys had to boil it down

to like one key thing that was the most important thing that

has made you successful, what do you think it would be?

I, I have this phrase, this, I don't know if you want to call

it a life motto or whatever it may be that, you know, I really

came. I don't know if I probably

wasn't the first one that ever said it, but it was something

that I thought of and really resonated with me when I was in

college. And it stuck with me until

today, which is never settled for mediocrity.

Anything that you do, you need to do it 110%, which is, you

know, really cliche, of course, as everyone says.

But we we really everything that we do, like we do it fully.

Like we never want to be mediocre business owners.

We don't want to be mediocre bosses.

I don't want to be a mediocre wife.

I don't want to be a mediocre mom.

Like I just want to be the absolute best that we can be.

And in order to do that, you have to put the time, the

effort, the blood, the sweat, the tears and really like give

it your all. Like, I don't want to ever look

back and be like, Oh, I could have done better at that or I

could have tried harder. I mean, we really are focused

on, you know, we want to be the best hospitality company in the

United States. I mean, we don't want to live

life halfway, right. So I think that's something that

we has resonated with us even like, you know, I think back

when we were doing construction, like Damian and I would get in

so many arguments because we get like, you know, an IKEA

something that we'd get built. And you realize like 75 or 90%

of the weigh in that like The thing is fleshed the wrong way

and you have to then deconstruct it because you've been stalled

something incorrectly. And I'm like exhausted at this

point and hungry and it's like, I'm cold and I want to go home.

And Damien would be like, no, like we can't do this.

Like mediocre, like we can't set this up.

We have to take it all apart and then rebuild it so it's done

correctly. And I.

Because the next day we had a anarchy be done and it.

Was fine. We put things backwards, you

know. You know, our deadline ourselves

like this needs to be done and ready today.

But to perfection, you know, so just to say like even from the

smallest thing of putting together a piece of IKEA

furniture, even though it's hard, even though it's, you're

hungry and it's cold and whatever, it's just like you got

to do it. You got to suck it up and and do

it 100% no matter what. Oh man.

Never take a node for final answer or an answer.

There's always a work around and there's always a solution.

And this is where it takes a lot of creativity and you know, you

need to really think truly true. How can you how can you go?

How can you create yourself a workaround to make half of it

part of it working to accomplish your goals.

And that that's very important when you build something like

this with nothing, you, you need to be able to be solution

oriented. And I don't know actually should

motivate you to turn it into a baby or yes, there's so many

examples by building this place. But as of today with the

technology we use, there's always a work around.

And if there is, it might take some time.

But you need to stick to it and work through it man.

Good stuff and a great story. Again, I'm I just can't believe

all the things I'm here and I'm learning a lot from you guys.

Is there an opinion that you once held strongly that you've

changed based on your experiences?

Yes, you know, we have a specific I have, we have a

specific mission and I thought I could trust everyone.

I thought that I could. Everyone wants to do good.

Everyone wants to be a part of this, but a lot of motivations

are so different from the people you have jumping with you in

that bandwagon or even assisting you.

And so my opinion that has changed a little bit on, well,

more like before, I give too much trust from the first

minute. We I need to be a bit more

cautious on, on, on, on, on the end goals and the end goals for

the people we surrender ourselves are very different.

Some people wants all of the money, some people wants the the

title. Some people wants all of the

benefits, but not what you want, right?

Some people wants it all, but don't want to deal with

responsibilities that come with it.

So I'm giving a broad example here.

But you know, as of today, we still want to trust people very

quickly. Let's do it.

Let's we're very motivated, but you know, sometimes slow down

and, and, and, and learn how to analyze what really people want

out of this, you know, and, and that's key to surrender yourself

with the right people so you can create your dream team, man

good. Stuff.

I completely agree with Damian. I think my default position used

to be to trust people and now it's a little bit more like you

should earn our trust. We had an experience very early

on our our GC had introduced us to to a local business owner and

he had a a float spa concept, right.

So one of those deprivation tanks and he, our GC had done a

lot of construction for this gentleman before.

So introduce us, we had some beers with him like, you know,

we thought we were like, you know, 2 fellow business owners.

And so we were talking to him about our concept and all of

these things. And at his float spot, he had

this room that had a sauna and it had a tub in it.

And so we asked him, you know, we're still doing construction.

Can we come and test our our beer bath infusions in your tub

and like do the sauna and have a beer in your sauna and, and do

the bath infusion in your tub and just like, you know, test

everything out. And he's like, yeah, yeah,

absolutely. Like we think he's being very

generous, right? So we go to his location, we end

up bringing our bath infusion and he's asking questions.

We think that he's just like, you know, curious.

So we tell him how we make our bath infusion.

So we tell him like, you know, he's asking all these very

specific questions, which we don't think anything about.

We're like naive. We're in our 20s.

We're just like this guy's like, so, you know, so friendly.

So we ended up telling him all of these things and before you

know it, we see that he's advertising a beer bath in his

as part of the experience. Fortunately he didn't have a

liquor license so you couldn't drink beer, but he had basically

taken everything that we told him about the bath infusions for

the tubs and was now marketing this as a beer bath experience

at his spa. And then our GC, come to find

out, tells us like, Oh yeah, this is kind of his like MO.

It's something that he calls R&D RIP off and duplicate that he

likes to, you know, get, get ideas from other business owners

and then duplicate it. So, you know, fortunately

nothing came of that. He ended up closing his float

spot because, you know, he's, he's, I think one of those

people that has many ideas and none of them like, you know,

fully executed. So at the end, it didn't really

end up impacting us, but it made us think like a little more

carefully. When people are curious, asking

us questions like wanting to be very friendly with us, we they

have to earn our trust a little before we start telling them our

our secret sauce. Yeah, there's probably very few

people that can bring the level of detail and commitment to

execution that you guys do. So competitions probably going

to be light for a while. No, but you never know.

Someone with deeper pockets can, it can come and open many of

these. But that's, that's what I always

tell Damien is, you know, we, we put a lot of intention into our,

the customer journey, the guest experience, the hospitality

aspect, that even if someone has a beer spa and maybe they offer

the services cheaper than us, they're certainly not going to

have a 4.9 rating on Google and the experience isn't going to be

as good as what we offer. So, you know, hopefully we have

that going for us. Sounds good.

What do you have any tips or tricks for a young entrepreneur

that wants to pursue a dream the way that you guys have that that

maybe doesn't have an idea yet but knows that they want to

chase that entrepreneurial dream?

What tips would you have for? Them yeah, if you want to have

an idea mistake you're selling your music in your belly and

trying to dig into industries and and really don't be afraid

to to to look into heaven boring stuff you know you know I think

I think it has never been I mean you might hear be hearing that

everywhere now but it has never been so easy to start a business

now, of course, it has never been so difficult to stay in

business. Let's not forget this because

technology because the the access to capital create cards

on that are pretty easy to access if you are responsible,

right And if you're curious and if you want if you want to spend

the time to self teach yourself those skills.

So stay curious. The ID will likely come stay

focus, stay discipline. Entrepreneurship is a marathon,

so if you have some changes with discipline, maybe self teach

yourself. Can you wake up every morning at

7:00 AM and run 2 bikes right? Or one might just just as those

little exercises that really self teach yourself a lot about

it. And mainly, I think you need to

have the taste of the efforts. You can't have an idea, talk

about it and not and, and, and try to do it with that, putting

a lot of efforts into it. You know, at the beginning, we

are working seven days a week, 16 hours a day.

Now we have a family, we need to manage our kids and all of that.

So how do you manage these efforts at the beginning?

If you're just by yourself? Put as much efforts as possible

to make your dream come true as often.

You know the the thirst of doing business, creating relationship,

cutting deals. It really depends of your

personality, being creative, finishing your portfolio.

You need to put as much effort as possible.

And whenever you say no, I'm gonna do that tomorrow, no, next

week or next month. That's the opportunity you

missed to finish it today, to show to the world that you've

done something that you want to to show and showcase to the

world. And, and so the taste of the

efforts, the the willingness to suffer true those efforts is

very important. You don't need to suffer

physically. Don't get me wrong.

It's just, you know, it just it just you need to be, you need to

be OK with the efforts you're going to put into.

This I, I have 3, three quick things.

The first is make sure that there is a need for this idea in

the market. You know, we hear a lot about

people starting businesses out of their passion, and while

passion is certainly important, you also need to make sure that

there is a genuine need for this in the world.

I'll use the example of, you know, in Denver, we have a ton

of Mexican restaurants and a ton of Taco shops in specific.

And, you know, there have been several people that have

recently decided to open up new Taco shops because it's

something that they're passionate about.

Maybe it's in their, you know, family history.

Their grandmother was Mexican or they've, you know, had this one

Taco recipe that they really loved, you know, but I can't

tell you how many times that these Taco shops have opened and

very quickly closed because we don't need another Taco shop in

Denver. Like we have so many of them

already. So even if it's something that

you're really passionate about or you love this Taco recipe and

you think that the world is going to fall in love with it,

like do we really need another one of these right now?

Are you solving something? You know, we're passionate about

hospitality and Wellness, but we also thought through like is a

beer spa, is a social Wellness experience something that people

need? And the answer that we came to

was yes. But often times I feel like

people follow their passion without really analyzing like,

is this something that is needed in the market and is now the

right time to do that? So that's the first thing that

the second thing is always start with your MVP or your minimum

viable product. We talked about that a lot when

we were starting the spa. We had all of these big ideas of

like for the bath infusions, we want to, we wanted to have an

eye had and the guests could say like how they were feeling that

day, like they were stressed or they this and they really like

these scent profiles and we would custom blend a bath

infusion for their experience that would be in their tub.

And then we're like, whoa, we're getting like really complicated.

We don't even know people want to bathe in a beer bath to begin

with. Like let's just have one bath

infusion. That's, you know, that's what

they get. They don't get an option for it.

Like we're making this way too complex.

And then if it, if we see that it works, we can get feedback

from guests and like, would you like multiple options?

Would you like to curate your own?

And then we can adapt from there.

But like don't get too complex with it.

You know, at a certain point though, like a brick and mortar,

like you have to do the construction.

So there's only so you can only get so minimal with an Opal beer

spot, especially things like if you're creating some sort of

service or an online based business or an e-commerce store,

like you don't need to have 100 skews to launch, like launch the

five things, see how it works, get feedback and expand from

there. So always focus on on minimal

viable product because as entrepreneurs, we can often get

like way ahead of ourselves and like have these really big

dreams. And then we end up trying to

execute too many things at once, whereas you should just keep it

simple at the beginning. And then my third is just think

about who, who you want to do this business with.

I don't think any successful business has done it alone.

And so whether that is a friend, whether that's your spouse

rather that's a business mentor, just you're going to need to

surround yourself with people that can provide advice and

expertise. You know, no matter how smart

you are, you're going to need other people to lean on, even if

it's just for support. I mean, Danny and I wouldn't be

able to, I don't think that we would ever be able to do this on

our own. You know, we both bring

different things to the table and when times get tough, it's

really important to have someone that you can lean on and that

you can talk to about the struggles.

And especially if you're in a a relationship, like if you're

married or you have a girlfriend, you're about to like

embark on this kind of journey, like make sure they're as bought

in as you are, because it can really put a strain on the

relationship. If one person is like, you know,

really crazy into this business and they're spending all their

time on it. And then let's say the other one

is still like working a nine to five and then they're getting

frustrated why you're not at home to spend time with them and

all these things. So just make sure that like you

and your partner, your person are on the same page with what

you're about to embark on. Man, yeah, there's some great

advice there. And man, I we might have to have

you guys on for a follow up. Your story deserves a lot more

attention. This is just so cool.

I'm so excited for you, but I want to honor your time and kind

of wrap things up here. So a question that I ask every

guest, do you guys practice a particular faith tradition?

And if so, how has that affected your journey?

No, we do not practice, or at least I mean, I speak for both

of us here, but we don't practice a specific faith.

You know, I grew up, I was raised Catholic.

I was forced into it at a very young age.

I was forced to go to Catholic school, you know, so I was going

to church once a week with my school and then once on Sunday

with my family. And you know, I was very

independent child that wanted to do my own thing.

And so I think being pressured into it at such a young age made

me kind of shy away from it. So, so no, we really don't

follow any sort of, you know, faith or religion.

However, I do believe in in karma and the greater good and,

you know, do unto others as as you would want to have done to

yourself, right. So some of that of course,

mirrors a lot of things that you'll find in religions, but I

think just, you know, doing good in the community and, and not

chasing money, you know, just wanting to do the right thing

and, and good things will come to you.

Yeah, I mean my, my, I I believe in a bigger power, you know,

someone watching us laptop and and that's personal to me.

I grew up in, within three, well, you know, the most

important three well in a very matricultural environment.

So my, my, I have my own faith and, and it's to do good for our

team or family, my family and, and of course the community

around that are supporting our business.

You know, it's, it's, I think it, I think you get the reward.

You shouldn't do it for the reward, but I think when you do

good, often you get back the goodness you've done and you've

spread for the people that you, you've helped along the, the,

the journey. You know, I, I think often

people remember what you've done bad.

They don't often remember what you've done good.

But it's better to stay focused on, on, on, you know, doing

good. And that's that's my own faith.

All right. Well, thank you, guys.

Thank you. Is there anybody that you'd like

to see on this show? Somebody with a a unique story,

a unique business that you'd like to learn more about?

It's a good question. We'd have to think about it.

I think. Get back to you.

We're so focused. We're like oblivious to what is

going on in the outside world. I feel like, you know, we listen

to, there's this podcast like How I Built this.

If you've ever listened to that before with Guy Raz, like, I

mean, that got us through our our construction days.

We'd have that on the loudspeaker, like listening to

these people's stories. But man, we're so heads down

right now with the business that it's yeah, we don't, we don't

really know what's going on much out there.

Yeah, you've got enough on your hands that this blooming

business, a new success, the sacrifice you put in to get

there and a growing family, it sounds like you guys have your

hands full so. Yes, it's just the beginning.

Awesome. Well, thank you guys so much for

giving us the time today. You, you really have an

incredible story. It sounds like you have an

incredible product. I'm really looking forward to

checking it out of myself. I'm going to move that up on the

priority list. We'll make sure we get down

there to check it out. And there's just a lot that can

be learned from your experience and your story.

So thank you for sharing that with us today.

Thanks so much, Eric. Yeah, we can't wait to host you

next time you're in Denver. Wonderful.

And thank you guys for joining us here on From the Ground Up

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