We were lucky to catch up with Michael Stepp recently and have shared our conversation below.

Michael , appreciate you joining us today. Parents play a huge role in our development as youngsters and sometimes that impact follows us into adulthood and into our lives and careers. Looking back, what’s something you think you parents did right?

My parents taught me the value of people. It’s not a lesson they curated or instructed, rather they instilled in me over their lifetime as a living example. I have this trait that I’ve needed to learn to reel-in or adapt, a bit, while raising four little boys; my dad always described it as “trying to fit 10 lbs of potatoes into a 5 lb sack”. I would always travel back to my small hometown on friday nights during college, with a long list of people to see, adventures to tackle, and, seemingly, not enough hours to accomplish it all. It was always a whirlwind and never without chaos but, wouldn’t you know it, I always headed back to college through the middle of the night on Sunday tired and wrecked, but with a full heart clean laundry, and no more boxes to check. As an adult I see, now, that I get that very naturally from my Mom. Her schedule is always packed to the gills, she makes time for everyone and everything, and can accomplish more in a week than anyone I know. It might not always be perfect or pretty, but she gets it done and her heart is wildly happy. Growing up, I was always surrounded by family. My mom and Dad’s sides were both big, happy, adventurous families that spent every available minute together. I would hide just around the corner from the kitchen and listen to late night stories and laughter from the kitchen table. My mom and dad squeezed every drop from the weekend hours and spent time doing fun stuff with my aunts and uncles, or their friends. I know, now, that it’s people that make life beautiful. You can throw the best party or plan the biggest event, but if no one shows up, it’s never going to be worth a hoot. It’s that human connection and spending time with people that makes it all work.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I am the co-founder of a little company called Handlebend. In college, back when the Moscow Mule was resurfacing in popular bar and cocktail culture, I spent a long day “back home” in my Dad’s shop (a commercial refrigeration business) hacking apart, brazing, and building a big, heavy, impressive copper mug. I toted that around college parties and it sat as a centerpiece of our bachelor pad’s kitchen. Everyone wanted one…but no one could have one. Except for one of my best childhood buddies, Matt. We eventually built him a set on a trip back home. Over the next 5 years we built sets of mugs for our closest friends and gifted them on their wedding days. In 2017, after much feedback and prodding from our network, we decided to take the dive and start a company. It wasn’t easy and it took a long time to figure out how to do it extremely well – we didn’t know where this might go, but we knew we had to deliver an experience wildly better than a potential customer would ever expect. Fast forward 7 years and through much trial, tribulation, and lots of wins and losses, and we feel successful. Our company has grown every year since our launch….but that’s not the qualifier. When we pick our heads up from the daily grind and look around, we see a team of 8 amazing and wonderful humans helping to push and pull what has become our brand. We see a big, beautiful remodeled building on main street of our hometown. We realize that the brand we’ve grown has been built upon the right foundations. Early on, when some of our closest friends were the only people in the world to have our hand-built copper mugs, we started getting feedback. “We had a barbecue last weekend and my neighbors all want mugs” or “we hosted a party and had a build-your-own-mule bar, all of our friends are in love with our mugs!”. It gave us the confidence to build a website and start a business, sure….but more than that, we realized what our mugs were doing. Our drinkware was, quite literally, giving people a reason to gather. Friends were motivated to bring people together- in many cases simply because they wanted a reason to use these amazing copper mugs – and we were seeing the power of our product as a platform in bringing people together. That’s what we need…in this hyper-connected, overstimulated, and lonely world of technology we need, maybe more than ever, time to unplug. We need time to sit down and slow down with friends and family and connect in a different way; face to face, laughing and loving, recounting old stories. By doing so, we’re creating the very memories we’ll look back on in the years to come. It’s important and it has been dwindling in our modern society. I think these notions are the way out of many of the problems we are facing today…spending time with human beings, practicing empathy and maybe just plain-old having fun. Our brick-and-mortar building is just that…bricks, mortar, concrete and steel. It’s gorgeous and it has a storied past. It’s huge. 14,000 square feet; way more space than we needed. Our coppershop sits at the rear of the building and as we planned the renovation we planned, too, how to use the space. We aimed at using it in the best way possible – a place to bring humans together and build community. The front of the building is 90-feet of panoramic glass overlooking main street. It houses a taproom, featuring craft beers and spirits from all over our state. Our coffee shop shares the back-bar with the taproom and features the most beautiful La Marzocco espresso machine – we pull espresso shots through it with beans roasted locally, right down the street in O’Neill, NE. Adjacent to the seating space is a full service flower and gift shop, owned and operated by two ladies from our hometown. Between the taproom and our coppershop is a 4500 square foot banquet room. It’s typically rented for wedding rehearsal dinners, baby or bridal showers, 90th birthday parties and the-like…we’ve even hosted 3 full weddings in there! The vibe in the building on a saturday is incredible…a family gathering full of happy people in the banquet room, folks sipping lattes and working on laptops; intermingled with day-drinking friends laughing around Mules and beers…maybe a pack of local kids running throughout the building with shirley temples; making the memories they’ll have of their hometown…it’s beautiful and it’s become the core of what we do. We are running this business that maybe no one would have ever bet on – it won’t work in small-town Nebraska. We’re doing it. We’re this big team of 8, with 15 more part-time rock stars, and we’re running this multi-faceted business. It was all built around the copper….just like we noticed way back – early on. We’re bringing people together with our copper, our hometown is proud of us and they support the heck out of us…and I think that’s what I am most proud of.

Can you tell us the story behind how you met your business partner?

My co-founder is Matt Dennis. He’s been my best friend since the day I showed up in a new town, at a new school, and didn’t know anyone in my 6th grade classroom. We’ve been through it all; we’ve fought with our fists, been jealous of each other over girls, been on incredible adventures, walked through the heart of tragedy, made wild memories and are now raising young families with just a short 3-mile stretch of dirt road between us. “Don’t ever go into business with family or friends” they advise. That rule doesn’t apply to us. Matt’s characteristics and qualities are almost unrecognizable from mine. We compliment each other very well…but that isn’t why this works. We have an understanding. We have built a strong trust together, over 25 years…but that isn’t necessarily it, either. That trust takes constant care and maintenance and we realized early on that it is all carried on the back of communication. We realized this, and talk about it a lot. We have promised each other to communicate at all costs. There will be disagreements. There will be disappointments. There will be hard conversations that are the hardest to start…but if we don’t dive into these things with each other and for each other, it will begin to unravel that hard-earned trust. Just like the old adage about burning bridges – it takes far longer to build something than to destroy it. I don’t think it matters who you are running your business with – a formal “business” partner, your wife, your friend, or your mom; plain and simply put, it will never be successful or sustainable without complete and committed communication. It’s so hard, and sometimes it’s uncomfortable, but with every hardship you work through you become a stronger, better, and more resilient human being. Side note: in college our buddies always said Matt and I were like a mullet. Matt was the business up front, and Mike was the party in the back. That’s that thing I mentioned about us complimenting each other well. It’s probably a piece of how we ended up running a business selling hand-built party vessels!

What else should we know about how you took your side hustle and scaled it up into what it is today?

I spoke, briefly, about the origin of our business. In 2017, when we launched the brand and our website, we were building the mugs in the corner of my Dad and I’s HVAC and Refrigeration shop. We had bolted a small workbench to the wall, bought a torch, and hung our old college beer pong table and a vintage American flag above the whole setup. We would meet there in the mornings and build mugs before buzzing home to pick-up and distribute our kids to daycare or school, and then go to our respective day jobs…each within a family business. Then, after work we’d reconvene and build mugs for a few more hours until it was time to head home for the bedtime routine. That was the grind….most of our orders were local or, at least, stemmed from a pretty small network. About 8 months in, a story dropped on the front page of our state’s largest newspaper publication…one we’d forgotten about as the interview was months and months before. Within 36 hours we had money in our business account from as many orders as we’d filled in the prior 8 months. It was a Sunday and I was out of cell service on vacation with my wife. When I returned to wifi I thought my phone was going to melt from the emails and calls and voicemails. I finally called Matt, back home, and said “what are we gonna do!?” We had never built back-stock as we didn’t have time to catch up; demand wasn’t overwhelming but it was steady. He just started laughing, “we’ll figure it out when you get home”. We started by reaching out to every customer, individually; explaining that we appreciated the support, but it might take 6-8 weeks to get their mugs out to them. Then we switched our morning routine to 4 a.m. instead of 6. Out of those thousands of mugs and customers – not ONE single person complained. In fact, it was the opposite: “we’re just proud of you boys and wanted to support such a cool business. We’re happy to wait”. It was like a big giant hug from the state of Nebraska. Now, we get visitors in our taproom from all over our state, and beyond. We drink beer and give tours to them, and make new friends every day at Handlebend. Scaling this business hasn’t been easy as it’s a hand-built product and labor doesn’t get cheaper with scaling quantities…but we’ve got good people and we’ve learned that our job now is, quite simply, problem solving. The problems will never stop arising…but it’s the day you quit finding solutions that your business will start to fail. That’s why you show up every day – even if it’s 4 a.m. Keep the problems solved and have fun doing it.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.handlebend.com
• Instagram: Handlebend
• Facebook: Handlebend
• Linkedin: Handlebend

Image Credits
Images are all captured within our brand, Handlebend.