We were lucky to catch up with Zachery Barthel recently and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Zachery , thanks for joining us today. Coming up with the idea is so exciting, but then comes the hard part – executing. Too often the media ignores the execution part and goes from idea to success, skipping over the nitty, gritty details of executing in the early days. We think that’s a disservice both to the entrepreneurs who built something amazing as well as the public who isn’t getting a realistic picture of what it takes to succeed. So, we’d really appreciate if you could open up about your execution story – how did you go from idea to execution?
In the beginning my father was always creating various little company’s and doing many different things not so much for the money but simply because he enjoyed it and wanted the challenge of doing it. He would get board and then just dump the successful booming little company and move on to something els.
I followed in his footsteps but I implemented the concepts that if I ever created something that why couldn’t I just hire people to run it while I went to do something els.
I started out in life working for my father doing manual labor for $7 an hour. I was always passionate about art and more particular the body art field.
I started with body piercing and to my surprise I got really good fairly quickly. That built up my confidence to take up tattooing. And ever since then about 15 years ago I’ve been pushing forward and reinvesting most of what I make.
By the age of 23 I owned 2 tattoo studios and multiple other artists working for me. It was stressful. Not going to sugar coat it. I was burning out and loosing the passion. Next door to me a vape shop opened up in St. Cloud Mn called smoking monkey and it was a revolving door. Vaping actually helped me quite smoking so it was something I believed I could get behind.
I decided to sell the tattoo studios to the main artists and switch things up.
I ended up opening Dark Horse Vapery in Crystal MN and dove in deep. I launched multiple lines of my own crafted Eliquids and began distributing these lines to other stores! We got to go to conventions all across the United States and I even got my products on the shelves over in Belgium. 🇧🇪!
Through this journey I met Matt my brewer in his basement and he was home brewer working for a print company! He made some of the best beer I’ve ever tasted. I spent few years convincing him to travel down this road with me. He agreed and I had him working for my manufacturing company side of things to make sure he was all on board and we began building my biggest project. My grand finale I always called it.
And it grew. And grew. And we evolved and it became a full brewpub, with full bar, full resturant, event center, concert hall, outdoor music festivals the list goes on and on. It’s wild. And also exhausting. It grew beyond what we were actually planning. And that means lots of staff and labor and overhead. And to think that I never once worked in a bar, resturant or kitchen. It’s wild to think about. But here we are. Throttling through and seeing where we might end up down the road.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
I think summed a lot of this up on the previous page. I like to build and create cool things, chase dreams and ideas and see if I can complete them.
I usually tell folks that I’m the crazy guy that will calculate and then jump off the cliff and if I don’t make it I’ll climb back up and recalculate.
My teams at the various business I own all take care of other people and what they are needing or wanting. Whether that’s to stop smoking cigarettes, a tattoo, a local crafted cold beer, delicious food or wonderful glass of scotch at the pub.
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
A little while back I went on a much needed vacation and made sure to set everything up the best I could while I was gone for the week. Two days in some of my key staff decided that would be a great time to tell me that they were quitting. I sank in to a whole. It was awful.
I was beyond done. I wanted out. I wanted peace and more of simple life.
It took a month for my brain to navigate through. I was researching many various options and I landed on it sounds less stressful to just hire a whole new team and keep pushing forward. And thank the good Lord I did. 7 months later and the Nordic is better than it’s ever been in these last 5 years!
How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?
Business to me is constant pivot! Always pivoting. Times are changing so quickly these days. All the new fads and also the classics that just hopefully won’t ever go away. When you launch a what seams like a good idea and it turns out not to be you can’t retreat or go backwards, you have to go left or right and keep pushing forward. Calculate what one has the highest potential to work and go for it.
Contact Info:
- Website: Nordicbrewpub.com
- Instagram: Zach.Barthel
- Facebook: NordicBrewpub