This week on The Mobile Alabama Business Podcast, we sit down with Jeff Zeiders with Rove Companies. Listen in as we discuss his life, career journey, and how he got into the world of lifestyle branding!

Produced by Blue Fish.

Transcript:

I am Jeff Zeiders, and I am the CEO of Rove Companies.

Marcus:

Nice, dude. Well, welcome to the podcast.

Jeff:

Thank you for having me, man.

Marcus:

Yeah. We've known each other for a number of years through a couple of organizations, and I've known about what it is that you're doing, and we'll get into that here in a minute, for quite some time. I think it's phenomenal. I love that you even exist in Mobile because, coming from D.C., I'm used to seeing businesses like yours, because you're somewhat of a tech business in a lot of different respects, but you're also a service business in a lot of respects as well. But anyway, I'm glad to have you here.

Jeff:

Thank you very much.

Marcus:

Yeah.

Jeff:

Glad to be here.

Marcus:

Yeah. Well, to get started, before we get into that, why don't you tell us the story of Jeff? Where did you come from, or where are you from? Where did you go to high school? Did you go to college? Are you married? Just give us some of the backstory.

Jeff:

Deep dive. There you go.

Marcus:

Yeah.

Jeff:

I'm also from the D.C. area. I was born and raised about 10 minutes south of D.C. Lived there my whole life.

Marcus:

Fairfax?

Jeff:

Woodbridge.

Marcus:

Did you go to-

Jeff:

Gar-Field.

Marcus:

Oh, my God. Have we talked about this before?

Jeff:

No.

Marcus:

I went to Woodbridge Senior High School.

Jeff:

No shit.

Marcus:

Dude, we're having a moment in the podcast right here.

Jeff:

Really? You went to Woodbridge? I went to Gar-Field.

Marcus:

What year did you graduate? Because you're younger than I am.

Jeff:

Awesome. Yeah, class of '04.

Marcus:

Okay. I was class of '92, but yeah, I went to Woodbridge Senior High School.

Jeff:

That's crazy.

Marcus:

I ended up graduating and going to James Madison, and then I moved to Chesapeake for about six-

Jeff:

I went to Mary Washington.

Marcus:

Okay. I went to Chesapeake for about six months, and then I moved back up to D.C.

Jeff:

That's crazy.

Marcus:

I lived with my parents in D.C. for a bit, and then I moved out to the Reston, Herndon, Ashburn area and stayed out there.

Jeff:

Wow. We have not talked about this.

Marcus:

That is so funny.

Jeff:

That is crazy. We probably grew up 10 miles from each other?

Marcus:

If that.

Jeff:

Probably. Yeah.

Marcus:

Yeah, that's so funny.

Jeff:

I was in Twin Oaks. I don't know if you know that.

Marcus:

I do. Yeah. That's funny.

Jeff:

Twin Oaks.

Marcus:

That area is... Gosh, we're digressing, but this is humorous here for a moment. We're having some time. But that area, have you been back?

Jeff:

A few times. It has blown up.

Marcus:

It is insane.

Jeff:

It's not the same the place.

Marcus:

It is not the same place. I remember when the Potomac Mills Mall was a field.

Jeff:

Yeah.

Marcus:

And now, if you go to that area... If any of you are listening to this because you're friends with me and you still live in that area, I haven't been back probably for 10 years, so I can't imagine what it looks like now. But the last time I was back, it was just insane to me. I just did not recognize the place. That's how fast it's growing.

Jeff:

Yeah. I probably went back two or three years ago, and it's even bigger. It's a D.C. suburb that's home to contractors and service people, and there's a lot of... Talk about real estate.

Marcus:

Oh, gosh.

Jeff:

That's blown up there, too. The home that my parents bought there 35 years ago-

Marcus:

I can't even imagine.

Jeff:

... is a multitude worth more now.

Marcus:

Yeah. Well, here's an idea for you folks that are listening. When I bought my first house in D.C., we paid $240,000 for it. Five, six years later, we sold it for over $500,000. And this was an hour outside of the city. Now, mind you, it was only 20 miles, but it was an hour outside of the city.

Jeff:

Depending on the day, yeah.

Marcus:

Yeah, it was out by Dulles Airport, and when we sold, it was well over half a million dollars. That was five years, so I can't even imagine what those houses are worth now, because it's just insane. Anyway, I'm sorry.

Jeff:

Yeah. No, no, no.

Marcus:

You're from D.C.

Jeff:

I'm a NOVA boy. I grew up, raised there, went to Gar-Field High School, and then went the University of Mary Washington, which is in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Did a double major there in English literature and music.

Marcus:

No way, dude. What instrument? Holy crap. How have we not know this about each other? We've known each other for-

Jeff:

Do you play?

Marcus:

I was a vocal performance major.

Jeff:

Really?

Marcus:

Yeah.

Jeff:

That's cool.

Marcus:

I quit that and went into English lit. Anyway.

Jeff:

That's insane. We're the same person.

Marcus:

Yeah. That's too funny. What instrument were you playing?

Jeff:

Percussion is what I do. But composition, really, is where I picked it up. That's where I found my real groove.

Marcus:

I wish that I had known... James Madison offered education, performance, or production. I wish I had known what music production really was because I think with my aptitude for technology and the ear that I had... I can't sing as well as I used to, although I can still carry a tune. I think that combination would've made me really good at mixing and producing and stuff like that. I think it would've been a good move for me.

Jeff:

I almost went to a JMU. They had a five-year bachelor's program in music that was very tempting, but I had a girlfriend that I was dating in high school, long distance, that whole thing, so followed her there.

Marcus:

Mary Washington, that's a tough school, man. That's no joke.

Jeff:

It was a great experience. It was great for me because, at James Madison, they have a large program. It's a large music school. Mary Washington has a great music program, but it's not what the school is known for, and it's a much smaller program. Because of just the sheer size of it, there was more opportunity to take on leadership roles. If you wanted to be really taking advantage of your education, the competition to do things was lower. For better or for worse, that allowed me to do some things that I probably wouldn't have been able to do at a bigger school like JMU. That put a little bit of a taste of leadership, entrepreneurship, nonprofit work. That got started when I was doing that work.

Marcus:

That is so cool.

Jeff:

And then from there, I did my master's degree at Johns Hopkins up in Baltimore, and then I went on and completed my doctorate there also in music composition.

Marcus:

Okay. In music composition. Very good. And yet, here you are as an entrepreneur that has started a new venture. How did that... You know what?

Jeff:

It's a long, winding road.

Marcus:

I know. I'm getting ahead of myself, because I'm excited about this now that I know a little bit of the backstory. Damn it, this is so funny. Okay. Sticking to the script, what was your first job, and were there any lessons that you remember from it? And when I say first job, I'm not talking after you got your doctorate. I'm talking like, "Hey, man, I'm in high school, I'm flipping burgers and scrubbing floors and stuff."

Jeff:

Oh, yeah. First job was in high school, summer, probably sophomore or junior year of high school. Worked at AMC Theaters. Started from the bottom as the guy that cleans out theaters after movies.

Marcus:

At Potomac Mills? Which AMC?

Jeff:

Yeah, Potomac Mills. And in the course of one summer, went from sweeper to concessions to then box office, so I was ... which sounds like a great progression.

Marcus:

Moving up.

Jeff:

There's no pay raise. It's just a nicer job. Biggest lesson there, big lesson was... You are taking cash, you're selling tickets, so you have your own till box. And one day, towards the end of the summer, I was brought in and was accused of stealing about $1,000 from my box, which I had not done. I had not done it. This was a manager who was abusing her ability to take this out on a high school kid who had no recourse, and she probably pocketed it.

Marcus:

Yeah. She was the one that was stealing.

Jeff:

Big lesson there was... Talked to my dad about it. We came up with a plan of action, and really just learned that sometimes, you just have to step up for yourself. And sometimes, there are situations like that that are not winnable, and you learn to be as gracious, and you take it as a lesson learned. It was just one of those situations where... I was probably 14. Well, probably 15.

Marcus:

That's a big lesson to learn at that age.

Jeff:

It was. It was a big lesson to be accused of theft like that, to know that I didn't do it, and take it with some grace and just get past it. Was a big lesson for me.

Marcus:

Wow. Okay. Tell us what Rove is, because I know it's a grouping of a couple of different businesses. And then give people an idea of how this all came to be.

Jeff:

Sure. Rove Companies is the current company that I run. Essentially, it's a family of consumer brands. I'll start with the first brand, because that's probably the best way to build this story. Moved to Mobile, Alabama in...

Marcus:

Yeah. Yes, you are here in Mobile.

Jeff:

I moved to Mobile, Alabama in 2016 with my wife. Moved here, didn't really have any jobs lined up. We just moved here on blind faith. My wife is from here. We had been bouncing around from a lot of cities, decided it was time to set up shop and make some roots.

Marcus:

Music composition degree is-

Jeff:

There are a lot of opportunities.

Marcus:

... so useful.

Jeff:

Oh, my gosh.

Marcus:

And an English lit degree is-

Jeff:

Even better.

Marcus:

... right up there with it.

Jeff:

I really honed in on the high-paying jobs there.

Marcus:

Yeah, exactly.

Jeff:

We moved here, looked around for a job. Found a great job at a local broadband company called Southern Light. Was a great job, but had this itch that I just had to be doing something more than a nine-to-five job to feel really fulfilled. I knew that the long-term picture being in one job like that just wouldn't do it for me, so I started to look for different opportunities. The timing was such that Mobile was hosting its first Startup Weekend, which is a Google-sponsored entrepreneurship networking event. Went to that with no ideas, no concepts of what it would be.

Jeff:

Long story short, in the course of that weekend, I pitched the idea of what CigarClub.com would eventually be, and CigarClub.com was my first business, my first real business. Formed up a team, co-founded it with Chris, and the idea behind CigarClub.com was, as millennial consumers of premium cigars, we felt that there wasn't really a viable marketplace for shoppers like us. You either had these really big generic.com stores that had no personalization. They weren't powered by any curated technologies. Or you had brick-and-mortar stores, which are your mom-and-pop shops, which are great, which we all need them, but they can be a little bit overwhelming.

Marcus:

And they're intimidating.

Jeff:

Yeah. They're intense. We didn't feel like there was a modern-feeling way to discover and shop for cigars. The idea was to build a platform where you could log on to the site, have zero knowledge about cigars. You just tell us what your favorite wines are, favorite beers are, favorite foods are. And then we had a piece of technology on the backend that would correlate your food and taste palate into a cigar palate, and then our system would basically select, curate, and mail you cigars each month based off of your personal palate, so every consumer of our site. It was a mixture of a service as well as actually a D-to-C product where we could be providing low costs, really great value cigars to our consumers. We had a guarantee, because it was tied to their palate, and that really started to gain some traction for us.

Jeff:

Essentially, what was happening then was that was our side hustle. Chris and I both had full-time gigs. I was working at Southern Light, very happy with that job, but I would come home at 5:30, and then I would start packing boxes and doing customer service and doing all the stuff that you do when you run a small business. It was a nights-and-weekends classic hustle. Did that for a solid year and a half until our customer base had gotten large enough, or I felt that it was worth thinking about trying to do this full-time. At that time, my wife was six months pregnant with twins.

Marcus:

Perfect time to leave a job.

Jeff:

Perfect timing. Had a great 401(k), a great healthcare plan. Very solid job. It was really good. But again, just have that itch. And I also knew that, before children, B.C., it's a lot easier to make choices that are a little bit more risky, because you don't have as much of a responsibility to others. I had this feeling that if I waited until after children, that choice might be a more difficult choice. I made the call, had conversations with my wife. She was very gracious and supportive. I made the move and hopped on full-time as CEO back in February of 2018.

Marcus:

Nice.

Jeff:

It's been over two years now since being full-time of growth. One of the big things that we did in the summer of 2019 is we acquired one of our direct competitors, called Good Cigar Company. They were offering a similar product with a little bit of a different brand approach. It was a really nice fit for us, so we made that acquisition. And then most recently... Well, let me just back up. That acquisition put the itch and idea in my mind that maybe, as opposed to just trying to grow and do one brand, there was a possibility of growing a family of brands in that.

Marcus:

Because once you have the infrastructure in place, the product is much easier to come up with. Yeah, I get it.

Jeff:

Right. Especially with our first acquisition where it was cigars. It was the same core product, the same kind of customer. We didn't really have to reinvent a lot of things. And actually, from the acquisition, we use the tools and some of the processes can make Cigar Club better. It was really a nice fit, and it put that idea in my head of doing more than just one brand. Then that thought process led to the acquisition in October of 2020 Gentleman's Box, which is a non-cigar company, but it's a men's lifestyle, consumer products company. Now, we were operating multiple brands with multiple products and lines of businesses.

Jeff:

The idea of Rove came about. When we made these acquisitions, we of course brought in team members from those companies. We had a Cigar Club team and a Gentleman's Box team and we had all these teams, and it felt like we were siloing ourselves. The idea of Rove Companies is, "Let's all be Rove, not Cigar Club, not Gentleman's Box. I'm no longer the CEO of Cigar Club. I'm as invested in Gentleman's Box as I am in Cigar Club, so I now run Rove, and we all run Rove." And the core idea with Rove is we're building a team, a set of tools, a set of systems that we can bring any e-comm, especially men's-focused lifestyle brand, into the system. And we have the team in place, we have all the tools, all the processes to scale from day one.

Jeff:

Right now, we run and operate seven different brands with seven different customer sets, and we essentially are growing an internal ad agency whose clients are Rove Companies. We have an internal operations team who does all of our shipping fulfillment, warehousing. We have an in-house customer service team who you have one set of agents who can service seven brands. It's a way that you can leverage a team where maybe one brand doesn't need a full-time person to do customer service, but you can pull seven hours a week from one of your people to make it happen. We're laying the foundation for what will hopefully be a wide array of brands and services.

Marcus:

To more than seven, obviously.

Jeff:

More than seven. Yeah, for sure.

Marcus:

Wow. Yeah, that's really cool. We were talking with... Was it Jeff Roberts? I think it was Jeff Roberts was the podcast that we recorded before yours. And one of the things that he brought up was Marcus Lemonus, The Profit. And I was making the point that if you watch that show for any period of time, you realize that Marcus purchases business, or he's purchased businesses in so many different industries that now his businesses are feeding his other businesses. For instance, if he needs carpet installed or if he needs an advertising agency or if he needs signs printed or uniforms made or whatever, he's got other businesses that do those. He's keeping the money within his own ecosystem, which then increases the profitability of all the businesses. Right?

Marcus:

But in this instance, I guess the benefit is that if you come up with an idea or see something that you want to go after, you've got the infrastructure set in place for a company to just from zero to however many subscribers you might ever want to get. You've got everything in place to be able to handle that, which is something that most businesses like that would dream of. That's really cool.

Jeff:

That's the vision. The vision is... I'm talking with two possible acquisitions now, and the idea is these are really brands that have a great brand, a great product, a great idea. They don't have the-

Marcus:

And hopefully customers.

Jeff:

They don't have the customers, they don't have the... Well, they have some-

Marcus:

Some, but not what you...

Jeff:

... but they're not at a real scale yet. They don't have the execution down. We can bring that thought, that brand, that small customer base into Rove, and again, from day one, be able to start to scale, make it more efficient, do it better.

Marcus:

And you've got some symbiotic...

Jeff:

Marketing.

Marcus:

You can sell to your... Yeah, some symbiotic marketing that you can do to your existing client base. That's really cool. Think back to Startup Weekend and the period of time after that. Do you remember the first time that you really thought, "Hey, there might be something to this?"

Jeff:

Yeah. The first time was... The idea with Startup Weekend was there was about 60 people there, and on Friday night, the expectation is everyone does a one-minute pitch, and then the group votes on the top five or six pitches, and then you form teams, then you work through the weekend. Well, I came into the weekend with no ideas and no concepts, and I wasn't going to pitch. And then I saw that everyone else pitched and I started to feel this guilt pressure of, "I should probably do something." I got in line, and from the time that I got in line to the time I got to the microphone is where I thought of the company.

Marcus:

Talking about life-changing.

Jeff:

In that five-minute span, I thought of Cigar Club and the whole thing. And then we formed the team. Chris was on that team. We first had the idea that this might have something big. The idea of that weekend is not to form a company. It's really to learn and to network and to maybe flush out some ideas.

Jeff:

We finished the weekend, we went home, I called Chris up probably a month later or three weeks later and said, "Hey, I really enjoyed getting to know you. Do you want to get lunch?" And during the course of those three weeks, I put together a basic business plan. I thought it might have some legs on it. I get to the lunch, Chris is there, and say, "I have this plan." And he pulls out a plan that's almost the exact same thing.

Marcus:

That's too cool.

Jeff:

In that moment, we knew that this was a great partnership. It did take a while for us to get traction. We had our first customer within two months, but it took a solid a year and a half for us to really have any real traction and real movement. That feeling of having someone else who saw the same vision that you did was-

Marcus:

Kind of like a light bulb.

Jeff:

... very powerful.

Marcus:

Yeah, yeah. That's really cool. If you were talking to someone that wanted to get started in running their own business, what's the one bit of wisdom that you would impart to them?

Jeff:

To think bigger than what you think is really possible. It's really easy to think of your local market or your local people like you or consumers like you. It's easy to not think of the bigger picture. Not that every business needs to be a big business or not that every business needs to change things or change the world, but there's a little bit of you have to be excited about reaching beyond what feels comfortable. Pairing the idea that you have of what that business is with the expectation that it can be something special, and then being willing to put in the sweat to make it happen. That's really what it takes. It's the combination of the idea, the excitement, and the hustle to actually do it.

Marcus:

It's amazing to me just how, and I'm going to include myself in this, but how small we think sometimes. You know what I mean? For the longest time, Blue Fish was really just an umbrella by which I operated as a freelancer. I'd find somebody, I'd design a website, I'd build it and launch it, and then that was pretty much it. If they needed anything else, it was, "Go to somebody else." And then I started thinking bigger and like, "Okay, well, what kind of clients do I want? Well, I want bigger clients." You know what I mean? It just grows.

Marcus:

It's funny, because I'm sitting here thinking... I don't know. We don't have to get into numbers, but I can imagine the scale at which you're able to operate by doing what you did versus just opening up a cigar shop. A cigar shop, if they sell to 20 people in a day, they've got a profitable business and they're making really great money. But that's a local mindset. "I'm going to affect people within a five to 10-mile radius." Whereas what you're talking about, it's at least a national, if not... Could be a global idea where it doesn't matter where they're located. You can ship to them and reach them. It's a much different mindset. A small mind would have said, "Well, I'm just going to open up this 1,500-square-foot store somewhere in downtown." And you said, "No, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to open up an online store that I can reach millions of people." That's pretty cool.

Jeff:

Thank you.

Marcus:

When you look to the business world, and I'm saying the larger business world, is there someone that, if you see their face on a magazine or you see an article that you know is about them, is there somebody that really inspires you or motivates you?

Jeff:

I don't really have that person. I know the question that you're asking. I don't really have a person like that, that I look to.

Marcus:

Yeah. That's fair.

Jeff:

I wish there were more leaders like Elon Musk that had that level of...

Marcus:

Just doesn't operate at the same level.

Jeff:

He's not a human. And there's a level of courage that he has, and fearlessness. He's probably scared often, but the ability to move past that is, I think, tremendous.

Marcus:

And execute.

Jeff:

And to think big, talk about think big, can change the world.

Marcus:

Listening to his latest podcast. This is a tangent, but whatever. You're listening to this podcast. You know. It's tangent-filled. But I was really struck by his most recent podcast with Joe Rogan, which is a three-hour-long interview, by the way, if you look into listening to it. Highly worth it. Even if you don't like Joe, listening to that podcast, because the way that Elon talks about his businesses is incredible. He talks about the design of the Model X with a passion that you would have for a child. It really is.

Marcus:

He talks about the sleekness of the rear-facing seats in the Model X and how they just merge with the floor. And he talks about, if you look at most vehicles nowadays, there are these quarter-size or half-dollar-size pucks, is what he calls them, on the front bumper. And those are proximity sensors so that when you're coming up on another vehicle or parking or something like that, it can sense where you're at and warn you.

Marcus:

Well, they wanted to put those on the Model X, which has the gull-wing doors that open straight up, but they wanted to put those on there because they didn't want a child to be hit or a person to be hit if the doors open, because they open automatically. But what they didn't want is these hockey or these quarter-size or half-dollar-size items on the door, so they went through all these little hoops just to eliminate that unsightliness, because they didn't want to mar you know the beauty of this vehicle that they created. And he said, "It's a highly preposterous vehicle that we've created. It should not have ever been done, but we did it." And it's a 10-minute little thing where he talks about it.

Marcus:

That one thing just struck me, because he's not just trying to save the world through energy conservation and all that stuff. He also just really loves the design of these things. I started looking around Blue Fish just to... And it's still new. This was just released. But what are we doing where we can have that thought, that design thinking, if you will?

Jeff:

I saw a great interview with him where he said that he was, I think, asked, "What is the biggest problem facing corporations, or really, companies?" And he said that there's too much of a focus on boardrooms and not enough focus on product. And the idea that, at the core of it, your product is what makes money. It's not spreadsheets and forecasting and all that. That's important, but the idea of starting with your product, and every single day, thinking, "How can this product be better? How can I bring more delight and happiness or less pain for our customer?" I think there's a real... That's what I find a lot of joy in, is trying to look at the actual product and see, "We know that this works, we know people like it, but it can truly be better."

Marcus:

It can always be better.

Jeff:

"And how can we do that?"

Marcus:

Yeah, it's the-

Jeff:

And always thinking about innovating. That's the most fun thing.

Marcus:

... internal discord that most entrepreneurs deal with, where it's like, "It's never done." But shipping is also extremely important. If you're listening to this, don't lose sight of the fact that perfection can be an albatross that hangs around your neck as well, like you need to ship, you need to get product out.

Marcus:

In old-school software development, we use this term called... It was waterfall development. You gathered requirements, and then you went off and you did all this development, and then somewhere along the end, you would test it, and then it would get launched. Right? Well, now, in software development, or at least a while back, there's iterative. It's smaller chunks of requirements, development, testing, constantly happening, all this stuff. It's this very circular pattern. And I think of business in that respect, too. You're always looking for little tweaks that you can make to your business and putting them into place, and then you're getting them out. But then you never stop. It's just constantly trying to make small improvements. Anyway. Are there any books, podcasts, people, or organizations that have been helpful in moving you forward?

Jeff:

I do listen to a lot of podcasts. Actually, I used to listen to Joe Rogan pretty much every single day. While it's not a business podcast, there's a lot of inspiration and a lot of inspiring people that he brings on his show, and it's probably the most honest podcast that's out there.

Jeff:

In terms of other resources... To be honest, in the course of the past year, our team has grown quite a lot, and I find, actually, most of my learning is from my people. It's the books that they read that they talk to me about, or the podcasts that they listen to. I find it really-

Marcus:

That's really cool, actually.

Jeff:

I find it inspiring to learn from them. I'm 34. I'm the oldest person on my team by five years. Most of my team is 23 to 28, and they're into a whole different level of stuff than I am. To be 34, I'm still very young, but they have access to a library of things that I wouldn't think to look for. It's always fascinating to just learn what they're learning and to take cues from them.

Marcus:

I think this is just life, right? In that age range, you also have a lot of disposable time to consume, and then you get into your... Most people, they get into their 30s, they start doing things like getting married, buying a house, having kids, things like that, and those things start to take away from that disposable time that you had. Unless you're mowing the lawn and you're able to put some headphones in and listen to a podcast or an audiobook or something like that, there's not that same amount of focus on those kinds of things.

Marcus:

But I think it's still important. I made the comment a couple of times, I just don't consume like I used to, but I still do. That podcast with Elon Musk was three hours long. I listened to every minute of it. And while that wasn't a business book that talks to you about a problem that somebody had and how it was solved and what the outcome was... Actually, it was, because it's Elon talking about problems that they had with, whether it's SpaceX or Tesla or any of the other ventures that he's involved in, and talking about how he looks at those things. You know what I mean? There's just something very different about his mindset, too, so it was very educational in a lot of different respects.

Jeff:

Absolutely.

Marcus:

Yeah. What is the most important thing that you've learned about running a business?

Jeff:

To always have money.

Marcus:

Yeah. Yeah.

Jeff:

Cash is king, man.

Marcus:

One way. One way is a wonderful thing.

Jeff:

You talk about the ultimate job of the CEO or the founder or whatever is to set a vision, strike it, and that's very important. It is a very important thing.

Marcus:

But the bigger one is to make sure you got some cash.

Jeff:

My most important thing... Yeah. I tell everyone on the team, I say, "My job is to inspire you, but my first job is to make sure that you get a paycheck. If I'm not getting you a paycheck-"

Marcus:

That's true. That gets overlooked quite a bit.

Jeff:

"... you don't care what the... You probably do care, but you have rent to pay, you got stuff to do. The way that I see it is my first job is to make sure that, every Friday, you get paid. Now, what we do to get there, that's the magic, right?" We went through a lot of times in Cigar Club, pre-Rove, where we had really tight times. We had times where I was looking at spreadsheets and we had four weeks left. I think what I learned is a resolve of, you can be looking four weeks in the face, and you got nine-months-old at home, and you got a wife who let you do this job and this whole thing, and-

Marcus:

I will not disappoint her.

Jeff:

I will not. This is not going to end. There's a grit that I don't know that you can foster without going through some shit. That's the biggest lesson, is going through hard times and coming out. I'll have more hard times. It's not over. But we went through some pretty dark times.

Marcus:

When you run a business, that's a guarantee. You're going to have difficult times, for sure. And I think it's interesting that the difficult times, as you get further into this, the difficult times that you had when you were starting out become lesser in the sense that what they were seems so minuscule, because the problems that you're dealing with now are so much bigger. That just keeps happening. Where I'm at now and the problems that I'm dealing with now are much bigger than the problems that I dealt with when I first started Blue Fish, if that makes sense, because I don't know that I explained it. You understood, but people listening may not have understood.

Jeff:

It's the type of thing where, back in 2017, I might be worried about an $800 order for cigars and making sure that it gets here on time. Now, I'm worried about a six-figure order. It's just a different... Doing an $800 order is a ...

Marcus:

That's $800 a day, probably.

Jeff:

Yeah. It's just a different... Yeah, you actually do look back on things, and it's all in perspective.

Marcus:

Yeah. That was awesome. All right. I tell people this is the most difficult question that I'm going to ask you of this whole interview, which is, how do you like to unwind? I can imagine, "Oh, I like just smoke a cigar with a bottle of whiskey," or something like that. Come on, man. Is that it? Cigar, lots Scotch or whiskey or something?

Jeff:

I'm a sucker for a good fire pit. I love sitting outside with stars. Cigar may or may not be present. But I love being alone. I love people, but I love having quiet solo time after everyone's gone to bed 11 o'clock, midnight, just sitting outside and just thinking about things and reflecting on what can be better.

Jeff:

I also play piano still. I play music. I don't do it professionally, but we have a piano at home, and I play at least an hour a day. On the weekends, couple hours a day. That's my biggest thing. I've learned how to... I don't know if listeners will know this, but if you know about fake books, basically, you can buy books of songs or of different things, and you essentially have the chord of what's happening and then just the melody. You can fake your way through what sounds like a song, but you just have to know the chords and the melody and that. I've learned how to do that very well, and that's my biggest entertainment, is just doing that. And I also still compose. Writing music, playing music, that's my biggest release.

Marcus:

Phase three of your life will be piano bar?

Jeff:

When I did the doctorate, the idea was that I was going to go into faculty and teach music. I think phase three is fund my professor salary at some local school and get back into teaching music.

Marcus:

Really? And you want to do that? Very cool.

Jeff:

Yeah, that'd be really cool.

Marcus:

It's funny, because there's literally almost no money in music. Like we mentioned, you're either performing, which you don't make any money unless you're the top of the top, or you're an educator, which you don't make any money. Ultimately, I ended up changing my major, not because of the money, but because I didn't know how to play piano when I went into it, and nobody bothered to like, "Hey, by the way, dummy, you're going to need to play piano in order to get a music degree." And I didn't want to spend six years to learn piano, to be stuck with all this debt because I was paying my way through college, and then end up with a teacher's salary. That wouldn't have matched up.

Jeff:

Yeah. Makes sense.

Marcus:

Anyway. Well, tell people where they can find out more about, whether it's Rove or Cigar Club or whatever you want to pitch.

Jeff:

Yeah. You can go to CigarClub.com. That's the OG brand. You can go to goodcigar.co. Right now, you can also go to gentlemansbox.com. I'll just leave you with those top three.

Marcus:

Yeah. That's cool.

Jeff:

Those are good starting points.

Marcus:

And I'm gathering, you're on social media, Facebook, Instagram, all those as well?

Jeff:

For all the brands. Yeah.

Marcus:

Okay. Very good. I think that's it. I know you're physically located here downtown on Dauphin Street, but there's no real reason for people to just stop in to see, because you're not a retail shop, so it wouldn't do any benefit. Well, I want to thank you again for coming on the podcast. To wrap up, any final thoughts or comments you'd like to share?

Jeff:

No, I'll say that, when we got started, it was in mid-2016. I'll say that there was an energy in Mobile around entrepreneurship and startups that was infectious. That was one of the big catapults that really inspired Chris and I to keep going and to do things. There were resources and people. I just want to say that, if you're in Mobile and you're in a startup or you're trying to think about startups or you want to support startups, talk to people. There's an appetite for it. It may not be on the surface, but if you dig a little bit deeper, it's there.

Marcus:

I'm well aware, because I have tried very much. I was not responsible for bringing Startup Weekend here, but I had contacted them a number of years before that, because I did want to bring them here. They just were not big enough at the time. A buddy of mine had started... Was it Michigan? I think he had gone to one and told me about it, and I was really excited about what it was that it meant. And also, I would consider Blue Fish a startup of sorts. You know what I mean? There's not a whole lot of advertising agencies in Mobile that do what we do, because we're more tech-focused than a lot of the graphic-design-focused or ad-placement-focused agencies. That doesn't mean that we don't do those things really well. It's just, when people think of us, they always gravitate towards websites, because that's how I started.

Marcus:

I love that. I have been an avid fan of things, ideas like the Startup Weekend, Innovation Portal. I love the fact that we have coworking spaces that have opened up over the course of the last 10 years down here. And part of the reason why I wanted to be downtown Mobile is because I wanted to be part of all the stuff that was going on. I felt what it was that you're talking about, and I wanted to be a part of that. And also, quite honestly, it's one of the reasons why we started the podcast. I wanted to share the positive things that were happening in the business community, but I also wanted to be able to shine a light on those folks that were just starting out, and I wanted to share their stories to inspire others that may be thinking about going down whatever path it is. And You know what I mean?

Marcus:

I see a future for Mobile that involves a lot of people coming up with ideas and chasing those dreams, whereas in the past, it has been very much a manufacturing, hospitality-focused area. If we don't change, if we don't morph into this more technological-focused, online-focused way of thinking, then we'll be stuck where we're at forever. But I'm convinced that people like you and Chris, I know he's not as big a part of Cigar Club as what he was, but starting this, you paved that way, because you guys did get a lot of press with the Alabama Launchpad and all the other things that you were doing. I think you guys paved the way for people to think about Mobile in a much different respect, and I know there are a number of others. There's one guy in particular that I want to get on the podcast. He just came to mind when we were talking, and I need to reach out to him. But there's a lot of folks that have started these tech-focused companies, and I think the more that we talk about them, the more it'll inspire other people to do the same thing.

Jeff:

100%.

Marcus:

That's why we're here.

Jeff:

All the way, man. Love it.

Marcus:

Jeff, I appreciate your willingness to sit with me and share your journey as a business owner and entrepreneur. It's been great talking with you, man.

Jeff:

Appreciate it, Marcus. Thanks.

Marcus:

Yeah.