Barry Kates, the president of Innovative Group. We touch on the hardships facing the events world and experiential marketing because of COVID-19 along with how his team managed to pivot to stay afloat. We discuss MAXIMUS – the truck produced by Innovative Group and used by Gordon Ramsay on the show ’24 Hours to Hell and Back’ and how they are at the forefront of technology in the experiential marketing space.
Date: September 8, 2020
Episode: 21
Title: Norman Farrar Introduces Barry Kates, Entrepreneur and President at Innovative Group, a Marketing and Advertising Agency.
Subtitle: “Find your passion and the money will follow you”
Final Show Link: https://iknowthisguy.com/episodes/ep-24-reaching-the-fansummit-matt-difebo/https://iknowthisguy.com/episodes/10-lil-roberts/
In this episode of I Know this Guy…, Norman Farrar introduces Barry Kates, entrepreneur and President at Innovative Group, a Marketing and Advertising Agency.
Barry Kates believes that his passion and calling is being an entrepreneur. He discussed the hardships facing the events world and experiential marketing because of COVID-19 along with how his team managed to pivot to stay afloat.
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Barry Kates 0:00
I’m joking. But next time, I want to see you at least I want you to feel good and to make you feel that you weren’t shunned from the list.
Norman Farrar 0:08
I was for a second.
Norman Farrar 0:16
Everyone is welcome to our new episode of I Know this Guy, the podcast where we dive deep into the lives of some of the most interesting people I know. Before we get started, please like and subscribe to I Know this Guy, wherever you get your podcasts. By the way, my kids want me to say something about ringing a bell? What the hell’s a bell?
Hayden Farrar 0:49
So Dad, who do we have lined up for the podcast today?
Norman Farrar 0:52
Well, this is a recommendation that Lil Roberts gave us a little while back and I can’t wait to talk to this guy. His name is Barry Kates and he runs an experiential marketing company.
Hayden Farrar 1:07
Nailed it. What do we have to look forward to?
Norman Farrar 1:11
Well, his backstory is going to be very interesting. However, I’m really interested to hear about how he grew this business from 1999, to this, it’s quite a large organization and he puts together some very unique events. But I’m more interested in how he’s handling the whole COVID situation since he’s in the event world.
Hayden Farrar 1:35
Right. One of the hardest hits in the industries out there. That’s awesome. I can’t wait to hear this one.
Norman Farrar 1:42
Yeah, me too. So Barry, welcome to the podcast.
Barry Kate 1:46
Thanks, Norm. Great to be here. Appreciate it.
Norman Farrar 1:48
I’m gonna tell you, I know I’m excited to talk to you. But you’re not making my glasses steam up. It is hot in here.
Barry Kates 1:58
You should try seeing what it’s like here in South Florida right now.
Norman Farrar 2:00
Oh, I couldn’t even imagine. I live in rural Canada, more cows than people and it’s hot outside. But my house for some reason, if you’re watching on video, if you’re watching YouTube, you can see my, it’s hilarious, because my glasses have steamed up. Oh, so we have a mutual friend, her name is Lil Roberts and she says you’re one of the most interesting people I need to get to know.
Barry Kates 2:32
Well, I appreciate that. But Lil and I met 11 years ago when both of us were interviewing to join an entrepreneurs organization, which is a global worldwide organization, with chapters around the world and it is for entrepreneurs. As a part of that entrepreneurial journey, it is about entrepreneurs that are the key stakeholders in their own business, that have to deal with HR, payroll, cash flow. It’s not the corporate side of entrepreneurs where if the CEO or CMO is hired and then gets let go by a big corporation, they get a big giant severance package. Entrepreneurs are all about sharing experience, journey for entrepreneurs. So fortunately for us, I had a great chance of meeting Lil while we’re going through it and we have what’s called a forum that you interview with, and it’s six to eight of your entrepreneur peers, kind of an advisory board and what they do is when you join a forum, it’s about matching personalities and making sure that there’s no overlap in entrepreneurial careers. Because it’s all about being able to get a different perspective in the entrepreneurial journey. So Lil had already been placed in a forum, excuse me, and I was interviewing in forums and she made the recommendation to her forum, and I interviewed with them and since then, it’s been 11 years and the entire forum has been together and I just love Lil to death. I just love her journey. I love where she’s been in her journey from a personal and professional perspective and almost just like a sister, so just have the utmost respect and I just love her drive, tenacity and passion and her thirst for learning.
Norman Farrar 4:33
One of the things I love about this podcast is everybody that I’ve had a chance to talk to, it’s all about sharing, it’s not taking, and I think that’s one of the common denominators and I don’t know if that just makes an interesting person, but so far everyone, and we’ve interviewed probably 30 people now, hopefully that’s going to be double or triple one of these days, but they’re all willing to share. I just find it amazing that that’s the one thing everyone has come back to say or we hear at the end of the day about just sharing. Anyways, Lil is a great lady, she said, You are the most interesting person, or one of the most interesting people that she knows and one of the things that she mentioned is that you’re decisive, you can make a decision on a dime and I mean, that’s what I love about entrepreneurs as well. So I like to dig into that a little bit. I always find it fascinating how, or talking to entrepreneurs, how they became entrepreneurs and we’re all different birds, I consider myself an entrepreneur as well. We’re like the goalie in the hockey game, right? They love to have Puck shot at them. Well that’s the risk factor I find in entrepreneurship. But anyways, can we just dig a little bit into your past? I mean, like, really dig into your past and find out, really, what makes Barry?
Barry Kates 5:55
Sure, I think that if I look back at my past I grew up in Natick, Massachusetts, it was Middle America. Literally, my parents, my father was a pharmacist, his dad was a pharmacist, his brother was a pharmacist, and my dad always wanted to be a doctor. But he couldn’t afford to go to medical school. So as most parents, at least at my age being 55, parents got married at a young age, my mom got married at 19 to my dad, and then I was born there at the age of 20, or 21. I remember we moved into a brand new neighborhood and ironically, my next door neighbor at that time, when I moved in at one is still my best friend to this day. So we’ve been best friends for 54 years and actually, my whole group from Natick is still very, very close. But what was really interesting that I think I learned was my dad was a very, very, very hard worker. He’d worked three jobs, all in pharmacy, and was only making $210 a week back in 1965. He built the house in the neighborhood that all my other friends grew up with, it was just one of those great suburban areas and I think, for me, I started to get a passion and understanding of I loved what he did from a pharmaceutical perspective he had always had aspirations of opening up his own drugstore and sure enough, he ended up opening up his own drugstore. After working for his father for many, many years, he just couldn’t work with his dad anymore and again, his dream was always to go to medical school. But he became an entrepreneur, borrowed some money from my grandfather to open up his drugstore and actually went into partnership with his college roommate, and ironically, his pharmaceutical college roommate, they were both one in the same and they opened up a drugstore and what was interesting is that back in those days in the 60s, 65, 66, you didn’t have the plethora of CVS, and Walgreens and records and, and all of the real commercial drug retailers, he was 24 hour service and when a child had a bad flu in the middle of the night, he’d get the phone call at the middle of the night at the house, and he’d go to the drugs, he’d go to his store, and open it up and get the medicine and deliver it to the house. So I really got an understanding of how hard it was to work when you were becoming an entrepreneur, but I think I wanted to follow in my dad’s footsteps of being a doctor and that was really, I loved helping people with something that was really something that I found great pleasure on and I saw what it meant to his customers, by just the little things that he did. Just knowing their names and knowing their prescriptions and just what customer service was like back in the day and then, I was born in 64 and then in 1972, my father, in his drugstore, was involved in a very sad gunshot accident, and my entire life changed at that point. My parents at that time were kind of drifting apart and the accident for him actually left him a quadriplegic for the short term and so my entire world had changed at that point and we actually remember my mom taking me and my sister who’s four years younger than I, we went to the hospital to see him and the reason why we went to the hospital the same way we found out later was that he was supposed to, he wasn’t supposed to make it. But then again, as you can appreciate, back in 1972, he didn’t have the medical advances that they do these days. He went to a small, Regional Hospital that was proximate to his drugstore, in Holliston, Massachusett and, it wasn’t until they got him stabilized before they could move them over to Mass General and ironically, they put them in a special ward. That was for patients who had serious neck or spine injury. So my dad had spent three out of five years in the hospital while it was very, very drastic and unfortunate. He was left a paraplegic wasn’t acquired. During that time, my mom, my grandparents lived in Florida, and my grandfather, who really was a great idol of mine, we’re always very, very close. I was the first grandchild, he had come from a family of five, my great grandparents were immigrants and what was really interesting was that my great grandparents came over here, they came over with nothing and they went into the Tailor business and they started to have success from the Tailor business and this was back in Massachusetts. But what was interesting was, is that my great grandfather had started to amass rental properties and as a part of my grandfather, he was putting himself through school, he was going door to door selling fuller brushes, vacuum cleaners, like just doing everything that he could to help pay for school and ironically, he also used to collect the rents for my grandfather, and my grandfather was telling me this, my great grandmother actually was telling me the story one day, my grandfather was responsible for collecting the rents as I had shared, and there were probably maybe 110 doors at this time and there was this one guy that my grandfather really, really liked. But he was three and a half months behind on his rent and my great grandfather really didn’t have the stamina for being patient with people that were going to be far more than maybe a month or two on their end. So he used to beat up on my grandfather, gotta get him out, gotta get him out and finally, the gentleman said to my grandfather, he said, Look, if you tell your father to give me two more months of free rent, I’ll give him 10% of my invention, because he had been working on an invention in his apartment for the past two and a half years. However, he just didn’t have any more cash and so my grandfather was doing everything that he could to try and buy this gentleman more time and finally, after a month, my great grandfather’s, like, victim, have plenty of people that want his apartment and my grandfather had given the bad news, this gentleman the bad news, and he moved out. When we came to find out that the person that was living in that apartment at the time, his name was Alan Land and Alan land was developing the Polaroid Land camera and that’s what came to be and so my great grandfather would have had 10% of Polaroid back in the day if he would have just allowed a couple more months of free rent. But I think that I got to see my grandfather as a young kid, as an entrepreneur. He went to engineering school, he actually was a part of a very small group from the government that they pulled out of engineering school, and they were called The Hush hush boys and back in World War Two, there were no, there was no jet engine. So General Electric, being in Boston, had tapped the top six engineering students from engineering college, and they brought them over to GE and my grandfather was actually part of The Hush hush boys that helped design the first jet engine because of the war. So his tenacity of just always wanting to be a fix it guy and then he moved to Florida with my grandmother, and they had five kids, my mom’s the oldest out of the five, and got into the hotel business. So I remember at the early age of six years old, I’d come and visit him and I’d go to the hotel with him. He’d never hire anybody to do the plumbing or air conditioning and this was a 600 room hotel on the beach. He would never hire it, he was, we like to say it’s Pennywise and pound foolish, right? But he just felt like he could do everything himself and he used to carry a big giant round bolt of keys probably had 150 keys on it, and they always just love to carry his keys. But the thing for me was I had always seen hard work and ingenuity and so when I would go visit them at the hotel, I would always be there to greet the guests coming in, and I would take their bags, so I would earn 50 cents or $1 and I was making myself 5, 6, 7 dollars a day, at six years old, just took people’s bags when they got to the front desk up to their room and, now granted, I would take all that money and blow it on the pinball machine that my my grandfather had there. But it was I think that that was really the start for me to really look at what he did and then he continued to buy more hotel properties and it’s just great guidance for me, but I really did have the desire to be a doctor and that really had stayed with me, all the way through junior high school and then in high school as well and my goal was to be a doctor. Again, living here in South Florida, we had really kind of uprooted from Massachusetts just overnight. We never went back for our furniture. I mean it was because my parents didn’t have a very good divorce. Unfortunately, as young kids, you get caught as a pawn. But, I think that I used that divorce as the impetus for my drive and to say that I was never going to be put in the scenario that I couldn’t, it created my desire. When I went into high school, our high school in Miami had a program called student leadership and what it did is you applied for it and what they would do is they would actually put you in the field that you wanted to study long term. So obviously I want to be the medical doctor. But I didn’t want to go into the doctor’s office and look at sore throats all day. So I actually got put with the department head for Miami Dade fire rescue, the division chief for fire rescue. So I would actually have to go to school for just one class and then I would go to work at the headquarters for the fire station, that would be headquarters fire department, and I was working on all kinds of special projects for the chief and I was writing rescue and I got to be a part of delivering a baby and being to car accidents and bit to shootings. So for me, I was really just, it was awesome. I loved it and only having to go to class my freshman in my, for one class my senior year. It was great, because then the other five periods I was out, working in the fire rescue field and I got a little fire car. So it was really I would go pick my friends up for lunch and we’d only have an hour. So we put the lights and sirens on to get to the pizza place to get everybody back in time and then, I ended up putting myself through school, I was going to go to University of Colorado of Boulder. But I had a better shot of being a Miami person getting into college to medical school from being in state local. So I ended up going to the University of Miami and I was actually an athletic trainer. So I was doing athletic training for football and baseball and ironically in 83, we won our first national championship my freshman year and it was just remarkable. But I used to use it when I was putting myself through school. I was a Chem major. I was working another job and you can imagine the amount of hours that you put in for working with football and I would use the team doctors as my guidance counselors at that point, because I still had the passion for being a doctor. But I was really starting to get burnt out of school and just because of the amount of hours and having to pay for school and put myself through school. At that time, doctors were going through a really bad time with medical malpractice and socialized medicine and I realized my sophomore year, I was like, You know what, I’m not in the grind for it anymore and so I switched into marketing and I was literally, it was even before sports marketing was even talked about. So I moved into sports marketing for Howard Schnellenberger, which was the head coach at the University of Miami about back in those days and we’re on a trajectory of really good or having really good football at that time. But I was given the phone books, the A through L and then the M through Z and I was trying to sell sponsorships to the coach’s show or to football or whatever it was. So I kind of got a back understanding of what it was like to work hard and try to sell and I was only making $50 a week. But I would like to reverse back. Because I think a lot of my work ethic really was watching my father work hard, watching my grandfather work hard and then when I was in seventh grade, I got a job at Publix and I worked at Publix for five years to my senior year of obviously graduated through high school working at Publix and by the time I left Publix, I was working 40 hours a week and my pay was $2 and 10 cents an hour. My paycheck was 85 bucks. Working hard for me was always in my blood and then my sophomore year, I got a great opportunity for becoming the bud rep on campus. I went to work for the Anheuser Busch wholesaler. I was actually the number three employee hired by them and I actually took that Anheuser Busch job started at the very, very bottom and turned it into a 13 year career.
Norman Farrar 19:17
Wow. So you were also the most popular person on campus?
Barry Kates 19:21
Yeah, because I gotta tell you, during my time, there was a slits rep, a paps rep, a Miller rep and a course Rep. Because we were the last group that was grandfathered in before the drinking age changed to 21. So it was very, very important for the beer companies to go ahead and start to build brand loyalty to those consumers that were just starting to be legal drinking age. So now, my pay at Budweiser was $50 a week. I made $25 a week in a salary and I had a $25 beer tasting allowance. So we would do Nicko push nights at the rat on Tuesday night. So you can imagine the amount of beers that I was able to buy but I had a substantial marketing budget. So we would do carni gras and fraternity parties that we would do three, four or 500 kegs and one night, those were the great old days and now all of a sudden, as you can appreciate, the dynamics at college are very, very different. Because you’re not really 21 now until you’re a senior. So that turned into a 13 year career for me, and I did everything from all of our events, all of our marketing, all of our sports properties, all of our venues, the on premise business, which was all the bars, restaurants and nightclubs that you actually consume beer in versus off premise, which are your grocery stores or convenience stores, like 7/11, Piggly Wiggly, and then I had a great opportunity of going to work with racecar promoter, and his name was Ralph Sanchez and Ralph used to do the Grand Prix of Miami downtown and with the expansion of downtown happening with Bayside, and the American Airlines Arena, he needed to move the course somewhere, just because the downtown dynamics were changing and the infrastructure when he was first doing the race, there wasn’t a whole lot going on downtown. But with his resurgence, and redevelopment he was going to look for he need to go find a new place. So he was actually really looking in North Miami. But unfortunately, he had a lot of backlash from the community. They didn’t really want the traffic there. They didn’t want a racetrack there and his goal was to build the Taj Mahal of racing and then Hurricane Andrew came through in 1992 and there were two brand new spring training facilities that were being built in Homestead because that was going to be kind of maybe the next play for spring baseball and unfortunately, Hurricane Andrew decimated those brand new facilities that the City of Homestead spent millions to do, I mean, decimated and those were going to be the Taj Mahal of spring training facilities, comparative to what is in Phoenix or in the northern part of the state. So a big blow from an economic perspective for Homestead, and Ralph kind of dealt with the city homestead and that’s how we ended up building the track in the Homestead. So that’s what’s now known as the Homestead Miami Speedway. Ralph had spent a couple years there and then the France family owns NASCAR came in and bought him out, which kind of left me out because Ralph was really looking for somebody who wasn’t a Motorhead that he could teach the racing business to, because he wants to enjoy more family time and so I actually got that opportunity to do that. But then it was obviously cut short when he got the opportunity of selling it. But what was really unique about it was, I’m not really a big Motorhead, but I remember when we were designing the track, we had Emerson Fittipaldi, Jeff Gordon, Dale Jarrett, Dale Earnhardt, we had all of these superstars are racing sitting in a conference room, because we were trying to figure out the banking when we’re building the track and just unfazed, it’s like maybe sitting in the Hall of Fame room with all the quarterbacks with Marino and Kelly and Joe Montana, and Steve Young and Bradshaw and Joe Nemeth, just trying to figure out what sides football should make, and where the leather should go and so, everything in life happens for a reason, I still had the burning desire to be an entrepreneur, I just, I didn’t have the
Barry Kates 23:19
I just couldn’t put myself over the hump yet. Because, again, when you come from the corporate culture, there’s a lot of safety there, you have a guaranteed paycheck, you got benefits. When you go on the entrepreneurial journey, it’s got your backpack, and you’re just hoping you got enough water and food to get you till the next rest stop, so that you can refill and then I got a call from a headhunter to go to work for PACs and communications, which at that time, had radio, television and billboard, I did that in the non traditional revenue side of things and then we got moved into and we got bought by clear gel and then as everybody can appreciate, you spend 30% of your time and in corporate culture in meetings, productive or unproductive and I had four or five clients that I had built a relationship with that said, hey, look, if you go on your own, we’ll be there to support you. So in 1999, that’s when I finally realized that I would be able to go ahead and have a couple rest stops after I emptied out my backpack with snacks and water and I’ve ventured off and I opened up my company then and, my number two is a gentleman named Jared Shattuck and I hired him right out of college, and he’s been with me for 20 plus years. So the journey of where we’ve been now for the past 20 years has just been absolutely amazing. Ups downs, pivots, to the left pivots to the right pivots forward, pivots backwards, so that really was the driver. The backstory between my dad and watching him work so hard and my grandfather watching him work so hard and buy hotels and fix things himself and they were entrepreneurs and that resonated well with me and then when I realized that I wasn’t going to be able to make the difference that I wanted to in the medical field. That’s how I ended up pivoting and moving into the sports marketing side of things and that’s why I love marketing events and it really became my passion and I share this with young entrepreneurs, find your passion, and the money will follow you. Because, when you find your passion, it’s not a job, it’s just something that you love to do. So.
Norman Farrar 25:25
Okay, so I’ve got something to ask you. But before I do, I really want to touch on like, what are you doing now? You kept in the sports marketing, your event company, tell us a little bit about that.
Barry Kates 25:36
We started the company office, Innovative Marketing Group, that was the initial name of our company and then, as years had passed, we got into more schools, originally, we were just doing some marketing, and we were doing events, and we were doing VIP hospitality stuff and then we opened up another company called Innovative Events and because we wanted to be, when you, your name has a lot to say, right, so as an innovative marketing group, they people look at you as a marketing company. So that’s why we opened up a secondary company called Innovative Events and Innovative Events was really doing a lot of event hospitality. We did the Superbowl back for sprint, when they were the NFL partner, we did AOL Superbowl. So we were really big in the event space, sports, and non sports and it was just so much fun of what we were doing so complimentary and we just continued to add on programs and elements to what our business was and instead of having five or six different websites, we decided to go ahead and added, we just created an innovative group, and then all of our divisions of all the great things that we do, have now fallen under the innovative group. So I would tell you that we got big into the experiential side, about six or seven years ago, and experiential is really about immersing brands together. So let me give you an example of what a brand immersion would be. So Jose Cuervo, back in the day was not allowed to advertise on radio or television and we were tasked with coming up with something that would give them a big giant, let’s say a publicity stunt for lack of a better word. So what we did is, their mantra at the time was about expressing yourself. So what we did was we paired up with radio stations, and we actually did costume contests in the Southeast region and the radio stations would literally go into these on premise clubs where Jose Cuervo was served and consumers would be able to go get dressed up, we’d bring in makeup artists we bring in customers, and they really got to express themselves through makeup and through these wardrobe changes and what we did is we actually had the radio stations be the judges for all of these potential costume character characters. Well, as a part of that, we brought on Freddy Krueger, we brought on leatherface from Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and we brought on Grandpa Monster, and we actually had them going around and doing like the morning show circuits and talking about the costume parties. Because the plan was that we would select a winner from each of the states and then we would fly them to South Florida on October the 30th. So we flew everybody to South Florida on October the 30th. We had a Jose Cuervo cocktail party for them. We had taken it as the Atlanta Hawks team plane, which was like 64 seats, and we wrapped it with Jose Cuervo and it was flight 1313 and so everybody that had flown to South Florida, we put them on the plane, we had 26 contestants, Freddy Krueger, Leatherface from Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Grandpa Monster, were all on there. The other 20 seats were given to the media. So we take off at 11:15 at night on October the 30th and by the stroke of midnight hitting October 31 we’re flying over the Bermuda Triangle and so and this obviously was before, you know all of the necessary compliance with the FAA and 911 so the pilots doing the big dive, and the next thing you know the air, things are coming out of the ceiling, and it’s just one of those great spooky things and we landed probably about an hour and 15 later, we’re serving Jose Cuervo on the plane, there’s music going, and the amount of publicity that Jose Cuervo got from that flight 1313 was just, it’s just one of those experiences you can’t buy and that’s a lot of what the experiential world is all about is those experiences that you know they call it FOMO fear of missing out. So those are the kinds of things that we really like to integrate ourselves with. But obviously, there’s not a whole lot of experiential going on right now, based on the shutdown of events, unfortunately, due to the virus.
Norman Farrar 30:15
So that leads to something else. So you’re in the event world, COVID affected us for months now, and will probably be a few more months, I don’t know when this thing is going to die down. But what doesn’t the general public see that you might see? Is there anything that’s hit the event world or the hospitality world differently, that the public’s not seeing?
Barry Kates 30:43
No, I think it’s wide, wide open right now. I mean, obviously, you’re seeing on either through virtual or TV, where athletes and entertainers are doing things from their home, because they want to play and they want to be able to interact with their crowds, they just can’t do it personally. Obviously, there’s no hospitality business. But maybe the thing that people really don’t realize is that, even though the events are not happening, you think about all of the folks from the booking agent side of things that one can’t book talent and earn their fees. The stagehands that build all the production stuff, the production houses that own all the equipment and the stages and the lighting, that stuff is now sitting dormant and whether it’s paid off or not paid off, they still have debt service for that. So, you think about all of the labor behind things that go into building out an event and a show, all of those people are working right now and it’s so we typically become the end user for the brands. But, the unfortunate thing is it takes an army to build an event from the ground up and that’s an unfortunate thing. You’re seeing a lot of it in the sports side of things, because with football, not playing with fans, and basketball, not playing with fans, think about all the concessions workers and all of the janitorial people that are working hourly and all of those people don’t have jobs right now. So it’s, it’s just so sad to see, really a lot of the back and of what happens in the event world that, where the effects really, really happen. I mean, you look at MSG, which is Madison Square Garden, they’re a huge conglomerate, they let go of 1000 people. William Morris, let go of executives and talent agents and I mean, the ripple effect is just, it’s just unparalleled. Personally, for me, I think that we’ll probably get to see live events come back in some shape or form. I think maybe by next summer, if again, my own personal opinion is, the vaccine comes out first of the year, we get everybody vaccinated within the next three or four months, I think that that’ll really start to go ahead and provide a sense of security and really help with people being able to get back into, in more of collective groups. But the world as we know, today is going to be changed. I think that there’s going to be all kinds of things we’re going to continue to have to manage, sanitizing, and be very mindful of social distancing and because it could be COVID20, or something else right behind it, but, right, so. So it’s just really, really been very, very unfortunate. There’s so many layers of people that are affected by it from every part of life. I was just reading an article the other day that said that the nightlife business is not open. So what do you do with all these people? Think about all the champagne manufacturers that have made tons and tons and tons and tons of champagne that they’re never gonna get to distribute or they’re gonna have to throw away. I mean, it’s just, it’s just so unfortunate. It’s almost like I feel like I’m living a bad dream, and I’m just waiting to wake up and nothing of this has ever happened.
Norman Farrar 34:08
I don’t monitor it a lot. Maybe once a week, I’ll take a look at what’s happening and I know this is off topic, but it’s kind of interesting. But I’ve seen how many daily cases there’ve been in the US. But I always thought, India, if it catches on over in India, what would happen and now they’ve surpassed the US. I think when I looked the other day, there were 65,000 active new cases and I think that’s going to skyrocket over there. I’m actually kind of worried about how many people like in Brazil and over in India are gonna catch this just because of the living conditions. But anyways, I don’t know what’s gonna happen. This is crazy. I know we’ve talked about COVID on 30 of the 30 podcasts. But what’s interesting? Here are sports events, guys. So what’s interesting is to See how Formula One has gotten around this. So the Formula One, now they’re racing again, but prior to the racing, are you a Formula One guy?
Barry Kates 35:11
No, I appreciate all sports. Obviously, Formula One doesn’t. Formula One, as you know has primarily been an international based racing platform and it’s really just started to make its way over to the United States over the past several years, so I can appreciate the fans that really are just so passionate about it, but I don’t know a lot of the drivers and so for me, I’m clear, I love what the Formula One does, because it clearly is an elevated hospitality experience and I love that about that. It’s all high end brands, and it’s, it really is just something special in the racing side of things. But what you know why we’re talking about racing, the Indianapolis 500 was supposed to be with 20% of the fan base, which is going to be about 80,000 people and just last week, they decided to have no nobody, no fans there because of the amount of positive cases that have been tested in Indiana. So, you see what basketball is done, by having everybody in the bubble and they’re tested and they’re very isolated. We’re unfortunately, in baseball, it’s kind of been hit or miss being from South Florida. Unfortunately, the Marlins feel the Marlins contracted it and then it delayed their opener by several days and they’re playing the Phillies and the Phillies were here ready to play and they ended up just having to hang out at the hotel for three days waiting for all this stuff to go by and you got some places, with football, football’s coming up and we’ve been having conversations with Tampa Super Bowl and college football championship, because it’s going to be hosted here in Miami. But the new Las Vegas Raiders have a multi billion dollar Stadium, and they’re going to be opening their football season and said, there’s going to be no fans allowed. Whereas some other of the NFL teams have said that, they’ll have a limited number of fans. But there’s still so many unknowns, and so many variables. Here’s the one difference where I think, after coming out of 9/11, if that was such a shock to our country. But the one thing I think that that is different between 9/11 and COVID, for a community is that, even though it was so somber of what was happening during 9/11, there was still an outlet for the United States citizens to be able to go to sporting events or concert events and just go to those events for three or four hours to take their mind off for the somberness that was going on in the United States. Whereas the virus that we’re living now, there is no recourse for that. There is no going to a concert or a football game to get away for the three or four hours of what’s happening in the environment. We’re living day to day and so the entertainers and the athletes and everybody else is living it as well. So you can see being cooped up, when you don’t have an outlet like that, just to get away for three or four hours. It just, it just helps in the mental acuity side of things and that’s something that I think that we’re all really yearning for because of being either stuck at home or stuck in an environment where you’re just, we’ve been shut down since March. So it’s just unfortunately, the nature of what we’re living in right now. But I would share with you that I think that with all going on half the battle is just an attitude and if you can maintain a positive attitude and just think positive about it. I just think it’s half the battle of versus just climbing underneath the desk and waiting for this thing to pass us by and however the time frame maybe.
Norman Farrar 38:53
Right. It’s interesting that you say that, because I’ve been cooped up. I’m one of these guys. I think I’ve been outside Hayden, probably not as head here. But three times in the last three months, literally outside. I have a health issue and I don’t I just if I get this, I’m gonna I know I’ll be one of the victims. So I’ve got to be very careful. But during this time, like I could have, just crawled up, did nothing. But we’ve got two new businesses that launched and two podcasts. So it’s just keeping it going, keeping your mind going. I’m lucky that I’m in the e-commerce game too. But, there’s just so many for everything that’s against you.There’s an equal amount of opportunity out there that you can go forward and either learn or get educated to do something, but it’s not doom and gloom. You can go out there and you can be successful.
Barry Kates 39:52
Well, I mean, we were launching an event in Phoenix when the NBA just the day before decided to shut down basketball and we still wanted to do our event and we were launching a musical and coronary event. We had Billy Ray Cyrus and Lifehouse. We had national talent that was going to be performing it. They actually were in Phoenix and we had the entire event built on Thursday and I remember it was nine o’clock at night, I was with myself and Jared Chadwick and Michael Sacks, who’s our chief development officer and the three of us were there like, No, well, let’s do this, let’s do this. People need an outlet and then we, we realized, we’re like, the NBA shutting down all the games, and we don’t want it to be perceived, like, we don’t want to be sensitive to what’s going on and then we realize, like, Well, what do we do if God forbid somebody got the virus at our event, that just wouldn’t be good. So literally, the production guys were getting ready to load up their truck to head to the hotel and they had spent five days building out our event site and we said, Hey, guys, we got to pull it and they’re like, what? So? Yeah, they all unloaded out of the truck and started breaking everything down, we canceled the event and I remember the next morning, sitting down with the guys at the hotel, and I’m like, Guys, at that time, we started getting all of the messages from our clients, hey, this is canceled, this is canceled, this is canceled. We literally went to zero revenue. We had so much stuff on the books, we went to zero revenue and I said to the guys, I’m like, Guys, we got to dive in and figure out, what’s it going to take for us to carry us? Because we figured in March, you know what, let’s figure out six months, right? Six months, we should be out of this and so let’s figure out what it’s going to take for us to be able to get over the hump in six months and we looked at every line item and of course, back then we didn’t know anything about PPE, what the support was going to be from the government. So we had a plan in place, and we were going to have that go a lot of people and, and furlough people, and we were really concerned about what we were going to do? Like, literally, we had, we were this close to looking at potentially being out of business and not being in existence anymore. As an entrepreneur, sometimes the light bulb goes off and we have some relationships that are in the manufacturing side overseas and we have healthcare partners, and we got into selling PPE, so we got into the mix of selling gloves, and gowns and face masks and that really became, we pivoted everybody, we put them into areas that they had never logistics, we did whatever we could to try and figure out what was going to allow us to stay alive during this time and so we had some successes with that and then most recently, we have been working on getting testing launched because testing is such a hotbed right now with where the delay in getting results back. So we have put together a team and we submitted our application to the Department of Health and Human Services and we’re waiting for that to come back. But we’re hoping to get testing launched, the first week of September to help make a difference and get people’s results back a lot quicker.
Norman Farrar 43:20
Hayden, have you ever seen one testing site in Montreal or Toronto?
Hayden Farrar 43:27
Not in person. I know from my perspective in Montreal, they had driving testing sites.
Norman Farrar 43:36
Because I’ve never seen it. Now, again, I’ve only been out three times. But anybody I’ve ever talked to. Nobody has seen a testing site.
Barry Kates 43:45
So they’re, fortunately, part of the reaction here in South Florida is that they took the stadium over and the Army National Guard came in to provide testing. But the problem is that the testing is going to independent labs, and the independent labs are just so bogged down, where you hope to get your results in 48 hours, it’s not taking seven days, 14 days. I can tell you one of our team members went to CVS, got tested, they said he’d have it in 72 hours. He got it 20 days later and obviously all the symptoms went away, and it came back negative 20 days later. So even if he had it, the 20 day lag time, I can tell you that we were in Cape Cod for July 4, and I have a family of five and ironically, or unfortunately, we had found out four days later that somebody in our group had tested positive. So like we’re scrambling now to go get tested. Because we had a flight the next day and we were never going to go ahead and get on a flight knowing that there was the potential that we had. So we literally spent six hours waiting in a walk-in clinic to go ahead and get the test and fortunately, we did the 15 minute antigen test which is the testing we’re planning on doing it and we all came back negative, but it delayed us an extra three days on flying home and I have a six year old. So the nasal swabs are not very comfortable when you’re having to do that. But so we’re hoping that by us coming in and being able to do testing where we can get your results within 15 minutes, is going to help to try and ease some of the pain of the delay and getting results back.
Norman Farrar 45:26
So I’m curious, Barry, you’re one of the first people that I’ve spoken to about traveling. So what was it like, at the airport getting onto a flight, the security? What was that all about?
Barry Kates 45:41
Well, when we traveled during July, it was finally at the point where we’re like, we had to do something like we were just so when you’re in the house for all of these months, right, you just go and stir crazy. So it was just such a pleasure to be able to get away and we went to an environment that was again, remember, as I shared with you growing up my next door neighbor of 55 years, he has a place that in the Cape, so it was just him and his wife and the kids and they had been they had been hunkered down there the entire time as well. So we went to the airport, and I gotta tell you, it wasn’t very, very busy at all, it took us no time to get through TSA. Everybody is of course, wearing masks and then, none of the airport lounges are open. So you’re sitting over by the gate area and when you get on to the plane, they literally at this point, just hand you a bag and in the bag is hand sanitizer, a bottle of water and a little snack bag, some peanuts and they were, the fortunate thing for us is there’s five of us flying. So three of us were together in one row, and then my two girls sat in the row next to us and the middle seat was open. We weren’t with anybody, there were people behind us and America did a pretty good job of trying to keep the middle seats open, to try and help with social distancing. But they were all about keeping masks on and unless you were just drinking from your, a snack or whatnot and the flights we’re not heavy at all. Actually, on the way back, I was more surprised at how much more full they were because there were a lot of middle seats that were taken and at the airports, very, very limited services. Coming back from Boston, there was only one place that was open serving food, and they only had two people working it and all I know is 50 people. So just the mere fact of being able to leave South Florida and go to Cape Cod, where you’re dealing with temperatures that are in the mid 70s and the humidity is not nearly as drastic as it is here. It was a great retreat just to be able to get away and then ironically, my family and I were very sensitive now on the flying side of things just because we came from Florida and because it is such a high, high rate of positive. We’re actually driving to North Carolina to go to Vegas. We rented the Airbnb up in the mountains, and we’re going to drive to the 12 hour drive and yeah, actually we are going out right outside of Asheville. Yeah. So, so yeah, just excited about getting away and getting out of the summer heat here. But, I’ve had chances to fly for business and other meetings to go and fly for business and just, it’s not worth changing it.
Norman Farrar 48:30
Yeah, right. It’s interesting how times have changed. Now, nobody could have predicted COVID but I remember being in the Hong Kong airport and there was a family that was sitting there, a family of four or five and they definitely had the flu and it was like a rainbow of colors flowing out of every orifice of this family and I was nervous. I was really nervous because I just don’t want to catch the flu. I didn’t want to catch a cold. So I went up and I said, and this was after swine. So especially in Hong Kong, they were supposed to be taking these precautions. I felt like I was being interrogated. It was if you don’t want to go on the flight, then leave and it was like, well, this family obviously they have the flu. I’m not trying to rat out anybody. It’s for health, the whole plane and it was look no and they got really, they actually got quite angry and I wasn’t raising my voice. I wasn’t screaming. But I was just stating a fact and it was either accepted or take a hike.
Barry Kates 49:48
I think from our end all we really try and do is to be as sensitive. Follow the rules. We have plenty of hand sanitizers. We have plenty of masks and just do everything that you can to not be contributing to spreading it. That’s why when we were in the Cape, and we were around somebody, and this was four days prior, so the incubation period during that time would have had effects, it would have shown up in your system, if you got tested, not necessarily within four hours, but four days later, what of which is when we all got tested, so we’re all negative and you just feel good about it, but it’s just a very, very trying time of what’s going on and it’s like how you’ve pivoted, we’ve pivoted and others have pivoted to, but there’s so many people that have just not had the chance to pivot and it’s just so sad to see that we can’t be nearly as robust, as we need to be. There’s no bed taxes, there’s no other things going on in the government side of things to help support the local community. So I’ll be really, really happy when this cloud passes us by as I’m sure the rest of the world will as well.
Hayden Farrar 51:05
Hey there guys and gals. That concludes part one of our interview with Barry Kates. Make sure to tune in next time to hear the rest of the interview. As always make sure to subscribe to the podcast. It helps us grow our audience and keeps you in the know of every new episode we put out. That’s enough for me, and I’ll see you next time.
Hayden Farrar 0:01
Hey there, guys and gals, this is your humble producer speaking, just letting that you’re about to listen to part two of our interview with Barry Kates. You haven’t checked out part one yet, make sure to go back and give that a listen. Or don’t, live on the edge. Anyway, that’s enough for me. Enjoy the rest of the episode.
Norman Farrar 0:29
So, is there anything in your business that makes you different from anybody else?
Barry Kates 0:33
Well, it’s funny that you say that because we created our own internal company called Insight, which is hospitality elevated, we saw that there was a huge need in hospitality of really elevating the hospitality experience outside the tent side of things. So we actually have built assets and if you go to our website, innovativegroup.agency, you’ll get to see the cool assets that we have. So we have these awesome, we call them our traditionals and they’re literally like mini houses, they have restrooms, they have outdoor TVs, outdoor bars, they have a kitchen, and they are literally a living room setup on site. So we use those last to Tampa for the college football championship. They were fantastic. We have our own village that we create out of it and then we found that people wanted to be able to be on a roof. So we created our rooftop suites and on the bottom is a bar, a real comfortable area. But the top has a rooftop deck to overlook the events. So our hospitality suites, we’re going to be at the Indy 500 part of college football like really, really cool assets. So we built those, we own them. But some of the other things that we have is we have a draft, which is our fire truck and it’s got taps on both sides. It’s got two 1500 pounds smokers for barbecue and we take those to all kinds of really cool events. But the thing that we’re really excited about is Maximus. Maximus is our culinary entertainment trailer. If you looked at the professional kitchen, that is, that’s a part of it right now. It could feed 3000 people, huge video walls. Absolutely. So for your party Norm, we can go ahead and throw the biggest party that you want and you already got the kitchen. But what was interesting about it is that we realized how important the culinary spaces are these days and when we built it, we got hired by Fox and Maximus went on the road with Gordon Ramsay as his kitchen for 24 hours to hell and back. So if you see the show, you’ll see Maximus wrapped, obviously 24 hours to hell. Maximus is his platform for being able to teach the culinary team from these restaurants. So the premise of Gordon Ramsay show’s 24 hours to hell and back is it goes into a restaurant and he has 24 hours to convert it from the time that he steps in there and what they do with Maximus, is he they take the entire culinary staff, and they’re working on the menu on Maximus so that when the store gets open from all of its new decor and new kitchen, new smallwares, the culinary staff has already been trained on the new menu and Maximus is is the breeding ground for that happening. So our X Factor from the experiential side is we have these awesome hospitality assets that we own and we deploy to really make a turnkey hospitality village so to speak and we’re really, really excited about that.
Hayden Farrar 3:38
Hey, Barry had a question about that. Actually, when I saw Maximus specifically, when you sent that over. Like what’s the process like for putting together something like Maximus? Is there like some Steve Job figure kind of spouting out ideas and then the engineers kind of go to work or how does that happen?
Barry Kates 3:58
One is we work with a whole bunch of consultants to make sure that we have the best of the best and I think the thing that really resonated was that Gordon Ramsay actually does a tour for us and it’s captured in our video and he kind of talks about the kitchen equipment and the refrigeration that’s got beer taps. So having that kitchen available, where he does the tour and talks about how awesome it is and it’s mobile and we’ve had Guy Fieri work on it. We’ve had a lot of the major celebrity chefs, we do a lot of stuff with Andrew Zimmern on it. So it’s been awesome to be able to watch these high profile chefs be able to just go ahead and work in this remote environment on Maximus and we have a huge jumbotron amazing sound system. It really is and we used it at Super Bowl live this year. They actually brought on demonstrations with top local chefs and they paired them with athletes and they were making all kinds of great meals for the folks that came out to Super Bowl live that was free to the community. So really just fun stuff again, like we talked about, loving what we do, having the ability to be creative, and then be able to put these assets to work, it really is a flag and the team’s efforts.
Norman Farrar 5:21
So I got a question for you. So we’ve got a lot of people here, very successful entrepreneurs and a lot of the people that we’ve talked to said that, hey, look, I’ve either gone to community college had like a lot of practical work, I’ve gone to university and found out that, hey, out of the books, and going over to the practical side, I’d rather do the practical side, or I learned it on my own. Now you’re one that has gone through the system, gone through you in MIT?
Barry Kates 5:56
Yeah, I did the MIT master’s program through an entrepreneurs organization.
Norman Farrar 6:02
So it’s a little bit higher level. Okay, but still, what do you think about somebody gaining education on the streets, compared to going to university? Is there a difference?
Barry Kates 6:14
I think so. So again, I’m speaking on behalf of myself. So when I finally graduated from the University of Miami, I was a Psych in a marketing major and a minor in PR and what I realized, though, in the event business, a lot of it really is just the real life experience, you’re not going to learn that. You learn textbook things on certain things. But the bottom line is, when you’re building out an experiential event, putting on a festival, a concert, a VIP hospitality program, half the battle is just having good common sense and I would tell you learning from the streets, I think that my pedigree of coming from the Budweiser side of business where we did events all the time, and Super Bowls, and all star games and hospitality programs, and it just they were the king, the king of doing those kind of things. So, for me, being immersed in that really allowed me to hone my skills that I’ve been able to go ahead and take in and drive and make better. I think also from being an entrepreneur, is the things that I learned in the corporate side of things, that red tape, and the disconnect, and communication, those are things that we just don’t do in our own company. We really want the company, like a family, we value our people, we have great core values, we communicate, people can call me on my cell phone, they don’t need to make an appointment and go through three different people to get me on the agenda. It’s just, it doesn’t work like that. It’s about customer service, it’s about access and I’m not afraid to do anything that I ask anybody else to do and I’ve done all those jobs. So for me, I don’t put myself on a pedestal, I don’t make my team go two days before market to make sure everything’s all set and pick me up. It’s just, we don’t run it like that. We’re a family. We love doing things collectively and collaboratively. We work on events where we’re bringing everybody from around the country to work on events, like we just did Super Bowl live down here for when the Super Bowl was in South Florida last this past February and we brought our entire team in from around the country and it was just a great camaraderie and we assign people to different tasks and that’s really what I love about the entrepreneurial spirit. I love being able to watch, I love grabbing kids out of college, they come with no bad habits, we can teach them our way of doing it. I’ve realized that there are three big things and in why people lose good people, the first off is that there’s not an understanding of people’s career path. So like, for instance, and I use Jarred as an example. Jared and I have been together for 20 plus years, five years ago, we landed a big client, and we can no longer be the mom and pop operation, we really had to go ahead and do. We had to do a business plan, we had to do all kinds of systems and processes. Because as an entrepreneur, you’re kind of doing things the way that you think that you want to do things. But the reality of it is, is that when you get to a certain level, you have to build in certain systems and processes. Even in the HR world, just to make sure that everybody’s protected and that there’s a direction and everybody has the understanding where the direction is. So, Jared and I had sat down with the team. It was probably seven years ago, eight years ago, we mapped out a five year plan and we just keep revising our five year plan when we go ahead and bring everybody together, typically in October or November, but part of Jarred’s deal was is that he wants to be president in the company so so we we built the plan around five years to get him to to become president which supposed to take shape at the end of this year. But what I wanted to get back to was that if you understand your team’s career path, and then you value them and people just want an Attaboy, they want to just know that you appreciate what they’re doing. So a thank you here, a thank you there and then if you compensate them, if you take care of those three things, you really have a great opportunity of keeping your people for a very, very long time and I can tell you, when we go, when we hire people, we really look to make lifers out of them. Because you invest time and teaching them and training them and making sure that they understand your core values, and then just to lose them three years later to somebody else, why did you, why did we lose that person? Now, we lose people because sometimes, there’s an opportunity that’s far greater in the world that they’re living now that they’ve uncovered a passion that may we may not be able to fill today or tomorrow or a year from now. So those people absolutely want them to be able to fly but, but because we were a card and really trying to understand, where people want to grow, that really has been a big success, and us being able to retain our people, and have our people grow with us, because they love to grow as well into different areas. We’re all about helping them learn and expand beyond what they think they know and that provides great growth. So really, really important on our end, is those factors is that when we’re bringing somebody on, we really work hard to try and make lifers out of them.
Norman Farrar 11:28
How do you retain your employees?
Barry Kates 11:30
Well, I think the most important thing is, one is that you have an environment that matches to where their needs are, right. But I think the three core things behind being able to retain people is one is understanding their career path. Second thing is valuing them, giving them the Attaboy and then the third thing is compensating them. Most people leave their jobs, because one of those three things is not clicking well for them. They are either stuck in a job that they don’t see themselves getting out of, or they’re not valued, where they don’t get an Attaboy, or they feel like they’re underpaid. So those are the three things that are that we have found to be the success as to how we like to keep and retain our people.
Norman 12:14
Okay, so I’m really interested in your view and I talked to a lot of entrepreneurs, and they’re undercapitalized. That’s one of the worst things that you can do getting into business, but entrepreneurs or entrepreneurs, they’re trying to either get contractors or bring on employees, and they’re trying to do it on the cheap and so a lot of the times those people will fail just for those reasons that you just talked about. But is there anything that you can do to talk to an employee or a contractor, get them to understand that, look, we’re starting here, but this is where I want you to go to get the buy in, it’s all about the buy in. But if I can’t pay somebody, let’s say $50,000, but I can pay 35, big chunk of change. Is there anything that you could advise?
Barry Kates 13:05
Yeah, there’s, there’s two things here. One is, I think communication is the most important thing. So if you look at a company that’s struggling, right, so like, we clearly went through our struggles, but when you have an open dialogue with your team, and everybody knows what’s going on, then they realize that it’s not independent to them, that it’s a company wide thing and because they’re already invested in the company, they’re willing to make the sacrifices. They’re willing to jump into the foxhole with you until the wars finished. So I think that that’s one component, because I think that where disconnects come in, is that employees, sometimes seeing their superiors with certain luxuries, or doing certain things that are luxury in law, look at that person, becomes a jealousy kind of thing from that perspective, or maybe it just doesn’t the optics don’t look the way that they should, right. But if you communicate with your team and say, Hey, guys, we got cash flow issues this morning, this afternoon, or this week, or this month, and we need to do this in order to get to the other side of the rainbow. The thing that I think specifically with our company, is that everybody is involved in the planning side of things. So what I do is it’s very, very simple, from my end, is that Jared and Michael are really the leaders in our company and what they’ll do is they’ll present to me where they think our revenue would be for the year, and they kind of give me a range and then they give me the backup as to how they feel that we’re going to get to those numbers and what I do is I agree on where I want to be from a revenue perspective based on what they shared with me. So, let’s just use easy numbers sake, right? So let’s say that they say, Hey, we’re gonna do a range of two to 4 million right and now I could say, guys, I don’t like your plan, I want to be at 6 million, go back and redo the plan and help us get to 6 million. Now they may come back and say, you know what, we can’t get the 6 million, we can only get the five. So I put them through the exercise of doing that, but they, they’re so seasoned, that they know really, they have such a wonderful pulse on where our businesses are and where the propensity of it is. So they’ll present a number, I’ll agree to the number and once I agree to the number, we all know where we want to be from a profit perspective, then what they do is they go ahead, and they get together with the rest of their teams and they now own the business. So when you’re invested in the business, it’s not like I say, Hey, guys, I need $4 million and I got to be at this percentage on the bottom line and this is what I want you to do and this is what I want you to do. At that point in time, they’re just soldiers, what we try and create as entrepreneurs within our own business, because then they’re accountable to the business and then they’re more invested in the business, because they’re the ones that are coming up with the plan from the beginning. So those are things that are really, really important on our end and my management style, I’m not a micromanager. It’s my job to find the best tools to provide our team so that I can allow them to maximize their success. The other thing too, that I think that provides a great opportunity within our business, specifically to our company is is that one, it takes a special person to work remote, because we have been working remotely, we only have two physical offices, we have a physical office in Atlanta with Jared out of, and then we have a physical office here in Miami, where I’m out of everybody else really works remote and so it takes a special person to be able to get up in the morning and get to work versus going to a physical office and spending nine to five in an office. I think the thing that makes it really, really attractive on our end, is that we believe in taking care of family first. So for instance, Jarred used to love to be a lacrosse coach for his son. So he would dip out at four o’clock, right, maybe finish at 7, 7:30. No, great, fantastic. But he knew that if we had a proposal due to the client The next morning, and he had to work at 10 o’clock at night, then he would do it.
Barry Kates 17:14
I think that that’s having freedom and flexibility versus pigeonholing people into, Hey, you got to be in the office by nine, you can leave at five o’clock. You get your one hour lunch, we provide all of the necessary free flexible time, being able to work remotely, if you got to take your daughter to the doctor, your daughter’s ballet event, whatever that is, we’re very proud of that. Because we know that if you take care of the family at home, then the things in the workfront make it that much easier. So we do that. The other thing too, that we instituted a couple years ago is we got rid of PTO. So, if you want to take a month and a half off, you take a month and a half off. Now granted, you got to work with your supervisor to make sure that nothing falls through the cracks. But the non PTO policy now allows people, even from a mental perspective, I haven’t seen anybody in our company take five weeks or six weeks or eight weeks or even four weeks off. They’ll take a week here or a week there. So nobody really abuses it. But I think a lot of it is really just the mental side of things. Whereas companies like, wow, if I really want to take a month off, I could take a month off if I needed to do that. So I think of the things that we try to do as a company, keeping that in a family environment, allowing you the freedom and flexibility to do the things that you need to do. Knowing that you pick the time to make sure that the customer is taken care of and the way that we anticipate it and expect the customer to be taken care of. I think that goes a long way.
Norman Farrar 18:42
Hayden, I’ve got an idea. Because every podcast that we do, from athletes, celebrity entrepreneurs, just interesting people, they always have tips like that. I think we should start creating a list to create a book on all these great tips that great successful people do. I’m serious, though. You’re laughing? I’m going to throw that out yet another thing that you can do,
Barry Kates 19:16
But think about it, Norman and Hayden, I mean, the bottom line is that people who work they, look, yes, they’re doing it to make a living. But it shouldn’t be a job. It should be something that you just love to do and when you’re passionate about it, it’s not really a job or work, right and because of it, you don’t look at the clock. There are many times that when we’re working on an event that will work 18 hours and then have to be up the next morning at five to do another 18 hours. But it’s the Mojo in the juice of being in it with everybody together. That is just kind of like yeah, the hours are long, and you invest a lot of time in it. But, we’re so fortunate that we get to be in such a diverse world between events and entertainment and sporting and VIP hospitality programs. It’s not everyday like having to go to work at a retail store, and you’re only selling clothes or hardware. So for me, I just look at it as the diversification and the things that we do, really allow us to have a lot of freedom and flexibility, really allow us to just exude the things that we just love to do and it reflects, its passion, right? Entrepreneurs, it’s all about passion, find your passion, right, like I shared with you before, and then the money, the money follows,
Norman Farrar 20:38
Talking about employees, contractors, it’s, I love listening to what you said, because I hear so many times, and I hear it at events, which really bothers me, when you’ve got these so called gurus are up there on stage, telling you basically how to manipulate contractors in the Philippines. Oh, and they’re happy about it, oh, I got them down to two bucks an hour, I got them down to, whatever it is. Yeah and they’ve got to work the weekends, and especially in the Philippines, 12 hours difference. So I got them working at night to meet my time for Eastern Standard Time. It drives me nuts, I actually just want to turn these guys off. When I hear this, like I know for us, I’m not preaching that I’m any better. But our company, by the way, so we have mostly contractors, very few employees, mostly contractors and we know that if we don’t treat these contractors properly, the next person that goes on to Upwork, is going to grab them for 10 cents more, but you have to pay people, they’ve got a family, they’ve got to support their family and if you’re just trying to nickel and dime them, first of all, they’re going to move on and then the other things, you’ve got to provide them with the right tools. So what we try to do is give them if they don’t have an iPhone, give them the iPhone, give them the internet. If they don’t have a good computer, get them a computer. If it’s the Philippines, and it’s over a period of a year, buy them a generator. But I know I just sound a little frustrated, but I am when it comes to people saying take advantage, go over there basically take advantage of somebody, get them to work for you, because they need the dollar. You talked about it earlier on. You don’t want to see somebody leave after a few months, and you’ve invested all this time and training and that’s the same way that I look at our contractor, they’re part of a family, if you treat them properly, they’ll be part of your family as long as you want. Now, contractors in our business is our lifeblood, we couldn’t survive without those contractors and to see people just take advantage of them and there’s so many of these people that have this mindset that that’s what you have to do.
Barry Kates 22:59
Maybe to add on to that Norm, loyalty breeds loyalty. I realized it a long time ago. When I worked at Publix, I started cleaning toilets and bagging groceries and so you get an appreciation for the guy who’s after you now like for me now being a seasoned entrepreneur, I go to Publix and I see the guy it’s always a Hello, and thank you and those little things you never know what’s going on in their day and just an ounce of gratitude, just to know that they’re acknowledged and it has all the ability for change. But I want to talk to you a little bit about what you talked about from the contractor side. First of all, for us, we’re big on hiring everybody. So we don’t use a whole lot of subcontracting, we make everybody really W two employees. So bring them under our fold, teach them our core values, let them be a part of us, they’re representing us. So it’s really, really important for us, for them to be a part of our team, the contractors that we do so let me give an example. So we have a great relationship. When I worked at Budweiser, our receptionist, Anna decided to open up her own sign company with her husband. Well, we’ve been doing business with her for 20 years. Now, she’s not the least, she’s not the most expensive, but she’s not the least expensive. She’s right there in the middle and she always gives us great pricing because of the longevity of history that we’ve had with it. But, people say to me, Well, I can beat her prices and I can do that. But what, if I get an emergency call from a client at 10 o’clock at night, and I need something for Sunday morning at seven o’clock in the morning, I can call her at home, they’ll go into the office, they’ll open up for me, and they’ll get my stuff done so that I could take care of my client for the next morning. That to me, is the value. It’s not about the money. It’s more about how our relationship just intertwines and I know that she would have my back and because of that, that means I can say yes to my client and I can deliver it to them in maybe most circumstances where other people wouldn’t be able to deliver for them or say well I can’t get anything done on Sunday, everybody’s closed. I can do it on Monday. So we’re very, very loyal to the group of people that we’ve been working with for 10, 15, 20 years, because we know that they have our back and we have theirs. Loyalty breeds loyalty.
Norman Farrar 25:18
Right. Very good. Alright. So now time for a tough one. I want to know about your biggest struggle, how you overcame it, and what you learn from it?
Barry Kates 25:33
Well, I can tell you, as an entrepreneur, as most entrepreneurs will tell you, it’s not just one single thing. I can tell you, the thing that probably resonates the most with me is that we were looking at buying a business and we had invested a lot of money, well over seven figures to get it to the finish line and we were content and trying to get it done and get it done and get it done and we continue to throw more dollars at it to get it done to get it done. Because we really believed that it had the ability to be coming, just such a great complementary business to what we were doing. It finally got to the point where we had so much invested in it. But we realized that we were never going to get to the finish line, no matter how emotional, we were attached to it and the sad thing behind it was that we were doing a deal with a relationship, right. So when you do deals with relationships, you don’t really think about the things that are not going to materialize through the relationship. So what ended up happening was, we ended up clipping the cord, we took a huge financial loss, I mean, huge, I mean, put us in debt, we’re gonna like we were literally going to have to unbury ourselves. So the learned lesson behind it was that I realized that the amount of energy that went into that, if I would now just refocus my energy into the growth piece, that we would be able to look at this in the rearview mirror, recover, and move forward and we did, it took us years. But nevertheless, we realized that we were able to come out of it and recover, we’re able to grow from it and the big learning lesson behind it was, was to make sure that you get your operating agreement or partnership agreement or your legal documents and play with the relationship before $1 is exchanged and we live by that. Moving forward, I would tell you from our end, from a business perspective, we’re not conservative, we love the risk side of things. We love being a part of things that we can see that are visionary in the future. So I don’t overanalyze a lot of things. I go by God, I go by the people but that was a really, really, really hard lesson to learn and not only that, though, but it was coupled in 2008, when the whole market tanked. So you’re trying to get this business off the ground, and you’re trying to launch it, and you’re throwing a bunch of money at it, more money, you’re going into your reserves, because you really believe in it and you don’t want to give up. It’s like giving CPR to somebody when unfortunately, they had already had their last breath and there was just no way that I wanted to give it up, I was too mentally attached to it, realized that it really could be just a wonderful asset to what we were doing and then you come to the realization that you know what, this thing’s dead, and you’re not gonna be able to revive it and you just got to bootstrap it and pick it up, move on and we did, and I’ll tell you another time for us was during the whole COVID. Realistically, we had 120 plus employees, the company and we went to zero revenue, like what we’re going to do, and fortunately, being able to pivot into the PPE world and utilizing those relationships, that you never thought that you’d be using your manufacturing relationship in China for what and now all of a sudden, they become a key stakeholder in helping you from your supply chain side of things and being able to support the health care providers, and we were really just doing it to help our health care suppliers, our providers, our partners, we weren’t trying to become middlemen and put up websites and sell stuff. It was really, they were really struggling with getting stuff to their frontline workers and we were really happy that we could be part of that now. Realizing what testing is in the bottleneck that is and we want to help clear it. So I mean, we’re experts in execution, right. So what’s the difference between executing an event, the festival, hospitality program versus executing testing, granted different compliance that’s new to us, but we hired experts. We have a laboratory director who’s a medical who’s an anesthesiologist by trade and also runs a substance abuse facility and then we hire a wonderful person who specializes in health care risk management and compliance. So, go out and find the best people and bring them on. I don’t pretend to know it, I believe in just hiring great people, people that are smarter than I am, that I can learn from, that just add wonderful spokes to the wheel to make it that much stronger. That’s how we are surviving, believe it or not.
Norman Farrar 30:25
So cut bait and the other thing that again, we talked about earlier on, is that you turned on a dime.
Barry Kates 30:35
I think though, being in the executional world, and our marketing side of things is that I think that the clients are always changing their mind are things the environment changes. I think that’s part of our x factor is that we really can pivot quickly, and we understand what it is like to be accommodating into pivot. So it really, as part of our DNA, we love the challenge of that. We would much rather a client come to us and give us 30 days to put on their event, versus having a year and a half to plan for it. Because, just the corporate culture can appreciate, it’s got to go through 10 layers just to approve the font, right. But when you will have a month, you’re like, hey, I need to know what the font size is, by the end of the day today. Otherwise, you’re backing us up, and they want, they want to get it off their plate too. So we love being in the hunt, of getting stuff done quick.
Norman Farrar 31:24
Now, on the other side of the fence, what do you consider your greatest success?
Barry Kates 31:30
I think the greatest success for me is being able to watch my people grow within our organization. When I started the company in 1999, it was just myself and Jared, and then for many, many years, we just always said like, we don’t want a big company, we don’t want to have 20 people. We don’t want to do anything that was like what it was like in corporate culture, let’s run it as a family, let’s make a good living, let’s have a lot of fun, let’s enjoy the events that we do. We picked up American Express, fortunately, as a client, and that provided some great growth and then we had the opportunity of picking up chase as a business opportunity and at that point in time, we were going to well exceed our 20 people. We’re now going to move into over 100 when that happens, it changes things right, you got to put on your big boy pants, and you got to have infrastructure and so we ended up hiring a VP of finance and HR and now we have all the the employee handbook and we have a PEO and we have great insurance for our people. We do the things that we want to do to really take care of them and embody them to make them feel like they are part of the innovative group family. So yeah, that’s kind of where things have landed these days.
Norman Farrar 32:49
Well congrats.
Norman Farrar 32:53
It’s funny, too, it’s a small world, because I had no idea before the call. We run in similar circles. So you actually did an event for a good friend of mine, Colin Campbell with .Club.
Barry Kates 33:05
So, Colin being the consummate entrepreneur that he is, I just love his journey and he was able to get into the.com game and he actually won the bid for clubs. So, him obviously understanding our scope of being able to do really cool events, tasked us with coming up with his launch party. So we cut a deal with 50 Cent and because 50 Cent had that hot song in the club, right? How appropriate. So what we did is we paired up with our good friends from the Tao Lavo group that we have a great relationship with from doing ultra and we did this awesome event in New York and we brought in 50 Cent and that’s how it all became .Club and 50 cent had his .Club domain and it was just an awesome opportunity. So, Colin got to bring in all the key stakeholders, and we had a private event for 300 people to launch .Club and there’s, it’s continued to be very, very, very successful.
Norman Farrar 34:09
Yeah, I got a little tick that I never got my invite all I was calling, giving me a Facebook Live or not a Facebook Live but a FaceTime.
Barry Kates 34:19
I had the invitation list and I went back to look at it, you were invited. But the problem was you gave us an old address and by the time we got the return back, the event had passed. So what I would suggest the next I’m joking, I’m joking, but the next I wanted to see at least I wanted to make you feel good. I wanted to at least make you feel good right to make you feel that you weren’t shunned from the list.
Norman Farrar 34:39
I was for a second.
Norman Farrar 34:45
So look, we’re at that time. We’ve talked for a little while here. Great story. At the end of every podcast. I always like to turn to the guest and say do you know a guy?
Barry Kates 34:59
Oh, I know a lot. Guys, I think, yes, I do. I know guys, I know gals. I have a guy who has a great journey and ironically, we only became friends within the past three months through a relationship. So Matt, the Phoebo from fan summit is somebody that I think that you would have a great conversation with. An entrepreneur in his own right, comes from the college sports world, watched how it’s changed dramatically and we’re actually doing some partnership synergistic things together. So I think that would be a great guy for you to know.
Norman Farrar 35:37
Well, that sounds great. Can’t wait to reach out to them. So Barry, thank you so much for being on the podcast.
Barry Kates 35:45
Great being with you and Hayden, really appreciate that.
Norman Farrar 35:47
Alright, thank you.
Hayden Farrar 35:50
That concludes part two of our interview with Barry Kates. Make sure to tune in next time for an interview with Jonathan Cronstedt. Also known as J Klein. He is the founder of Kajabi and was involved with digital marketer one point. We end up having a succinct and vulnerable conversation of how he came to be at the forefront of one of the top education platforms in the market today. Pretty incredible. As always, make sure to subscribe to the podcast. It helps us grow our audience and keeps you in the know of every new episode.
Hayden Farrar 36:29
That’s enough for me and I’ll see you next time.
