Episode 12: Starting Points | Montecristo White Series

Yo yo yo yo yo. Welcome back to Sticks and Stones podcast. Sticks and Stones is where we bring serious cigar smokers together with serious serious dealmakers. And today we're talking about starting points. And it wouldn't be sticks and stones if we didn't start out with what we're enjoying today. And today for starting points we are talking about the Monte Cristo white series. Monte Cristo is a great brand. It's a great cigar company. And this episode is all about starting out. Starting points. Where do you start? You know, the greatest athletes known to man didn't start out dunking professional basketball hoops right out of the gate. They didn't start breaking world speed records. You have to start out somewhere. And that's in everything. I'm also enjoying some ketogenic friendly whipped cream over a hot espresso shot. So, Ready Whip makes a zero sugar whipped cream. I think this is very fitting for this cigar. So, you have decided you want to pick up the passion. You decided you wanted to pick up the passion, the desire, albeit the hobby. You want to be a member of the brothership of the leaf. How do you do it? Where do you start? Most people's recommendations are going to be a very very mild cigar and I agree with that. Everybody's opinion of what that should be is very different. There are a myriad of options which is why for this episode I picked the Monte Cristo white series. Monte Cristo is first of all one of my favorite Cuban cigars is the Monte Cristo number two. They are a brand synonymous with quality and consistency, which is something that you want in a stick that you're going to be picking up and smoking for the first time. I mean, Ashton's a great stick. There are Shade Connecticut, ton of great products out there, but you want something that you're going to be able to ease your way into. You don't want to start off smoking cigars with a really really heavy bold, you know, medium to bold body cigar because let's face it, I mean, it it's taken a lot of time and many cigars over the years to build up a tolerance to the stronger tobacos. You don't walk into the gym and start bench pressing 385, right? That would be that would be insanity. That would be crazy. You don't walk into a jiujitsu school and start rolling with black belts and beating them. That's not happening. It's It's the very same with It's the very same with cigars. You don't walk into a cigar shop and pick up the biggest, darkest, strongest Girka cigar made because you're going to take one puff of that. You're going to, you know, probably call Ralph and you're never going to pick up a cigar ever again. So, you have to ease your way into things. Guys, everything that I'm comparing this to is nowhere near going to the gym and building your your body up to to bench press 385 lbs. It's nowhere near strenuous as becoming a black belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu. We're talking about cigar smoking, but you have to think about a few things before you get into it. So, you definitely want to pinpoint some of the cigars that you're going to want to start enjoying in the beginning. The, as I mentioned, the Ashton Connecticut Shade, my father's cigar, they have a Connecticut Shade rapper cigar, phenomenal. The Monte Crystal White series, a lot of the Monte Crystal stuff. Factory Smokes by Drew Estates, also phenomenal. Surplus by CAO, phenomenal. They have a they have a Connecticut shade as well. And then you can, you know, up your game into the Habano and, you know, Maduro and just keep getting stronger and stronger. But for a starting point, I would personally recommend that you start with a Connecticut shade. And I'm not alone in that. Now, you can I still smoke Connecticut shades, but that's kind of like my morning coffee and morning smoke. That's that's what I would But it's not to say once you are in the medium and full body sticks that you stop smoking the Connecticut shades. You you don't I mean you never you never stop in this thing that we call ours. You never stop doing what you love. If this is something that you've seen people enjoy and you want to be a part of that, that's great. But most of the people that do this, and I'm not talking about the people that are like once in a great while cigar smokers. I'm talking about regular cigar smokers that are at a weekly basis. People men and women who are smoking on a weekly basis. This is a passion. And let's let's talk about accuchants, things that accompany a cigar. It could be, you know, I highly do not recommend I do not recommend smoking on an empty stomach when you first start out. That can mess you up pretty good. But, you know, I recommend either going with a straight cut like I do. That's my preferred. but could be a little much for someone just starting out. So, you do have a um a cigar punch that just allows just enough little baby circle in order for you to get the draw out without having a whole bunch of tobacco in your mouth cuz it's inevitably going to happen. You're going to cut a cigar wrong, you know, in the beginning stages of of this. So, be mindful of of how you're going to cut the stick. Be mindful of eating beforehand. But there's a lot of different ways to enjoy some things. You know, there there still are some restaurants in the country where you can smoke and eat. They're very, very few. I know of only one in New Jersey. Shout out to Jamie Cigar Bar, but some people have a little shakuderie while they're smoking. Some people will have a big steak beforehand or during depending on, you know, your your mojo for that day. You can enjoy cigars with coffee, with rum, with gin, with scotch, with bourbon, with Irish whiskey, with wine. I've had cigars and wine many, many times. There's no written rule to say you have to have this with this. It's kind of it's your own thing. Like you do what you want to do. If you want to drink with a Red Bull, great. If you want to drink a vodka Red Bull with a cigar, it's all up to you. It's what you want to do. How can any one person tell you how to enjoy something? They can't. Suggestions, of course. As somebody who has done this for a long time, can you make suggestions on how to enjoy something? Absolutely. Can you give some pointers, life experiences? Sure. Start off with a a shallower stick, meaning a a lighter, not as heavy cigar, and then work your way up from there and work out the different types of cuts you like and the different shapes. I mean, these these things cigars have so many shapes, so many sizes, so many ring gauges. Most cigars have multiple vitas. And a vah is a size. It's the It's the length. It's the shape. It's the uh the ring gauge. Inspect. Check it out. Figure out what you like. And then when you hit that sweet spot, enjoy that for a while. And then inevitably things are going to start changing. And then you're going to, you know, pick something else that you like. And that will be your new sweet spot. And you just, you know, you keep evolving until you find what you like. But just like a starting point in everything, there's a starting point in business. And I love the entrepreneurial spirit and I love entrepreneurs in general. But I have to say that in the United States of America, nobody beats our entrepreneurial spirit, there have been more entrepreneurs in this country and have developed this country and evolved this country more than any other country in the entire world. We are one of the globe's powerhouses and that is for a good reason. We have a we have many many people who have started businesses that have become global leaders in commerce in products in services. And it doesn't just start off like that. Like you don't just wake up one day and build Amazon from the ground up. You don't wake up one day and build Oracle from the ground up. You don't wake up one day and build International Paper from the ground up. It just doesn't happen. or CSX Railway or all of you know any of these huge companies. How do you start? There's a couple of different ways. You can start off with a solid business plan and you generate a business plan by basically putting down, you know, your idea, what your idea is for your business. Figure out how you're going to make money, where your target audience is, what your projected incomes would be for the first initially probably 5 years is about standard. You know what your incomes are going to be for the first 5 years, what your expenses are going to be for the first 5 years. When are you going to start to turn a dollar? And now all of that sounds great and anybody with an active imagination could come up with a business plan. But here's the key to a business plan. The key to a business plan is you have to put some background, some investigation, some research into your business plan. Because I will bet you anything that you want, whoever you present your business plan to is 99.9% who you're going to try to get some money from as a loan or as an equity share in your business or whatever. They are going to do the research and they are going to find out if your idea is legit or complete [ __ ] Did you just cook that up out of your mind's eye or, you know, did you have a wild dream one night and and put that down on paper and call that your business plan? Or did you actually roll up your sleeves and get dirty and figure out all of your demographics? Who is your target audience? What is the cost for for client acquisition? What would be your cost in the product? What is it going to cost you to ship that product and get it down to your door or get it to the customer's door? Get it to distribution's door and then the customer's door. You know, your investors, bankers, private equity, they're going to want to know that you have done that research. They don't want to have to second guessess you cuz if they do, if they start secondguessing you, kiss your money goodbye. Not happening. Now there's a really really old school way to do things starting off and that is start small and build from there. If you have an idea and you have a way of doing something, you can start that idea and then start making money from that idea and start reinvesting the money into the business that you want to build. And let me just take it from here. Let's just say it's a landscaping business. It's pretty clear-cut. It's pretty I'm not going to say it's easy, but it's an easy business model to figure out. You buy a lawnmower, you buy a weed whacker, you buy a blower. It's relatively low capital cost. Low capital. It's a low capital investment. You've got $1,000 or less. You have a trailer. You can buy a trailer on Facebook Marketplace for a couple hundred bucks. You load all that stuff up. You load all your crap in that trailer and you go doortodoor and you offer your services for landscaping services, your landscaping work, and you start charging people per month or per week to cut their lawn for them. Someone always will need somebody to do their work for them because they're busy or whatever reason. You have your capital expenditure, call it 2 grand. You want to charge somebody 20 bucks a week to cut their grass. So, for every 10 lawns is 200 bucks and a 100 lawns is 2,000 bucks. You are going to cut 100 lawns and you've made your money back. Once you've made your money back, now you can start reinvesting in the company. Buy another piece of equipment, buy a bigger trailer, buy a bigger lawn mower. Now you can cut bigger lawns with that equipment, make more money, pay the cost for the equipment, and now put into some sort of advertising. Now you can throw the net out a lot further because you're not just knocking door to door. Put somebody on the phone, maybe one of your kids, put someone on the phone to call people and see if they can get you some business. Eventually through lather, rinse, repeat, you keep doing that and reinvesting into the company, reinvesting into your landscaping service. Now you start becoming a bigger and bigger concern. Now you become maybe one of your small town's bigger landscaping providers. And now you grow out of that and now you go into become one of the city's bigger landscaping providers. Now you're one of the county's bigger landscaping providers. Now you're doing landscaping for the entire state. Maybe you win a contract to do a lot of the highways. Anything can scale. Anything can snowball. It just depends on how well you are at thinking things through. Now, I will tell you this that a lot of businesses, you could have the best idea in the world, you could have the best product in the world. If you don't have a good sales team, you are not going to go anywhere. It will always take people or machines, but it takes some sort of programming from a human being to program a machine to market for you. There will always be someone that needs to be at the helm of a sales and marketing department that can generate sales goals, dedicate specific people to markets and demographics, territories, sales territories, if you will. people who can come up with marketing designs and marketing ideas and campaigns and all sorts of different digital advertising and and print advertising depending on what what business you're in. There's always going to be a sales and marketing team that you'll need in order to grow the business. In the beginning, you can because we're talking about starting points, you can do it all yourself. It's not unlike real estate. in real estate when you whether you are residential or commercial or a little bit of both, read every book that you want out there, you know, the million-dollar real estate agent uh by Gary Keller. If you want to read any other, you know, the first year, the first year in real estate, anyone will tell you prospect, prospect, prospect. And what does that mean? That means cold calling, sending out letters, sending out postcards, sending out handwritten notes, recording a podcast, writing an article. All of this stuff is prospecting. You are casting out the net. You're throwing out the net as far and wide as you possibly can. And you are going to make a lot of calls and you're going to outreach to a lot of people. And you're going to visit a lot of different places for networking events. And you're going to join in on everything you possibly can. And if you want to be a smart and intuitive real estate professional, you will plug into your community. You will join as many community events as you can, as many clubs as you can, and you want to get the finger on the pulse of your community. Maybe you've lived in that community all of your life, and you know it very well. Regardless of what it is, you want to cater to your community. You're going to get out there and you are going to show a lot of properties. You are going to meet a lot of people. The first thing is first, you want to get out there and you want to try to get listings. That is going to be incredibly difficult on your own because you have no track record. No one knows who the hell you are or what the hell you're capable of. So aligning yourself with a brokerage that has some pretty heavy hitters as agents or brokers is a really good idea. You in a sense want to ride those coattails because you have no experience. So you want to align yourself with a team or with a broker. grab a coach or a mentor, hire them and now you can use their expertise and now you can use their knowledge and you could ride those coattailes and say, "Hey, you know, I am a new um agent. I'm a new commercial real estate broker, but I'm with XYZ team or I'm partnered with XYZ person." and you want to be at bat as many times, you lose 100% of the swings you never swing at. Let me rephrase that. You lose 100% of the balls you never swing at. So, you want to get out there and you want to swing at as many fly balls as you possibly can. In the interim of swinging for those pitches, you are going to run into potential principal clients. And they may not be listings. They may be buyers. They may be tenants. Hey, I need to rent this space for XYZ business. Hey, I need to buy a building for my, you know, ABC business. You are going to align with that person. You are going to get an agreement signed with that person for your services as in almost every state. Well, every state does require it now that you have an agreement with that buyer or that tenant. And then you want to go out and you want to find them some some property. You want to do what you say you're going to do when you say you're going to do it. The follow through. Follow through and follow up is huge in any business, but especially in real estate. When you say you're going to do something, do it. And then you find them the spaces that they want. And then you have to start your negotiating experience. If you have never negotiated before, you're going to have to work on that. And I can go into this whole thing and this could be hours and hours, but there's a starting point for everything. And no, it's not going to be luxurious. No, it's not going to be easy. No, it's not going to be handed to you. And it is not going to be the best time in the world. But those experiences, those crawling to the top, climbing the ladder, whatever adage you want to use, is going to build character in you. And it's going to build perseverance in you. And you're going to be able to handle anything that life throws at you. And every assignment that you get, every experience you go through, you're going to learn from it. And you're going to put that experience and you're going to use it as a tool. And you're going to sock that tool away in your toolbox. And one day when you arrive at a situation where something like that pops up again, you're going to pull that tool out of a drawer and you're going to use that tool to get yourself out of that or your client out of that problem. That is life as a business person, as an entrepreneur. If you don't want to be an entrepreneur, if you don't want to run your own show, if you don't want to make your own hours, if you don't want to make your own income, then it's a moot point. you can skip over the everything I'm saying and you can tell me to blow it out my ass because it makes no difference to you whatsoever. But if you do, if that does perk up your ears and you like what I'm saying that you want to run your own business, you want to call your own hours, you want to make your own money, then these are the things that you need to do. It's a lot of hard work, it's a lot of perseverance, it's a lot of hustle, and it's also a lot of rejection. You're going to get the the phone hung up on you a lot. You're going to get a lot of deals get rejected. You're going to lose out on a lot of bids. It's going to happen. But if you knew if your guardian angel came down to you and said, "Your milliondoll opportunity is $465 phone calls away, you will burn through that telephone 64 times so fast. I promise you it'll make anyone's head spin." If you knew that that 465th phone call was going to be your million-dollar opportunity or your multi-million dollar opportunity, it's the reps, guys. It's all the repetition. How many times you've done something when you are a seasoned professional and you are thrown in to the cage with the lions, you're moonwalking around that [ __ ] You are dancing all around those lions because you ain't scared. You done did it before. You been your way around in that arena. Ain't [ __ ] scaring you. The first time you're thrown in that cage with those lions, chocolate train's coming, baby. I'mma tell you right now, you're going to [ __ ] your pants. But if you make it through that, that'll make you so much stronger. It'll get you to the next level. And now, the next time you're thrown in that cage, you're doing that dance, baby. You are doing that dance. And the name of the game is do this as many times as you possibly can. Because once you do it as many times as you can, now you can automate things. Now you can get things on autopilot. And then once you have it to like to that level, then you can start hiring people on. Now you can hire on a salesperson, a sales manager in the real estate world, a buyer agent, a listing agent, transaction coordinator, an admin. You are leveraging your business with people. It's the same thing in any walk of business. You are going to hire on professionals, people that do a specific thing, engineers, architects, salespeople, people with technical knowhow, admin people. I mean, as as simple as a receptionist. These are all people that you will you will deploy and you will use and become a part of your unit, your family unit, your work family unit to complete the goals that you have in mind, your sales goals, your annual goals, your quarterly goals, whatever they may be, but you have to start somewhere. There's always a starting point. I can't see them yet. Being so close to an airport, I see all kinds of stuff, civilian stuff, military stuff up up in the air. And I got to tell you, the aviation world, and I was really big in the aviation world at one time, professionally, I have not seen so much wild [ __ ] going on in the aviation world like I have recently. So many plane crashes, so many weird things happening in aerospace and it just it blows my mind. But not going to go deep into that. You have to start someplace. Depending on where you go is where you start. Depending on how far you want to go depends on your attitude. It is so true. The old adage, your altitude all depends on your attitude. If you feel like if you have a sense of entitlement like you deserve XYZ, you deserve that corner office, you deserve, you know, a big car, you deserve, you're not going anywhere. You are going to fail miserably. I have seen many times very very successful people grab a broom, grab a vacuum and clean up, help out their staff, help out their people. There's no ego in business. There shouldn't be ego in business. It's about leading people, not bossing people around. That is the ultimate starting point. You have to get your your priorities and you have to get your mindset in order. If you are going to go anywhere in life, you have to have your priorities in line. Because if you think that you're going to start a business and you're going to be rich and famous overnight and you're going to be able to pay people to boss them around and it ain't going to end well for you. I'm just I'm telling you that right now. It may for a little while. It may for a little while, but eventually people are going to catch on. There's a lot of recently some famous people which I will not name. They will remain nameless. Everyone thought that they were a certain type of person and then very quickly found out that they were not. Their whole empire imploded. It's going to catch on one at one time or another. May take a while but it will catch on. People will figure out you are not what you're saying you are. your goals and your drive, your your ending was not what you said. You know, it was it was very fake and people are going to catch on to that. They're not going to like that and things are not going to go well for you. So, your starting point should be your deep core. What do you want out of life? What do you want out of this business? What do you want out of cigars? What do you want? And depending on what that answer is is where you should take it from there. My personal opinion is if you ask yourself those questions and all of those answers are not real good answers. I think you should pivot. I think you should look into something else. Having said that, not a lot of people do that, but you have to start realistically. That's the starting point. Be realistic. And my opinion is you will go a lot further by being realistic. So, you know, just a just a quick thought, a quick a quick smoke, you know, my my time with you guys sharing my thoughts and and all of that with you guys. And I appreciate anybody who listens or watches this podcast. And I hope you get something from it. I really do because that's the whole purpose. It's it's to share our thoughts and our mindset and experiences and what we do and all that kind of stuff and and hopefully be able to share a moment with you. share a cigar with you, have a drink with you. That is that would be great for me because I do love people in general and I love sharing experiences with people and sharing time with people. So, you know, that would be fantastic for me. But starting points, it should make you think. It should make you think on what you want out of life, what your goals are, and where and how would you go about starting that? Where would your starting point be? So, I hope I've given you some some fair thoughts to think of. I hope this may have intrigued your your mind in getting into the cigar world, smoking these things that we love so much. And if there's any recommendations that you would want, I am very open and very honest with you. I will give you my opinions. I will give you recommendations. I will give you brands, cigars, different leaves and all of that to try as well as pairings, what what to pair that with and when to pair it with it and all that sort of stuff. So, anything that I can do to help, I would love to do that for you and with you. This is our episode on starting points and a lot has gone into this. So, you know, I hope you got something out of it. But that is it for this episode and I pray that you stay blessed and above all things keep it rolling