Episode 45 | Entrepreneurship| Harvey Marie San Andreas

Yo, yo, yo, yo, yo. And we are back for another episode of the Sticks & Stones podcast. Sticks & Stones podcast is all about good deals and good smokes. So, we talk about life, we talk about love, and we talk about premium tobacco products, cigars, pipe tobacco, so on so forth. In this episode, I'm talking entrepreneurialship and what entrepreneurialship means to me, the entrepreneurial spirit. I am drinking some coffee with sugar-free Starbucks creamer, the caramel macchiato sugar-free creamer. Going to give it a snippy snippy here. And what I'm smoking is I'm smoking a small-batch boutique brand called Harvey Marie Premium Cigars. And I just want to show you that they they put their cigars, the sampler pack, in a a little orange is their brand color, in an orange burlap little sack. And with, you know, drawstrings on it. That is such a classy touch to a brand of any kind. I can't tell you how much I appreciate that. I am smoking the 5 by 50 San Andreas. Give it a cold draw. So, we all know that this channel, our our Instagram, our Facebook, our YouTube, we have multiple websites, we are very much about the cigars. I mean, cigars are a big part of my life. Anyone who knows me outside of these channels knows that I'm an avid cigar smoker, huge fan, spend most of my time curating my own collection of cigars, talking about cigars, meeting people who smoke cigars and enjoy cigars, helping people in the cigar world or try to get into the cigar world, help people that are just starting to smoke. People call me up when they're new in cigars and they don't know what to smoke. They'll call me up and they'll say "Ange, I'm in XYZ kind of a mood and I want to smoke a cigar. What do you recommend?" Or "Ange, I'm going to my local and trying to buy some cigars. Go to my local and trying to buy some cigars. I don't want to keep buying the same things over and over again. You recommended XYZ cigar. I liked it. What do you What else do you got? What else can you recommend?" And I will curate them a list of cigars that they can go buy on their next trip to the cigar shop. I'm very, very plugged into the community and I am so willing to help anybody out in this community. And we are all walks of life. You know, I have I've met police officers. I have met bus drivers. I've met attorneys. I've met so many different people and we all have the one thing in common. We are all in the Brotherhood of the Leaf, BOTL, and the Sisterhood of the Leaf, SOTL, cuz I have met some incredible women that really, really know their stuff. And I was at a board meeting today and, you know, I I'm involved in a lot of different things and different businesses and me myself, I have about eight or nine brands that I am working to get to market and to build. And when I say brands, I mean actual companies, not just, you know, brands. This is one of them. Sticks and Stones Cigars is the main brand for all of my cigar-related stuff. So, I have got about eight or nine different balls in the air that I'm trying to get traction on, get them to market, and get them successful. So, on this episode of the podcast, I'm going to be talking about what entrepreneurship means for me, what it entails if you are an aspiring entrepreneur. If you want to get into the entrepreneur game, if you want to call yourself an entrepreneur in whatever circles you run in, I'm going to give you the breakdown. I'm going to tell you what that entails. But now, getting back to Harvey Marie Cigars. This is a small batch boutique brand out of New York City, the one and only, the city so nice they named it twice. Found these guys on Instagram. The owner is very very nice, very nice guy. Helped me out here. Sent me this beautiful package and I can't wait to smoke all of these. The San Andreas was kind of like calling me, so and and I know that this is one of the larger sticks that he sent. No, just knowing how these podcasts go and how long they go for, I figured I'd pick up the the largest one. This is a 5 by 50. So far, so good. The ash is nice. The burn is razor straight. And just so you all know, I purchased this sampler pack. Transparency and integrity is a very big thing for me. So, I did pay my own money for this sampler pack. Harvey Marie Cigars did throw in They threw in their exclusive Evolution. So, they threw that in. Thank you guys so much. Really appreciate that. You didn't have to, but you did. Very classy operation. So far, I'm getting a lot of light notes, you know, light woodsy, not getting like a kick in your teeth strength, which is, you know, no one likes being kicked in the teeth. Sometimes you want a little bit more strength, you know, at the end of the day or whatever it may be, whatever your situation is. So far, I am liking what I am tasting. I am going to be honest, near the cap and the shoulder, it is fraying a little bit. I got these about three, four days ago and I usually don't smoke right away when I get something in the mail or, you know, when I get it from the cigar shop. I let my sticks get comfortable in my humidor, settle in, you know, take a load off, hang out a little bit, meet the other guys. This is bringing good vibes, for sure. Nothing is ringing out at me that would indicate a problem. Let's just put it that way. It's got decent smoke output, not phenomenal smoke output, but it's got decent smoke output. The draw is good, and this is a small batch brand. I mean, I I checked one of my AIs, and they couldn't pull anything on the brand. So, and this is the perfect reason why I chose to smoke this brand while I'm talking about this particular subject for this episode. Entrepreneurialship, having the entrepreneurial spirit. And what does that mean? To me, very basically, that means taking something or making something at one price point and selling that to someone who wants it at a profit, at a higher price point, so that way the delta is your profit. So, if I can buy this item or make this item for $5 and sell it for $10, my delta, aka profit, is $5. In essence, that is being a business person. Entrepreneurialship is identifying a problem, providing a solution, offering that solution at a profit to you and to your partners, whoever that may be, whatever whatever the business case is. It may be you alone, you can handle every part of the business, so it's it's a profit to you. But, if you've got a partner with manufacturers or service providers or software developers, whatever your solution to the problem is, you need to sell that product or or service or solution to a pro at a profit to everyone involved. But, entrepreneurialship entrepreneurialship is taking it to the next level and now offering that solution to other industries, other people, and maybe even people or industries that didn't even know they had the problem. That to me is entrepreneurialship, being able to take or make something that offers a solution to a known problem and being able to sell that product solution or service to a lot of other people, other industries, a wider group of people. And to do it well, to sell it well, and help people. But if you want to take entrepreneurialship to the next level, I would say the next evolution of that is taking that solution and creating another solution to another problem. Maybe a derivative problem of the main problem or diving into the problem, creating that solution, you understand another problem in that industry or that business or whatever it may be. You So, you you know of an industry and there's there's a known problem in that industry, whatever it whatever it may be. And you know, let let's let's call it the road construction industry. You know that there is a known problem in that industry. Call it you can't put the asphalt down everywhere because of weather condition. Now, I'm I'm spitballing here. This is a complete fictitious scenario. This is not real that I know of. But let's just say the known problem is you've got asphalt companies who do road construction and they they build roads, but they can't do it everywhere because, you know, Arizona is like 1 million degrees in the summer. So, you create a widget, let's call it a widget, that helps with that situation. Now, you can offer this the the road building service, the road building solution to anybody and everybody in the United States because you have this widget that will allow you to put the asphalt down in any weather, any time of year, summer, spring, winter, fall, whatever. Perfect. Now, in researching the problem, it will in researching the industry and the known issues in the industry to create the solution, you're creating this widget, so you got to dive deep into the industry. You're trying to figure out the problem and how do I get around the problem? I want to make this widget. You find a another problem that may or may not be a known problem. So, let's just say you're working through the industry and you're talking to a lot of people and you find out that they can't sell they can't sell the asphalt everywhere because of the heat, whatever, or the cold. So, now you're coming up with this widget, but you talk to a few more people, you go to some aggregate plants, and you figure out a you know, a bunch of other stuff, and you find out that efficiency is a problem because there's no way to lay down the striping on the road like the the white and yellow lines, there's no way to to do that efficiently, quickly, and effectively because everyone's doing it by hand. So, now you're developing this widget that helps put the asphalt down everywhere in the country, but now you also create a an arm with a spray gun on the end of it, so that way while the trucks are moving and putting the asphalt down or while the trucks are moving and laying out cones to do the work or or to separate lanes or whatever it may be, it's spraying the the paint to make the lanes. So, now you just created multiple solutions for multiple problems that some of them were known, some of them may have been unknown. Now, you're selling solutions or providing solutions to an industry that you are helping people, you are making productivity much higher, efficiency goes up, people are gladly paying for your service or your product or your solution because of it. And then you turn around and you say your entrepreneurial mind is saying, "I have this arm now that sprays lines on the road, where else can I apply that to?" Well, I can apply that to airports for the stuff that they you know, for taxiways and for runways and for all of that and aprons and whatnot. And now I can take that technology, put it on a different piece of equipment, and now maybe I can start spraying you know, traffic uh symbols and lines and stuff inside, you know, big facilities like uh you know, paper mills or you know, whatever. So, to me, that is the entrepreneurial spirit. Getting back to the cigar, the burn is still razor razor straight. This is a good taste >> [clears throat] >> This is a good tasting cigar. Whoa, almost got that in my coffee. My only My only gripe about cigars, not just this cigar. I I am a new fan of the lancero uh vitola. I usually stayed away from lanceros. Now, I'm a huge fan just because they're flavor bombs, but I I favor the larger, you know, the 6 by 60, the gigante a lot of people call it, you know, you know, whatever they There's a bunch of different names for it. That would be my only gripe is the ring gauge cuz it's a 50 ring gauge, which that's usually like 10 below what I'm used to. Other than that, I mean, this is a This is a solid cigar. The cracking at the top here is just it's it's giving me a weird mouth feel just because it is cracked and It's kind of like when you lose a tooth and you're so tempted to put your tongue and rub rub where the tooth used to be. I don't want to say notes of espresso cuz it might be it might just be the coffee that I'm drinking that's influencing that flavor note. I definitely a woodsy cedar, but you can see this is not I'm not struggling to draw on this. It's got a good nice even draw. As of right now, I would call the body on this a creamy light cigar. I would also attribute the strength and the nicotine to be very light. So, now I'm going to get back to that is the entrepreneurial spirit. That's the entrepreneurial mind. However, there is a difference between an entrepreneur and somebody who has a business or has a business idea, runs a business. You can own a business and not be an entrepreneur. A lot of people think that an entrepreneur is someone who owns, runs multiple successful businesses. Not true. In my opinion, somebody who can create a business model, create a solution to a known problem, and continue to innovate that business and keep it successful for an extended period of years, decades, that to me is an entrepreneur. And here's why. An entrepreneur is someone who understands that most companies, and I'm not saying specifically cigar companies, most companies do not start with $6 billion in the bank. When you have money, money's not everything. Money does not motivate me. I can only speak for myself. Money is not a motivator. Money does not It's not a measure of success for me. You could have very cash fat companies that don't really offer a solution or a product or anything to their consumer base that helps anything, enriches their life. There it's all about the money. They're They're just very heavily profit-driven companies. To me, that's of no value to me. So, money isn't everything. But, having said that, most companies, including cigar companies, don't start with a tremendous amount of money in the bank. Now, again, like I said, money is not a motivator for me. It's not a level It's not a measure of success for me, but you do need money to make things easier. You need money to streamline processes, make things more efficient, make things seamless, make it better for the bottom line and for people's lives. It does help, don't get me wrong. Like I said, money doesn't push me to do unintegral things. Money is not going to make me do something to hurt someone over. But, money, when you're starting up a business, if you're starting it with money, things are going to get where they need to get. Your vision is going to be completed a lot quicker than it would be if you are bootstrapping a business. If you are if you've got everything put together with spit and chewing gum and wishful thinking, hopes and dreams, it's going to take you a lot longer. So, if you have a great idea and you have no money, it may take you 5 years, 10 years to get where you see it in your vision. Maybe longer. Versus you have 10 million in the bank, you can get that product to market, get it successful, get it working, get it into the hands of millions of people maybe in a year. Maybe two. Maybe sooner. I don't know. So, money does make life easier, but it's not everything. This is where the entrepreneurial spirit comes in. This, by definition to my definition, is an entrepreneur. Someone who knows when they have to be hands-on and then when they can delegate. Someone who understands that you need to surround yourself with people smarter than you for when you're ready to make that switch of delegation, they can go ahead and take the ball and run with it. But, also an entrepreneur is someone who, in the beginning, during the growing pains phase, during the lean and green and mean phase, when you don't have a lot of money in the bank, can do mostly everything himself or herself. So, if I need to form an entity, I know how to do that. If I have to structure it a certain way, I know how to do that. I know the documents that are needed to form an entity, to do the operating agreement, partners agreement, corporate bylaws, you know, stuff like that. You can do the accounting. You may not be an expert at everything, but you know how to do everything enough to get it going and get it functional and operating. Then, you need to be someone who knows how to strike deals with people. I know people who are absolutely brilliant, super duper smart. Back to the cigar real quick. I love that this thing is not going out. I'm giving it the time to rest. You know, I'm not smoking this thing like a Shop-Vac like I normally do, and it's not dying out on me. I did that recently with another cigar that's getting a lot of buzz in the industry, and it died on me. So, just saying. I know a lot of brilliant people. I know doctors. I know scientists. I know lawyers, software programmers, all very bright, very smart, very intelligent, wonderful people. But, even though they've created a product, they've created a service, they've created something that could help people, they don't know how to sell that. They don't know how to intrigue people into their service or product or solution that they created. I think another part of entrepreneurialship is also partnering with other companies. So, like hey, I've I've created this, I've built this, and you do that, let's let's come together and and form some sort of a joint venture, something like that. Don't get me wrong, competition I feel is great. I feel that competition is great for an individual and a company. Keeps you on your toes. Now, honestly, if you're the first to market with something, you're not going to have competition. That's a great place to be. I have been there at least once in my life where I created something that I patented and I was the only one in the market space to do that. It puts you at a great advantage in business, for your bottom line, for your finances, for recognition by the industry and the consumer base. You become the only one in the game. All that does is give you a head start. Somebody eventually will come up with a competing solution, whether you have a patent or not. If you have a patent, they may come up with a solution that is a completely different process, product, or whatever and it, you know, they get around the whole patent situation. But, a good entrepreneur knows how to work with other companies to kind of form deals that are good deals for both parties, long-term deals, maybe evergreen deals. You know, kind of like and it may end up it may end up in a merger, you know, like Continental Continental Airlines and United Airlines started out with a merger or a joint venture and they ended up being United Airlines with the Continental mark. So, you have to know how to do that and how to do it well. But, here's one thing I got to tell you. You can have great ideas. You can have a winning idea. However, if you don't know how to treat people, especially your partners, your employees, whatever, you're not an entrepreneur. If you have a great idea, if you have a great business idea, business plan, um a service, you know, whatever, and you can't read a balance sheet or profit and loss or financial statement, in my humble opinion, you are not an entrepreneur. You're good good person. I'm not saying there's bad people out there. I'm I'm sure there are a lot of bad people out there, but what I'm saying is in in terms of business and in terms of entrepreneurialship, you could be the greatest person in the world, and you could have the greatest idea, but until you know how to juggle all of these things, until you know finances, and like I said, you don't have to be an expert in every field of your business, but you have to at least know it. Because you have to know your strengths and weaknesses, and you have to know when it's time to delegate to someone who is smarter than you in that field. I know when I need to enlist the help of a bookkeeper, of a CPA, of a CFO. I know when I need, you know, a a manufacturing expert. You know when you need a programming expert, a software engineer, a graphic designer, a packaging expert. Shifting back to the cigar really quickly, this is a stand-up cigar. If I have a quip, if I've got a bone to pick with this cigar, if any, if you are looking for the knock-your-socks-off fireworks in a rolled tobacco product, if you're looking for something that's going to blow your mind, this is not it. However, you don't need your socks off, you don't need your socks knocked off every time you light up a cigar. Sometimes you just need a high-quality rolled hand-rolled cigar that gets the job done, is tasty, is delightful, is a pleasure to smoke, doesn't die on you, outputs a good amount of smoke, has a nice looking ash, good strength, good body, decent complexity, nice burn, not canoeing or all over the place, looks like an EKG. And that is this Harvey Marie Premium Cigars San Andreas 5 by 50. That fraying is just it's really putting a damper in in my smoking experience because it's it's becoming more of a mouthfeel type thing. It's like you're trying to work your way around it, trying to figure out a spot in the cigar that it's not such a red flag for you when you're smoking it. Okay, back to entrepreneurship. So, an entrepreneur is someone who can do all of the things. Someone who can man all of the bases on the on the baseball diamond and do it well enough to be profitable until you know the time to switch off and now start hiring people. An entrepreneur is also someone who knows how to hire and unfortunately terminate people. You have to be good at that because you're in business and you're going to need people and sometimes you make the right hiring decision at that time. Nothing lasts forever. That is the one thing that I will say sets the entrepreneur apart from any other type of business person. Every entrepreneur knows that nothing lasts forever. Even if you employ someone for 40 years, 50 years, eventually things are going to happen. Eventually someone's going to leave, eventually someone's performance is not hitting the grade, they're they're not meeting their KPIs. Unfortunately, some people die while in your employment. These are all situations that happen in life cuz we do this podcast is all about life and love and cigars and good deals and good smokes. So, a good entrepreneur knows that, knows that nothing lasts forever and knowing when to hire, when to fire people and how to put deals together. Being an entrepreneur is not easy. I'll tell you that right now, it's not easy. When you think of entrepreneur, you think of people like Elon Musk, Larry Ellison, Mark Cuban, everybody that's on Shark Tank, Marcus Lemonis. These are people that know their finances. They know how to put a good business model together. They know a diamond in the rough when they see it. Entrepreneurship also means reading people. You have to be able to read somebody. To kind of know, you have that gut feeling when that person's got it and when they don't. And this is all stuff that you can't teach. This is not teachable stuff. The only teacher that can teach it is life. Life will put you through stuff and it'll put you through the paces. And this is another thing that sets entrepreneurial entrepreneurs apart from the rest of the rat race. When life is teaching you those lessons, business is a lot like sports. You go out there, whatever sport you're in, baseball, basketball, American football, soccer, whatever it may be, gymnastics. You go out there and you compete with other people and you either win or you learn. So, a loss is a learning experience. And entrepreneurs are those people that when life is teaching them a lesson, they don't give up. They're going to keep going, they're going to pivot, they're going to reposition, they're going to figure stuff out until it does work and they do get that win. You've got people that there are businesses out there that had great solutions, great products, great angles, great marketing, but it just didn't work because sometimes people try doing getting the same result by doing the same stuff over and over and over again. Like, okay, I made this widget and I am going to do I'm going to cold call and I'm going to do digital marketing and I'm going to do email campaigns and I'm just going to keep doing that. And that didn't work for a year, we got no business in a year. Now, I'm going to try a different audience of people but do the exact same thing. I'm going to do digital marketing, I'm going to do email campaigns and cold calling. Sometimes, you're going to have to pivot, you're going to have to change your position, you're going to have to get a different angle at this and shoot for the basket from a different spot on the court. You're going to have to call an audible and you're going to have to run a different play. That also sets the entrepreneur apart from everyone else. Being able to read the future, say, "Okay, this is not working right now. It might We might come back to this later when we have a little bit more traction, a little bit more brand recognition, a little bit more market share, but it's not working right now. So, we got to try something else. We have to try a different marketing strategy." There are people out there that they can't see they don't have the foresight to say, "Okay, the traditional marketing methods, advertising methods, are not working. Let's try something else." A lot of people make the mistake to say, "The traditional marketing and advertising methods are not working for this group of people. Let's try this other group of people for another year." And don't get me wrong, there is part of that part of that may be true. Maybe a different group of people might be more acceptable or more amenable to what your product or service is, but you don't have a lot of time. You need to try that out very quickly, and if you're not getting traction right away, you need to do something else. You need to reposition. You need to pivot very quickly. That is the difference between an entrepreneur. An entrepreneur doesn't give up easily. Now, don't get me wrong. An entrepreneur also knows what he has, or more often than not, doesn't have in the bank, and knows that sometimes you have to Let's not call it give up. You don't have to give up, but sometimes you have to try something You have to put down the ball, pick up a different ball, and try that game until things start working there, and you have the resources, the finances to pick up that other ball and run with it again. So often people believe in an idea, in a business, so strongly that they will literally put themselves in the poorhouse to see that dream come true. I quit my job, and I'm doing this because I know it's going to work, and I see the vision. I see it. I can I I can see It's my dream. I can taste it. And then they get a home equity loan on their house, and then they start selling everything that they own. And then they sell their car to get a jalopy because they need the money to continue funding this business. You get the pattern? A good entrepreneur knows when they have to go another route, maybe do another business, sell a different product, a different solution, get into a whole another business, maybe take a job with like a W-2 or a 1099 position to make some money in order to pivot on the business that they started. A lot of people will go bankrupt because they don't know when enough is enough. Most entrepreneurs know when enough is enough, and they know self-preservation. They know what they need to do to keep themselves out of trouble. And let's face the facts. Most entrepreneurs are not afraid to roll up their sleeves and get in the dirt, jump in the mud. And what do I mean by that? Well, if your business requires a lot of cold calls, a good entrepreneur has no problem picking up that phone and making a hundred calls a day. A good entrepreneur, if your business requires a lot of postcards or sending out letters, and if you don't have the money for a mail fulfillment company, you go buy a couple rolls of stamps at the post office, and you write those letters, and you sign them, and you fold them, and you put them in those envelopes, and you stick a stamp on there, and you drop them off at the post office. You do what you have to do to get the job done. You know, it's like that it's that old adage, "I don't stop when I'm tired, I stop when I'm done, when I'm finished." That is a a good motto for a good entrepreneur. And these are new friends of mine, and I'm hoping that that's who these guys are. I'm hoping that Harvey Marie Premium Cigars have that tenacity. They have that that go-to, that drive in them. Because this is not a bad cigar. This is a very good cigar. I mean, I've been smoking this this whole time and has not died on me. The smoke output has not changed. The draw is very good. And look, this is this is memorable. This this shipping sack is very memorable. Sometimes your branding is enough to make people, you know, remember you. Oh, yeah, the cigar company that sends you the cigars in the mail in a sack. And when you don't buy a whole box. And I just from Instagram seeing their setup and everything. The boxes look pretty nice, too. If you are a cigar shop owner, I would start looking into these guys, Harvey Marie Premium Cigars, and see what it's like, you know, what kind of deals they can offer you to get these on your shelves, you know, give these guys a facing or two. It's got good taste. It's got good complexity. It's just maybe this is a a a a me bias that I'm usually smoking bolder, seriously complex cigars. You know, I'm a big fan of the entire Crown Heads lineup, and those are cigars that really pack a punch. It could just be a me thing, but otherwise, I mean, this thing is great. So, point is this world has all kinds of every walk of life. And I say this I say this to a lot of people. The world needs cooks and the world needs chefs. You know, the not everybody has to be a leader. The world needs followers, too. And sometimes followers want to be an entrepreneur. They want to be a leader so badly that they're just hyper-focused on being that leader, being in charge, and they don't realize what being in charge entails. There are people that are born leaders, just born leaders. You know what I mean? Like little kids on summer vacation, you know, school break, and they're meeting every day in the cul-de-sac, and you've always got that one kid that's just like, "Hey, let's go over here, and I saw a canoe, and let's all get together and walk down to the creek and put the canoe in the water and you know, always thinking up fun ideas, places to go, things to do. That is born leadership. Granted, sometimes that leadership get you in a lot of trouble. However, it doesn't stop them from coming up with them ideas and it doesn't stop them from executing said ideas. But you'll know when a follower, when a worker is trying to be a boss or a leader because life is funny. Life will teach you things and you'll know, this is how you'll know that the follower or the worker is trying to be that leader and that boss is when [ __ ] starts to get tough and everything they thought was going to happen doesn't play out the way they thought in their head, they don't know what to do. They lose track of everything, the train comes completely off the damn rails and they don't know what to do. They don't know how to turn it around. And there's nothing wrong with followers, there's nothing wrong with being a worker. But until you've walked a mile in a leader's shoes, you don't know how things are going to play out and you don't know what could happen to your idea, your business. Who knows? You may You may do a bang-up job and you get an offer to to be acquired. A good entrepreneur knows an exit point, knows when you got a little bit more in the tank and if you just hold on and you continue doing what you're doing, your devaluation of your company might be 10x where it is today in a year from now or 18 months from now or 2 years or whatever. There are a lot of moving parts and pieces to being an entrepreneur and it's not something that they can teach you in college. I mean, they could teach you a lot of things in college. I did not go to college and I have run successful businesses. I've sold businesses. I've also had several businesses fail for a lot of different reasons. Economies, global pandemics, personnel changes and you know, the labor pool at the time and that in a specific geographic location. There's a lot of different reasons why a business can fail. But, when life throws you those challenges, if you don't know how to switch positions, pivot, change gears, it could be the demise of your idea, your business, you know, whatever. And a good entrepreneur knows that. So, if you're in the cigar world and you're trying to to bring your brand to market, there's a lot of things that you have to think of. There's a lot of planning that goes into it. And there's a lot of ways to execute. And And I'll And I'll say this, I have been in business for a very long time. I have been self-employed all of my life. I have been employing people since I have been 17 years old. Yes, you heard that correctly. 17. Not yet legal in the USA, but signing people's paychecks. And I have seen all sorts of advertising methods and marketing methods and marketing campaigns and market- The word marketing has evolved so much from the '90s, the '80s and '90s to to present day, 2026. And I will say that marketing has I'm not going to say easier, it's become more accessible. I remember a day when if you wanted to market, you wanted to advertise your product or service, your solution, you had to pay thousands of dollars to advertise your company, your brand, your product, your solution in a printed publication, whether that be the newspaper, whether that be a magazine, a trade publication, the freaking Yellow Pages. I mean, that just goes to show you how old I am. Yellow Pages was a big, thick book that had a white section, which was like people's residences, and you could look up someone's last name, and all the Smiths were all together. And if you knew the guy's name, oh, that's John Smith, you could find his home number in the white pages. And then in the yellow pages, they were all different sized ads. They were very small ads and they were big ads. They were, you know, half pages, full page yellow page ad, and it would cost a lot of money to get your company in the yellow pages. And that was kind of the only way, you know, the only ways to advertise your business back in the day was to spend a lot of money in in your ad budget. TV, radio, billboards, print. That was kind of that was it. And every one of those methods cost money. Now, it's all relative because back then, you know, if we look at the costs back then, if I go through my records and see what I paid to advertise back in 1996, 1998, even 2000, you'd laugh and say, "Oh my god, like that's what I was paying?" But it's all relative because the amount of income was a lot different back in those days as well. You know, inflation and what have you, everything is on a much different scale of economies compared to today. So, transversing to the cigar again real quick, the burn is starting to get a little wonky and I'm like at the end of the second third. That's weird. You Nowadays, you open an Instagram account, a TikTok account, which for the most part is all free unless you want to pay for the verification, the blue check. You open up you get yourself a LinkedIn, a TikTok, a Facebook, a YouTube, an Instagram. You have all of the means, you have all of the makeup of a decent marketing campaign, a website. And if you don't know how to do web programming and stuff like that, you're going to have to pay somebody to put you a website up. And that'll cost some money, but even that has become more economical, more reasonable than what it used to. Shoot, I remember in the early 2000s, 2002 maybe, maybe maybe 2000, I paid a company called Interland to build a website for me and I paid them $17,000 way back then. $17,000 back then was like saying $170,000 today. And I paid this company $17,000 to build me a website that never fully worked. Was a semi-functioning website. Let that marinate. I mean, are there $17,000 websites today? Absolutely. You know, there's half a million dollar websites. But, for a startup, you can get everything together for very little money. Your startup capital can be very little if you know what you're doing. That is also another trait of an entrepreneur. Yeah, can you hire the best of the best marketing agencies and and give them $200,000 in a year? Absolutely. Can you pay top dollar for sales people? Absolutely. I mean, can you pay top dollar for everything? Yes, but a good entrepreneur knows where to where they can save but still accomplish the same thing. Do I have to give half a million dollars on a website? No. I can get to the same finish line for a fraction of that cost. And this is coming from someone that has been in the industrial food manufacturing industry, the quasi construction industry, the oil and gas field, all over the aviation industry, aviation and aerospace, military contracting, real estate, armament, you know, ammunition and guns and ammunition in that industry, the arms industry. I have done a lot of different things in in many different industries, not just one. So, when you do all the things that I have done in my professional life, you tend to learn a lot of stuff, and I think that's the main the main characteristic of an entrepreneur. We are continually learning, very similar to the cigar industry. You know, what you think will go over with the public very well may fall on its face, but it's what you do when it falls on its face that sets you apart from someone with just a good business idea and an entrepreneur. I'm going to give you a perfectly good example of that. CAO Cigars, which is owned by General Cigar, don't get me wrong. They have tons and tons of money, billions of dollars. They had an idea last year, maybe, called they called this cigar the Stoke, and it was half cigar tobacco, half pipe tobacco. And when I heard about this, I was like, "Oh, you know, that sounds interesting." Interesting enough to try it. Needless to say, it didn't do very well. Kind of fell flat on its face, and we don't know what's going to happen with the Stoke, if they're going to reformulate it, reblend it. Don't know what's going to happen with that, but it's actually one of the key points that the guy at the CAO booth at PCA talked about. And he said, "Yeah, they're not all winners. You know, we had the Stoke, and that didn't do so well. That fell on its face." But CAO also has the Flathead line, which does phenomenally well. And they have the America and the Brazilia, and you know, they have so many different bangers that they're okay. You know, they're they're they're going to be okay. They had one failure, no big deal. They keep going. So, this is a this is a heavy subject, and there's there's a lot that goes into entrepreneurship, but I think, you know, that's that's the surface, you know, we're scratching the surface on it. And you know, I want to know if you guys got any value to this conversation, because >> [cough and clears throat] >> I'd be happy to go into, you know, dive deeper into some other stuff about entrepreneurship and and business ownership and you know, things like that. But that's just the surface of it. There's so many more moving parts to business ownership and entrepreneurship and so on and so forth. And it all plays into the cigar industry, the cigar world. Because if Harvey Marie Cigars pushes at this and they work at it and they don't give up, they could be one of those brands where you see them in every freaking cigar shop in the world. Are they going to be? I don't know. Only time will tell. They have the makings to be. Cuz this is one hell of a cigar. I just wish it came in the 60 ring vitola. That would be nice. Or a lancero. That would be equally as nice. However, I hope that you enjoyed this podcast. We are Sticks and Stones. We operate multiple websites. We have the Puff Cast review, which is puff-cast.com and that's a website where we have long-form videos. That is nothing but cigar reviews. We're doing nothing but reviews on that website. We've got sticksstonescigars.com. We've got this podcast. We've got sticksandstonescre. That is our Instagram where we share in the community and connect a lot of people and you know, try to be as big of an impact as we possibly can in the cigar world and the world of you know, humans in general. We are working with another He's become a good friend of mine, Anthony at Beards and Burns Cigars. We are coming up with a kind of co-branded joint venture type thing, which we can get into details in that later. But we're doing a lot of different things in the cigar world. And soon we're going to be launching a an online marketplace, a storefront where you can buy merch and cigar accessories and eventually cigars online. We do a lot of different things and it just died. It just died on me. So, it made it through a good bit of the of the podcast. So, we do a lot of a lot of things. We talk about a lot of different subjects. We smoke all kinds of cigars. And this thing is going to be changing and evolving and growing as the days and weeks and months and years go on. So, I hope you got something out of this episode. We drop podcast episodes every Tuesday and every Thursday. So, look out for us. We're on Apple Podcast, Spotify, and YouTube. You can find us on Instagram. I believe TikTok now, multiple different websites. So, we're trying our best. We're trying our best to get out there and to give you guys content that you could appreciate and you could like. You know, we would appreciate if you would subscribe and like and recommend us to as many people as you can if you like the content or you know someone who might like the content. But, I am Angelo for Sticks and Stones Cigars and the Sticks and Stones Podcast and the Puff Cast Review website. I hope you got something out of this. I hope you enjoyed it. I wish all of you guys out there, all of you listeners, all of you viewers, I wish blessings upon you for you and your families and your businesses. So, stay blessed. And above all else, keep it rolling, baby. I'm Angelo for Sticks and Stones. And we out. Until the next episode. I'll see you later.