October 2019 will go down as one of the greatest months in the history of The Beau Collective. Over the course of two weeks, we went from our home for the last four years to no home at all, to our brand new home at Alpine Distilling! As everyone made their way to the distillery to resume session 20, we were asked the same question over and over….. HOW??
“How " is a question that we all love to ask...HOW did someone do something that seems nearly impossible from the outside? This question of “how” led Whit and I to the How I Built This Summit in San Francisco last week. We could not have had more going on in Park City; but with everything going on- it made the timing perfect. We headed out to spend two days being inspired. We listened to Sara Blakely who started Spanx, David Neeleman who started Jet Blue, the couple who started Cliff Bar and the list goes on and on. We soaked it all in and realized by day two, that a lot of the messages were the same:
-I had no clue what I was doing
- I did not know where the business was going, but I was committed to working hard to find out
-I surrounded myself with people that have different strengths than me
- The road has been filled with ups and downs
-I had some lucky moments
- I worked my a** off
Their stories were inspirational because they were so relatable. These were normal people with a BIG idea, GUTS to try to pursue their idea and the willingness to WORK to make it happen. Some of these stories happened quickly, but most of them were years and years of steady climb until one day they had their big moment. They all just went for it in the scariest and best way!
Our HOW felt similar to a lot of the stories we heard. We received a call from Rob Sergent (owner of Alpine Distilling) on Monday, October 14th. He was on vacation and out of pure love for his wife and the Park City community, he offered us his extra space. It took us about a week to meet, check in with the county and make a plan for our takeover. We did not really know how it was going to get done, but we had an absolute optimistic belief that it would. We had a group of people that dedicated their entire week to the distillery. We had friends and teammates show up for an hour or many hours to help move, bang nails or clean. We had the county grant us a quick building permit. We opened ourselves up to help and this community--our community answered!!!
-We did not know what we were doing or where the building would go.
-We surrounded ourselves with talented people that could pull it off.
-The week was hard, BUT really fun.
-We got totally lucky
-We all worked our a** off
It was a great lesson that you don’t always need to know exactly how things will work... just stay optimistic, stay brave and always work hard!
I am not afraid of failure, but I am terrified of regret!