Christin Marvin: 0:46

Before we jump into today's episode, I have to give a shout out to my former co-host, Nick Spinelli. Nick has some amazing things happening in his life right now and has graciously promoted himself to be a guest on the show. He will be missed, but fear not, he will not be a stranger. So, Nick, thank you for everything you've done to build this foundation and help this show get off the ground. Really appreciate it, buddy. Okay, today we are welcoming Shane Reiser to the show. Shane is the head foodie. Love this title of Tucson Foodie, which is the largest media and events platform in Southern Arizona, focused exclusively on the local food and beverage scene. More than a quarter of Tucson's population reads Tucson Foodie. Each month, their social media presence exceeds 500,000, and their dinners and festivals draw in tens of thousands of people annually, which is incredible. Hi, Shane, great to have you on the show, hi.

Shane Reiser: 1:46

Christin, thanks for having me. I'm just wondering what kind of great things Nick Spinelli has happening in his life. That's what I want to know how excited for him.

Christin Marvin: 1:54

Yeah, I mean there's some great life changes. I know he can sometimes be a little bit of a private person so I'm not going to air everything out. I know you two know each other, but he's got some great personal and professional things happening and good for him for saying recognizing that he's got more on his plate right now and setting a little bit of some boundaries, something that a lot of us are still learning how to do.

Shane Reiser: 2:17

Oh, God, I'm still learning how to set boundaries as well, yeah, me too, it's difficult. Have you talked about boundaries on this podcast, given boundaries are an important part of leadership, right?

Christin Marvin: 2:27

Yeah, they sure are, absolutely yeah, we can dive into that. If you want to come back on the show at some point and talk about that, that would be amazing.

Shane Reiser: 2:36

I know other people that are way better at that than me.

Christin Marvin: 2:38

Okay, sounds good. Just wanted to open that invitation for you Love it? Well, thanks for being here today. I'm so excited to share your journey with our listeners. You and I had a chance to connect about a month ago and I just think you have such a fascinating, interesting story and I'm just super excited about your mission and everything that you're doing with Tucson Foodie, and I'm excited to share some of the challenges that you've shared with me that you have faced since you acquired Tucson Foodie last year, and dive a little bit deeper into your vision for the company and explore why community is such a big deal for you I know that's one of your big values and a big deal for the company and showcase how you're building a profitable revenue model with community at the center, because that's not easy to do with the business that you're in. Yeah, that's my journey.

Christin Marvin: 3:33

Yeah, you have a very interesting background, but it's not necessarily rooted in food, so share a little bit about how that journey led you to Tucson Foodie.

Shane Reiser: 3:43

Not at all, In fact. I mean I had a pretty boring foodie upbringing, I would say. I mean my mom would cook one of 10, 15 dishes and we'd go out to eat at a Chinese restaurant, in a pizza place. It wasn't until I left the house and realized that there are all these other cuisine types and just regional cuisines and started exploring and doing some traveling that I started calling myself a foodie, if you will. Nice, yeah, Sorry, what was the question? Yeah, Just yeah.

Christin Marvin: 4:21

Absolutely no. You're good, Sounds like you and I have similar backgrounds as far as our foodie upbringing took some exploration and travel. I wanted to really share with the listeners how your life journey has led you to Tucson Foodie.

Shane Reiser: 4:37

Oh gosh, I bought Tucson Foodie on a whim, if you will. So when I moved here in Tucson to Tucson nine years ago, I was kind of forced to move here. I moved here to continue co-parenting my daughter. Her mom was in the Air Force. A lot of people end up in Tucson for similar reasons and my girlfriend was like, hey, there's actually a lot of stuff going on in Tucson, you shouldn't be so sad about it. Have you found Tucson Foodie on Instagram? So I created my first Instagram account no background in social media and yeah, tucson Foodie was part of my falling and love journey. With Tucson I started checking out great restaurants. I started making friends in the restaurant scene, to restaurant owners, et cetera. They're very accessible here in Tucson Now you can. They're usually working in the restaurant. You can meet them. So Tucson Foodie absolutely played a role in my kind of getting to know Tucson and starting to call Tucson home. I've never called anywhere home except St Louis, where I grew up, until I moved here, and I've lived at a lot of different places in between Missouri and Arizona. So I fell in love with Tucson Foodie and fell in love with Tucson because of Tucson Foodie.

Shane Reiser: 6:05

Fast forward, you know, nine years COVID hits. Tucson Foodie is not doing so well and I'm sad because I'm just a reader and subscriber and I had met Adam, the guy who started Tucson Foodie, a couple of times. So I reached out and you know Tucson Foodie had one revenue stream and we'll get into this a little bit later, kind of all the different new revenue streams that we started to launch and grow but he had one primary revenue stream and that was sponsored content from restaurants. He also had a paywall up. You can only read so many articles before you had to pay some money to keep reading. So he kind of had those two revenue streams but the bulk was restaurants paying him to create content and that went to zero as soon as the mayor shut the city down when COVID hit. So Tucson Foodie struggled hard.

Shane Reiser: 7:07

And also Adam had a nine year run with Tucson Foodie maybe 10 years right, like he started and grew to what it is today and he's getting a little burned out. So I helped him explore some possibilities of selling the company and there was a lot of interest but everybody was moving really slow and out of frustration Adam looked at me one day and said why don't you buy it? Why don't you buy Tucson Foodie. And within five seconds I said yes. And in those five seconds all kinds of great stuff happened in my brain, like my heart said yes. Immediately you know big emotional pull. I was like yeah, and then my heart also said and we can't let Tucson Foodie die. Like Tucson needs this. This is part of the connective tissue of Tucson. It's an economic driver. All these people I know who run restaurants and work in restaurants rely on Tucson Foodie. It actually has a huge impact. We've dropped articles that overwhelm restaurants and, yeah, sometimes that's a problem actually, but yeah, it can be a good problem to have.

Shane Reiser: 8:18

We actually wait a little while after a rest. We do a little announcement now like this restaurant's opening, and then we wait like a couple of months before we do like a deep story so they can get their feet under them. So my heart was saying this is fun, it's a new challenge. You already love the brand and the company and this can't die. It's important to the city that you know love. But also, within those five seconds, I thought of 10 different revenue streams that you know Tucson Foodie could go after and all the stuff I always wanted Tucson Foodie to do. But you know I wasn't involved, right? So I thought, man, what an opportunity. So I said yes, on the spot and then figured it out.

Christin Marvin: 9:02

Nice. Those are the best kind of decisions sometimes right. I love it. I love it. I mean clearly your heart was was leading. You know your heart and your head working together. But I love that you have said that you you're now calling Tucson home and that Tucson Foodie helped you establish yourself here here and build a community, and you want to turn around and do that for other people, which is beautiful. That's a great purpose, so thank you for doing that.

Shane Reiser: 9:26

Well, you are very welcome. My background is in community building. I've in entrepreneurship. I've started seven companies. This is the first company that I acquired and I highly recommend it. It's so much harder to start from zero, from nothing and build up and convince the first few crazy people to follow you. Tucson Foodie had a huge audience, a well loved brand, so much potential. So being able to start with all of that and start to experiment right On top of all of the assets and the audience and the numbers and the brand equity that Tucson Foodie had, just it's a dream compared to the seven times I've started companies from zero. My background is in community building. One of the first jobs I mean I had a couple of boring corporate jobs, right.

Christin Marvin: 10:27

And then I love the robot arms.

Shane Reiser: 10:28

I know people can't see us, but go through the dimensions A couple of boring corporate jobs and, looking back, they weren't that bad actually, but at the time I hated them and I took the jump into working in a nonprofit called Startup Weekend. Startup Weekend was definitely a community. It was a volunteer run organization. People would sign up to volunteer and they'd run a three day event in their hometown and this event brought together 100, 125 aspiring entrepreneurs. People would pitch ideas for new companies they wanted to start, or sometimes just a problem they wanted to solve, and they'd form teams and try to literally launch a new company within 72 hours. It was educational, but more important than educational, it was about community building. People forged relationships that were deep. When you're stuck in a room with somebody for three days and you're trying to solve a problem, you get to know them really well, you bond. So the relationships that were forged at these events were meaningful and we'd have tons of stories after Startup Weekend about oh, I started another company with this guy, or I got hired, or I hired this guy, I got married to somebody I met at a Startup Weekend. It brought the community together and connected it more deeply and we were able to run Startup Weekends in almost every country in the world. Well over half a million people have been to them.

Shane Reiser: 12:01

It was a high growth nonprofit and I was the Chief Operations Officer and I got to train the volunteers that ran these events and see how it changed their lives, transform, put them on a new path, some of them eyes open to how much potential they even had as a person. Their whole trajectory changed Multiple dozens, hundreds of companies. I actually got started at startup weekends, which went on to hire people, create economic growth, change lives. So it mattered a lot and I got the bug of community building. I called myself a community builder then and since then, everything I've done. I thought well, what's the community around this thing? Whether it's a product, a technology, a brand, a person, a cause, whatever it is, there's people around it that identify with it, that want to be involved, that want to help further it. Maybe they just buy it and they use it, but they want to meet other people that use it and learn and connect. People are thirsting for connection, for community. With just a little bit of effort, you can put some structure around that and bring people together, make it a lot more meaningful and then use that community as a competitive advantage. Nice Right.

Shane Reiser: 13:22

So Tucson Foodie is a media company. There are other media companies here in town that I mean not anymore I call it a community now but are one of our primary pillars. In how most people know, it says a news organization. There are other organizations that write about restaurants, but I don't see people wearing their t-shirts like texting me, thanking me for what we do, hearing stories about people who met at our events or members of our communities meeting each other and becoming friends. You don't hear that about some of the other news organizations in town, and that's the big difference. We rewrote our mission statement to be we bring people together over a shared level of food. So everything we do now I think how is this bringing people together? And if it doesn't, we don't do it.

Christin Marvin: 14:20

I love that. It sounds like you're speaking a little bit about how you're really impacting the community on a large scale, which is great, and bringing people together. People are meeting each other at events, forming friendships, sharing their common love for food. How is Tucson Foodie making an impact directly to restaurants and you mentioned a little bit of this earlier, but speak a little bit more on that.

Shane Reiser: 14:43

Sure, Well, that was already in place when I acquired the company. Already a huge audience, People already looking to Tucson Foodie to hear about new openings, new menus, new chefs etc. So there's a bit of a thunderclap effect with Tucson Foodie. When we drop something on Instagram or on our website or we send something out in our newsletter, it drives people to go shop local. We only write about locally owned businesses. I believe in the power of local economic development so we focus on that and a lot of people understand that that matters. But also for all the good food is, I mean, there's exceptions. I love me some North Italia. The place is fantastic. It's not locally owned. It actually sort of has history here because it's a Fox concept.

Christin Marvin: 15:33

Yeah, same as around here.

Shane Reiser: 15:38

And True Food Kitchen just opened up. They have some great food, also some deep Tucson connections, but technically not headquartered in the state of Arizona, so when you spend money there, most of the money will flutter across state lines and it's gone. It doesn't help us grow our community or keep our community strong, but all the good food, most of the good food, is family owned businesses Hiring local, and when you spend local, that money stays in our economy. So we drive business to restaurants through our content, through our news. But now we do it in a new way too, through community. So we've got the Tucson Foodie Insiders Club and we've got the Tucson Foodie Passport. These are two new products that we dreamed up and launched within the last 12 months. The passport is directly targeting getting more people to go to local restaurants and it's kind of a coupon book. Right, it's $300 and you get over $3,000. It's now up to like $3,600 worth of vouchers to like 75 locally owned restaurants.

Christin Marvin: 16:53

Wow.

Shane Reiser: 16:56

And the people that buy that are super foodies. They want to explore. Maybe they're stuck in a rut and go to the same five or six restaurants and they want to get out and explore because they keep hearing like wow, Tucson's a UNESCO City of gastronomy, what am I missing? I don't even believe that that's possible. So we reached out to all the best, looked on restaurants. They throw vouchers into the passport and it's basically as good as cash. Right, you go there, you show that you're a member, they take it right off your bill and it's a great way to discover and explore. So that drives business straight into the doors of restaurants. And then the Tucson Foodie Insiders Club. That's our club. That's our real community. It's $20 a month. You can pause or quit at any time, but we get people together and we do that at restaurants and we do that in all other types of places as well.

Shane Reiser: 17:49

We do a monthly dinner series with different chefs. It's a private event just for insiders. Chefs open up their restaurant and cook tasting menus so that they can experiment with different dishes they're thinking about adding to future menus and insiders love that. I love doing that. I think it's really fun. You get to meet the chef shake their hands, learn about their story. There's a fireside chat. Chef comes out, shakes people's hands and explains each dish and it's very accessible. So creating that connectivity between diners that they may not normally get when they just go eat at a restaurant and the chef or the business owner, that's deliberate. We're trying to do that and then we're just trying to get people to discover just how diverse and delicious Tucson's restaurant scene really is.

Christin Marvin: 18:38

Yeah, it's incredible. I think 67% of our restaurants are local here. That's what I read. Do you have any?

Shane Reiser: 18:45

sense Kristen. If that is higher or lower than the average, I'm guessing higher.

Christin Marvin: 18:50

I don't, I don't. I need to look into that. But it sounds like an incredible number to me. Just driving around and looking at the landscape, it seems to be a lot higher than where else I've lived Missouri and Colorado and here, so yeah.

Shane Reiser: 19:06

I do know one stat. Jonathan Maybury, who runs the City of Gastronomy, the Tucson City of Gastronomy here, told me that we have more food trucks per capita than Los Angeles.

Christin Marvin: 19:17

Really.

Shane Reiser: 19:19

We have a lot. I have a database of 250. I mean it's massive. I mean everything north of like 22nd there's a lot but not that many. But once you get down to the south side, on Irvington and all these other streets South 16th, south 25th there are so many trucks and carts. Huge, thriving scene of food trucks down there.

Christin Marvin: 19:44

That's awesome. I've got a lot of exploring to do. I've been at the pit a couple of times, over 20 seconds. Pantano, that's my side of town, but we need to go exploring south, for sure A little bit more than we have. So you mentioned earlier that you immediately said yes to taking over Tucson Foodie. You knew it was struggling. You had some big ideas. 10 revenue streams popped into your mind right away. What's been your biggest challenge since acquiring the company?

Shane Reiser: 20:11

Okay Well, yeah, here's a struggle for buying a business. It already had a reputation right and people thought it thought of it in a certain way and I was looking to change that. So it's been a struggle to change minds and sometimes change hearts, but even just to educate and explain. New team, new leadership, new direction, new products, new offerings. I've learned from talking to people that some people think of Tucson Foodie as nothing more than an Instagram account. Some people thought we're just a newsletter. Some people thought we're just a website, so you can, you just go and grab the money. Are you okay with that?

Shane Reiser: 20:56

You know, taking the city that I live in on this journey with me and getting them to consider Tucson Foodie in a new light has been very difficult. There are still restaurant owners, despite my best efforts to call them to visit them, that think Adam still runs Tucson Foodie. You know and are surprised to learn that we don't charge restaurants for anything anymore. We're never going to ask a Tucson restaurant for money. We you know, we those important to me. I wanted to take that away. There are people who stopped you reading Tucson Foodie when the paywall went up and are surprised and delighted to hear that the paywall doesn't exist anymore. All of our content's free. Oh, and it's been like that for a year, you know. So, yeah, that's been a challenge. Building a team has been really hard to Kristen, and you know, now that you're asking me, I've got like 10 other challenges that come to mind.

Christin Marvin: 21:55

Yeah, yeah, yeah, say more about the team component.

Shane Reiser: 21:57

Sure, you know, tucson Foodie didn't have any employees when I acquired it but I was able to get Matt Sturner, who was the editor under Adam, to come back and work full time for foodie. But everybody else was new to foodie and figuring out like what the team needed to even look like. Obviously we investing big in the community so we need like a community manager or somebody who's deeply connected already and great in front of people. I was also looking to do things bigger than foodie had ever done before. So, you know, brought somebody on to tackle operations and build out systems and documentation so that we had the infrastructure to scale. Events has been really hard. We've gone through a few different event directors decided against it actually not events, but against having having an internal events director and said we're hiring out production companies and I'm doing. I have a background with events. I've run so many events, big conferences. I have the bandwidth for it's a full time job to run festivals and events, especially the quantity that that we do at foodie. So, figuring out what that team needs to look like, I thought it would be one person who was, just like you know, running and controlling. It turns out it's four or five people that come together, sometimes more intensely than at other periods of time, and we make stuff happen. As long as we have good documentation and good processes in place, it works great.

Shane Reiser: 23:34

Yeah, my first hire after Matt was Hannah Hernandez, and that was a dream hire. Social media is also one of our three pillars, right. So it's editorial. It's editorial, social and community. Those are kind of our three pillars of foodie. Our social media is so big and so many people follow us and that's all they do. They interact with us in that way and it's a funnel. Now, right, we want to connect people into our clubs through all of these different channels. Bringing Hannah on was just such a key hire. What I did there is I just looked around Tucson and I found somebody doing social media in the way that I thought it should be done, with the right voice, style and consistency, and then I just aggressively pursued her.

Christin Marvin: 24:31

How long did it take you to bring her on at this point?

Shane Reiser: 24:35

A couple months she was definitely open to it, but getting her to finally say yes and then jump into it and then supporting her. So she's successful. But she's been amazing. She's doubled our social media following In a year, across all platforms.

Christin Marvin: 24:49

That's incredible.

Shane Reiser: 24:50

In like 16 months, right, yeah, and she's just so wonderful to work with. She's very client facing, right. She's out shooting. She's like her. She's leveled up her photography game or videography game, but she's so good now that she's out bumping in the restaurant owners grabbing content she's now selling, she tells them about our restaurant partnership program. She lets them know our paywalls down, like she's an advocate and ambassador and not just a full-time employee. But, yeah, building a team has been tough.

Shane Reiser: 25:26

I made the mistake that I've made prior. Maybe, if you have any advice on this for me or your audience, how do you avoid shiny object syndrome? This is just me. I wanted to do so many things right out of the gate. I went big, I did way too much, yeah, spent way too much money, didn't kill projects quickly enough and because of that, other things that should have gotten the time and money didn't and some growth metrics were hurt. But also just the emotional journey of putting my heart into a project. Like we launched a video series, we launched like a TV show and we tried so expensive, so much of my time, and it just didn't work.

Christin Marvin: 26:16

Yeah, it's interesting when you're in that creative space, right, because you're constantly reinventing and the more creative you are, the more you're flexing that muscle, the more exciting it is.

Christin Marvin: 26:26

Right, it's kind of like it's just it's that dopamine rush, I think.

Christin Marvin: 26:31

When you talk about the shiny objects, I mean I've been growing local restaurants for the last, you know, 20 years, so every day was about chasing shiny objects, right, every day is different in the restaurant business, especially when you're in high volume, and I've really realized that, you know, being an entrepreneur now, over the last you know, just over a year, and there's so many things that I'm learning every day and there's so many things I want to try and I want to stay innovative and sharp and build my skills around editing and, you know, editorial, the editorial piece, the social media piece, every aspect of what I do right, the best way and I've got clients that struggle with this too, who have 15 concepts that are different or six concepts that are the same and want to grow.

Christin Marvin: 27:24

If you can get really clear on your vision and I mean really clear and detail out every single aspect of that vision and you are constantly checking in on where you're going, that's going to help you stay connected to it and help inform every decision that you make by saying hang on. Before we go through this process, before we roll out something else, let's talk about how this is helping us get closer to the vision.

Shane Reiser: 27:54

Yeah, we're keeping that top of mind right. It's so hard, especially when you're growing. You get a little bit of success, opportunities start popping up and some of them seem like whoa, this could be a game changer, totally Reminding yourself in the moment. Okay, what's my vision? What is the goalpost? Does this get me there? Does it distract?

Christin Marvin: 28:20

Yeah, and you said earlier, you jumped at Tucson Foodie within five seconds. I don't know if you have a tendency to jump that fast with every object, right, but sometimes just sleeping on it and then seeing if that excitement is there the next day can really help slow things down a little bit.

Shane Reiser: 28:40

Another move that I made, maybe six months ago I can't remember exactly when but I saw this pattern in myself. I was really happy that I saw this pattern and was able to kind of acknowledge it and do something about it. But I wasn't able to just change, could just change my behavior, and I couldn't stop just saying yes to things that seemed amazing. So I brought somebody on, nice, I brought a partner on who is amazing at accountability and saying no and staying focused, asking why are we doing this? What's the priority? Have we looked at the money? Have we looked at the time? Time is money. So that's been amazing. And then, of course, actually letting her, or actually listening to her. It's supposed to be like can you do this? And then I mean, I don't know about you.

Shane Reiser: 29:41

I've worked with coaches and accountability partners and they just I wasn't ready, I guess, for that, but I was ready and also I had almost run foodie into the ground. It was sort of a desperate situation. I was like, okay, I'm spending way more than I have, than we're making, I'm out of money. I'm so excited for this project, but I'm just burned out and it's hurting my health and relationships. This thing has so much potential and I have full I still have full confidence. This thing is going to happen, but not on this current path, because I am sabotaging it. So what can I do?

Christin Marvin: 30:21

Yeah, well, good for you for recognizing that. And I mean, that's what team building is all about, right? It's surrounding yourself with people that are different than you, that can challenge you and hold you accountable and offer different perspectives and balance you out a little bit. So good for you for doing that.

Shane Reiser: 30:39

Thank you. It was a long learning journey to get there and sort of open up emotionally. The other big mind shift was just like stop making it about myself. You know, I don't know how to explain that exactly, but I feel like there was a mind shift at some point where I feel like now I just kind of work for Tucson Foodie and I'm like serving it. I'm of like a service leadership mentality. Tucson Foodie is bigger than me. I'm not. You know, it's going to exist past me, maybe hopefully it's important for the community it's not mine, right, it's the communities and it's employing several people. They rely on it. It's not a passion project, it's in a very important organization. It's a group of people that help each other. So I need to run it like in a fiscally responsible way that honors our mission and honors the people that depend on it, including restaurant owners.

Shane Reiser: 31:51

Yeah, so I didn't quite internalize that. You know I was like, oh, I'm the CEO of this new company, I'm important. You know that got in the way. That mindset just got in the way and it prevented me from looking at kind of the numbers and the books and all of that stuff and just thinking big and existing up here. You know I still need to do that right. We still need to go to leaders, we need to step out, we need to have that you know, time to think big and have you know and like consider our vision and plan annually and all of that stuff. But I used to do it, I used to just live up there. Now I'm like I've got my CEO dashboard, I've got my numbers, every decision is data driven and it feels so good. I don't know why I was not letting myself do that.

Christin Marvin: 32:43

Well, it's just not sustainable to make business decisions based on emotion. You have to do it based on data. And I see that sometimes with local restaurant owners is they are so busy wearing so many hats running every aspect of the business when they wanted to be a chef or they wanted to run the front of the house and now they're in charge of HR and marketing and hiring and motivation and all these things, and they move so quickly that they often make decisions based on emotion or solving something quickly instead of really looking at the numbers and letting the numbers lead their decision.

Shane Reiser: 33:21

That's so true, yeah, and they do something. All of them do something really well, and maybe it's make food really really well, but making the decision to start a company really has nothing to do with that. It's totally an entirely different thing. I was just I caught up with Yano's, kind of a famous old OG chef here in Tucson. I'll be working with him tonight. Oh cool. Tell him. I said hi.

Christin Marvin: 33:49

I will.

Shane Reiser: 33:50

Do you know his motivation behind starting Studio Yano's?

Christin Marvin: 33:54

Yes, but you tell me, you tell me Okay.

Shane Reiser: 33:58

Cool.

Christin Marvin: 33:58

I was hoping you'd say no.

Shane Reiser: 34:00

I'll tell you the story anyway. Well, he told me that he's started solo restaurants and after he spent some time not working in restaurants anymore, he kind of realized just how much he missed cooking for people, cooking for people. And that's how he started. You know, loved cooking for people. But at some point, after you open a restaurant and open another restaurant and you have chefs working for you and cooks, you don't have time to cook for people anymore. The majority of your time is managing people, is managing finances, all that stuff you just said, all that HR, marketing, sales, finance, like all these things you have to do. And he hadn't just cooked for people in a long time. So that was sort of the concept behind Studio Yano's. It's literally just one table, 12 people. You have to buy the whole damn table. Yeah, you can't just settle like it's usually a group coming in and he's like welcome, I'm going to cook for you now. Yeah, and it's just incredibly intimate and it's, you know, he's like loving life again.

Christin Marvin: 35:15

Yeah, and I will say, being you know, I help him in the kitchen and on the front of house side with the studio, and what he's doing there is so special and it's so intimate and it's so, it's just an experience that you can never, ever recreate because of the people in the space and it's beautiful.

Christin Marvin: 35:37

I mean, we take group photos together at the end of the meals, if you know, not, not not it's not part of the show, you know, or the experience, but last time I worked one of the guests had their camera and we're like, let's everybody get back on the chef's counter. And you know the host was like laying on the counter and wanted to take a picture with everybody. There's just a lot of love in that room and and passion, and if you want to hear more about that, listen to episode seven. Janice and I have really good conversation and his son Ben joins us for that, which is great.

Christin Marvin: 36:11

And he's going to talk a little bit more about it. We've got another episode. We shot down at 10 West and talked a little bit more about T-Con to City of Gastronomy and Janice is just he's hilarious. He is so kind, he's got such a big heart, he truly loves what he does and it's just contagious. So it's a it's a great experience, for sure.

Shane Reiser: 36:33

It's true, you get around, janice, you're just smiling, yeah, but to bring it back, I think I was getting into that because, you know, even even very successful restaurant owners and chefs like like Janice, you know, they start because they love doing something and then they realize that starting a business is a totally different thing, and we have to, you know it's. I almost wish that I had taken a really pragmatic approach to like the current company that I run, instead of making a big passion move, you know, because now I've had to set that aside, which is fine, because now everything is changing, now that I'm like cool, shane, you love this, great, Just keep that inside and run a business. Man. A business is an organization, exists to deliver a product, to make money, you know. So let's deliver products and make money so we can keep this thing going.

Christin Marvin: 37:30

Yeah, I mean there's you've got to have the business side of it, but the purpose is the driver right, I mean you're. You're not going to get up every morning and keep doing what you're doing if you're not passionate about it. And I'm curious from your perspective, now that you've built this team and you've had that mindset shift of serving the community and understanding even more important how how Tucson food is even more important to the community how do you make that sustainable?

Shane Reiser: 37:57

You want to talk about like revenue streams.

Shane Reiser: 37:59

Sure Is that what you're saying so, you mean by sustainable? Yeah, so the one of the first things that popped into my mind in that five second window when Adam asked me if I wanted to buy Tucson foodie, was we've got to diversify revenue streams, right? Tucson foodie was basically killed by COVID at one revenue stream. I didn't want that to happen again, wanted to build some resilience into our revenue model. So we've we've launched several revenue streams and we're I've been wanting to launch more, but Sam was like dude, like we've invested so much time into building such a great product, before we move on to the next one, can we go ahead and market and sell the heck out of this, you know, to get it where it needs to be. So I've mentioned a couple right and, by the way, dismantled the only two we had right when I took over, which was sponsored content and which I just I don't like it, it doesn't feel good. And the paywall, which also I don't like it doesn't feel good. But it was kind of a hard decision to make, cause, you know, when I took over a media company, of course and I never run a media company before I researched like what's the, what are the trends in the, in the in the journalists were in the media world. You know how are media companies, how regional media companies make making money. What are the trends? And paywalls were a trend that's just increasing right, add revenue sinking. It's harder to get people's attention.

Shane Reiser: 39:42

But I decided to go in a different direction. It's because my background in community I thought you know I don't. I want, I feel like it's going to be more sustainable to be dependent on the people that we serve, which is our audience. But I want to do so in a value added way. I want to do so in a deeply connected way. Right, I didn't want to say we have much of great content and you can read a little bit, but you have to stop. If you want to keep reading it, you have to pay. That almost feels like you're being penalized. It just doesn't feel good to me and I always hated it personally. Like that, that feeling when you go to Tucson for you and it says, oh, you've already, you've already read your fifth article this month. It's just like a big middle finger in your face. You know I hated it. It didn't feel good. So I want good vibes. And back to my you know background bringing people together we have.

Shane Reiser: 40:38

So let me just tell you what our revenue streams are. We have the Tucson Foodie Insiders Club. I would I would say that's probably our biggest bet. This is $20 a month and you get all kinds of stuff. You get to invite to those dinners. We throw monthly mixers at rotating restaurants and you get showered with discounts, not just at the events that we run but all kinds of food and beverage events from other organizations around town. So it's for people that want to experiment or sorry, explore, discover, but also connect and meet other foodies. So we're trying to find all those foodies that want to meet each other in town, bringing together as often as possible and give them cool experiences. That's our big bet. We're at 500 members. I'm trying to get to 2000. You can do the math on that and we're going to get to 2000 members is $40,000 a month. That's double our burn rate.

Shane Reiser: 41:33

For every revenue stream and I don't know if this is good financial advice or good leadership advice but for every revenue stream we've launched I've thought does this have the potential to completely fund the company? If it didn't not worth it, let's do stuff that. Let's do five or six big revenue stream bets and if five of them fail. Fine, as long as one succeeds, we exist. Tucson Foodie Insiders is a big bet. If we can get that to 1,000, 2,000 members, we'll be sustainable. Then our organization, our team, gets to focus on happiness reducing churn, increasing loyalty, making people happy so they don't leave. I'm way better at that. I'd much rather serve and make sure people are happy and solve their problems than sell them on something. It's a lot easier, I think. The passport is the other thing. We can sell enough of those annually to cover our burn rate.

Shane Reiser: 42:40

Festivals that's another big one. Events and festivals we actually acquired a couple of festivals in town that were at risk of being shut down. One is Restaurant Week. It made a ton of sense. Super synergistic, we were able to bring Tucson Foodie's audience to bear on Restaurant Week in a way that never happened the first year we took it over. We doubled it. Doubled the number of restaurants participating, doubled the number of people that go out during Restaurant Week and try the Restaurant Week menu. Triple the economic impact we run that. We make money on that through sponsorships. That's not a ticketed event but we make good money on sponsorship. Visit Tucson supports us, helps us do all the content we do during the week. Every city needs a Restaurant Week. Most cities do. I have one. Tucson deserves one, considering how great our food scene is.

Shane Reiser: 43:37

We took over the craft beer crawl. We launched a great new festival called the Vegan Night Market. It exploded. I thought 300 people would come to the first one. 1,300 people showed up. Fire code violations left and right. I love it. The second one, I thought about 1,000. 3,000 people showed up. Our next one is tomorrow. It's our third one. I'm expecting 3,000 people. I don't know, it's a little colder. We'll see what. If 4,000 people show up, what are we going to do? We've taken over the entire line of the Tucson Children's Museum. We've tripled the amount of vendors. There's so much food that's an exciting one. Then we're planning a festival in October in partnership with Dr Andrew Wilde, focused on wellness. There's a lot of overlap between wellness and food, not just nutrition, but many other ways it's connected. Yeah, festivals Huge revenue stream for us. I think it's been our biggest so far. I'm hoping that insiders will surpass that soon.

Shane Reiser: 44:51

We did lean into advertising. We took the paywall down, we did something, and I feel lucky for this. But we reached out to the ad agency that represents Eater. We said, hey, we have a lot of page views. Now they said, yeah, you meet our requirements. You have to have.

Shane Reiser: 45:11

I think they require 500,000 page views a month before they even consider working with you. Then they did a bunch of diligence on us. We had to pass all kinds of tests around sentiment analysis. They called our entire website If we had too many cuss words or negative words. They wouldn't have, because they ultimately bring advertisers to us. Long story short, I think Tucson Foodie was making less than $200 a month on ad revenue through just Google ads. Now that we're represented by Raptive, we make $4,000 to $7,000 a month on the advertisements on our website. I hate advertisements. I was scared all of our readers were going to run away, but we launched them. Nobody is complained and we make the money. It supports our editorial staff. It allows us to hire freelancers to write articles. It allows us to hire photographers and videographers to create good content. That turned out to be a really nice, really passive revenue stream.

Christin Marvin: 46:15

That's awesome.

Shane Reiser: 46:18

Then we tried to sell direct ads. For a long time. I hated it. Little onesie, twosies, $200, $200 ads. We launched the new thing a couple of months ago. It's working great. We call it a brand partnership. We make it scarce. Basically, we're working with 20 brands at a time. They're not restaurants, they're anybody that wants to get in front of the foodie audience. A lot of them are food adjacent, like Whiskey, dalbock or the Tucson Community Food Bank or Open and Farms packaged food products. We're talking with a dispensary. We're talking with a couple of theaters in town. We're going to work with 20 at a time. We're going to just cheerlead for them in all of our channels Newsletter ads, sponsorships at events, hosting mixers with our members at their facilities and just be there for them all year. For a retainer model Again, minimum $500 a month, somewhere at the $1200 a month. 20 brands you do the math. That can actually cover just the brand partnerships, our entire burn rate and the companies covered. We're only working with 20 companies that we love.

Shane Reiser: 47:38

That's awesome. It's working great man.

Christin Marvin: 47:41

I love it.

Shane Reiser: 47:42

Back to your advice. Get really clear on what you do, focus Totally working.

Christin Marvin: 47:48

Yeah, it takes time and practice. Yeah, and reflection. I'm so in awe and impressed with what your team has been able to do over the last 16 months. You've outlined for us so many wonderful ways that you serve and support the community through the passport at the insider, all these festivals and events that you're doing. There's so many wonderful ways that the community can support you too, which is awesome. Thank you for everything you're doing for the community. I know when I moved here because we typically read Eater.

Christin Marvin: 48:24

everywhere we go when we travel, we travel for sport, for to eat, and Tucson Foodie was my guide, our guide to where to eat. We immediately checked out a couple of the recommendations and built trust with your brand, which is incredible.

Shane Reiser: 48:43

That's how I started doing the same thing.

Christin Marvin: 48:46

That's great. How can restaurants get in contact with you?

Shane Reiser: 48:53

Well, we're highly accessible. Shane at TucsonFoodiecom. You can hit me up there. There's a partners page on the website that explains how we work with restaurants, in case they're curious, because there are multiple ways we can help a restaurant. They always have news throughout the year. We want that news. We love to break that news. We'll be the first to write it and break it. We don't charge for any of that stuff. We have the news desk, Matt Sturner. It's his life's mission to find cool news stories. He'll be the first person to break it. He worked at K-Gun. He loves doing that. He'll just pump stuff out all day long. Any restaurant in Tucson, in the broader region of Tucson, who has newsworthy information. You're expanding to a new location. You have a new seasonal menu that just dropped. You've got a new chef, whatever it is new happy hour, whatever.

Shane Reiser: 49:52

It could be big or small. You can hit our news desk. You can hit Matt at TucsonFoodiecom. There's a form to submit a news story. You can invite the team down.

Shane Reiser: 50:04

We do this once or twice a week. We head to a restaurant Hannah will go, dalton will go. We'll shoot some photographs, we'll shoot some video. We drop that stuff. We drop it on Instagram or Facebook. We might make an article out of it. We love doing that.

Shane Reiser: 50:24

I love meeting the restaurant owners. I love I interview them every chance I get. Are you struggling right now? How could we help? How can we better serve you? We have a restaurant partnership program that I think I mentioned briefly earlier. It's an all trade program. Here's how it works, in case you're curious. There's no cash exchanged. This is where the passport comes into play. Restaurants offer vouchers to the passport holders. We aim for a $40 value. They can break that up into $4, $10 vouchers if they want to. I think that's a great marketing exercise in itself, because a voucher only costs the restaurant about 33%. Suddenly, they put a $40 value and they spend it in whatever. That math is $13 or something like that. We're only selling 500 passports. Most passport owners don't use all of their vouchers, just like the entertainment coupon book. Remember that, yes, which is where I came up with this idea. I don't have any original ideas, by the way. I've stolen every idea.

Christin Marvin: 51:36

I'm looking at what other cities are doing. You have to look at your competition. It's how you run business.

Shane Reiser: 51:42

For sure. I'm like that looks cool. We could do that in Tucson. We can fund the passport to the insider club, to the festivals we launched, totally just ripped off of other organizations who succeed. It's way easier to be a fast follower than the first to market. Let the first guy make all the mistakes.

Christin Marvin: 52:04

There's so many events here which is a great thing that span all types of interests for people in hobbies and what have you. The weather, because it's so beautiful all year around. I can't even keep up with everything that's happening here. What I have seen is that the local community just really supports these festivals and these events. They love to show up for their community, which is just amazing, yeah.

Shane Reiser: 52:31

Definitely a local feel here in Tucson. I'm starting to think about taking Tucson for the other cities and launching, like Santa Fe Foodie or San Diego Foodie or even Phoenix Foodie, something Adam thought about, tried a couple of times. I will see. It's going to be an experiment. I'm not going to do it for a while. Back to Sam's voice in my head we just got to build that sustainability, that resilience, those processes, that documentation. Until it's really repeatable we can just drop it and repeat. The only experiment we're running is that it's a new city, not experiments around product or language or anything.

Christin Marvin: 53:14

You've got your framework built and you can just duplicate.

Shane Reiser: 53:18

But it's a different city To your point. What's the vibe like in San Diego? Do the locals support local as strongly as Tucsonans do? Will they show up? Will they care? How do we enter a new city? Tucson Foodie has been here for 10 years so that'll be interesting. But yeah, the people in Tucson, they really come out. They do. I think people love living here.

Christin Marvin: 53:43

Yeah, they do. I do for sure. So, shane, again, thank you enough for coming on the show and sharing everything that you have about Tucson Foodie and being transparent and letting the community know how you support them and how they can support you, and just giving us an inside look at your challenges too. It's super eye-opening and, from an entrepreneurial standpoint, I can relate on all of those levels.

Shane Reiser: 54:12

I've been dying for somebody to ask me these kinds of questions so that I can be really transparent. Are there, is there anything else that you think everybody should know, or that you're wondering that you feel like I wouldn't answer because it's an open book over here?

Christin Marvin: 54:25

Well, I know, when you and I met, you had said that some people reach out to you and say what kind of restaurant should I open? You're like I don't know.

Shane Reiser: 54:34

Oh, that's true.

Christin Marvin: 54:36

I was going to ask you where the trends are going, where you're seeing the trends, but you know, obviously you. It sounds like you're at the forefront with the vegan festivals that you're doing, but any other trends that you see, I think plant-based is a trend nationally, growing crazy.

Shane Reiser: 54:54

I wish local was a trend. It's important for the future of our country and the world, I think, but for so many reasons not just like local resiliency but also like sustainability that trend is not quite. I have a master's degree in sustainability and I was hoping that I could use Tucson Foodie in a way to sort of beat that drum a bit. You know that sustainability, plant-based matters, local matters all these things are way more sustainable. So eat a little bit less meat, spend a little bit more local. But people are moving at an incredibly slow pace there, so it's not the kind of trend I wish it was, but I don't know.

Shane Reiser: 55:40

I've made a couple of observations and I don't know if this is true or not, but I've noticed that really differentiated stuff succeeds, weird stuff I mean like, for example and this isn't a local spot, but two hands Korean corn dogs. There's a restaurant that opened up here in Tucson called Two Hands and it's a chain. But they came to Tucson and I was really surprised they came to Tucson because it's like the smallest town they've been to. They came here for a reason and wildly successful they're doing really well. I bumped into the woman who helped bring it to Tucson.

Shane Reiser: 56:27

They've now opened up two other spots there's three now in Tucson and it's just corn dogs weird wacky corn dogs with all kinds of crazy toppings rolled in crazy sauces and filled with different things, injected with cheese and sausage, and that sauce is crazy. They're supposed to have a vegan dog pretty soon. I'm excited for that. It's on the menu, but it says coming soon. It's been that way for like a year. But every time I see a restaurant open then I'm like, oh, I've never heard. Oh, finally we have a Bosnian restaurant.

Shane Reiser: 56:55

That's going to do well, because people just want new stuff. They want new experiences, new tastes, they want to try things. And when another barbecue spot opens up or another American food restaurant, I'm like OK, well, how are you different? Why are people going to seek you out? What's the differentiation here? Because if there's not something that captures their attention, it's going to be wild before they give it a try. And that's tough when you're starting a new restaurant. You have limited time, limited money. You need to get people in there, they need to fall in love and they need to get that word of mouth and an organic marketing happening as soon as possible.

Shane Reiser: 57:37

That's how successful restaurant Like. When a restaurant has a bad opening, it's a really bad sign. Chances are they'll be dead inside of 18 months.

Christin Marvin: 57:46

Yeah, if even that long yeah.

Shane Reiser: 57:48

Yeah.

Christin Marvin: 57:48

Did they make it to 18?

Shane Reiser: 57:49

You probably done better than I do.

Christin Marvin: 57:50

Well, it's so. Yeah, I mean, I've opened 13 different restaurants over the course of my career and you really have to lean into those first 90 days for sure. And some restaurants, a lot of restaurants, open up and they're really busy in the first couple of weeks and they think, oh, this is great, we're going to be really popular. And then they drop off, which is natural, and they're not ready for that. Sure.

Christin Marvin: 58:13

But I think it's so important for the local restaurant scene to continue to be diverse and offer new, exciting concepts to the local, to the people that live here, to encourage diners to continue to go out and have new experiences and just strengthen our culture. And we have such a huge population of students and snowbirds that spend only part of the year here, right, that I think it's important for us to show up really well and offer them something exciting when they're here.

Shane Reiser: 58:45

So Absolutely OK. I want more thing. Yeah, please. I've also noticed that restaurants that invest in the community do well. Yeah, the I'm not going to name names here, but I think there are some restaurants that are OK and I'm not a food critic, I don't have a trained palate but they're a handful of restaurants that do so well because the chef and the owner are so visible and friendly and they invest in the community and they give back and they volunteer and they cook at events and they participate in the competitions. They're not on an island. They help other chefs get started. They believe in that and it pays dividends and people go there because they want to support that guy and the food is fine. Well, no.

Christin Marvin: 59:47

I will say that one thing that I've really noticed and appreciated from moving here last year is that this town is so collaborative. I mean, I've spent so much time connecting with as many local restaurant owners as I can and so many of them know everybody and will say let me introduce you to this person, Come help with events with this location, or they just they love each other, they support each other and that really directly contributes to helping the local dining scene thrive. Because leadership is lonely. A lot of restaurant tours are only spending time in their four walls and when they start to branch out they feel less lonely. They can be strategic with other restaurant owners. They build that network, they collaborate together. It's about again serving the local community, not just about them and their business. Similar to what you said earlier, it's a game changer.

Shane Reiser: 1:00:41

So true, it really is, man, yeah, you got to get yourself out of that lonely leader guy at the top. Man, it's just such a mental, it's so heavy feeling that way and you just don't have. Nobody has to feel that way.

Christin Marvin: 1:00:57

Right, all right. My friend, great to spend more time with you. Thank you, I look forward to more conversations. Please come back.

Shane Reiser: 1:01:04

Thanks for having me on the show, Kristen. I really appreciate it. I'm going to go listen to that Janos episode.

Christin Marvin: 1:01:08

Yeah, please do. It's a who and I will tell you the one that's coming up. I don't have it scheduled yet, but Janos shares his fantasy of wanting to get arrested by harvesting some local food, and I'll leave it at that.

Shane Reiser: 1:01:21

That's funny. We could just volunteer with Ishka Sheetah. Yes exactly that's hilarious. Yeah, I can picture him just like stealing some Meyer lemons off of some neighbor's tree and then all of a sudden he gets the cops called on him Totally, and then he's like do you know who I am?

Christin Marvin: 1:01:37

He was in the chef's coat on, yeah.

Shane Reiser: 1:01:40

I love it. Tucson Foodie would totally write a story about that.

Christin Marvin: 1:01:44

Janos' mug shot would be amazing, so awesome.

Shane Reiser: 1:01:47

I just wanted to preserve some lemons.

Christin Marvin: 1:01:49

Right, exactly.

Shane Reiser: 1:01:50

That's a good impression, hilarious.

Christin Marvin: 1:01:52

Awesome, we'll talk to you soon, friend. Ok, bye, bye.