Jen Price, Atlanta Beer Boutique

[00:00:00] Sanjay Parekh: Welcome to the Side Hustle to Small Business Podcast, powered by Hiscox. I’m your host, Sanjay Parekh. Throughout my career I’ve had side hustles, some of which turned into real businesses, but first and foremost: I’m a serial technology entrepreneur.

In the creator space, we hear plenty of advice on how to hustle harder and why you can “sleep when you’re dead.” On this show, we ask new questions in hopes of getting new answers.

Questions like: How can small businesses work smarter? How do you achieve balance between work and family? How can we redefine success in our businesses so that we don’t burn out after year three?

Every week, I sit down with business founders at various stages of their side hustle to small business journey. These entrepreneurs are pushing the envelope while keeping their values. Keep listening for conversation, context, and camaraderie.

[00:00:57] Sanjay Parekh: Jen Price fell in love with craft beer during her college summer internships in Boulder, Colorado. In her free time, Jen began educating herself on the craft beer scene and then started offering beer tasting classes, writing a book on craft beer, and launching a tasting room in Atlanta. The pandemic prevented her from opening the Atlanta Beer Boutique and instead led Jen to use her expertise and pivot into launching a second beer-focused business, Crafted for Action.

On today’s show, Jen and I talk about the process of writing and self-publishing her book, how the pandemic impacted the opening of her bar, and how she’s continuing her entrepreneurial journey with a new venture. Stay tuned.

Jen, I'm excited to have you on the podcast. Welcome and thanks for joining us.

[00:01:41] Jen Price: Thank you so much for having me, I appreciate it.

[00:01:43] Sanjay Parekh: Jen, I think it'd be great if you just tell us first, a little bit about your background, like where you're from. Where'd you go to school? All of those kinds of things.

[00:01:51] Jen Price: Sure. Yeah. So I grew up in Decatur, Georgia, which is a little east of Atlanta. It's in the Metro Atlanta area. Yeah, grew up here, high school, went off to college. I went to Bethune-Cookman College right out the gate, which is in Daytona Beach, Florida.

[00:02:07] Sanjay Parekh: I'm glad you told us where that was.

[00:02:10] Jen Price: It's a small, historically black college down there on the beach. Beautiful town. Awesome setting for a college.

[00:02:17] Sanjay Parekh: And did you pick that college because of the history of the college or because it was by the beach?

[00:02:22] Jen Price: Yeah. I got a full scholarship. My dad picked the college. I was actually enrolled to go to Tuskegee, which is another historically black college in Alabama.

My background, I was going to study engineering and they have a great program there, and Bethune-Cookman called in the 11th hour with the full presidential scholarship. And my dad was like, well it looks like you're going to school in Daytona Beach. So that's where I went.

[00:02:45] Sanjay Parekh: And you were like, well, there's the beach. It’s fine.

[00:02:51] Jen Price: I was very excited once I got there and saw how beautiful the campus was. But they didn't have an engineering program per se. They have a lot of historically black colleges have arrangements with other HBCUs or other bigger schools. If a student is at their school and they don't, they want to be an engineer, but they don't have the program, they'll send you to another school. It's called a three-two program, a dual degree program.

So, I was dually enrolled at Bethune-Cookman. I did three years there and basically majored in math. Took all the math courses that they had to offer and the few of the pre-engineering classes that they had. And then the arrangement was for me to transfer it to Florida A&M university.

It's a Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University in Tallahassee, another historical black college. That's where I transferred to for the “two” part of the three-two program to finish there and focus on my civil engineering degree. So, I did both of those back to back decided that did not want to be an engineer by any stretch.

It was not, didn't jam well with me. I just didn't love it. I suffered through the program. I did pretty good, but I just knew I didn't want that for a career. One of my professors recommended that I look at the school of planning, city planning, urban planning at Florida State. And I applied and I got in and that's where I went to grad school.

So I spent two more years in Tallahassee before I left and moved to Philadelphia. But during that time in college, I had a really cool internship at, it was called the National Center for Atmospheric Research. It was out in Boulder, Colorado, and I had no interest in atmospheric research whatsoever, but Boulder, Colorado, was so beautiful.

And I fell in love with the city and there was beer everywhere. Like, beer better than anything I'd ever had in my whole life. And so, I interned with them every summer for four years with no interest in being an atmospheric scientist. I got to use my engineering degree there though a lot and then taste incredible beer, which is really what turned me onto craft beer.

[00:04:56] Sanjay Parekh: So, at what point did you get that entrepreneurial bug? Were you ever, did you ever do anything entrepreneurial when you were a kid?

[00:05:03] Jen Price: No way, absolutely not, never, nothing. Never thought I'd be in business.

[00:05:10] Sanjay Parekh: No entrepreneurs in the family or anything like that?

[00:05:12] Jen Price: Not until I got a little older, like both of my parents were, my father worked very corporate job.

He worked in the oil business for Mobil Oil Corporation and my mom's a teacher. And so, they worked very traditional jobs and I was supposed to also work a very traditional job. My brother actually was an entrepreneur, but I don't know if I recognized that. He owns a paint company with his father-in-law.

He started out with his father-in-law, training under him at the time. And so, I never really thought of that as being an entrepreneur endeavor, but I guess it was. But, no, the focus or the plan was for me to have a corporate job and have a nine-to-five and a 401k and retirement and all that good traditional stuff, which I did for a very long time.

I don't think I got bit by the bug until I moved to Philadelphia. That was after Charlotte, moved there and worked for a woman-owned company as a planner. And I think that was the first time I worked for someone who owned their own company. And I was just so fascinated by that. I was really impressed.

She was a 30-year-old woman who owned a company had office in downtown Philadelphia, which I thought was just so freaking cool and a woman of color too. She's a black woman. So, I was just like, wow, this is I had never really been this close to this and then just got, just I fell in love with the city.

I fell in love with people's businesses like the cafe that was near me that I could walk to, and the little pizza shop, and the bodega. Like I just really fell in love. It was my first time being in an urban setting too. So, I got to see a lot of like hustle and bustle. It just, it really broadened my perspective on the life and the lifestyle people could really have.

[00:06:57] Sanjay Parekh: So, at what point then did you decide? So, you started working. At what point did you decide, hey, I want to start my own thing? How did you go about doing that?

[00:07:06] Jen Price: That didn’t come until I moved to Atlanta. I thought about it a little bit in Philly and just never did anything with it. Moved back to Atlanta. I've been back here at home for a while now. I moved back in ‘06.

And I think maybe a few years after that, I started just revisiting my love for craft beer, started studying it, reading books, going to breweries. Atlanta at the time was just jst getting maybe a few breweries at the time and just kind of growing in its infancy when it comes to craft beer.

So, I did a lot of studying and reading and probably in 2008-ish, I started thinking about, how I could really turn my passion into a real job. What could I do in craft beer? What would that look like? I started hosting pairing parties and classes and events with my friends to teach them about craft beer.

Those grew into paid events where people would actually pay me to come and listen to me talk about beer. And I was like, this is weird because I’d do this for free.

[00:08:09] Sanjay Parekh: And this was as a, basically a side hustle while you were still working.

[00:08:14] Jen Price: Absolutely. Absolutely. That's when I started Atlanta Beer Boutique, it actually started when I started reading, I started blogging about beer and I knew at that time that I wanted a brick-and-mortar location, but I just had no idea how I was going to get to it.

[00:08:29] Sanjay Parekh: What was your stumbling block? Was it money? Was it like, you didn't know how to make it all work?

[00:08:35] Jen Price: Yeah. All of that. This is me coming into this as a project manager and as a planner, as someone with no background in hospitality, and food or beverage, just the passion for it.

And it just seemed like an insurmountable goal. I was like, I don't even know the language well enough to own a business. While I was blogging and writing about beer, I started just reading about business and reading about retail and just trying to understand it. I had a friend who owned a retail clothing store at the time.

So, I would bend her ear, just talking about the retail business and learned as much as I could. And it just seemed like something that just, it still didn't seem like it was something that I could do. It seemed like it just wasn't for me, like other people start businesses. It just didn't seem like something that I could do. But I knew that I wanted it.

And I didn't know how to get to it. So I was like, let me just at least immerse myself in craft beer, learn as much as I can about it. I felt very strongly that I needed to have credentials or to build sort of some foundation and credential myself. That's when I started reading and writing about it, blogging.

I said I'll know, at least as you blog, you learn so much yourself too. So I was like this is helpful to me and helpful to others. I can do that. The classes helped me create a buzz and a following. And then eventually I wrote a book. I was like, this is not as hard as I thought it was to actually write a book.

But you know why though? I cheated. I took all of my blog posts and used them as the content for my book.

[00:10:14] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah. Yeah. Did you, so that's actually a unique process in and of itself. A lot of people think about writing a book and very few people actually make that jump. So, how did you figure that part of it out? And did you self-publish this? How did you go about getting that made?

[00:10:30] Jen Price: I self-published. Yeah. I I knew that I didn't want to write like a thick, dense book. It's called The Chick's Guide to Beer, so the idea was for it to be like a reference manual or a little book that someone would put in their pocket or take with them to a bar because that's the nerdy thing I did.

I would go to the bars in my neighborhood and take my books and my journals and just read and write about beer and drink beer and take notes and stuff like that. So, I was like, you know what, it'd be nice if someone had just a little guide book and it's called The Chick's Guide to Beer because when I started hosting my craft beer events, I noticed about 75% of my attendees were ladies.

And it was such a surprise to me. I don't know what I expected when I started hosting events, but I was pleasantly surprised that a lot of women just wanted it to be in a place where they could learn about beer. Maybe it helped that I was a lady too. But just to be almost like a safe space to ask any question you wanted and to not feel like folks were looking at you weird and you're not holding up the line at the bar.

So that, that was really my inspiration for the book. I was like, I have to give people more information and to make it easier for folks. But yeah, I still, I wrote it. I did an outline of that thing. Went on Fiver to get all my graphics done, found someone to work with in that marketplace, who could do my graphics.

I found a friend who's a graphic designer who’d never laid out a book before, but I said can you lay out my book? She was like, sure. I'll try. Yeah. And then I found a WordPress, I think, not WordPress, I can't remember the name of it. Now it’s Kindle publishing and Amazon, they bought everything. And the company I used initially to self-publish, Create Space, that was the name of it. You just upload your document, someone will proof it, and if it's ready to go, they'll print it for you. So that was how I wrote my book.

[00:12:24] Sanjay Parekh: So, do you think the fact that you were a woman leading an event about beer is the reason why you had that gender shift from what you were expecting?

[00:12:34] Jen Price: I think so. A hundred percent. I do. I do. Gender shift and cultural shift. There were a lot of women of color there too. But women in general, I was just so pleasantly surprised. I just thought it'd be a room full of white guys with beards, I don't know, who knew way more than I did about craft beer, but it ended up being people who needed the education, who wanted the education.

And also Atlanta is an entertainment city. We have a really strong food and beverage scene and entertainment scene. So people are always looking for fun and interesting things to do. And I know folks have been to wine tastings before but a beer tasting sounded a little different and unique.

The benefit of being in Atlanta is that people like to go out and like to do girls nights and like to do fun things. I think that helps a little bit, to just the culture of hanging out here in the city.

[00:13:27] Sanjay Parekh: So then at some point during all of this, then you decided Hey, you know what, I want to open my own place. And I know obviously one of your issues was funding and you decide to do a Kickstarter and that looked like it was pretty successful. You got more than what you were aiming for it.

[00:13:45] Jen Price: Yeah. I would have asked for more, if I had known that was going happen. I probably set the bar too low. My goal was $25,000 in 30 days.

And the reason I set that goal and that amount really was because I knew I'd gotten through my business plan. I did an incubator program with Emory University here to help me write my business plan and get ready to open my business and I knew how much that was going to cost, and I knew that I didn't have the 20% to put down on a loan to secure that funding for myself. So I had to raise it. I don't have a rich auntie or an inheritance waiting on me anywhere. So I had to hustle and get it myself and a Kickstarter campaign at the time was it just seemed like the right thing to do.

So that was the reasoning behind setting the 25K goal. And I raised $30,000 in 30 days and it took work every single day. But it really helped not only promote my business, because Kickstarter as a platform promotes you, but the way that I set up my campaign was through establishing ambassadors.

So these were like close friends of mine, who I knew I could count on to post on my behalf. Friends who had a slightly different following than I did. Friends from outside of craft beer, who could say, hey, this is my friend. She's doing this campaign for this reason. Please support her. So, I think that helped grow my following to people outside of craft beer.

The campaign was so helpful in that regard too, not only raising money, but really just helping to promote me as a business and as a brand.

[00:15:24] Adam Walker: Support for this podcast comes from Hiscox. Committed to helping small businesses protect their dreams since 1901. Quotes and information on customized insurance for specific risks are available at hiscox.com. Hiscox, the business insurance experts.

[00:15:41] Sanjay Parekh: Okay, so you got the money, you got more than what you were expecting. You found the spot in 2019. And you started building out in kind of summer, spring. What happened then?

[00:15:53] Jen Price: I went through all of the several, several permitting interviews.

[00:16:02] Sanjay Parekh: And this is with the City of Atlanta?

[00:16:04] Jen Price: It's with the City, with the County, with every single body. It's such a long process.

So the weird thing that I heard has changed a lot since COVID is that in Atlanta, every single department, they don't have consolidated permitting. So the building code inspector has to come out separate from the health inspector and the health department is separate from the fire. They're all separate. And you have to have one before you move on to the next. So there's like a chain of command that you have to go through.

[00:16:42] Sanjay Parekh: Oh, so you can't do them in any order that you want. There's a specified order that they have to happen in.

[00:16:48] Jen Price: The specified order and they can't, and you can't schedule them concurrently. You have to have the approval of one before you move on to the next.

[00:16:56] Sanjay Parekh: So how long did this take? How many weeks?

[00:17:00] Jen Price: Months, it took months. So once I had most things built out, I got the certificate of occupancy, which was good, which means that I could at least start doing stuff in this space. But it took months to get through all of the other permits. Probably a total of 4 months to get through the whole process.

Meanwhile I'm getting stuff in though. I'm getting in my shelving and having that built in the space, I'm getting my draperies hung. I'm getting the place painted. So we're working through and ready and waiting and as we hit these hurdles for permitting, just pausing for a minute and then picking back up whenever we can.

Work was still happening, but it took it took months for that to roll out just because it just, I don't know, I guess they have a thousand million people they're permitting at one time in the city — it’s a big city — but it’s just, it'd be laborious itself, after a while, and it just feels like it's never going to happen, but eventually, I have everything ready and I'm ready to go. This was January 2020, where I had all of my permits in place. I'm ready to go for the liquor licensing part. That's the last thing you can do by the way, you have to have all of your permits in place before you can apply for a liquor license from the city first, and then you apply to the one for the state of Georgia.

And none of that is allowed until you have all of the other permits and the place is pretty much ready to go.

[00:18:30] Sanjay Parekh: Okay. There's a risk there, right? Like your main thing you're doing is related to the alcohol and liquor. And if you don't get that liquor license, then it doesn't matter that all the other things got done.

[00:18:42] Jen Price: Absolutely not.

[00:18:43] Sanjay Parekh: So what happened?

[00:18:44] Jen Price: Yeah. So I the first step is to go to Atlanta police department, who issues liquor licenses for the city. You start your application through them and they schedule all your meetings. You have to go to the neighborhood association, you have to go to the neighborhood planning unit, which is the larger sort of coalition of neighborhoods.

And then you go before the Alcohol License and Review Board. So I'd gone through the neighborhood level and the same thing here, you have to go through one level before they can schedule the next. So I went through that in January. And then by February they gave me my date to go before the liquor and review board which was going to be in April.

I was geared up ready to go. I had a soft launch in the end of January just to invite people to my space, all the folks who supported me from a Kickstarter, all my friends, family, just everyone had a big party there. I got lots of beer donated. So can't sell beer at this time. But I can give beer way.

So we had kegs, we activated the kegerator machine that I had with two kegs from some local beer folks, and just had a party for the neighborhood the next day. Just a bring your own pint glass party. And I filled up beer and just met the neighbors and had a really good time. And was getting ready for my interview, with the liquor review board and then the city shut down.

The world shut down, as we know. I think that February 14th, March 13, 14. February 14th is when I got is when I had my final sort of hoo-rah, my party. And yeah, I was like, yay, this is all gonna happen. We're just waiting on the review board. That obviously did not happen because my interview was going to be in in the spring.

And I just didn't I didn't know that the city was going to shut down forever. So I was like, oh, okay. It's okay. We'll just reschedule. They canceled everything to do in Atlanta. I think like a lot of cities just weren't really ready or equipped to handle business virtually and online.

And they also, of course like the rest of the world didn't think that it was going to be a really long, drawn out, prolonged pandemic. I think they thought, we'll get back to business in a few months. This won't last forever and it has lasted forever. My meeting kept getting canceled and pushed back and indefinitely at this time.

By the time April, May rolls around, the city has no plans of opening and doing business. They still hadn't gotten even City Council meetings online, virtually yet. Everything just really paused. And in this time my landlord decided, well, we'll give you a little bit of leeway on your lease.

We don't expect this to be a long-standing thing issue is what I'm sure they're thinking. So they were the reason why I needed leniency on my lease, I should mention this is very important is because the SBA, when the pandemic happened, if you had a loan with them, through the SBA, didn't matter who your bank was, but if you had a small business loan that wasn't fully funded or that was still open which my loan was.

I'd spent most of my money on the build-out. At this time, there's money left in my loan to go towards working capital and inventory, because that was the last thing I had to buy and then working capital just to stay afloat.

But at that time they froze my loan and every other loan in that position, because it was just risky to them. So I had no access to working capital, so I couldn't continue to pay utilities, equipment costs, things that I was just carrying and waiting to open. It timed out really well, though.

If things had happened, it wouldn't have been a big deal. At this point I'm burning through my own savings, burning through my money. The city didn't resume, I don't think they resumed their review board interviews until August or September, so that was six months later. And I didn't have the personal funding. I refuse to burn through my personal savings again.

[00:22:58] Sanjay Parekh: Right, because you've got to think about yourself too. And what if this goes on for a long time and you need to stay afloat personally as well.

[00:23:05] Jen Price: Yeah. Yeah. And one other thing happened that was key to me making this decision is when I went to the neighborhood review board with the Atlanta Police Department, they looked at the zoning and it's really weird in Atlanta. So the police department interprets zoning code that is written by the planning department, which is a very interesting setup. When I found this location and went through the planning department and looked at the zoning, zoning was fine.

There was nothing wrong with what I wanted to do. I could do everything I wanted to do because of the special use district that I was in. The police department thought otherwise, and when I went to them to finalize my application, they said you can't do both. You can't be a bottle shop and a bar in this neighborhood, which is totally counter to what the zone that I was in, it was a mixed-use zone.

So the spirit of that zone is to be, and it was a neighborhood scale zone. So the spirit of that zone is to be very walkable, close, to encourage these kinds of co-location of uses and just a vibe for a district. So they told me I had to pick one. And I decided, okay Jen, what do you like most about craft beer?

Is it selling bottles or is it like the community part, like hanging out with people, being able to have classes, talking? And of course that's the core. That's where I started is sharing information and creating community around beer. So I chose bar because I was like that's the only, of these two uses, if I have a bottle shop, I can't do tastings here. But if I have a bar, I can still do tastings and classes and such. So I chose, okay, let's just go forward with this as a bar.

My attorney said, yeah, let's just move forward with that. And we could probably come back and get an amendment and get you into the package soon. So I said, cool, we'll go for the bar. And probably the wrong choice after learning that bars were not allowed to open, like, for months in Atlanta. If I had known that I probably would have chosen the bottle shop, but who knew that any of this was going to happen.

[00:25:11] Sanjay Parekh: So did you end up shutting this down then?

[00:25:13] Jen Price: I had to. I had to shut down. Not only because I was burning through my money, but because there was no end in sight to these bar closures. And bars, we're treated like concert halls and movie theaters, they were in the same class during COVID of places that were super spreader locations.

[00:25:36] Sanjay Parekh: Which makes sense now, in retrospect for everything that we've lived through, but you feel like if you'd made a different choice, then do you think the beer boutique would still be around?

[00:25:47] Jen Price: It's hard to say. I think it may have been, I think it may have been. I do know that it still would have been a really difficult time to try to open a brand-new business. Atlanta also still was not very friendly to delivery of alcohol and to-go sales. I know some folks who own wine shops who had who had success during the pandemic because of curbside pick-up and things that they could do for their business.

But Atlanta didn't update their delivery of alcohol laws until almost a year later after the pandemic. It's hard to say. I would've probably had to let people go. I would've had to fire staff. I don't know how I would've managed being the sole proprietor of a Beer Boutique and working a full-time job because my plan was to hire staff to run the Beer Boutique and for me to come when I could after work and relieve people.

But it just I don't know. I don't know, Sanjay, if it would have been successful because of still all the hurdles that I would have had to have made it over as a brand new business opening.

[00:27:03] Sanjay Parekh: The way you describe it, too, it feels like that would have been a lot less fun of a place.

[00:27:11] Jen Price: It wasn’t what I wanted. Yeah. That's the other thing. I'm not upset that I chose, when I had to choose between a bar and a package store, I'm not upset that I chose the bar, because that like you said, that's where the fun is for me. Is pouring beers and talking and being around people. Yeah, it wouldn't have been the same.

[00:27:32] Sanjay Parekh: Okay. You had to shut this down then. And then what? Did you say I'm done with trying to start businesses?

[00:27:41] Jen Price: No, not at all. The bank actually gave me, so after working with them through a couple of deferments that they allowed, the banker I was working with directly really believed in my business and really wanted to help me find a location and had worked out with the SBA that they could release the rest of my funding and maybe even increase my loan if I found another location, because remember I burned through all of my money.

Like I was just down to working capital and inventory left in my loan. They were going to have to give me more money if I were to find another location. And because I wanted it to be a bar, I had to find a space that had, in my opinion, had a patio. This place I was at didn't have any outdoor seating, no option for it.

It was just a small and closed COVID trap. So, I was trying to find a business that was the opposite of that. And we just, we never found anything that the bank really, really liked. I found things that I liked, but not things that the bank would really, really get behind. There was one location that seemed like it would work out and it fell through in negotiations with the lease.

So that was probably 2021, in October is when I auctioned off all of the equipment that I had. All my equipment, furniture, fixtures, shelving, all that stuff in storage because I was planning on opening auction it off in October, started paying back that loan. I'd gotten some federal funds.

I got like the restaurant revitalization fund that I was just holding onto. And then I was applying for grants like crazy, all 2020, and some of 2021, just to get more funding to open up and ended up dumping all of that into the SBA loan to reduce the balance of that and start figuring out how to pay that back.

But in the meantime, decided that I wanted to launch a new business. Me, the non-entrepreneur launched another business. I wanted to open, I've always wanted to do a conference, a craft beer conference, and the timing just never seemed right. And in 2020, I was like, well, it's a pandemic, so you can't do a conference.

And then in 2021, I decided, you should at least do something. Do something virtual, see what happens. Line it up with American Craft Beer Week, which is in May, and make a thing out of it. Like just do something. And so I launched a company, Crafted for Action. And it's going back to the stuff I love. Just hosting events, parties, workshops, and the signature event of Crafted for Action is Craft Beer Con, which is a virtual craft beer conference that launched last year in 2021.

And in addition to the panels, which we did 13 panels over a few days. I also hosted really small in-person events. Because I really wanted people to still be able to get together who were local in Atlanta. So I did things like brew days and happy hours and some panel discussions about collaboration.

And for the first year I was really surprised that, first of all, I pulled it off in six to eight weeks. It was a very last-minute decision because it really wasn't supposed to be a conference. It just grew into a conference. Honestly, I knew that I wanted it to feel almost like a conference, but my plan really was to just do a few events during American Craft Beer Week and just see what happened.

And then it just kept growing, growing, growing into Craft Beer Con. So here I am, my second year planning it for a May 11 through 14. Still mostly virtual panels but even bigger and better in-person events throughout that four-day period. So that's what I pivoted into.

[00:31:33] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah. So for listeners that are thinking that they might want to come to this, are the in-person events only in one city? Are they in multiple cities? Like how does that work?

[00:31:44] Jen Price: In Atlanta.

[00:31:44] Sanjay Parekh: Okay.

[00:31:45] Jen Price: Just in Atlanta. The virtual sessions are everywhere. So you can get virtual everywhere. But yeah, in person stuff's happening here in the city of Atlanta and a couple of different things.

[00:31:56] Sanjay Parekh: Is that an easier-to-manage-for-you decision or is it something else that's driving that?

[00:32:01] Jen Price: Absolutely. My goal is I wanted to be able to do it in person this year, honestly, but I just still didn't feel comfortable planning something in person. Just the uncertainty around the pandemic was just worrying me.

[00:32:18] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah, you've been bitten by that once already.

[00:32:23] Jen Price:  Oh, yeah. I'm a little more cautious than normal.

[00:32:25] Sanjay Parekh: So I think you're now at the point where I don't think you can call yourself a non-entrepreneur anymore. This is how this is the second time that you've gone back to the well and in the same space. And I feel like you're further deepening your experience and expertise.

So does that mean down the line, once we are really post pandemic, am I going to hear, Jen is no longer a city planner and is going all in on beer and starting up yet another businesses? Is that like your vision for where you're going to go?

[00:32:56] Jen Price: Absolutely. Absolutely. I can't wait to retire from being a city planner. I just, I can't wait. It has paid the way for a very long time, for 20 years for me. But I'm just ready to shift and to start something new and fresh and to be really immersed in craft beer and for it to be my everyday, day to day kind of thing. I don't I don't see myself being this excited about much else, honestly.

And there's so many opportunities within craft beer. I think I've shown myself that just from going from being a bottle shop owner to now a conference planner and promoter. But, so many opportunities. And again, like the thing that I love so much about it is the community and so many ways to bring people together. Craft beer is, I mean, it's everywhere.

Almost every country on the planet has its own signature craft beer. And it's the third most popular beverage in the world. So, it's just such a unifying thread among cultures and people and I'm really interested in finding new ways to bring that to the forefront and to use it as a way to connect people and to just bring different folks together who may not have a chance to be shoulder to shoulder or elbow to elbow at a bar and to talk about stuff that matters.

There's so many ways I could do that in craft beer. So, I'm excited about the future.

[00:34:28] Sanjay Parekh: I got to say I am excited for you and just hearing your story and knowing the trials and tribulations that you've been through and to stick with it and going forward again. I think that says a lot about you as a person and the perseverance. Maybe there's a little bit of that engineering in there too, of I'm going to just keep hammering, a little problem solving in there. I'm super excited for you as well. Listeners that might want to attend the conference in May, where can they go to find out more information and buy tickets?

[00:35:02] Jen Price: You go to CraftedForAction.com. Yeah, right now I just closed the open call for panelists and panel discussions. Cause I really wanted to crowd source the ideas for this year's conference. So that just closed. And if you go to the website now you'll still see the save the date up.

And registration will open really soon. So I've looked forward to seeing some new faces virtually and in Atlanta, if people want to make the trek down.

[00:35:28] Sanjay Parekh: There you go, Jen. Thanks so much for coming on podcast.

[00:35:33] Jen Price: Awesome. Thank you for having me again. I appreciate it, that was a lot of fun.

[00:31:15] Sanjay Parekh: Thank you for listening to this week’s episode of the Side Hustle to Small Business Podcast, powered by Hiscox. To learn more about how Hiscox can help protect your small business through intelligent insurance solutions, visit hiscox.com. And if you have a story you want to hear on this podcast, please visit Hiscox.com/shareyourstory. I’m your host, Sanjay Parekh. You can find me on Twitter at @sanjay or on my website at sanjayparekh.com

[00:34:15] Sanjay Parekh: Thank you for listening to this week’s episode of the Side Hustle to Small Business Podcast, powered by Hiscox. To learn more about how Hiscox can help protect your small business through intelligent insurance solutions, visit hiscox.com.

And, if you have a story that you want to hear on this podcast, please visit Hiscox.com/shareyourstory.

I’m your host, Sanjay Parekh. You can find me on Twitter at @sanjay or on my website at sanjayparekh.com.