Ep11 Gail Schomisch - How a Paint-Your-Own-Pottery Business Survived 27 Years of Tariffs, COVID, and Cutthroat Competition in Henderson

Gail Schomisch  0:00  
You can't fix stupid most of the time. Those that make the mistake to move in too close to a competitor, especially those that really don't know the business, they don't survive a lease term. And sometimes you just have to suffer through bad decision making by someone else. If you're there first, you're at the disadvantage. You just have to be better at what you do and really engage the community and get them in your corner and treat everybody right. Just focus and hunker down. Do what you do best. You just have to be the last man standing.

Scott Groves  0:32  
Welcome to Henderson. HQ, this is the podcast where you get all the stories behind the businesses that make our community tick. Don't forget to subscribe to our weekly newsletter. Hey. Henderson, HQ, Scott groves, today, we talked to my new friend Gail, who is such a hoot. Had such a good time with her. She owns a company called all fired up LV. They do mobile pottery for all kinds of events, from super high end corporate to schools that are looking to do fundraisers. Talked a lot about her 27 years of business here in Henderson, and also the extreme number of pivots she's had to made in her business, whether it was tariffs, most recently, or covid, or changing from a storefront to a mobile business, just a wealth of knowledge for business owners who are thinking about going through a pivot. And she gave me like five great restaurant recommendations here at Henderson that I didn't know about. So check it out. Enjoy our episode with Gail at all fired up Las Vegas. Hey, ladies and gentlemen. Scott groves from the Henderson HQ podcast and newsletter, don't forget to subscribe to both. And I'm here with my new friend Gail, who owns all fired up Las Vegas. And they are a paint your own pottery studio. They're going to be doing an event for my kids. So kids, so wanted to have her come in. And the business story is pretty crazy, and what you do is very unique. So I always want to talk to unique business owners. You guys have been in business here in the Valley for 27 years. So tell me, first of all, like, what does all fired up do? And then I want to hear about, what does it take to stay in business in Vegas and in Henderson for 27 years.

Gail Schomisch  2:02  
Okay, how much time do we have

Scott Groves  2:04  
you eat as long as you need. Yeah.

Gail Schomisch  2:06  
So 1998 we opened in Henderson. Actually, that was our first location. Took us a long time to get a yes from a major shopping center developer that would allow an upstart to come in. My wife and business partner and I had come to Las Vegas specifically with the mindset to open a small business back in the early 90s. Excuse me, late 90s. Very good business climate, really, really user or business friendly for lending money. State of Nevada was really looking for women owned businesses, that sort of thing. So we had an easy startup. With the exception of neither of us had any business experience. I had never even touched clay in my entire high school and college career. And that's how all

Scott Groves  2:52  
businesses start. You just starting something you have no expertise on, and you figure it out. Really,

Gail Schomisch  2:56  
I'm a graphic designer, you know, with my degree, but art class, I stayed away from those weird kids, kids that did clay and the other side of the room never even threw on a wheel until six weeks ago, literally.

Scott Groves  3:06  
So wait, was this a franchise that you bought into or like to, like, start something totally out of your core competency? It's one thing if you're like, a franchise, but it's another thing if you're starting from, like, the ground

Gail Schomisch  3:16  
up. No, we did it from Ground Zero, literally. But Wait, does your wife have experience of pottery? No, no, not at all, because, so why not open and, you know, sink $100,000

Scott Groves  3:28  
into something you know nothing about. Yeah, this is every business we're

Gail Schomisch  3:30  
adventurous, yeah, that way. There you go. There. There is a national franchise. And we were aware of this new spin, this new contemporary version of old fashioned ceramics. Old Fashioned ceramics makes me think of like my mom and my aunts chain smoking cigarettes, scraping this gray clay out on a picnic table in the backyard, and they'd fire it a couple times, and it was very labor intensive, and everything kind of had the feel of that's a tchotchke that's gonna sit on a bookshelf in the rec room in the basement. No one's ever gonna, you know, appreciate it, or look at

Scott Groves  4:04  
it. Or in the 90s, we were still allowed to make ashtrays for dad when I was going to high school, like that. I think we're the tail end of like, being able to make ashtray and so, you know, you come home with a Father's Day gift that's just a deformed ashtray. It

Gail Schomisch  4:16  
might be a doorstop, or it might be so thin and delicate it falls apart, right, right? We didn't have any experience, but we knew we wanted to be in business for ourselves. I'm a graphic designer by trade. My wife was a vice presidential kind of executive for some fortune 500 companies, so she had a lot of business management experience. And we happen to have friends that were wealthy folks hanging out in Newport Beach, California, and had wives who that were like the ladies who lunch, and they had no experience at all in business, much less arts, pottery graphics, anything. And they decided, let's give up our tennis club and go open a paint your own pottery studio on the beach in Costa Mesa. And they opened the first one. Down in Orange County. And my business partner at that time, I worked for a very large printing company down in Southern California. And Kevin said, Gail, you really got to come check out what my wife is doing. I think you'd really dig it. You're an artist. You're into all this kind of stuff. Just come on over. Well, I didn't happen to live in Orange County. I lived in a different region of Southern California. So getting to Orange County to the beach was not like an easy, super thing, right? So it was always a, yeah, we'll do that sometime. And then they ended up moving away, and they closed the business, and I never got to see it. So suddenly, it kept popping up in my radar, and I was, you know, got me thinking, so we can't we came to Vegas on a corporate transfer for my wife and I decided to take a temporary stop gap measure job in graphics and printing, but we kind of came with the intention to like, hey, Vegas is a great place to open a business right now, right? And it wouldn't take a gazillion dollars like it would in Southern California. We wouldn't be carrying a hunt on a ton of debt. We could kind of reach this. So let's do it. It took us two years, but it was fun working for the MGM Grand in the meantime, okay, I was a specialty buyer for the property, and I dealt with only printed collateral, so it was still kind of in my lane. But the whole Vegas thing, and, you know, the hotel hospitality industry, gambling, wagering, all that was, like, totally like, out of my wheelhouse. But it was really fun to learn the business, and I really enjoyed my time there a lot. I am still friends with my ex employer, my boss, my supervisor, he's no longer with the company. He's retired, but I made a lot of fast friends, and I really enjoyed the MGM Grand experience.

Scott Groves  6:29  
So what made you, I mean, because you guys were squarely in corporate America, what made you decide to make the jump? To be like, no, no, I want to sign the front of the check, not the back of the check, and I want the headache and heartache of owning my own business, because I think that's the leap. A lot of people, you know, they have a comfortable w2 job, maybe, I know there's not a ton of upside. It's scary to own your own business, like, what gave you two the confidence to do that?

Gail Schomisch  6:53  
I'm I'm way too bossy to work for someone else. I'm way too much of an independent spirit type. And my wife and business partner just kind of saw that the grind of being on a plane five days a week, flying home, that was her life. Never home, jetting around the country, overseeing large warehousing and distribution centers for time. Warner, Pitney Bowes, pretty big jobs that kept her away from home a lot, and it was fun for a while, but the grind really started to wear. Yeah, and then 911 happened, and you know, that just reinforced that we made the right decision. She wasn't jetting around all the time, and, you know, only seeing her on the weekends for a few hours here and there kind of thing. Yeah, it's a horrible marriage, yeah. But we our kids grown. They're in Denver. We didn't have littles in the house, so we had the liberty to be able to kind of throw some time at this. But it took us a while to get off the ground. We researched it. We joined a national association, went to their national convention before

Scott Groves  7:54  
we National Association of people who sell pottery for

Gail Schomisch  7:58  
contemporary studios. Yes, yeah. Old Fashioned ceramic world is pretty much a dinosaur that's going away. I don't even think there's anything in Clark County that's left that does that literally. And for the last few years, actually, it's, it's just kind of a an art form that faded out the contemporary spin really, I think, for the general public to really grasp it, we call ourselves painting cafes, so you come into the storefronts for most of these studios now, and it looks upscale, like a coffee house. There's table settings, little cafe tables, lots of cool stuff on the walls to pick from and paint. Everything's blank white, yeah, but it's got a nice vibe to it. It's like a restaurant setting more so than an artist

Scott Groves  8:38  
like, kind of like these paint by, you know, the date paint thing is, I mean, this painting, because they I have done with my wife, you know, you go drink a bottle of wine and you paint. It's a little cool date night experience. So that's kind of the direction the ceramics industry went, Yeah.

Gail Schomisch  8:50  
And they kind of, like the canvas painting. People do this cool thing with, like, these communal tables where everybody's in one row down, you know, eight or 10 or 20 people sitting at one table, and there's rows and rows of those, which is great for which is great for social interaction, but pottery kind of went to individual tables, like in a restaurant, you need a table for two, you need a table for four, you need a table for six, that sort of thing. Flexible floor plans. The kilns that we operate are, they have to be segregated from the

Scott Groves  9:18  
public because explain what a kiln is to people that don't know pottery. I entirely know about this because my uncle did pottery, and it's fascinating to me, but your normal person probably doesn't

Gail Schomisch  9:27  
know what a kiln is, and there's a great way to make a an association on it. It's like a giant industrial toaster. Literally, there's little tiny coils in your toaster that turn on and glow red when you turn it on, but those little wires are super thin and fragile. They're they're very delicate, but my kiln wiring is so thick and heavy duty and industrial. When that thing turns on, it takes a 50 amp breaker to run those I fire to almost 2000 degrees, and that happens for like 24 to 36 hours sometimes.

Scott Groves  9:56  
So the kiln is, what if I remember correctly? If. My uncle bakes all the moisture out of it, makes it super strong, like just turns what should be fragile clay into not unbreakable, but sturdy

Gail Schomisch  10:08  
exactly the clay body should be dry before it goes into the kiln. Oh, okay, any moisture trapped in the kiln, that's when things go boom. Oh, okay, that's not good. Yeah, not good. So there are places where you can play with raw, wet clay and throw on a wheel and do hand building, as they call it. That's where those lovely ashtrays came from. Hand building. But the type of contemporary studio work that we do, all the forms come ready made, there's a gazillion different types of dinner plates, salad plates, cereal bowls, giant coffee table bowls, coffee mugs, home decor stuff. We're really big into kids, so we have a lot of kids items for birthday parties or piggy banks. But banks these days come in the forms of T rexes and sharks and fairies and dolphins, and there's, there's so many fun things on the market for us to buy. So the the painting Cafe is kind of when you walk in, yes, you see all the tables that look like a restaurant, but then the walls are lined with one side is going to be all of the paint bottles and the accessories of everything you get to play with. And the opposite side, the other wall, is going to be all the forms you get. You just get to browse and just kind of take a look, see what you want to paint. You sit down. All the magic happens after you paint, because the paints don't look like they're real selves, until we fire them at 2000 degrees and they melt into glass. So everything's kind of a pale, chalky version of its true finished form. But you don't it's like a leap of faith. Yeah, so you're getting to see what your colors look like fired when you pick them. So you're making sure you get what you like. We know that like Raiders fans and Cowboys fans and you know, all those football teams, you got to have those colors just right? Well, a lot of people like lose their minds when we tell them, trust me, this is going to be red when I fire it. And you tell, like a New England Patriots fan that, like, this is going to be red. It looks pink right now. And then, when it dries on your project, the pink becomes even more pale pink. They walk out going, I just paid $40 for something that I swear is not going to be red. And then we take it out of the firing and ta, da, it's like fire engine red. It's amazing.

Scott Groves  12:04  
That's awesome. So I know, years ago you guys went mobile. How long did you own the storefront before you decided on this new evolution of

Gail Schomisch  12:11  
being mobile? Yeah, it's been, it was about 12 years, okay, where we were just doing what we call in our industry, butts and seats, yeah, you know, trying to promote people to get into our store, that sort of thing. And we had been pretty much chewing through five year lease terms, you know, with commercial developers and different shopping centers. And so we, our first studio sat, I think, 4748 people. The second studio sat 65 people. So it's, it takes a lot of effort, a lot of money in advertising, to get walk in traffic to pop into storefronts of that sort. That was before Facebook and social media was even around. It was still, you know, boots on the ground type of advertising, right? So when we started to go off site, we dabbled on the request of a school that wanted us to come to them, rather than them come to us because bussing and transportation were issues for them. Yeah, huge liability, huge expense. Oh, yes, yes, liability. They have to have permission slips from all the parents to go off. Oh, I mean, it's a lot, so it made much more sense for us to come to them. We parked ourselves in their Multi Purpose room, and they rotated through like all the grade levels to us all day long. And we did, I don't know, four or 500 kids. It was a fundraiser. The school made some money. We had a lot of product pushing through our store, so it was great for us. It was a great win win, kind of aha moment. And we just kind of sat on that, but didn't really move on it, because we didn't realize how much of a business model that could work out to be in our favor, until we ran into a very disturbing situation where we had just landed in a great shopping center up at Horizon ridge and Eastern, nice upscale area. It was a Smith anchored shopping center had a lot of great stores in it, and we were there. We were two years into our lease, and then the district showed up, and the district. We had a conversation with them about leasing space in there, but that is as class a retail space as you can get. Yeah. I mean, it was, it was out of our league at the time they built it. They just, we could have afforded a small suite, but they weren't putting small suites in right? You know, the floor plans were just way too big, and they wouldn't subdivide small enough for

Scott Groves  14:19  
us. We love the team from migusa Tacos, and they have a spot there in the district, and off studio. They told me how much that place costs, and it's astronomical to be a district.

Gail Schomisch  14:27  
It was astronomical when they first built it. And we kind of thought, okay, they're just really proud of their real estate. You know, maybe a few years from now, we'll reconsider. But when we first saw the interest list of other potential tenants that were going to be there, there were a lot of independent names, but as time went on, every six months, we would kind of touch back and see how's construction going. You got any small suites on the north side? You know, we noticed more and more national retailers were showing up on those names, and the small independents were falling out. And then it just reconfirmed, especially with the footprints we couldn't find anything on. Like, 2500 square feet, and at that rate, it was out of reach for us.

Scott Groves  15:03  
Yeah, and can you explain to business owners that are maybe, like, thinking about this? Oh, do I go mobile? Do I go independent? Do I go in inside of a store? Can you talk a little bit about the pros and cons of having one of these commercial leases, because I know you're on the hook for a long time, like, well, maybe just in general, what were the pros and cons of like, having that footprint in that local in person, butts in seats, type model versus like what you've done now going mobile.

Gail Schomisch  15:28  
So prior to Facebook, social media, so many great other avenues for low cost, high volume, touchstones of customer contact, you had really had to rely on traditional advertising, but having a physical presence was kind of how you presented yourself to the world. So you can kind of have a physical presence in multiple ways, Class A retail in destination lifestyle centers. The second tier down is a little bit more where we landed grocery store anchored large strip malls. And some of them are very attractive these days. You know, they've got pad sites out front. Some people put landscaping and fountains in and some nice features. Shade covers the whole nine yards. It's not like a super sterile kind of antiquated looking, you know, deadbeat kind of a place. They're pretty nice. We now have walked away from retail, and we are in what's called flex space in this market, sometimes that's called light industrial, but retail generally drives you to play by some rules that the developer wants. They want you to have your store open a certain amount of hours. They want that shopping center to be vibrant, have a lot of community involvement with customers, proprietors, events and interaction. They want a nice vibrancy going on. When you do that type of thing, you are marrying it's like you're marrying the developer. Yeah, and we're five years or seven years or 10 years. Yeah, retail rarely goes lower than five years. Most of them, I shouldn't say most, but I know some are going now, seven years. Yeah, when you go into light industrial or flex space, usually those leases are shorter, three years. You can do five. You can even do one, but you're going to pay a higher per square foot rate, but you have a lot of liberty and freedom to really call your hours whatever you want them to be. So that works out super great for us, because our kilns fire at all different times of the day and night. Our schedule's all over the map. So our environment now is we are on Sunset road behind PTS gold, right across from the reed airport runways. It's not an office park, technically, but it kind of gives that vibe, but it's a really nice setting for small businesses. Back in there, we all have about 900 square feet to 1000 square feet per suite, and some people rent two or three of them knock out the door or knock out the wall, so you get a little bit bigger footprint, but it presents well. So you could have guests come to your offices, and we've got people like State Farm Insurance in there. I think it's Molly maids. Runs their business out of that entity too. So all their cars are parked there at night, but during the day, they're all gone, you know, doing their jam. We've got a number. There's somebody that imports tea. We never see them at all. They work graveyard shift in that particular facility. So we all have, we all do our own thing. But the developer that shopping No, I can't really call it shopping center, but the developer that commercial center doesn't care what you do, as long as you are paying your rent and you're not, you know, a complainer or causing trouble, or you have issues, or you're putting something dangerous in your suite, you've got free reign to do whatever you want. And I

Scott Groves  18:36  
love that. Yeah, and for for you, it doesn't matter anymore, because you're not doing the storefront right. You guys did a full pivot to mobile. So can you talk about you said you had that aha moment where you're like, Oh man, we can maybe get whatever, 5060, 100 people in on the weekend in our storefront, we just ran through 400 kids in an afternoon. Can you talk about that pivot to mobile? Because I think there's a lot of business owners out there. You mentioned the Facebook the new ways of advertising they probably know in the back of their head, or maybe in the front of their head, they need to pivot. But there's some fear there of the unknown, of like, well, I know how this business model works. I'm scared to pivot over here. What was that process for you all? And like, what gave you the courage to do that?

Gail Schomisch  19:14  
Oh, man, it was fear driven. Let me tell you. Fear is a an animal you got to swallow when you're a small business owner. I swallowed a lot of it. So when we moved up to Horizon ridge and Eastern and we're really happy with that whole demographic, the neighborhood we were embedded in all the schools around there, life was great. The district opened up, and one of the franchise stores went in there, a national franchise doesn't care about a small independent nearby in their neighborhood, because if the demographics right and the lease agreement is right, and it fits their recipe, and it looks like it's really going to be a long term good fit for them, they're going to go for it, which is actually exactly what they did. And I don't, I don't cite them at all for that. I actually have my competitions Studio. So owners in my classes that I teach at our national convention to learn what I do. Now we've been in business that long, but it wasn't only just the national franchise that came and showed up. We also had one of our customers that was a hair salon owner was renting in a nice, upscale shopping center close by to us, and they had frequented our business for a few years, and the space next to them opened up, and the landlord said, I'll give you a smoking deal. Take the rest of the space. And they're like, We don't want to expand our studio, our hair salon, studio, pot side, but we think we might want to do an art thing. Are you open to that? And so they got a smoking deal on the adjacent space, and they took one segment of our business, which is just children's birthday parties, and they focused on a monster banner that they hung for all the drive by traffic on Eastern Avenue to see all day long and All night long. Half Price business, half price birthday parties every day. Well, we thought that was going to be like a kind of a grand opening special, but that banner was still there. Six months later, eight months later, a year in and our business for birthday parties tanked. I'm sure it did for our competitor in the district as well, because our supplier base is the same. We know who we're buying from. We kind of, we kind of know who all the players are, right? So they were using birthday parties as a loss leader to get people in for, you know, the rest of the business model. They were just a micro size of what we were. They didn't have as much skin in the game, but they were really touting business part or birthday parties, and it was really working well for them, but our business was really suffering, and we decided, you know, that school had invited us to go out to it, and we did a lot of kids in a very short amount of time, and that turned out to be really, really great, lucrative afternoon. So what if we go seek that business rather than just wait for it to call us up on the phone one day, and, you know, we just luck out. So we started marketing, going mobile, and it was kind of not only a test the waters thing, but it was a no poop, no kidding, when all your eggs are in one basket. As an entrepreneur, you got to make it work. We didn't have a spouse at home with a corporate salary to fall back on. It was both of us. We had left our jobs. We were all in, and it was like in it to win it, or we just declare bankruptcy fail, and just, I don't know, go buy an RV and tool around with the dogs. I mean, you dig deep and you find a way to do it, yeah, and we didn't know what it was gonna look like. We kind of did it on a leap of faith, but we were very well received by CCSD elementary schools, we were suddenly getting yeses, and so we refined our processes and got really efficient at it, and really started to figure out how it could be a money making entity of our business. And we survived the lease term out up at that retail location, but it was ugly, and we it took a long time to crawl out of it, but the other studio closed. They didn't make it the whole five year lease term. We liquidated them, took all their inventory, and then some really great flat screen TVs and a brand new kiln, pretty much for pennies on the dollar, it worked out. But, you know, we got no compensation or assistance from our landlord for a break on rent. It's a gamble that you have to be willing to take as an entrepreneur, right? And sometimes my competition is not always a studio like mine, a competition business model for me could be a jump house kind of bounce house kids entertainment venue or canvas painting studios, those types of things, any type of entertainment for families really, kind of could hypothetically, technically be my competition, right? But we are really so dialed into K through five elementary school kids. That's where our sweet spot is, and that's what we focus on? I haven't marketed to a middle school or a high school for a number of years. We're they're just too cool for everything, and they don't like anything, and they're crabby and right? I give me the K through five little ones. Any

Scott Groves  24:12  
day, teenagers will all be trying to make pipes or something crazy.

Gail Schomisch  24:16  
He's trying to stretch. What's allowed. You know, a lot of things that we do get installed at the schools permanently. We do a lot of tile legacy tile murals, and so all those pieces of art have to be inspected by, you know, administration before they go on the wall to make sure it's not derogatory or, you know, some code language or something like that. So I can tell the ones that are trying to slip something past us. We fire it regardless, but we kind of flag it, box it, and say, check these ones out. Not too sure about that.

Scott Groves  24:42  
That's so funny. You know, I'm sure Time heals all wounds, but at the time, you know a patron of yours opening a competitor right down the street. Did that hurt? Did you? Oh, obviously you stayed in touch with them, because you bought all their liquidation stuff when they closed down. But. Were you able to, were you able to take the high road and stay cool, or was there some bitter moments?

Gail Schomisch  25:03  
Oh, my wife and business partner always takes the high road. She's cut from a different cloth than I am. She is got her act together, and she's very left brained and super professional. But she's also a she's visionary. She's very, very, I don't know. She's just got some sort of gift when it comes to keeping all of her act together all the time. I'm definitely right brained. I am scattered. I'm an artist, you know, all the stuff that goes with these creatives. That's me. So, you know, I'm like, getting an ulcer, and I'm sweating bullets, and I'm just, like, very emotional and, you know, just a hot mess. And now that we are 27 years in, in our national association, my wife and I are instructors for this type of stuff on a national stage. We only have a national convention once a year, but we also host conferences around the country a couple times a year, and we do our own workshops, that sort of thing. We tell other business owners, because this happens all over the country, right? You know, it's not just Vegas, you know, we've got a pretty vibrant market here, but even in Boston, it's going to happen. In San Diego, if somebody gets a good deal on rent, they're going to step on someone's toes to nail that spot. They don't care who's nearby. But a smart business owner would also see, what can the market bear? Because there's no point in putting too many of you to making the density so close that neither of you can thrive, right? But you can't fix stupid, and sometimes you just have to suffer through bad decision making by someone else. If you're there first, you're at the disadvantage. You know, there's no way around it. You just have to be better at what you do and really engage the community and get them in your corner and treat everybody right. Just focus and honker down. Do what you do best most of the time. Those that make the mistake to move in too close to a competitor, especially those that really don't know the business, they don't survive a lease term. You just have to be the last man standing and therein. Takes guts, because that's a lot of fear. And if you can keep you know, financially afloat during it, more power to you. We went into debt to do that, but it was a choice we chose to make because we could see if we could get out of this lease and get to a different location away from here. Great, but we got pretty smart pretty fast when we realized by going mobile, we can really expand our butts in seats. They're just in someone else's building, and there's a whole lot of seats available, because these are massive church halls, corporate entities. The Convention Center is massive when they've got a show and they've got cocktail hour for a bunch of doctors and nurses in town for a convention, and we are the entertainment. There's 300 people in a room, and there's banquet tables with eight seats, eight or 10 at each one, and they're full of people having cocktails, painting pottery.

Scott Groves  27:48  
So talk about the logistics of that, because just when you talk about that, it makes my brain hurt, of like, of like, okay, so you've got 400 students coming through. You got to make sure that, you know, Alina and Gabe get the right thing back to them, and you got to fire it, and then you got to transport it, and then is there breakage, and like the logistical nightmare of any transportation business like that, I'm still in awe of Amazon. I think in some ways, are kind of the evil empire, but I'm also like, just, I mean, they're not a sales company or a store, they are a logistics company, yes. So can you talk a little bit about what experience you had or the pain points that you work through for logistics. You know, I've got a buddy. He's 19. He started his own business last year, absolutely killing it on trash removal. And he's getting to the point where he's like, Wait, I gotta be scheduling multiple crews, and we got to do this, and I got to figure out drive time, back and forth to the dump, and I got to do this, and I got to equate for mileage. And I'm like, Oh, just wait, you have 100 trucks, because he's, he's going to be that successful, right? And so I just think of the logistics of moving 400 unique pieces and then firing them and then redelivering them, and so that the one kid, Susie Q, is not mad that her things messed up. Like, it sounds like a nightmare

Gail Schomisch  28:56  
to me. It, it is a lot. And when Jackie and I teach, we kind of do two phases to our classes, the marketing side, that's usually like four hours in the morning, and then the late afternoon to early evening side is production management and execution. So here's a good throwback.

Scott Groves  29:11  
Oh, this way you teach other Yeah. So I thought you're teaching the kids marketing. No, that's brilliant.

Gail Schomisch  29:15  
No, there's there's two, there's two sides of the equation, and you're exactly right. So the logistics is a huge part of going mobile. So this ties into how, in hindsight, now we look back, maybe we were really destined to open this kind of business, because my wife's background, for Time Warner and Pitney Bowes was Logistics and Distribution. Okay, so she would over all coming together. Now she would oversee the mass, you know, warehouses they would put together. This is back in the days when there, remember, you could buy CDs in a club or something, and it was a mail

Scott Groves  29:44  
order Music Club, yeah, probably still them 1000s of dollars for free season.

Gail Schomisch  29:49  
And I didn't even, I don't even Time Life books. I remember Time Life books. I think my aunts and uncles had those, but that that morphed into, like, double day book club or something, yeah, so all those massive warehouses are all underneath. Umbrella of Time Warner. So although Logistics and Distribution was kind of yes, what she oversaw, she got some very specialized training paid for by that corporation, something called Total Quality Management, TQM techniques, and that revolves around being in a position where you analyze all of your processes within a business to streamline, cut out unnecessary steps, cut out redoing retouching. I'm sure Amazon are now these days, masters of this, and I'm sure that computer programs run all it right. Back when Jackie was doing all this in the mid 90s, it was still a manual process where there's a bunch of people around a boardroom looking at spreadsheets and diagrams trying to figure out how many how can we get the returns from this semi tractor trailer back in up to the dock number 47, of the warehouse to bin number 17 over here without touching it 14 times. Let's try to get those touches down to nine times and that sort of thing. So she's kind of like an efficiency expert. So I got the art side, she's got the business side. But at any rate, we learned very quickly how to we wanted to do this part of the business profitably, not just break even. It had to make sense for us to do it. Otherwise, why bother? It's pretty labor intensive. So we perfected labeling, getting super organized, packing our kits. We don't reinvent the wheel. Every time we go out, we use the same kit. The product changes for different customers, right? But our T Rex or a dolphin or exactly, or for instance, when we go down to the strip, maybe we're entertaining Charles Schwab executives, because they're having a manager's meeting and they are going to paint planters that have a theme about growing the money, because that's what somebody told them to get their mindset around. So we are supplying the planter. We are supplying the art activity for them during cocktail hour to paint their planter. We're going to jam back to our studio. Everyone's going to have a coated thing underneath it so that we can match it to the right person that needs to get that planter back on their executive desk in their respective city and their respective state. So we're going to fire all that. We're going to deliver it to the concierge department at the hotel. Concierge department plants a bonsai tree in every planter, puts it in a very specialized FedEx box that is handled in a very special way, so it's never tipped over, it's always held upright, and it's sent to every business executive to his office, so it's there by the time he flies home. When the Convention's over. It's crazy town. The convention business is got so many levels of amazing stuff going on that the general public never really knows about. But that's an expense, and that's usually reserved for, you know, the cream of the crop of convention clientele that come to Las Vegas. When I go down to the MGM Grand accounting group and they paint something, or we go to Zappos, or United Airlines, and they got all the flight attendants get an employee, Employee Appreciation something. I'm just massive, massively packaging multiple cases and boxes of pottery labeled by department for people with a name, and I'm delivering those, those back to a local office. They're handed over, and then, like, office managers are making sure that everybody gets an email, Hey, your pottery is here. Pick it up on your way out. Or, you know, we're gonna have the mail room deliver them all to everybody's desks, that sort of thing. We don't necessarily traipse around in everybody's offices. Nor do I walk through a school and get access to all the classrooms to deliver pottery. I literally deliver it to the school office. But we make sure everything is super concise, labeled, organized. It's either alphabetized or, for instance, with classrooms sequential room numbers, so that, you know, somebody on an AV cart is walking down the hall, and they're peeling off on the left for classroom four, and then classroom five is on the other side of the hallway, and then they go to classroom six, and it's this massive handout of pottery back to people. So, so what I

Scott Groves  33:55  
love about your business is like you, you and your wife literally created something new, like, talk about the, you know, Blue Ocean Strategy. Every town's probably now got a paint by numbers canvas and a pottery store, and you guys created, like, this whole new vertical it sounds like, which is amazing. The downside is, like, there's probably some risk you didn't think about, right? Like, all of a sudden, cost of fuel goes up, cost of shipping goes up, tariffs go up, whatever. Like, oh, let's talk about covid. Yeah, let's talk. Let's talk. Let's talk

Gail Schomisch  34:22  
about covid. Let's talk about covid in schools, and no kids in schools, and everything's remote.

Scott Groves  34:26  
And as a percentage of business, what are schools as a percentage of your business? Because I know you're gonna go do this for my wife's school. There's 25 kids, not a big deal. But are you doing this for hundreds of kids, 1000s of kids, 10s of 1000s of kids a year?

Gail Schomisch  34:38  
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Okay, so 75% of our business is definitely school age kids, okay, followed closely thereafter by a mix of adults, but different venues. So that could be restaurant, bar, distillery, little nights in their restaurant that are themed, where we're bringing pottery in, and it's definitely cocktails and paying. Saying that's kind of set against corporate team building, which is more professional during daytime hours, in a in a office setting, in someone's place. But we do have a nice looking space where we are, so sometimes small groups of up to 20 people like to come visit us, just to give people like a different, you know, visual look to immerse themselves in while they're doing an artistic activity, because we are kind of a we still made our studio look just like it did back when we had butts and seats. Yeah, that we, you know, sought after. It's still attractive inside. Looks like a painting Cafe. We don't do as many family events as we would like, as far as a mix of adults and children. It's our favorite thing to do when we go into elementary schools and they do events at night. It's parent engagement, it's community building for the school. The school principal loves it because it is an opportunity for administrators and parents as well to see their kids unplugged from their phone screens. They're unplugged from electronics, period. Kids, K through five kids love what we do, and especially you know that kindergarten through third grade sweet spot, oh my gosh. I could put just a blank clay tile in front of them, and they'd be thrilled. But when we walk in and let's say their school mascot is a dragon, and they see 150 dragons lined up on the table, and they each get to paint one however they want. However they want, and it's their school mascot, because it's a spirit night. Oh my gosh. It's like the roof came off the place. It's so fun. But parents engaging with their families and engaging with their kids, husbands and wives talking to each other across the table. In fact, that's a good point. Across the table. A lot of school lunchrooms have their kids facing forward all across that lunch room, 200 kids at a time, in row after row, but they're all facing forward to the stage. It's, it's an efficiency thing from a custodial standpoint. Yeah? Sometimes these

Scott Groves  36:51  
schools like prison, yeah, exactly.

Gail Schomisch  36:56  
Military, you know, kind of very regimented. But sometimes these schools have got to rotate multiple lunch periods through, jam them in, jam them out, in and out, in and out. So, you know, it serves a purpose, but there's no good socialization when everybody's facing forward and you don't get to see somebody in front of you, you're like at the back of someone's head. It's like a non starter. But when you turn those tables around and you're facing your friend across the way, or your parent or your teacher, or it's a school assembling. You're all kind of chit chatting and working on a problem together. It's a whole different thing, and you put art in it, and it's a party. Yeah, you know,

Scott Groves  37:29  
it's just a really great How did you knowing that schools are 70% of your business? How did you guys survive covid?

Gail Schomisch  37:35  
We immediately pivoted and got really brave and called all of our existing holiday you know, folks at Christmas, and said, We'll do take home kits. Please, just don't cut us out of the picture. We're not going to survive. We need to still be able to do something, because we got zero assistance from our landlord, no deferment, no you know, put it on the back end of your lease. No discount, no, nothing. Full rent, 100% on time, without fail. End of story, period. So our number of employees fluctuates. We use some permanent employees, but we do seasonal employees as well. So for instance, right now, I'm going to be running almost 25 people for the holidays. Oh, wow. It takes that many of us out in the community. When you got like, two and 300 400 people in a lunch room at a school, it takes three or four of us to efficiently run those events. They're buffet style, like open house. I'm not, I'm not on stage, teaching people what to do step by step, right? But during the off season, you know, we go back down to our kind of skeleton crew, per se. But I do projects in schools all throughout the school year. We tailor our projects for different times of the year for different things. So I'm in the schools at Valentine's Day with really cool heart shaped stuff for Valentine's gifts for parents. We're there in September for Grandparents Day. Were there for Mother's Day in May? Poor dads, we don't get a coffee cup. You don't get a coffee cup because Father's Day is in June and School's out in June. Yeah, I knew there was conspiracy against dads. We've been in business long enough to remember when CCSD here had school year round, right? Yeah, which we loved, because at any given time I had even amounts of business all year long. You know the track program, I think they called it, schools were on tracks. But then when they went to the back to the nine month calendar, we had to pivot again and fill in. So we went after summer camp.

Scott Groves  39:32  
Business. Isn't this just a story of any business owner, though? It's like, pivot after pivot, after learning new thing, after finding new suppliers, after pivot again, and then you're like, I got it all figured out. Yes, yes, I got it all figured out because, like, this is just how the school district is gonna run. No, we're back to a nine month calendar. It's like, I mean, this is the plight of the business owner, always having to figure out something new.

Gail Schomisch  39:51  
And you got to have the Coneys for it. You guys got to have the mental grit to know that stuff's gonna come fly at you. Like. Right? Now I am looking, I'm staring down the barrel of tariffs.

Scott Groves  40:04  
Yeah, tell us how that works, right? Because I think, I think most people have a, maybe a political conceptualization of how tariffs work. But how does that affect the end user? Is it just the cost of the product goes up, or is it there's an extra tax? Like, how does that affect you? Maybe we can take this dragon product, right? What are you used to cost, and what does it cost now? Because I'm guessing most of the stuff, most of the stuff comes

Gail Schomisch  40:24  
from China, yeah, American manufacturing left for our industry over 12 years ago. There it all went to Italy, China, Mexico and Thailand. Okay, there is no domestic manufacturing for us whatsoever. So the vast majority of it comes from China, followed by Thailand, a little bit in Mexico. I would have loved to have more in Mexico, because the Mexico tariffs that are in place right now are pretty minimal. Those we could probably swallow, and our suppliers only raised our prices 10 to 15% okay, but the ones coming from China, I'm getting emails every six and eight weeks. We got to take you up another 8% we got to go up another 7% sorry, you know, and literally, all that is happening is those tariffs. They are not being absorbed by the importers and distributors. They are being passed on to their customers. Me, the small business, the mid size business, and I haven't been in business for 27 years. I've built my life around a certain business model. I cannot reduce my margins, right? Because then I cannot afford my health care, I can't afford my house payment, I can't afford all the things that I built into how I price my product. So I am forced to raise my price to the end user, which is the general public, right? And I bet 99% of businesses out there are doing the exact same thing, right?

Scott Groves  41:45  
And what I think a lot of people don't understand. They're like, Oh, well, you own the business. You must make a ton of money. Most businesses don't work off more of a margin than 10 or 12% like, like, as far as profit. So it's like, you got to do a lot of volume if you want to make a lot of money. And all of a sudden there's some supply chain issue where it's like, well, now we have 10% more in cost, like, we have to raise our cost, which means fewer people will buy it to supply and demand, right? Cost, elasticity, or whatever that term was from econ, 101, but like, that's, that's tough

Gail Schomisch  42:13  
when you do off site work to the level that we do, to the customer base that I do now. Corporate team building is different. That's a, yeah, they'll pay whatever. They'll pay whatever they're going to entertain the it's employee retention. You know, they throw a lot of money at that kind of thing. But when I go into Clark County, is my second largest customer, behind the Clark County School District, literally, Clark County Parks and Recreation. Their offices are in Sunset Park. I could throw stone and hit them. They're really close to me. But there's so many recreation centers in the valley that are Clark County sites we work with most of them. They put me up on Mount Charleston in the summer for the camps the whole nine yards. Those it the recipe is low cost, high volume, right? That's my model. So when low cost becomes mid price, cost, we are kind of reaching the ceiling, where programming by public sector company, not companies, but public sector agencies like parks and recreation. Take a look and say, rather than raise costs to our families, because then not as many people will sign their kids up for our summer camp programs, we are just choosing to cut programming right and that's what I'm facing down right now. I mean, this is the same upper end of the threshold. This

Scott Groves  43:22  
is the same thing I grew up in, la so LA, USD, it's the same thing they went through with why they cut automotive shop, you know, steel, wood. Now, most schools don't even have PE anymore, because, like, it's just not in the budget to provide a service like that, right? Yeah. And it's kind of scary when you cut programming, because then kids are exposed to less to fewer things, and then maybe, you know, there's probably some kid that their very first thing they painted was a dragon, and now they're an amazing graphic designer, or they are an amazing painter, or they found something in the arts because that, like, inspired them, right? And this idea that everyone has to be on a Stem College Track, it's like, no, no. You want to expose kids to a ton

Gail Schomisch  43:59  
of different stuff. You need to use the right side of the brain as well as the left. Yeah, I

Scott Groves  44:03  
always forget which one is the creative. Do you know that? Right? Okay, I gotta, like, commit this to memory, because I'm always using this right side versus left side of the brain. I can never

Gail Schomisch  44:10  
remember which is super analytical. Okay, right. Right side creative.

Scott Groves  44:14  
Yeah. So I'm, like, far left over here. I have no creativity. I can't draw a stick figure. Oh,

Gail Schomisch  44:20  
my God. My toughest customers are the accounting group at MGM Grand. They're all accountants. They're all number crunching all day. They need concise data. They like spreadsheets. They live in little boxes. Everything is very you know, on point for them, they need pain by numbers. There's no creative My gosh. So for them to come in and the first words out of our mouth are always relax, you can do this. They're all like, you drink, oh my gosh. They're all They're like deer in headlights. You know, it's crazy. But once we do design our studio to be super user friendly, so we're not going to just set them free and go, here's an array of really great barbecue platters. Have fun. Create whatever you want. No, we're going to show them. Are you Cowboys fan? Awesome? Here you get to put a Cowboys logo right in the middle of. Your platter, and we'll help you get those colors, and we'll put all your family names around the perimeter, and then you get to theme it to how you like it, you know. So we've got all these little gadgets and accessories so that our core customer is not an artistic person, it's not creative person, it's the average public so away from Christmas, which is our biggest season of the year, even now, we still do a lot of work at the end of the school year, because every exiting fifth grader gets to put their legacy tile on a wall at the schools that we work with that have picked us up for these legacy projects. So sometimes they're a self portrait, sometimes they're just my favorite memory of my time here at XYZ elementary school, or they are given some latitude at some of them anything from your fifth grade springtime. So a lot of it's Field Day or their fifth grade trip. Or, you know, they learn to do tetherball, or, you know, that's their favorite jam, whatever it is. And other schools invite the parents, and it's a family legacy. So then it's a family engagement night, where parents and child get to paint their family tile together. But these are designed to be installed at the school, and they add the year to them in the corner so that they're always able to go back and visit it. A lot of families have multiple children, so their kids are coming up through the same school, so they get to come back and see it. But once I glaze and fire something, even full sun, Southern Exposure after 20 years, those tiles look like they were installed the first day, right? The glaze that we melt on, it is stable. The colors don't fade. It does become glass. And what's great for public spaces is it releases tagging, because it's so super slick and glossy, you know, slippery, so we never have to worry about tagging. But at any rate. So we also talked to some principals that said, you know, we got to find a way we cannot let this fifth grade class miss getting their tiles on this school. Their entire school career was here for four years. They're just not getting their fifth grade year teaching in person. That shouldn't mean that they can't have their legacy tile on the wall. So we devised a way to make to go kits. And at one of the schools, the principal ponied up out on the parking lot underneath an easy up 10 by 10 awning with a couple of folding chairs. And we brought the kits. And the parents did a drive by on a Friday, when they get their pick they get their kids folders for the week's, you know, lessons and or instructions. And they were given a kit for all the fifth graders, and they painted at home over a week. Some of the schools got really organized and had the art teacher walk them through it step by step, and then we fetched them later. So we still retained that business. But, you know, we did it as a skeleton operation. I mean, it was myself, my wife, and, I think, our manager, until she had to resign. She got long covid, had a lot of health problems, and we lost her. She had worked for us for 12 years, and she chose not to come back. She became a grandmother, and it was like, all over. Then I couldn't compete with that. Yeah. No competition, yeah. And then, kind of like an assistant manager, but we had no staff on on board. We immediately laid everybody off because we were really frightened, and that turned around to really, really hurt us, which we did not know it would. But there were no guidelines. There were no rules, right? It was so, you know, and I'm not putting blame on anybody, it was, it is what it is. It was what it was. But because we cut staff, I didn't become eligible for a lot of the grants that were given afterwards, we were ineligible because we didn't have staff, so we had to take on the eidl loan debt.

Scott Groves  48:32  
I would be remiss if I didn't ask you about that the staffing, because knowing that you guys run a business where you have to go from whatever five employees to 25 employees, almost overnight during the holiday season. You know, when we were first talking and scheduling something for our school, you were mentioning like, oh yeah, I want to do this one, because it's your wife. But, you know, I've got these girls going out to here, and I got to train these girls to do this. Like the idea of bringing in staff for 60 days, I feel like my team doesn't even know really what's going on. And have a full conception of the business. I just going through hiring a new executive assistant, and it's going to be months before she knows how to do everything. And that's not a slight against her. It's just we have a complicated business, and there's a lot of logistics, like there is in yours. How in the hell do you bring so many new staff on board, quickly, efficiently, trust them to work with kids, represent your brand, and then they know they only have this job for 60 or 90 days. Like, how do you do

Gail Schomisch  49:25  
that? There's, there's a lot of moving parts, and it's extremely it eats up. It's a Time Eater upper there's just no way. There's no way around it. But we have the benefit of being in business a long time, so we have people that want to work for us just seasonally. So we kind of get to pull let's Okay, so let's say I'm bringing on 25 people this holiday season. I don't have to train 25 people from the get go. I'm probably going to have to train six or seven. Okay, we have people that like to come back. You know, we have a lot of adult moms that like to work for us. It's kind of like. Okay, my husband says, I get to keep all the money that I make working for you, for our, you know, Christmas club money, and I get it's my my my prerogative. I get to work as much or as little as I want, and blah, blah. And she goes, and, trust me, I want you to give me as many hours as possible so I can stay out of the house as much as possible. But we do have a lot of adult women that work for us. We do have some high school and college age kids. We tend to attract overachievers, which we love because they're smart as a whip. They're they catch on super quick. Most of them like kids. They can interact with, you know, just about anybody of any age. But overachievers tend to be busy, so right? Sometimes it's hard to get them on the schedule. So it does take a lot of, you know, time and effort to fill that, that void. So we start back in August, you know, kind of get our basic pool of who's going to work for us this season, who wants to be on deck, whose jobs have changed if they already work somewhere else during daytime, who can't get out of work till five. They work on the Strip. They're not going to get out of that parking garage till 530 right? You know, let's not schedule them anywhere where they got to be at six. They got to do the gigs that are 630 to, you know, and beyond. There's all those kinds of things going on, but

Gail Schomisch  51:05  
we are kind of like our own little

Gail Schomisch  51:07  
temp agency, yeah, you know, in a sense, we kind of, we have our regular employees, and we also use people that want to come on as independent contractors. So we'll do a little

Scott Groves  51:16  
bit of both. So, you know, you moved here in the 90s with this vision of starting your own business. What's been the good, the bad and the ugly of running a business in Henderson, you know, dealing with permits, or dealing with the school district or whatnot, like, has it fulfilled your vision? You know, if you had to do it over again, would you have done it differently? Or what's the best and worst part about doing business in

Gail Schomisch  51:35  
Henderson? I've never thought about what I would do differently. We definitely do it again. Okay, so having the liberty to do to run my life, how I want, when I want schedule myself, if we want to take off and travel for a month and a half, we can do it. I don't have to ask for permission. I don't have to schedule it. We just look at our calendar and when people want to schedule us, and they're saying, let's we want to do something in the first quarter of the winter, we just go, Okay, we're blocking ourselves out of January because we're going to be the Bahamas. Gonna be the Bahamas, right? So we we've got a lot of liberty to travel as long or as short as we want. That has been. That's like drugs. Once you get that, it's hard to give that up, right? It would be really hard for me to go back to work for somebody else, right?

Scott Groves  52:16  
I would say impossible. There's no chance I gotta work for anybody, yeah,

Gail Schomisch  52:19  
and especially if I had to go back to work for someone substantially younger than me and in a position where I can clearly see that they have no idea what they're doing, that would be, I'm just not. I'm just not that personality, right? I also cannot. I've been asked to serve on our national board, or executive board for our National Association for so many years. So is my wife. So have a bunch of our friends that also own studios, but that's like, no, that's like a penance. That's going to be like, serving on an HOA board. I can't do it. I can't I can't because I know it's, I know what these other people on the board are gonna be like.

Scott Groves  52:52  
And I just, I'm, you don't want to be the ceramic Karen. Oh, well, yeah, no, no,

Gail Schomisch  52:55  
Karen's not a good name for me, but

Gail Schomisch  52:59  
we would do it again for sure. Henderson was a great place to land our business. When we started, we actually were technically in Las Vegas, because we were on Eastern at windmill, but on the other side of Eastern got it. But when we moved to Eastern and horizon Ridge, we were on the right side of Eastern, and we landed in Henderson. But that was all good. You know, the the first five to eight years, the hours were long, and it was a learning curve, and it was a grind, and it was not all glamorous, but with age come wisdom, comes wisdom, right? And as the longer that we hung on, and once we realized, hey, we were profitable in like, year two, and we're not just a little bit like, break even. We're like, we got it going on, let's let's Okay. We're good with this. So we really enjoyed the first five years. Excuse me, that that next five year period great making. I would let go of ego next time, for sure, I wanted to land in the right looking place, the right demographic, which is important, but that came at a cost that was really hard for us to get around. And I mean, it wasn't just me, you know, my wife is also. We're like, we really want to be in that neighborhood, we really want to be in that shopping center, or we really want to be in this neighborhood, but that came with a really high cost, and when there were lean months, that was a stress I wasn't prepared for, right, that that was hard for me, that really wore on my psyche. I think now, if I had to dispel any wisdom out there, it would be unless you have got a lot of working capital from, I don't know, an angel investor, or you got a wealthy uncle. I don't know where it's going to come from, but you got to really no no poop, no kidding, plan for lean times and be able to grind out sometimes, you know, economic downturn. Returns don't just happen for a few months. Sometimes they can be six months long or longer, right? You got to be able to weather those kinds of storms. You also have to be, you know, as a micro business like I am, I'm literally like Mom and Pop Main Street, USA, you know, you got to be able to, sometimes be willing, to not take payroll for a bit. You always have to pay your employees Absolutely, but you can take on debt and pay yourself, which we've done as well. We've we've been, we've kind of done it all, you know, but

Gail Schomisch  55:31  
we kind of have a take no prisoners attitude, and it's like, whatever it

Scott Groves  55:34  
takes. So because you're in that entertainment space, I got to ask, like, what's some of the best stuff in Henderson, outside of your business, of course, for entertainment. And what is something that the city is missing desperately? They're like, Oh, if I could start another business, if I had the bandwidth and the energy to do that. Is there anything that the city is really missing that some entrepreneur needs to be looking at? Yes, but it's not entertainment. What is it?

Gail Schomisch  55:54  
Tell me, okay, so when I

Gail Schomisch  55:55  
lived in Southern California for a while, there was this really cool thing called a drive through dairy. Okay, so it's dairy, is misleading, because it's not a dairy it's like a drive through convenience

Scott Groves  56:07  
store where you get beer. That's what I remember from Kansas. Like you would have to drive through beer spot that just happened to sell sodas and dairy stuff.

Gail Schomisch  56:13  
Yeah, one side of it was like beer and cigarettes and junk food. The other side was like cottage cheese and milk and half and half and ice cream, yeah, but you never have to get out of your car. You drive in and they're like, those big flaps, like a car wash that, you know, kept the air conditioning in. I'm like, oh my god, we live on the surface of the sun here in summer. I can't tell you how many motorists would just love to go through a drive through jam and go, you know, I need this, this and this, and, oh, but that's not it. Well, kind of was entertainment for me, because I

Gail Schomisch  56:41  
thought it was the coolest thing. Yeah, they

Scott Groves  56:42  
had those in Kansas. I remember was great. You just like, drive through, you show your ID. They load up your trunk with, like, whatever beer you're drinking for the night. You're like, oh, I'll just take some pretzels and also take some Funyuns. And it's like, the upsell one of those places is amazing, because you think you're stopping by for a gallon of milk, and you see everything in the coolers. And you're like, take one of those. Take one of those. I mean, the per car ticket on that must be huge. Just, I

Gail Schomisch  57:03  
just thought that was always the coolest concept. I don't see it here in Southern California or Southern Nevada, anywhere

Scott Groves  57:08  
like Chick fil A or Dutch Bros or somebody that's really good at that drive through model needs to figure that out.

Gail Schomisch  57:13  
Yep. Well, I got kind of excited for a bit because in Henderson at the curve on st rose Parkway, right near Paseo Verde, where intersex there was going to be a drive through pizza thing. It was kind of like an airport hangar looking vibe. And I watched construction. They were doing tenant improvement, build out, and something happened. Oh, it's kind of a dead issue. I haven't been by there in about three months, but I don't think it's going on. But at any rate, Henderson is an I don't know if you know if you know this. You probably do, because you are deep, you're deep in Henderson here. Yeah. Henderson is an award winning, nationally renowned community for its city design with parks and family and community, oh yeah, engagement. We

Scott Groves  57:54  
just put a an article up. I think it's going out in next week's news later. Don't forget to subscribe Henderson. Hq.com, forward slash, subscribe. It's the 72nd Henderson Park is opening up. And like, you know, we do parks really well. So yeah, for for one fairly small city, I think we only have 120,000 households here to have 70 something public parks that are actually maintained and don't have a bunch of drug addicts at them. And are, I can take my kids to all of them. I mean, it's pretty amazing.

Gail Schomisch  58:21  
They are. They're beautifully designed.

Gail Schomisch  58:24  
They did great with tree canopy, yeah, just the topography of this area is great. Lot of undulating hillsides and such. They really build in that. It's really remarkable. So water parks, I thought were always a lacking thing, so it was nice to see we landed one over there off of older highway. I know that that is cowabunga Bay, cowabunga Bay. And then, of course, cowabunga Canyon is now part of that same business on the west side. But I was always enamored with the outdoor auditorium amphitheater that was at the area by the district at Green Valley and Paseo Verde, which is now Lee's family forum. And I'm not taking anything away from Lee family, because they're an institution around here. Love them to pieces. They're great. But I think Henderson could use an outdoor entertainment concert venue for seasonal, not top tier entertainment that's gonna, you know, that's for the strip. Let them, let the showrooms there have it in the, you know,

Scott Groves  59:26  
yeah, they should be called the, I don't know, Cheap Trick, or some like, you know, 80s band that's on their on their last leg, if you want to see them at the Henderson Henderson park,

Gail Schomisch  59:36  
you know, tickets under 100 bucks. Yes, you know. I mean, there's no more 25 or $30 shows anywhere, really, but yeah, you know something, or family shows. You know, even Spring Mountain Ranch out on the west side that does super summer theater. You know, musicals, plays, yeah, when I first moved here, I remember Shakespeare in the Park was held in Fox Ridge Park. By Estes McDaniel elementary for years, and that was a really cool thing. Well, that's probably out of vogue right now. Plus Cedar City, Utah pulls all the Shakespeare, you know, people, but maybe there's something else that's, you know, kind of a current vibe. I know water

Scott Groves  1:00:15  
Street's working on that some more, not Shakespeare, but like movies at the park, more family friendly activities right in between Shakespeare. But yeah, ice skating center there. So I've been down there a couple times. They always do their car show and their their parades and stuff. But I know they're working on, like, movie movie nights and community nights and some bands and stuff. So I hope, yeah, I hope to see more of

Gail Schomisch  1:00:35  
that sounds that sounds promising? Yeah, I know water Street's taken a very long time to come to fruition. We were invited, I think, two or three times, to come down and take a look at space and get invited over to that area to go in. But and that, that's all well and good. We were invited to go down into neonopolis as well. But when they invite you in as the first one in, it's like, okay, this is what it's going to take. No, really, I need two years free rent to ride this ride, this ride, until you build this out and get people in here, right? You can't give me a couple months rent. That's not reality, right? Because I'm not. I mean, it's not my first rodeo now, and it's not, it is the season business owner, are you talking? Yeah, now I know how long it's really going to take to get this thing off the ground, and it's great if it happens. I mean, water Street's really turning out remarkable, but we never could have lasted. I would have gone in five years ago, waiting on it, right? Things just move too slow. It's reality of it.

Scott Groves  1:01:33  
Most important question is a Henderson insider who's been here 30 years, favorite restaurants,

Gail Schomisch  1:01:38  
oh, el Dorito. El Torito? Yes, this is shining to me on boulder highway, that little in the ground.

Scott Groves  1:01:47  
Oh, is this like a low, I haven't been there. Is this a local El Torito, or is this like near you, I know is. But is this local, or is this like the

Gail Schomisch  1:01:55  
chain El Torito? Oh, no. Little old mom and pop, El Torito.

Scott Groves  1:02:01  
Okay, that is why I have avoided because I'm always looking for restaurants on Boulder, because we're right here. But like, when I see El Torito, I think of the California i know i horrible corporate fake Mexican food, horrible margaritas. Yeah, this is not corporate,

Gail Schomisch  1:02:13  
no. This is locally. Since 1975

Scott Groves  1:02:16  
I'm going tonight El Torito, my wife was just saying when she was leaving Jiu Jitsu, she's like, you know, we don't have a lot of food in the fridge. That's code for, will you take us out for dinner? So we are going tonight to El Torito on polar highway.

Gail Schomisch  1:02:27  
And by all means, I mean, I totally dig Juan's fajitas, and I don't want to take anything away from them, because I frequent them as well. But El Torito, it's family owned, literally, like the whole family's in the kitchen, the family like the aunts are serving and the uncles are bussing and, you know, the kids own it and run it. I mean, it's but the food's great. Prices are great. They've got the best house. Margarita. Love it, love it. But 1975 Richard Harris shot a commercial in there. I don't know who Richard Harris is, the attorneys. Oh yeah, the billboards, yeah, the billboards. He and his son are sitting in a booth, and they're in El Torito, yeah, yeah. It's a great family. I like Nikki Lee's. It's on also on boulder highway in there. It's where all of like, the baseball clubs go to, oh, yes, a lot of sports teams do their banquets there and that

Gail Schomisch  1:03:24  
sort of thing, but they've got good food.

Gail Schomisch  1:03:27  
I think the place I frequent the most lately, gosh, it's gonna be sammy's Green Valley and peddle there. Yeah, love them. Desert willows haven't eaten there yet. Okay, so I'm a golfer, so I gravitate towards golf course, not convenience windows for a grab and go sandwich, but a really nice, upscale restaurant that's got a nice variety for the public.

Scott Groves  1:03:50  
I have an exact 90 degree slice so I don't try to play golf. Excuse my ignorance. Is desert willows the golf course, or is that the name of the restaurant?

Gail Schomisch  1:03:57  
Desert willows is the golf course and the restaurant? Oh, okay, well, that makes it easy. It is in McDonald Ranch, the Sun City community there right on Horizon Ridge, but it's open to the public. It's not a public not a private course, okay, but the restaurant remodeled last year, and they expanded a really huge, nice cover over their gargantuan patio. They have glass walls along it so the wind doesn't cut you when it's chilly, but they've got great food, and the view is awesome. And it's just a nice, really quiet spot. It's hard to get quiet dining on Eastern for instance, you know, there's a lot of great places, you know, up and down Eastern. But noisy, noisy, noisy, noisy, desert willows is like, a whole different thing. I like buckman's. I haven't been there either. Revere golf course up in all kinds of recommendations. Anthem Highlands area. Oh, buckman's, is that part of the country club there? Yeah, but that's also public. Oh, it is public. Is public? Well, there's there knows, Anthem Country Club, right? That's private. That's the gated community. This is public, okay, but great views that maybe weddings up there.

Scott Groves  1:05:04  
Are you a good golfer?

Gail Schomisch  1:05:07  
I don't keep track of my handicap anymore. Let's just leave it at that. Okay? It's, I'm a social golfer. There you go. We like, we like women's golf league with cocktails. Yeah, the kind of golf I do. When people ask

Scott Groves  1:05:18  
me to go belt fall, I'm like, I'm like, Hey, I am a horrendous golfer. You do not want me to be part of your group to golf, but I will drive the cart and drink and bring, like, really good cigars. So I usually get an invite, but I can't golf to save my life. Oh

Gail Schomisch  1:05:30  
my gosh, you know what? As I'm getting older, I just, I don't know, I've reached this golden age where I don't care. I don't care about my score anymore. I'm not that competitive. I just want to have fun and relax, because my business sometimes stresses me out. And I'm an entrepreneur in in an age of covid and tariffs and all this other nightmare, and it's like, if I don't, I'm going to spontaneously combust. My head's going to come off. So, you know, we do fun things glow in the dark, golf at Desert willows few years back for it was around Halloween, most fun tournament in the dark I ever had,

Scott Groves  1:06:00  
by the way, next year, this is for the people watching Summerlin Summerlin HQ newsletter, don't forget to subscribe. Summerlin hq.com forward slash. Subscribe at the baseball stadium out there, they're doing a whole season of glow in the dark, nighttime baseball. Oh, so that's gonna be awesome. The whole crowd is gonna have glow sticks and paint and everything, and then all the players are painted head to toe in some type something that glows, the ball glows. So they were showing the preview of what it's going to look like. It's going to be awesome. I'll have to make the pilgrimage all the way out to the west side, which is funny because you said you used to live in Southern California when people out here complain about traffic, and they're like, Oh, it's so far. I'm like, that's 20 minutes, like table stakes to get anywhere in LA is like an hour. So going to Summerlin is not this big adventure that people make it out to be to me so well. Gail, thank you for coming on. Thank you for what you doing for my wife's school, apogee.com. Check it out. I'm getting a lot of promos in today. You're a good guest. Where can people find you and when people want to hire you for their corporate gigs, their school parties, their baseball team, their boy scouts, their Girl Scouts, whatever. What's the easiest place for people to find you?

Gail Schomisch  1:07:06  
Alrighty, our website is all fired up, lv.com,

Gail Schomisch  1:07:10  
and our number is 702-269-4444.

Scott Groves  1:07:14  
We'll make sure you put that on all the show notes. Thanks for watching. Thank you. Hey, it's Scott groves with the Henderson HQ podcast. I hope you got something out of that episode. If you enjoyed it, please don't forget to like, comment and subscribe to the podcast. It really helps the show grow. And by the way, if you are a business owner, or you know a business owner who has an interesting product, service or just an interesting backstory, please, please get in touch with us. Email us at the Henderson hq@gmail.com we would love to interview you, because that's what this show is all about. It's about building community, supporting local, individually owned businesses, and just making Henderson a great place to live. And don't forget, go to Henderson hq.com and make sure you sign up for our newsletter. We send out a once a week newsletter, no spam, about the most interesting local businesses, hot spots, restaurants, community events. Thanks for watching the show. Really appreciate you.