At this point, Jimmy and I were still operating on the idea that the room would primarily be an event space, albeit one with a pretty full calendar.
We continued to chip away at our DIY projects.
Most of the room had very nice wainscotting on the walls, but the stain looked cloudy and faded. I grabbed a soft cloth and rubbed a matching stain into the wood to rejuvenate it.
Can you believe the difference?!?
Unfortunately, on one side of the room, the wainscotting was missing. The nice paneling abruptly ends a couple of feet down the wall and it’s just drywall for the remainder. Weird, right? This room has been various bars going back at least to the 1980’s, so maybe at some point, the bar ran the whole length of the wall – the switch from wainscotting to drywall makes more sense if that side of the room was filled with coolers and bar equipment.
I debated various ways to camouflage this defect, including adding trim and stain to create a “faux wainscotting” look.
In the end, I decided the effort and expense wouldn’t be worth it, especially since the room would be full of furniture. Instead, I decided to paint the lower panel the same brown as the ceiling, which became my go-to tactic for making odd “design features” blend in.
By this time, it was the summer of 2017. We were chugging along when our steady progress was rudely interrupted by…
WEDDING SEASON
Cue the scary music.
I was working as the event manager at a local event facility, and it was my first time experiencing the “busy season”. My team and I had booked the shit out of the room, (we ended up increasing sales by 31% for the year) so when summer hit we were working 80 hour weeks. Weddings, giant corporate events, you name it. From June to October I worked 12-15 hour days (sometimes more), came home, ate, sobbed into my pillow, slept, then got up and did it again.
The project came to a grinding halt.
When I came up for air in the fall, I realized that rather than thinking of the Listening Room as a part-time side project, maybe we needed to think about it being more than that. I was completely ragged physically and emotionally and I knew this wasn’t how I wanted to live my life.
I put some systems into place in my department to help manage the crazy schedule and cut down on the insane hours, but the bigger issue was the work environment. It was super-toxic, the working conditions were appalling, and there was no regard for the quality of life and safety of the staff. It was affecting me in a really negative way.
About that time I came across this quote from the fabulous Cindy Gallop:
“If you are working at a place that does not welcome and celebrate your talent, somewhere that does not allow you to disrupt and innovate in the way that you want to, get the fuck out, get another job. There’s no point in being there.”
It was like the sky opened up and angels sang.
Cindy was speaking directly to me.
I’m creative, passionate, tenacious and have a monster work ethic. I have actually been self-employed for most of my life, but I took the job because I LOVE creating and managing events and obviously I liked the steady paycheck and benefits. I had learned a lot, but my creativity was being stifled and the better I performed the more pushback I got from a management team who was more comfortable with the status quo. I knew I had to move up my timeline for leaving.
(You can read about how that ultimately played out on my other blog HERE)
Jimmy and I started retooling our business model. He is a few years out from retiring and has an eye on what he might do next. I clearly needed an exit strategy.
We started talking about what we could do with the space during the day and we quickly came to the conclusion that a coffee house was the logical choice. Mike had actually been approached by two different local coffee roasters about renting the space, but neither had panned out. Jimmy is a coffee fiend, and I have been in the hospitality business off and on since I was 14 years old.
We originally thought we would have the coffee shop open every day until 2pm and open for ticketed events 2-3 nights a week. As we talked that through, I realized it would be confusing to not have consistent hours. Aside from that, this venture wasn’t a little side hustle anymore. It seemed awkward to separate the daytime coffee business from the nighttime bar and music business and I didn’t want to lose track of the creative community vibe. I was really struggling with how to make sense of it in my head as I worked on building this website and crafting our marketing language.
My struggle with defining what we were doing had a lot to do with the fact that our business model doesn’t really exist yet in Syracuse. We have some really fabulous coffee shops that do their own roasting, but they don’t offer booze or live music. We have tons of terrific bars, but they lack the daytime component and the feeling of being a community gathering place that I was aiming for.
We want to serve a killer cup of coffee, but we have no plans to roast our own beans and didn’t want coffee to be the main focus. We want to serve great wine, locally crafted beer and classic cocktails, but we don’t want a “bar” per se – the idea of being open until 2am was not appealing to us or our landlord. We want stellar live acoustic music to be a big focus. We named our venture the “The Listening Room”, not just because of the style of shows we will produce…we also want it to be a place of community gathering, of creativity and “listening” in every sense of the word – book signings and readings, political roundtable discussions and a hub for grassroots community efforts. AND I wanted the freedom to try out some fun programming ideas I’ve been working on. It seemed a little crazy.
I solved my existential crisis by looking around online and discovering that this kind of business totally does exist. All over the place, actually.
Duh.
In Syracuse, we sometimes joke that we are a good 10 years behind what’s hot in bigger cities. For example, tapas bars have a been a thing for at least 20 years in larger cities all over the US. In Syracuse, the concept has only had mainstream understanding for the last 5 years or so – and you’re still likely to hear some yahoo saying, “Did you say TOPLESS bar?!?”
I found a handful of places in other cities that were pretty darn close to the vision I had in mind, and it really helped to clarify all my random ideas about what I wanted our place to be. The coffee, music, booze, community stuff and creativity could all coexist peacefully – I just had to stop thinking about them as separate concepts, as a daytime business vs. what happens at night.
And it only took A YEAR to figure it out.
