Podcast episode 16

Serial Entrepreneur Shares How to Start a Business

John Bogosian | 38 Minutes | September 21, 2021

In this episode, we speak with John Bogosian, a serial entrepreneur and former CEO of Zingfit, a software platform designed to help boutique fitness studios manage their business.

John’s past entrepreneurial ventures include online retail software, in-store organic grocery, digital marketing consulting, content management software, and a Wall Street food delivery service. He takes a creative customer-based approach to launch every new business, in lieu of a traditional planning process.

In his spare time, he is also an educator, musician, avid cook, and hockey player.

Listen as we chat with John about food entrepreneurship, education tech, pursuing your passion, health & wellness, and bringing a business idea to life.

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Notes & Transcript

TRANSCRIPT

Kirk Bachmann: Hi everyone. My name is Kirk Bachmann, and welcome back to The Ultimate Dish. In today’s episode, we’re speaking with John Bogosian, an entrepreneur and form CEO of Zingfit, a software platform designed to help boutique fitness studios manage their business. John’s past entrepreneurial ventures include online retail software, in-store organic grocery, digital marketing consulting, content management software, and a Wall Street food delivery service. In his spare time, John is also an educator, musician, avid cook and hockey player. Join us today as we chat with John about health and wellness, education tech, family, and food entrepreneurship.

Bogo! Welcome John. How are you doing buddy?

John Bogosian: Hey Kirk, how are you? Good morning.

Kirk Bachmann: I’m doing great. Good morning. I am so excited. I like the set there. It looks really, really comfortable. If you want to play a few bars a little bit later, I’m totally cool with that.

John Bogosian: Maybe I’ll sing a few, too.

Kirk Bachmann: Okay. Let’s not get carried away.

First of all, I’m super, super excited to have you here this morning. We’ve been talking about doing this for a long time, and I am super, super amped up, still. My wife Gretchen and I, we went up to Red Rocks last night to see Nathaniel Rateliff. It was wonderful. It was at first a little overwhelming. I don’t think I’ve been out in the last 18 months, but it was kind of beautiful to see so many people together enjoying music, enjoying each other. We’re going to talk music today. My ears are still ringing a little bit, but it was really cool.

John Bogosian: And enjoying all that with the good scenery last night. Did you get some sunset?

Kirk Bachmann: Big full moon, the whole bit.

John Bogosian: It’s an amazing place. A full moon, nice.

Kirk Bachmann: It was perfect, just perfect.

Let’s talk about you. You are just back with the family from a six-week tour of the United States, or something like that?

John Bogosian: Yeah. From the view of a trailer.

Kirk Bachmann: You call it a trailer, but I bet it was…

John Bogosian: A travel trailer.

Kirk Bachmann: A travel trailer. There you go. Where did you go?

John Bogosian: So we’re here in Colorado. We went all the way to Newport, Rhode Island, which is as far east as you could possibly go, I think. Maybe the cape is a little further yet. Then headed back. We saw some family there, some relatives and friends that we left behind on the coast there. Saw some caves on the way, swam in Lake Michigan. The big highlights, create some memories for the kids.

Kirk Bachmann: Any new discoveries? Was this the first time with the kids to go across the country like that?

John Bogosian: Yeah. We literally got the camper delivered a week before we took off. Really brand new, and high adventure.

Kirk Bachmann: What cool discoveries along the way, particularly around food? We’ve been shut down for a long time, so it was probably fascinating.

John Bogosian: Truck stop food is as bad as you expect.

Kirk Bachmann: Okay, consistent.

John Bogosian: The kids had all sorts of gourmet experiences with microwave ovens in some of the truck stops. And they loved it, by the way.

Kirk Bachmann: Well, it was fun. It was different for them.

Bogo and Hockey and Family Affairs

I called you “Bogo” at the beginning. Let’s tell our audience where that comes from. Is that a college nickname, or is that a lifelong nickname?

John Bogosian: That goes back a few generations, actually. My last name is Bogosian.

Kirk Bachmann: So Bogo.

John Bogosian: So if you get into the etymology, “bogos” is Paul in Armenian, so “son of Paul.” People have been saying, “Hey Bogo,” to my grandfather, to my dad, to my brother. My brother and I both went to Wesleyan, both played on the hockey team. He was Bogo One and I was Bogo Two for a while. He left, and I finally got the mantle of just Bogo.

Kirk Bachmann: I love it. Talk about hockey a little bit. That’s a real passion for you. You played in grade school, high school, college, the whole bit, right?

John Bogosian: That’s another thing that kind of goes back some generations in my family. Rhode Island, where I’m from, there’s a lot of water there. All the lakes froze, and that’s just what everyone did.

Kirk Bachmann: Played hockey.

John Bogosian: Probably four months a year everyone would just go and skate. My mom met my dad on the ice, actually.

Kirk Bachmann: Neat!

John Bogosian: They threw her in the net. He used to skate with her big brother. I started when I was two, and went on to play hockey at Wesleyan. My sister played. My mom started a girls’ ice hockey league in Rhode Island. My dad coached.

Kirk Bachmann: Wow! I did not know that.

John Bogosian: It was a real family affair.

Kirk Bachmann: Hockey. Super competitive team sport. Is that where some of your drive comes from?

John Bogosian: Aggression?

Kirk Bachmann: Your recklessness?

John Bogosian: Say it, Kirk. Is that why you’re “bleep?”

Entrepreneurial Ventures

Kirk Bachmann: You’re competitive, you’re entrepreneurial. Does it have some roots in your participation in sports?

John Bogosian: I imagine so. There’s something about growing up in a blue collar world that just makes you a little scrappy. Interestingly, when I graduated from school, I got a few interviews down at Wall Street. I thought I was going to be a trader for a while. They were like, “We love hockey players. Love hockey players on the desk.” So yeah, I would imagine so.

Kirk Bachmann: Write it all over the resume. We’re going to bounce a lot because the resume is really impressive. One thing that you and I haven’t talked about a lot: I know there is a big background in food, but the Food Spa? Was that the juice bar that you started? Was that you’re first entrepreneurial venture? Or is there stuff even before that?

John Bogosian: I grew up every summer doing food. My first entrepreneurial adventure was probably doing New England-style clam bakes for people in Newport. We used to go and put on a big show, create a big fire, get the rocks that we’d wrap in foil and do a big fire and a big bake.

Kirk Bachmann: Where’d that come from? Was that a family thing that you did?

John Bogosian: We didn’t. There was a guy that I worked for, a place called The Coast Guard House, in Narragansett, Rhode Island. This guy, Chuck, was a really talented chef. I actually created a raw [00:07:15] bar with him at The Coast Guard House. I used to be up on the deck and I used to shuck a thousand clams and oysters a day, and boil a ton of shrimp. Chuck did these New England-style clam bakes. I really kind of learned from him. I went off on my own and did a few.

Kirk Bachmann: I love it. I love it. I’m trying to think of the calendar. Where does the Food Spa pop into that?

John Bogosian: The Food Spa was post 9/11. One of my first tech companies, called Runtime, we were in the middle of raising money in 2000, then the market crashed. We had to let a bunch of people go at that point. I stepped out soon after. I went and had a vacation for a bit, and when I came back, it was 9/11. I moved out to the Hamptons at that point. I was still taking a little bit of time off after the Runtime venture. I was bartending.

I don’t know, I was looking for another venture and I started a little juice bar. There’s this guy, Jeff. He had a place called Jeff’s Fancy Produce. It wasn’t in a building; it was really kind of a tent. He had a canvas roof on the top of it. I took it over. I fixed it up and put in a juice bar and sold a lot of produce. All the groceries were organic, as much organic as possible. It was just a lot of fun. We’d have jams a couple times a week in the courtyard in back of the place. We’d play a lot of “Shaggy All the Time” to get a good vibe going on.

Kirk Bachmann: Did you play, too, a little bit?

John Bogosian: I was playing guitar then.

Kirk Bachmann: So the thing that fascinates me about all that – and correct me if I get this wrong – is that when you adopted an online ordering system? Was that for Food Spa?

John Bogosian: Technically, it was for Bogo Food.

Kirk Bachmann: No way. You can’t even make that up. I love it.

John Bogosian: The thing about the shack was that I couldn’t run it in the winter. I had a lot of people that I was trying to turn onto organic food. It’s hard to imagine now, but there was a time when the vast majority of people hadn’t heard of the organics. It was kind of interesting that a lot of the people that were converting were new moms. They really became dependent upon what I was doing. I actually started selling diapers, which was the biggest thing that new moms were looking for, diapers that weren’t bleached. And formula. Baby food, those kinds of things that new moms were looking for.

Meeting Needs with a Co-op

So I started a co-op. United Foods, who I used to buy through, supports co-ops. So I figured out how to get them to support a co-op even though I was a store. I ran a co-op. So effectively people would order once a week, and their food would come a few days later. I continued the co-op and it got pretty big. It had 50 or 60 families that first year ordering from the co-op.

Kirk Bachmann: Wow.

John Bogosian: Then, when I decided to close down the Food Spa after a four or five year run, I really went online. I took the co-op concept and then I started stocking things. So the co-op is a cool idea. It’s just-in-time delivery. People order stuff and then it shows up a couple days later. I kind of worked on that concept with the groceries so I didn’t have to stock any. I would stock a couple hundred items. All of the produce, again, was pre-ordered, so I didn’t have any waste there.

I had this really fun concept. With United, everything you have to order a case. Some moms just didn’t want a case of diapers. So I created this thing called “Splitsville.” In Splitsville, you could go and you could order just 12 diapers out of the case, but you wouldn’t get it until another mom came and ordered the other 12. And it could be two different parents might order six. When that’d get done, you’d send out an email to everyone and say, “Hey, you’re getting diapers this week. Come down and grab it.”

Kirk Bachmann: Does this all still exist? You walked away from that, but did someone take that over?

John Bogosian: They didn’t, know. The software is probably sitting in a box somewhere.

Kirk Bachmann: And somebody’s going to grab it.
?What year are we? Where are we?

John Bogosian: This is probably 2005 at that point.

What Wall Street Wants

Kirk Bachmann: I’m going to segue to the Wall Street delivery service. Was that part of that, or was that something that came after that?

John Bogosian: That came way before, actually. That was pretty much right out of college. That was 1987.

Kirk Bachmann: So talk about that a little bit. That story’s fascinating to me. You’re taking other people’s business away because you figured out a way to give people on Wall Street what they wanted.

John Bogosian: It was pretty cool. There were really a couple components. The company was called La Carte. There was this guy, Walter Greenblatt [[00:12:58] had started it. The concept was to send guys down in tuxedos and take orders from the guys at the trading desks. Then go back into the refrigerator truck that was waiting downstairs, and they’d get all these little bento boxes, which they’d then bring up.

One of the things I helped innovate there was the ordering system. Instead of having the guys in the tuxedos come up, which took a lot of time, at Bear Stearns we actually programmed the Quotrons. The guys could actually order right through the Quotrons. It was kind of fun.

But the thing we learned pretty quickly is that the traders are typically hockey players, right? Strong-willed guys who were not into the salmon with sauce verte that we were serving them. (We also sold these bento box meals in Bloomingdale’s and a few other retail outlets as well.) We innovated to setting up buffets for them, and they could come and take what they wanted from the buffets with more hearty food.

I had a number of friends who were in investment banking, so I started selling to the investment bankers who got fed after 8 o’clock.

Kirk Bachmann: In the evening.

John Bogosian: Most of them were ordering from Delmonico’s and other places downtown. They had a $28 budget, actually, if they stayed after 8 o’clock. So I went down and said, “Give me 18 bucks and I’ll reduce your security concerns of having all these delivery guys running around your halls,” and set up a buffet for them every night. I think at [Drexel’s [00:14:46] we were in an elevator bay. We set it up there, and guys would come through. For the most part, they loved it.

Kirk Bachmann: You made friends with the folks at Delmonico’s, huh?

John Bogosian: No, they didn’t like us too much.

Kirk Bachmann: I imagine.
?John Bogosian: They were kind of reeling. They really didn’t get any warning at all.

Kirk Bachmann: Out of nowhere, competition.

Advice for Entrepreneurs

So fast forward. We cook together. Food is a big important part of your life. I love the entrepreneurial spirit. We’ll come back to this question again. Things you’ve learned through starting companies, changing companies, then starting new companies? Any advice on what to do, what not to do?

John Bogosian: Wow. The first thing I’ll say is that I think a lot of people plan and plan. Right now I’m planning another venture around music. You can plan and plan, but some of me feels like I need to go back to my old instincts and just kind of jump in and start doing something. Just start doing it. I think a lot people out there will tell you that. Just get a product out there. Start getting some customer feedback.

Innovating, from ordering from a Quotron to giving guys a buffet that they were much happier with. And by the way, the reason it worked is because traders can’t leave their desks. They don’t go out for lunch. They’re just there the whole time.

Kirk Bachmann: Meet them where they are.

John Bogosian: So we found a big business need and just kept listening until we found something that really worked and turned that into a multi-million dollar business.

And the other thing is just finding the right people to work with. Finding people that share the passion for pleasing customers, for finding solutions. That’s a world of difference from people who are having to pick themselves up to be getting into work every day. I generally always had passionate people. Especially a production partner. With the La Carte business, I had Richie Jones, who – Man! – he could pump out some food. 5000 meals a day out of a 5000-square-foot commissary.

Kirk Bachmann: That’s cranking.

John Bogosian: We had the tiniest walk-in. We had the food come in fresh three times a day because we didn’t have any walk-in or freezer space.

Kirk Bachmann: Unbelievable.

John Bogosian: Finding other people that really have the passion for solving problems.

Passion, Fear, Service

Kirk Bachmann: The word passion is just so important. No matter how cool or lucrative the idea is, in the absence of passion, is it still interesting?

John Bogosian: To me, really not so much. By the way, fear helps, too. Fear of putting some food on the table. I think a combination of the two.

Kirk Bachmann: That’s a good combination. You can see where I’m going with this. The advice is really, really important. Sometimes those are the things that keep people from being successful. There’s no passion there. I’m not feeling. There’s the fear of failing. I’ll just go work for someone because I’m too terrified about failing.
?John Bogosian: And I think it helps to like your customers, to really feel the need to please people and to be able to get the feedback that you’re really solving their problems and you’re really helping. That’s been a big driver.

Kirk Bachmann: I love that, John, this idea of liking your customers. I’m always the marketer. I’ve got to connect that to Escoffier a little bit. That was something that Auguste Escoffier was known for. He loved hospitality. He loved to serve. That was inherent to him.

John Bogosian: That’s the fun thing about retail. I had never worked in retail before the Food Spa, but it was great just being at the register. Making juices for folks and just getting instant feedback.

Kirk Bachmann: I love that. It’s just amazing to me, because I’ve known you for several years now. We hang and all that. There’s these little nuances I didn’t even know about. I absolutely love it.

The Food and Fitness Lifestyle

John, let’s talk a little bit about your most recent company, Zingfit, which sold right before the pandemic. The connection to your passion, moving out of the food-centric spirit to this whole lifestyle company, which Zingfit really was regarding exercise. What was the catalyst to that? How did that all come about?
John Bogosian: First, I think it’s useful to say that Zingfit wasn’t a lifestyle company. We were supporting lifestyle brands, like SoulCycle. I was a techie since way back and had done some technical things. While I was running the Food Spa, which was a seasonal business because we were in a shack, during the winters, I would do some tech work for people. One of the things I learned to do was web coding.

I was web coding for a company out there, and it was kind of a strange occurrence. My commissary was in the bottom of a barn and upstairs was a yoga studio and SoulCycle. SoulCycle was actually working out of a barn. I would be trying to take my trucks out and do my deliveries, and all these Range Rovers would be coming in at 60 miles an hour as they try to make it to their SoulCycle class, blocking my drive. So strangely enough, they’re also a client of the web company.

When SoulCycle really started to ramp up, the owner of that, Gordon, needed some help. I brought in Jeremy Firsenbaum, who is my partner. Jeremy I know from another life in the city. Jeremy took over that company that was making software for SoulCycle, rewrote the code, and then I helped Jeremy do a lot of the front end interfaces for the studios. I went out and was helping him sell for a bit.
?Zingfit had a dozen cycling studios as part of the business before I jumped on full time. I was still doing my other gigs. Even when I jumped on, I think there were probably 50 cycling studios in the world at that point. I had an idea again because I had a sense of lifestyle, just from the food business. They have this thing they call LOHAS, which is Lifestyle of Health and Sustainability. You’ve probably heard of that.

Kirk Bachmann: Yeah. Probably from you.

John Bogosian: That’s everything from yoga to organic and everything. From that I understood lifestyle, and I thought of SoulCycle and Barry’s Boot Camp who was probably our Number 8 customer, I really thought of them as lifestyle businesses. I thought because of that lifestyle, that boutique fitness would grow rapidly because I thought they had lifestyle right, and the timing was right. So I jumped on the software company to help enable that.

Kirk Bachmann: Your background in the tech space is amazing. Do you see any parallels between this adoption of software, technology and innovation in the food industry and/or in the fitness industry?

John Bogosian: Yeah. I think that people that eat organic food adopt the lifestyle. I think there’s a lifestyle around barbecue. I think there’s a lifestyle, probably, around pasta and red sauce. I think that fits into the lifestyles about how people gather and how people socialize. I think the real connection is social. Food is a highly social thing, whether it be around our kitchen table, whether we’re being in the restaurant, whether we’re eating in the park for Shakespeare. It’s all social.

Boutique fitness is a really highly social thing. People come to work out, but also to be seen. And even a lot of our studios ended up implementing juice bars, tea and coffee so people could hang out and congregate. Create a courtyard for congregation before and after.

Kirk Bachmann: Beautifully said. Said like an educator.

Education to Tech

Speaking of education, let’s talk a little bit about education. Another part of your amazing resume. You were actually a teacher for a little while. Was that right out of college or was that after Food Spa?

John Bogosian: When I left La Carte, the business, I was really passionate about environmental issues, and I went to work for Greenpeace for a little bit. I was working on the solid waste campaign. My focus was on incinerators, and almost ended my life in the incinerators. So I went into teaching.

I taught at a private school on Long Island called Friends Academy. I taught there for a couple years, and I taught at the Dalton School in New York City for a couple years. Then, ironically, Jeremy also taught at the Dalton School. The technology heritage there and how I got into technology is that Bob Tishman gave Dalton $5 million to experiment with technology in the classroom. That’s really where my tech chops began and how I transitioned from education to technology. I was just so fascinated with the stuff we were doing.

Kirk Bachmann: Amazing stories. My mind’s going a million miles an hour, because when I think about it, I have been in the food business and the education business for a long, long, long time. I never thought 10, 15 years ago that we could create a platform where we could reach people from coast to coast and help them better understand and learn how to cook and prepare for the industry. Who would have thought that we could do that with this?

John Bogosian: They don’t seem to go together, right, the idea of cooking in front of a screen, right? I guess Julia changed all that, right?

Kirk Bachmann: She certainly had a lot to do with that. It’s fascinating.

This concept of digital marketing. Talk to me about digital marketing. What does that mean to you?

John Bogosian: It means a huge amount now. At that point, it was really just about helping through my own work of doing SEO – search engine optimization – I helped other folks do that. In the 1980s, there weren’t a lot of tools out there. There was no social media. The other thing was really buying Google ads. I’d help people buy Google ads, and I worked for some agencies who did that. That was my “went to work.”

Kirk Bachmann: And back to the shack?

John Bogosian: Back to the shack! Shaggy in the shack.

Kirk Bachmann: I’m not going to let that one go. I love that story.

Pandemic Piano

From a timing perspective, right before the pandemic, what’s kept you busy? I see a keyboard just barely and a pretty impressive microphone. What’s kept you busy over the last 18 months?

John Bogosian: There was a bit of a transition after we sold the company. Just before covid, the acquirers took over and Jeremy and I stepped out. A lot of the other founders stepped out as well. They bought five companies in the boutique fitness business.

Things were really on lockdown. I keep this bucket list on my iPhone. I just picked something from the bucket list. I play guitar. I sing a little bit, but I’ve always wanted to play the piano. It’s a particular challenge for me because I’m so uncoordinated in terms of using both hands. It took me a while on the guitar. It seemed like a good challenge. My daughter used to take in-person lessons that moved to Zoom. She had a really cool instructor, this guy Adam Coleman. So I asked him if he would teach me. So he started teaching me. And I guess even before that, I’ve learned Piano Man note-for-note using YouTube.

Kirk Bachmann: Isn’t that something? See how you can learn online.

John Bogosian: And I just slogged through it for like two months. So much so that I can’t play it in the house because my kids will kill me. “Not Piano Man again!”

Kirk Bachmann: The kids are at school right now. Let’s hear a little Piano Man. No?

John Bogosian: I don’t know if I remember it. It’s like *music plays.*

Kirk Bachmann: I love it. I love it. With both hands. With both hands.

Music, again, a passion. You told me once that you went to France and played the guitar. Now, I’m probably exaggerating a little bit. What were you doing? Were you in France for food? Were you in France for business? Or were you in France to play the guitar?

John Bogosian: It gets almost embarrassing as I kind of move from passion to passion. It is what it is. This is really after Runtime. After I stepped out of there and just before 9/11, I just needed a break. I’d been working at this company for a while. We grew it to a few million dollar business. I just stepped out. I left food at some point for technology. I wanted to get back for a while. What better thing than to go to France and just work as a sous chef? And just try to find a job.

So I did some networking. One of my artist friends in New York lived in this tiny little town called Pézenas in the south of France. Very few people speak English. I studied a little French in school, and studied in Geneva for a semester, so I had some French under my belt. I just went for it. I worked in this tiny little restaurant making some food. I managed not to get myself killed with my French in the kitchen.

Kirk Bachmann: Oui, Chef. Oui Chef.

John Bogosian: When I was there, the work police ended up coming to get me. I had to stop. I had to make a living. I had my guitar there, and I wasn’t great on it. I’m okay at the guitar. I’m okay at singing, but people there loved the fact that I pronounced the English words correctly. I’d play the Beatles, and people would go nuts!

Kirk Bachmann: Who knew?

John Bogosian: I did a lot of Elvis. People would go nuts. *singing* “Since my baby left me.”

His Next Path

Kirk Bachmann: Are we parleying that passion for music into any future projects that we can talk about just a little bit? Stay tuned, right?

John Bogosian: Before I started taking lessons, I learned a few tunes on YouTube. And I think YouTube does really great things. There are all these content creators, as they call them, out there helping people.
They’re making the money through ads, which are really, really annoying. Now, very few of them are making money on ads anymore. Google’s taking all the money. There are other platforms that people are using now to try to get tips. They’re doing a lot of product promotion. “Oh by the way, this is the guitar I’m playing. You can buy it on sweetwater.com.” There’s a lot of that stuff.

And it’s really hard to find content. I’ve been working on trying to [develop] a better monetizing model, making better curation. It’s really difficult to find stuff on YouTube that is in the genre or at the level that you want, where you are. A lot of the traditional music schools are good at that, at saying that you’re at this level. But you shouldn’t have to be stuck at that level either. You should be able to move to something more complicated.

So that’s the next thing. It’ll be called “Raves.” That will be the name of it.

Kirk Bachmann: So you’re down a path! You’re ideating. You’re going.

John Bogosian: I was working pretty hard on it, and then we got in the trailer for six weeks and I let my mind go free. Now I’m kind of back at the piano, back thinking about Raves.

Kirk Bachmann: But you took your music with you on the road, as I understand.

John Bogosian: I did. Much to the annoyance of my family, I had a little battery-powered keyboard.

Kirk Bachmann: Keep the passion going.

Bogo’s Ultimate Dish

We’re getting a little close to the end of our time together. I’m going to have you come back at some later date. So many great conversations. Maybe we’ll play a little bit more music. I love the background for this. The name of the podcast, John, is The Ultimate Dish. In your mind – and you’ve got a lot of thoughts – what is The Ultimate Dish?

John Bogosian: There are so many. So it’s really two things. One is chicken soup. I make a really good chicken soup, and it’s really the one thing that the kids get really, really excited about. It’s really from my mom. She got my son, Leo, eating chicken soup. My mom’s nickname is Grandma Chicken Soup.

Kirk Bachmann: I didn’t know that! Oh my God!

John Bogosian: So I’ve worked pretty hard at replicating her recipe.

Kirk Bachmann: Everyone loves chicken soup. It warms the soul. It’s perfect. What’s number two??

John Bogosian: Number two is this dish I’ve learned how to make in Pézenas. It’s this mussel dish, made with the seafood stock and roasted red peppers. I forget the name of it. I think it’s pretty classic. You service mussels on top of it.

Kirk Bachmann: With fresh bread.

John Bogosian: ‘Moules mariniere’ or something like that.

Kirk Bachmann: That sounds right. And it takes you there. I’m there just hearing it. And you dip the bread into the broth. Very, very nice.

John Bogosian: It’s actually not even a broth. It’s really just a red pepper puree with seafood stock. And then all the broth from the mussels, when you put it on it, actually drizzles and makes these rivers in the red pepper puree. It’s really, really sublime.

Kirk Bachmann: Beautiful.

John Bogosian: You’re right; that one really takes me back there.

Kirk Bachmann: That’s a good memory. I think maybe what we should do at some point is that I’m thinking we should write a sitcom, you and me. I even have a name. I’m going to write it. But I can’t share that name.

John Bogosian: You can’t expose that yet.

Kirk Bachmann: Not yet. Not yet, buddy.

John Bogosian: Maybe we can work up a bit for the next time.

Kirk Bachmann: Let’s do that. This could be a different podcast. Why not. Bogo, thanks for being with us today. I love you, and best wishes always. I’m going to bring you back, okay.

John Bogosian: Bring me back?

Kirk Bachmann: Yeah, to the podcast.

John Bogosian: Yeah, well thanks for sorting through my crazy, twisted life.

Kirk Bachmann: No, but it’s a fascinating story. You’re a storyteller, and you have a great story to tell, and I love it. Lots of beautiful lessons about passion. And I think you said at the beginning of the podcast, “Just do something.” Just do something. Just start something.

John Bogosian: And you can. there’s this big fear, but I think if there’s enough there, you’ll kind of figure out how to make it work. You don’t have to go out and raise money. You just have to find customers, and then find a partner, because the energy doesn’t last. You need someone to basically be able to pick it up when you’ve had enough. Find someone who has some sort of skills that aren’t doing what you’re doing, but that works.

Kirk Bachmann: And like your customers. Like your customers.

John Bogosian: Even if they give you lip a couple times.

Kirk Bachmann: All right buddy. Thank you again. Appreciate it. Thank you for being with us.

And thank you for listening to The Ultimate Dish podcast, brought to you by Auguste Escoffier School of Culinary Arts. Visit Escoffier.edu/podcast where you’ll find any materials mentioned during the podcast, including notes, links, and other resources. You can also browse other episodes and subscribe.

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