Less Than 1% of a $40 Billion Industry Is Black-Owned. Emmanuel J. Waters and Old Hillside Bourbon Are Changing That

Promote a culture of inclusion, supercharge your communication and unleash the full potential of your teams and leaders with the Inclusive Handbook Collection from the Diversity Movement. As part of the collection, I wrote the Inclusive Leadership Handbook with Kurt Meriwether to empower leaders with tools needed to cultivate a culture that fosters creativity, innovation and employee engagement. Through strategies, exercises and self reflection, leaders at all levels can enhance their effectiveness. Learn more@thediversitymovement.com store. Use code HOL at checkout for 25% of your first order. We never wanted to be the best black owned bourbon. We want to be the best bourbon. Point blank period. And you just happen to know that we're black. That was our goal. Welcome to High Octane Leadership with Donald Thompson. This season we're diving deeper with more solo episodes where I'll share the experiences that have led to recognition by ey, Forbes, Fast Company and others. Not as a boast, but as milestones on my entrepreneurial path. From growing multimillion dollar firms to successful business exits and building high performance teams with a global perspective, I'll reveal the insights and strategies from my journey and share them with you so that we can win together. Alongside these solo episodes, we'll have industry visionaries and thought leaders and we'll explore effective leadership. Ready to empower your leadership journey with real success stories. Let's embark on this transformational journey together. Welcome to another episode of High Octane Leadership. I'm your host Donald Thompson. I'm here today with Emmanuel Waters, the CEO and co founder of Old Hillside Bourbon. Emmanuel, welcome to the show. Thank you, sir. Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be on and be speaking with you. Excited to dive in. I'm excited. Good stuff, man. One of the things that I like to do so that our audience is listening to you as a friend. Just take a minute. Kind of non business. Tell us something about you family education. Biggest lesson you learned that you wouldn't find on your LinkedIn profile or your pitch deck. Yeah. So one thing people don't know about me is I'm actually a son of a military. I'm a military brat. My dad was a military officer, Air Force guy. I spent a good portion of my life living overseas. So I lived in Japan and I graduated high school in Europe. So my dad who just was. He was actually a colonel. I'm lieutenant colonel. But he got two consecutive overseas assignments which just doesn't happen. So I literally went from Japan directly to Europe. So the life, I would say the View in prison, in which I see life is gonna be completely different than, I would say, probably your average person from North Carolina. So my parents like to joke around. They'd be like, you're really not from North Carolina? We're from North Carolina. I'm like, no, no, no. I grew up in North Carolina, but then we went overseas. You know, my family's there and grandparents. And so I have a passion for traveling. I mean, I've been to, I think, 35 foreign countries. My goal is to get to 60. I try to see amount of countries that match my age, but I now have little kids that have slowed me down. Well, yeah, I love to see the world, love experiencing new cultures. And like I said, I got that bug really early when I was in high school and just fell in love with traveling and connecting to other cultures. So that's something you won't find on the LinkedIn bio anywhere. No, I love that. And I was not an army brat. I was the son of a. I am the son of a retired college football coach. So I didn't travels extensively as you, but I moved around in the US Quite a bit. And even when in the US My prism of culture and backgrounds and perspectives and different things was driven by that. And so we'll unpack that a little bit more because I think that probably aligns your executive style, too. Here's the first question about Old Hillside. Right. And we'll come back to the heritage story in a minute. But I want to dig into kind of the brand and the build out. Right. One of the things I was researching is bourbon is one of the few products. Right. That you can't just manufacture and ship. There's an aging process. Absolutely. So now you're investing significant dollars and building out a product that you've got to have in a barrel for years before you can now ship the product. How does that shape your thinking as a business leader in distribution, and how do you plan that? That's a big systemic difference from most leaders that I've talked to. Yeah. Don, you're not helping me out with any investors, by the way. I just want to let you know that. Yeah. So you know what's interesting is, and I never had a background in bourbon. I never drank a bottle of bourbon prior to the company in 2020. I had never. That's just not my drink of choice. I think I'm more of a sweet guy. And so when Jesse called or they told me about the. I was like, bourbon, this is kind of weird. And so when he walked me through the process and he invited me to distillery. I was learning. I was like, oh wow. So like it's like you mentioned, you have to age it and we pick the years. Everything that we do is a minimum of four years because that's what we believe, that we have a sweet spot and that's where it starts to really taste good. So anything below four years we won't put in a bottle. Right. And, and actually that speaks to I would say also the spirit of excellence that we have when it comes to our brand. Because what we could have done is you can, you know, you could put, we could have put a six month bourbon in a bottle and got a lot more volume and had margins from the start over. Like no, we want something that's age with something crap good. If we don't think it tastes good, why would we give our, give it to our customers? For the sake of getting a dollar. Right. And so yeah, we had to essentially buy it aged, let it sit for a while. It takes a while. You know, I'm buying. We're buying stuff now to release what we're in 2026. We're not going to release the 2030. That, that's, you know, so you, so, so our investors are always like, you, you're buying this stuff. You got it as you got to be with us for the long haul. You got to be with us for, for the long haul. But it just became a, a passion. It's, it's the true American spirit and it's the only spirit that you can manipulate based on where it sits. So I hadn't, I never knew my first time distillery you could have. And we do something called single barrel, which you can't. Like, we can do everything that comes out me and we have the same exact barrels. They can be put in the barrel the same exact day. One could sit here, one can sit here and you're going to get two completely distinctive flavors, different flavors. Bourbon is the only spirit that can do that. And so I was blown away. I was like, wait. So when we went there, he turned the barrel to the side. He said, oh yeah. Then I move these, gives them more flavor. I was like, this is freaking phenomenal. And so, yeah, I fell in love with it. I was like, okay, now I'm gonna, now I'm gonna really ramp up and just, I think I came home that day and I just started buying all types of stuff. I didn't even, John, I didn't even know what bourbon. I didn't even know bourbon was a Type of whiskey. I just. I was buying whiskey. I bought scotch. I didn't know. I didn't just. I was, you know, but it's. It's been fun. It's. It's an. It's exciting process. And again, it goes literally, it goes back to what, this 1600 and they were bootlegging it. Right. It goes back to Prohibition, you know, that is awesome. One of the things that attracted me to want to talk to you, and we're doing some partnership things on another. Another lane that maybe we'll get into at another time. But as I've researched you all, I've really been impressed with the way you're thinking about branding the business and building a storytelling brand. Right. The extension of the spirits, but really telling the story. Unpack that a little bit. Both the thought process and. And some of the themes of which you're creating uniqueness in the market. Yeah. So for those that don't know. So just our name, let's start there. Hillside, which was named after Hillside High School, which is one of the oldest African American high schools in the United States. In Durham, where we're all originally from. If you know anything about Durham and really, really history. Right. Durham was home of one of five black wall streets in America. Now we know the most famous one is obviously Tulsa because of the destruction that there. But there were other black wall streets in America for those that don't know. Black wall streets were places in a time post slavery where obviously we could not integrate with whites. We had Our own. Our own banks, our own post offices, essentially. It was literally, I would call a melting pot of black entrepreneurship. Right. Like we thrived in our own. Right. My granddaddy would tell you that he never wanted to integrate because we need. We didn't need. We had no reason to go across town. Right. So that was the basis for the brand. Right. And so when Jesse, my co founder, who got out the military, was living in Kentucky at the time as well, he invited us to a horse race. We went out there, didn't see any African Americans. We're like, what? And then we find out that African Americans had literally built the Kentucky Derby. Those were the baseline and really the inspiration to the brand. So if you look on our crest, you'll see there's a massive horse on there that represents the black jockeys and there's a bull. That is Bull Durham City. So those were the two pillars anchored in to start the brand. Because the spirits industry, it's just crazy competitive, right? I mean, my God, it's It's in bourbon specifically $9 billion category. How are you going to compete with the likes of Jack Daniels or Woofer? These guys been around Buffalo trades. They've been around since 1795. There's. There's. I mean, they got a marketing budget, literally, that people probably won't see a revenue, right? So how do you differentiate yourselves? And that's what we wanted to do. It was never about let's get drunk. It was always about let's tell stories. And thus the pillars, history, heritage, and homage, those became our three anchors. And the idea was, let's tell stories in the form, and we'll use bourbon as a median to tell those stories. And everything that we do will be centered around those three buckets. And, I mean, it became a runaway hit. That's actually what attracted me to the brand. It was never about bourbon because I'm not naturally a bourbon drinker. But when we got on the call and I said, oh, my God, like this. These black jockeys. This is a phenomenal freaking story in Durham. Like, we got. I literally said, we have something. And I was blown away. And I said, oh, my. Like, I need to be involved, you know, and that was that. One of the things that I want to extend on that and appreciate that very much, especially what you were talking about relative to black Wall Street. One of the things in our country today is the narrative of who we are as African Americans is skewed, right? And it is skewed, primarily negative, right? You should be afraid of the angry black man. You should be afraid of xyz and. And it clouds all the amazing things that we're doing to both contribute and build and grow economic value in our country. And so black Wall street, this is my soapbox moment a little bit. Entrepreneurs like yourself, like myself, have a responsibility to win, not only for us and our families, Right. But to change the narrative in the paradigm. So here's my question, right? When you're building this business out and some of the things, there's a small percentage of people that look like you and I in the spirit space, right? So how are you navigating this space, right, with suppliers, with investors, with different things so that you don't use it in as an excuse. But there is a business reality that your road's going to be a little bit tougher. What are you. What are you doing to navigate? Yeah, Abs, Absolutely. Let me give you some. Some statistics. So the US spirits industry alone is a $40 billion industry. African Americans represent 12% of consumers less than 1% of ownership. Think about that. That means we spend about almost $3 billion in alcohol, and less than 1% of alcohol companies are black. That is ridiculous. Right? But what I learned, and I spent some time in corporate America too. I'm here in Silicon Valley. I'm in tech. There's not a lot of African Americans in tech. There's not a lot of African Americans in AI. I've had to navigate this basically my entire career. And you, you've done the same thing, Don. Right? So it's. I thought so when I, when we got together, I'm like, oh, this is really cool. I get to do it with my brothers. Like, oh, this is gonna be great. And then we get over here and I'm like, it's the same freaking thing. It's just a different industry. It's the same. So I like to say you can say whatever you want. Men lie, women lie, but numbers do not. This is systemic across the board, Right. If you are, if you are an entrepreneur, and I hate to get on the soapbox, but if you are specifically black and you are a black woman is dang near impossible. And there are systemic barriers to get to navigate. Right? But instead of always trying to ask somebody for help, let's just build our own table. Right? One of the things like that's powerful. And I'm going to give you the mic back in just a second. James Sills is the CEO of MNF bank, based out of Durham. Yep, yep, yep, yep. Yeah. And I had him on my podcast a few years ago. In fact, I owe him a phone call. But one of the things he was talking about is how to accelerate closing of the wealth gap and how entrepreneurship is one of the fastest ways to do that. Right. Because you can have an idea, you can have a business and different things. And so here's my question. As you look at your business and growth, what are some of the levers that you want our listeners to think about to support black owned, black led businesses? And in particular, Old Hillside? Right. As we promote this episode, as we're talking to people about what you're doing, how can we be supportive? Because the thing that I'll say is a lot of times we're competing in our own race and we never look to the left and right to see how we can help our brother. Right. How we can help our sister. And so what I want to ask you, as I promote this episode, as I'm out and about as a business leader, what can we do to support Old Hillside in this amazing journey? Yeah. So old Hillside and really every black owned business, number one, or small business as a whole, number one, don't ask for free product. That's, that's number one. We are all out here grinding. We are, you know, unless you, you know, started this company or your company with a lot of money when most of us do not don't ask for free product. That's, that's, that's number one. You want to support me right there, Go out and buy a bottle, buy, you know, black owned shirts, whatever the case may be. Go, go buy the product, try it, support it. And then now we're in a day and age as you, as, you know, Don. We're in a, we're in a word of mouth social media share on social media. To me, actually that's probably the biggest lever, to be quite honest with you, because we're in an age of media where things can be picked up by hashtag and before you know it, you know, you're, you're, you're kind of viable, right? So to me, those are the two biggest things. Understand that like we are all in here, especially small business, like it is, it is really tough. There is systemic barriers to access to capital. But I don't have to make that necessarily a race thing. I will say banks and I learned this from John O. Bryant. They're in the business, they fund balance sheets, they don't fund dreams. Right. So I, you know, like as much as, and you know, we had a hard time until today, Don. I mean I bank with some of the biggest banks out there. Like I haven't got a freaking loan yet. Like, you know what I mean? That just until you get to a certain amount of R and R and your EBITDA is positive, like you just, you know what I mean? Like they'll give you a credit card but they're not going to give you a loan. Like, I mean it's so many levers that you just like, hey, I'm trying to get the loan so I can build the revenue, right? They want to see your balance sheet. They don't care about that. Right. And so you learn heavy on, you know, what, what, what that looks like, right. But if you keep, you really have to be, you have to be persistent. That's something that I learned and I've only been doing this. Our business is six years old. I am going into year three full time. And I would say entrepreneurship and even being a CEO is the lowest paying job you could ever take. If you think about it from a mic, Max gives You macro to do list task perspective. Like, I tell I, I wouldn't wish this job on one of my worst enemies. Like, this is, this is. It's not for the week. You know what I mean? Like, this is, you know, this is coming from a place like, I live in Silicon. Like, I was like, I made. I had a really good life. Right. So I told my co founder, Jess and Cory, as the next time you have a dream in light, don't call me, hang up, don't call me. Do not call me. Your next endeavor, don't call me. Right. But also what I love about my guys is that although I had a great career in Silicon Valley and a good successful career, there wasn't fulfillment. Every 18 months, I was chasing like the next big thing on the job and just navigating a space that was just very difficult, dealing with idiots and, and personalities. And I gotta check in and I gotta, you know, submit my, you know, document to get, you know, time off. And, and again, I have no problem with authority. My, my father was military. I, I am very big on authority. I love authority. I think it's great. And I love, I love structure. But what I learned is just like, you know, this is not a place for me, and it'd be really tough to go back. Right. And entrepreneurship, by the way, you still answer to somebody. I answer to my investors. I answer to my stockholders. And if you don't answer to anybody, entrepreneur, then you really don't have a business. You just have a side hustle, to be quite honest with you. Yeah, I appreciate that. So couple of specifics. In one of the things that I've learned in working with you is you've got to be licensed in a particular state. Yes. Right. To then distribute product. Right. And so talk to me a little bit about when we talk about supporting Old Hillside. Right. What are the states where we can support your business? Can we get at you online? Like, how do we do that? What are some of the retailers that we need to go? Because here's the reason I want to square this. I want to be able to look at this podcast today. Yep. And then a few years from now, right through our voice, through our volume, we're helping the story become real. Right. That big success story. So that's why I'm asking a couple of these detailed questions. Yeah. So every time I hear the word license now, Donna, I, I kind of get chest compressions, and it's very stressful. Kidding. But obviously our home state, North Carolina, is what we call a control state. That means all, that means the state controls all the liquor sales. So you can go to your local ABC board and purchase a bottle. So collectively we are in North Carolina, Mississippi, Alabama, those are three control states. So you can go to your local ABC spirit store and purchase us, grab a bottle heading out west. Here in California, we are everywhere. All bedmos, all total wines, Whole Foods. You cannot come to California, not find us. From the tip of the top of the bay all the way to the Mexican border, we are everywhere. And that speaks to really, first of all, brand that's less than 6 years old doesn't give this attribution, but this speaks volumes to what we've done as a. And we've really put our, you know, our work boots on. We're blue collar, we've been working. So California and then Hawaii and those that are not in those states, Old Hillside, bourboncompany.com We ship to 49 out of 50 states. We ship everywhere but Utah. So you can find us everywhere and come right to your door. Ah, beautiful. I think that is fantastic. Now, when you're thinking about navigating this space, this is now more of a leadership perspective. I'm going to broaden the window out. What are some characteristics that you see that you want to and are emulating, right. As a CEO and as a leader. Right. That you could share with our audience. And then you feel free to weave in any lessons learned. Right. Because being a new CEO of this new firm, I'm sure there's a lot of lessons learned over the last three years. And so without unpacking, like the book, because I have a book. Right. But if you wouldn't mind giving us a couple of reflective thoughts on your views on leadership and building that cohesive team to win in spite of the barriers. Yeah. What's interesting, Don, is for whatever reason, years ago, when I started my career right out of college, I started working for Department of Defense early on. And I always was fascinated by, I always read a lot of leadership books. I couldn't tell you why, I just was. I just love leadership books. I read a lot of autobiography books and self help business books. So leaders like, excuse me, Colin Powell, Barack Obama, Malcolm X. I just fell in love with visionaries like that Steve Jobs. I've read them all. Phil Knight, Nike. I fell in love with those type of books. And one thing that stands out to me is really everybody that I've mentioned and leader in general is really taking a vision and creating a vision and turning it into a movement or pounding the pavement Right. And so for us and for me, I saw. I think one thing that makes me a good leader is I saw the vision early on when it came to the brand. I saw it, I think, probably before my co founder saw. And even though obviously they got together before me. And I was the last piece of the puzzle that day in Durham. For those that don't know, November 2021, this is. This is the day, the month that I knew I was no longer being corporate America. For those that don't know, you mentioned alcohol. North Carolina is a control state. It is by far the hardest state to get into from an alcohol perspective because of the laws and how meticulous it comes to how to distribute is. So much so that other brands who had been, you know, older than us when we started, this is their words. Do not go into North Carolina because it'll kill your brand. Literally what they told us, do not go into North Carolina. It will kill your brand. Don't go in there, come to Atlanta. Go to Georgia instead. Don't go into North Carolina. But this is why you need to have the vision, right? What was supposed to be the death of us actually was a catapult, right? We went from a brand state that we weren't supposed to be in till we broke the record, which we hold that record to the day we sold 50 cases, which is 300 bottles. Keep in mind, nobody has ever tasted our bourbon. Nobody's ever tasted it. And we go to the store that day and we have a bottle signing. And the store, when we got to the building, Don, I have no way to describe it other than this. The lime was wrapped around the building. November 2021 is cold. This is Covid. And everybody's in here to see us and to support us. City, the council, city councilmen, mayors, old high school teachers. I mean, it was packed. People were buying six, seven, eight, nine bottles at a time. Within 15 minutes of the tasting. We had to lower the amount of people that buy and say, you can only buy one bottle of time because we're going to run out of product. Right? And so the way I describe it is, if you ever look, there's a picture on Black Wall street in Durham, years ago in the 1930s and 40s. There's a picture of a line that was there. That's what it was. I'm like, we touched the ancestors that day. I was. I called my wife. I literally was just like, I'm. I was like, I'm not gonna be around much longer. I knew that day I didn't know when it was going to happen. But that to me said, this cannot be a part time business for me. That, that's when I knew, right? I saw the vision. I said, oh my God, people are coming. And we broke a record in the heart of state and we're telling stories. Oh, and by the way, we only have one bottle at the time and they're willing to do this. What could we do a little bit more? And how can the world, all the states get to see this? And so that's. I knew right then and there I saw the vision early, early, early on. So as a leader, you better see the vision. I think that's what I like. I think that's what, you know, you may not necessarily have the, the steps right then and there, but if you can see the vision, you know, it's like the, like my favorite Scripture is Habakkuk 2 and 2. Write the vision and make it plain. That day I was like, oh, okay, I'm writing it down, right? And I saw it. I was like, this is going to be that day. And there's so many other things that have gone along the road. But I was like, this is. This is bigger than Bergen. This is. This one is bigger than bourbon. That is, that is powerful. So one of the things I'm going to circle back now to the production we talked about, the storytelling, right. Of building the brand. Now let's pull back. And how do you create something that is considered high quality in the spirit space? How did you do your testing and your benchmarking and how do you feel confident, right, that your bourbon should stand out amongst those legacy players? Yeah, absolutely. So one, we were. It was during COVID We did a lot of sampling. We had a lot of time, our hands. And just to be quite honest with you, Don, like, for me personally, Donald, I was extremely intimidated because I don't have a sophisticated palette. My co founders were drinking bourbon way before me. And if they're. They're watching this podcast, they're much older than me. So they, they were. So that would. I mean like literally Jesse, Bryan and like, they literally are bourbon collectors. Like, you know what I mean? They go to. Jesse and Brian were going to do distillery tours. I had never done nothing like that, so it was extremely intimidating for me. But as I started refining my palate, as I started trying stuff, I realized like 95% of stuff that's out there is terrible. It's horrible, right? But it's been shoved down our throats because it's really not in the good spirits industry, it's less about the quality and more about the marketing, right? Yeah. So it's just 95% of stuff you see on the shelf. All of it's trash. Be quite honest with you. Right. I just, you know, like, tomorrow I'm not. There's some big celebrities that have some bourbon. This is terrible. And I love the celebrity, but it's horrible. Right. You don't take any time to put any money into the product. So what we wanted to do, we never wanted to be the best black owned bourbon. We want to be the best bourbon, point blank period. And you just happen to know that we're black. That was our goal. So we took a lot of time to craft. When we found something that we liked, we wanted to make sure that it was aged good and that if we didn't like it, we wouldn't put it in a bottle and give it to our customers. And then we did a bunch of blind tastings. And then we entered the largest spirits competition in the world. And then we got a couple gold medals, and then we got a double gold medal. Okay. This shows us, you know, out of like, I think was like over a couple million entries. They don't know us from Adam. It's a blind tasting and we got a gold medal. That tells me we have a sophisticated and a great product. All right, so I want to go back to the gold medals for a minute, right? Because, because that, because that's your. That's the humble brag. But I'm gonna, I want to pull back the, the a little bit. Talk to me about some of those competitions. Talk to me about the number of participants and, and getting a gold medal is pretty significant, especially as a brand new brand I mentioned. Yeah, yeah, it was actually was our very first sku, which is our Kentucky bourbon, our first bottle. The San Francisco Spirits Competition is the largest spirits competition in the world. In the entire world. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions of applicants entered this specific competition. It's been around for decades. If you win a medal in that competition, it's legit. That's what we were told. And from now we know, we're like, oh, yeah. So now when we go to trade shows, the first thing we do is we look to see if you have a medal from that company. We don't care about no other competition but that one. Right. And so when we went in there, we applied, and when we won the gold medal, we're like, holy moly. We want to go met our very first year. Like, this is amazing. You know what I mean? This is phenomenal, right? There's literally bronze, silver, gold and there's double gold. So gold out the gate were like, okay, we got something. Oh, and then by the way, we're going to get even refiner, get even better. And then we came out with our rye. Our last ride, what pays tribute to the black jockies. We won a double gold, the highest medal you come out with. So it was like non stop, back to back. I'm like, okay, this goes to show you. So I always say we have a great product and we have an even better story. So let's go now put the product and the story together because you just mentioned it, but I want to amplify this for our listeners. Right. You built a version of your product specifically around the story of black jockeys, is that correct? Yes, there are the talk to me about that merging of the high quality product and the story into the product. Yeah. So this was, you know what's interesting is this was supposed to be a one time thing that we were going to do for the Kentucky Derby and it was, we were going to call it the ride. Jess was like, Jesse had the idea to come up, called the Last ride and, and he was like, hey, let's, let's pay an ode to the jockeys. We have literally built a company that we're talking about jockeys. We don't have anything to really represent them. This is going to be that. And I said, okay, this is a great idea. So we tried some flavors and when we got the rye out the barrel, I was like, oh my God, this is the juice was first. The juice was amazing. It was prohibition style. So if the jockeys were allowed to drink alcohol in their day, this is what, this is the proof they would have drunk it at, you know. And then we use the term last ride as a play of words because they were the last riders and the black riders in the Kentucky Derby that won. So it's, it's come play on words with them. And we put their four faces on a bottle and Don literally, I call, I, we call that that bottle. I called it the bill payer because it was supposed to be a one time. I think we did 30 cases, 180 bottles. It went literally no other ways. The lawyers went crazy. Next thing you know, Venmo in California is calling and we're supposed to do 180 bottles. They order something close to like a couple hundred cases. So we had to like then go back and find money to try to ramp up production. You Know, because it was never supposed to be here in California. Right. It was always supposed to be just a Kentucky thing because, you know, Kentucky is the home of horse racing. But this is not just a Kentucky story. And to our. Not. And to our surprise, there's a big horse racing culture across America that we never knew about outside of Kentucky. Right. And so people love to see what we found as we're going through this journey. These aren't just black history stories. These are American history stories, and people love to hear about them, you know, and so if you're telling that, that really is our secret sauce and what we found, we have a niche. Nobody is doing this in the alcohol space that we are aware of, and not to the degree that we're doing it for sure. So as we. And I could absolutely talk to you all day, we've just found with our algorithms and all the things that short, powerful conversations are the best. And so I'll bend your ear more and more over the weeks, but as we land the plane on this conversation, what would you like to share with our audience that I haven't thought to ask, but I haven't thought to ask? So I would say I always like to leave people because this is a phenomenal podcast, and you're you. So you are somebody that I look up to, right? And people. And it gets at some point, people are crazy enough to look up to me for whatever reason, but that's, you know, there. But I think aspiring entrepreneurs, if I can leave you with anything, obviously, it's so cliche to say, don't quit, don't give up. Like, those are all true, right? By all means, you don't want to quit, don't give up. But you really count the cost, really be measured in terms of if you're going. If you want to do entrepreneurship full time, there's going to be different ways to do it. There are different ways to get into it. Is. I'm not telling anybody. I'm not one to tell you to just go quit your job tomorrow. And then that's not. That wasn't my journey. Not to say you can't do that, but really count the cost. Right. I think sometimes we have to be a little more calculated in terms of how we do things. But also, I think as African Americans, I think we have a really low tolerance for risk, obviously, because of where we come from as a people that, like, it was like, hey, get this good job. Stay on this job 30 years. Get this good pension. Don't mess up this money because we didn't come for money. But what do you have to lose? That's what I want to tell people. Ask yourself, what is the literally the worst possible scenario? And then sometimes you may see yourself, I have nothing to lose and everything to gain by doing this, by pursuing this. Right. Which, which is upside. Right. But for me, when I looked at it, you know, I said, I want to do this full time. And that, that day I said, I'm going to be done with corporate America. And me and my wife, we just walk. We went through everything. Now we're married with kids. And we were at a different phase of life. But I had said, we've made enough money. We have rental property. We have the American dream. We got a dog, we got two kids. We got everything. We got investment property. Like, I am tired of building for other people. What do you have to lose? What is the risk? So if I could tell anybody that it'd be as smart entrepreneurs like, really look at risk and ask yourself, like, is it really risky? I think we have more to gain, to lose a lot of the times to be entrepreneurs. And I want to encourage everybody to, you know, I'm not, not everybody needs to be entrepreneur. Like, that's, that's right. I was talking to a business leader and I was serving on their board and won't name drop. That's not important. But we were going through some crisis in the organization, some challenging times. And the leader said, thank you all as a board for the phone calls to check and see if I'm doing well. And all the things he said, I just want you to remember that in the airspace we play in, it's windy. Oh, wow. And if you cannot manage. Right. The storms. Wow. And you probably shouldn't pick leadership as a way to grow your career. So thank you for your thoughts, but I'm doing fine. And I was like. And I'm thinking, I'm in the back. I'm like, that's the baller I've ever heard. Right. It's a big organization and I'm sitting there. But it was, but it was true. Right. You have to be wired for. So yes, it's risk, but it's also what is your pressure response, Right. To leadership. Right. And are you emotively equipped for the ups and downs before you get the win? Right. And those are the things that we all have to support each other, cheer for each other, but at the same time, nobody can go through your journey but you. And my wish. I. I would. And the, the, the l that goes with it. If people want to get in touch with you personally, whether it's speaking different things. And also Old Hillside, give us some of the contact things you'd like to share and then we'll also put them in the show notes. Yeah, absolutely. You can me Personally, I'm on LinkedIn. This Man Waters link LinkedIn and if you want to find us via we always old hillsideburbancompany.com Please social media, Old Hillside Bourbon Company. I'm very accessible. You know, I'm starting to now as part of my new job. I've never been one for the spotlight. I've been kind of in the shadows per se. But now I'm kind of out here and it's part of my journey. Right. It's learning how to be for and up front. So now I'm kind of out here speaking and every time I get an opportunity to share wisdom, I do. But I do want to leave you with a nugget, Donald, if I may. Yes, you can. Okay. So earlier this year, we did a special project for the Harlem Hellfighters, which were the very first African American unit to fight in World War I. They preceded the Tuskegee Airmen. Three gentlemen. James Reese, Europe, who was responsible for bringing the jazz to Europe. He inspired Duke Ellent and he was the godfather of jazz, really. So if you listen to jazz anywhere in the world, it's because of him. We have him. We have Benjamin Davis Sr. Who's the very first black general in the army. And then we have Henry Johnson. But these gentlemen were amazing. Check out the Harlem Hellfighters. This story is phenomenal. Actually, I have a look at this gorgeous, gorgeous bottle right here. This is Ben Davis Senior on the bottle right here. But as we were navigating this journey, we found out that Benjamin Davis Sr. Had a son. Who is Ben Davis Jr. He is the very first black general in the Air Force. The very first father and son duo. Only the second. There's only been two father and son duo generals in the military. The first black father and son duo. We are coming out with a project. Doug Melville, who is the great nephew of these gentlemen, wrote a book called Invisible Generals. He was on Today show and he was on the Breakfast Club recently and he's on tour right now. We are going to do a special edition bottle in honor of the first black father and son duo in the military. And I'm really excited about it, called Invisible General. So by the time this airs, we'll be really close to coming out with that bottle again. We just want to keep that mantra, keep storytelling. So, you know, old hillside. Bourboncompany.com Sign up for our newsletter. That's kind of where we do, you know, special releases and we do stories, but we literally let the story create the bourbon, right? And that's something that we love to do and that's going to be our mantra as long as, as long as we can go. So we're excited about this one and we hope that. We hope to keep doing these every year if we can. It takes a lot, a lot of, a lot of stress. I had a full, I had a full braid and hair before I started this. I'm all grayed out. But it's, it's, it's when you get through, you see the descendants. Everything that we do, we always try to contact the descendants that they're around and we just tell them that we're not interested in, in, you know, stealing anything. We just want to honor you and we can, we can do that. And so we've done this for the past, it's going on three and a half, four years now. And so every project we're meeting descendants that literally our American history, right? And so I don't know anybody that's, that's doing this on, on our scale and again, and we're a really, really, really small brand, right. So nobody's doing that to this capacity. And so it's excited to do that and we hope to again keep doing as long as we can. So if you love, that's why I tell people, if you love history, follow us. You don't ever have to drink an ounce of alcohol. Follow us. If you have to Google any story that we have came out with, that means we would have done our job. If you never buy a bottle and that's what we want to do. That's awesome. Emmanuel, thank you very much for your time, for your journey and for your inspiration. And I love helping business leaders, entrepreneurs, anyone that's out there making a change in a positive way and that can help people along the way as well. So thank you, my friend. Well, thank you, sir. This was, this is, this has been great. You're going to have that. We're going to have to get you down there, get you a bottle. We need to get you to the derby. We got to get you derby, get you a hat. I'm open, I'm open minded. I am open minded. I'm open about it. Thank you for joining us on High Octane Leadership with Donald Thompson. Today's episode is a step in our collective journey towards leadership excellence. Remember, every story we share and every insight we gain is a piece in the puzzle of our leadership journey. For more insight and detail, hit the subscribe button so that we can stay connected. For deeper information and more episodes, go to donaldthompson.com continue to lead with vision and purpose and until we meet again, embrace your role as a high octane leader in the ever evolving world of business.