Take a year off, do some music, then I'd go to to school and once the music was bubbling in my blood, there was no turning back. Getting people to relocate to Northeast Indiana, a part of this team, this culture, this rocket ship that you guys are building, whatever you do, do it really well. Do it beyond reproach, so you don't ever have to apologize and just take the high road in everything you do.
When did you get past the like, oh, I'm behind. Where did you start to be like proud of what you were building? From South Bend to Evansville and everywhere in between. This is Get IN, the show focused on the Hoosier State and the incredible stories happening here today. I'm Nate Spangle, founder of Get Indiana, and I will be your host for today's conversation.
Today my guest is Chuck Surack, the founder of Sweetwater Sound, the largest online retailer of musical instruments and pro audio equipment in the US with its home in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Sweetwater is a billion dollar company employing hundreds of Hoosiers that have actually come to Indiana from all walks of life, from Nashville to LA all car, we're gonna get into what the secret sauce was of getting people to move to Fort Wayne, Indiana to be part of Sweetwater.
Now, Chuck has become the driving force in northeast Indiana through the Surack Family Foundation and Surack Enterprises investing in everything from aviation, healthcare, community development, and so much more. He's known for his entrepreneurship and his deep love for Indiana. He's helped put Fort Wayne on a global map.
I'm really excited to talk through the journey of building Sweetwater and what it looks like now as you're, you know, pouring into the Surack Family Foundation. Surack Enterprises said over 20 businesses are involved. Uh, Chuck, welcome to Get IN. Thank you Nate. So glad to be here today, man, I am pumped up about this one.
Um, obviously a, a legend, not just in Fort Wayne, not just in Indiana, across the country. Your journey from VW bus and early recording equipment to building a billion dollar enterprise here in the state of Indiana and recruiting talent from some of the most prestigious universities across the.
Country from LA and Nashville and the music industry, getting albums recorded in Fort Wayne, Indiana. There's so many stories. This could be like a 10 hour multi-time Joe Rogan episode. But, uh, we're gonna dive right into it and talk to us about obviously you, you grew up and you started this, this business, uh, kind of from the back of a VW bus.
Take us through that moment. Sure. Probably need to back up a little bit. Yeah. But I was actually born in southern Ohio and my parents brought me to Fort Wayne at age 13, middle school, or junior high as we called it back then. And, uh,
I was going down the path to be a doctor, but I also loved doing music.
And so I went through high school, took all the college prep courses,
you know, chemistry and Latin and all of that. But I also was doing lots and lots of music and immediately after high school. I went on the road as a musician and I started playing music all over the country. Back in those days, musicians could play six nights a week at the various nightclubs and, uh, various concert facilities and that sort of thing.
And, uh, after being on the road for almost five years, uh, I decided I wanted to do something a little different. And so during those five years I had. Gathered some recording equipment. Uh, in fact, a lot of times there weren't really recording studios, but they were radio stations. And when I'd go to a new town, uh, we'd go into the local radio station and record a commercial to say, we're playing at this restaurant this week, or whatever.
And so I was always the, the guy that knew how to use the equipment. I
acquired a little bit of equipment while I was on the road and came home. And what am I gonna do? I had this beat up rusty VW bus that my parents had given me as a junior in high school.
And, uh, I'd filled that bus, by the way, with two gallons of Bondo on the front 'cause my mom had wrecked it.
It had, uh, headlights from Tractor Supply that looked like big Bug Eyes And I painted it with 99 cent cans of blue spray paint from Kmart. And that's what I drove my junior and senior year of high school and on the road for several years. Wow. But I came home and I took that bus and I would pull alongside the school, the church, the nightclub.
I'd run 200 feet of microphone cables in, and I would mic up the band, the choir, the preacher, whatever it was. And then I would record them by sitting in the bus with, in those days, a reel-to-reel tape recorder, long before we had digital.
And, I would make those recordings and then I would take them to the living room of my 12 by 55 mobile home that I lived in, and I would edit those recordings into
the right order and maybe, um, you know, do some sweetening or make 'em sound a little bit better.
And then I'd send those away and have LPs made. And so for your high school band or your junior high choir, we could make albums and then we'd sell those albums for you. And it was just a really amazing way to start my company. Wow. Uh, I, I can only imagine, yeah. The amount of places you had to pull up next to, like, I think a lot of times you see today, like this huge enterprise.
Sure. And people can forget about going to, you know, the preacher, the, the high school band, this, that, the other thing, and just putting in the work there and how hard it was, like it wasn't as easy as it's today. Like we, I mean, we got set up to record today in about. 36 seconds. Shout out to Robert. Thank you.It was, it was so easy, but it's like you had to run 200 feet of microphone cable and do the whole nine yard, like that's, that's wild. What I do wanna talk about, obviously on the track, you want, you were considering being a doctor and you end up going the path of music first. What was the moment that music, that you just knew that music was important to you?
Like where in your journey did that first, I dunno, spark ignite deep inside? Well, I started playing saxophone in fifth grade. My, my father, actually, I wanted to play trombone. My dad says, no, you don't wanna play trombone, you wanna play saxophone. My dad was a frustrated accordion player. Why did he want you to play the saxophone?
Well, because saxophone players, he said, got all the, all the girls. Yeah. Got all the solos, you know? Oh yeah. And I'm thinking if my dad really understood, he'd have told me to play guitar, but. Anyway, so I did saxophone. The, okay, so what was the first, like you're, you're sitting there, you wanna play trombone, you pick up like the alto saxophone, tenor sax, tenor sax. Oh, alright.
We went, we went to a pawn shop in Columbus, Ohio, and he bought me a tenor sax. Mm-hmm. I came home to my little town in southern Ohio and I put the mouthpiece on and I went to the local music teacher. Uh, he was a teacher at the school, but it was happened to be on a Sunday afternoon. And I said, look, I can make this sound on a saxophone.
And it was the most horrendous duck sounding thing. And he looks at it and he says, you have your mouthpiece on upside down. That was my first, and frankly last only lesson I ever had. I never had a private lesson on instruments. Right. So you just had to get the one to get the mouthpiece. How'd you learn?
Well, you'd learn in school with your band director and that sort of thing. Yeah, but I never took private lessons. Wow. And I taught myself in, you know, those days we listened to a lot of records. There wasn't YouTube, there wasn't all the. Tools that you have today to learn, but, uh, I would read a lot and I would listen to lots of records.
So you were, you were playing the saxophone, but what were you listening? Like what was in your headphones or like what was on, what were the records you were listening to? Well, it'd be the standard jazz guys like John Coltrane and, and one of my favorites is a guy named Cannonball Adderley. Um, and then probably my favorite, which not everybody knows today, is a guy named Boots Randolph.
Boots Randolph had a big hit in 1961 called Yakety Sax. Yakety Sax is that humorous sort of song, uh, that eventually became the Benny Hill theme song. And so anytime you see somebody roll down the hill or something, that's the Yakety Sax tune. Yakety Sax? Yes. Okay. I'm gonna have to put that on the list to check.
It's a two minute 30. One second. Just humorous, very fast song. And Boots not only played that song, but he played on thousands and thousands of other albums, uh, 50 of his own albums. He did the, uh, big sax solo and Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree with Brenda Lee. That's Boots Randolph. Oh yeah. So he was my That's a good one.
Yeah. He was my friend and Idol through the years. A lot of fun. That's like the, yeah. Oh, wow. That's a, that's a fire, that's a fire. Saxophone solo. All right. So you. Then get to the point. So music becomes such a staple part of who you are. Yep. And you have to, you make this decision to forego college. So I thought I would take, we didn't call it a gap year back then, but I'd take a year off, do some music, then I'd go to, to school.
But, uh, once the music was bubbling in my blood, there was no turning back. What was that conversation with your family like? Did your parents, were your parents, uh, well off, did you guys grow up? Like were they, what, what did your parents do for work? Uh, my dad was a chemical engineer. Okay. And I'm, uh, one of five, I'm the oldest of five.
So my mom stayed home as a homemaker and probably did the harder of the two jobs. Five kids. Absolutely. Yeah. Um, no, they really, they were relatively supportive. They didn't understand, a lot of people didn't understand. In fact, I was probably well into my thirties when people quit asking me when I was gonna get a real job.
No way. Oh yeah. And, uh, now it's like, can I have a job? Wait, so, so you. L leave home at, I mean, you're probably what, 18? 18, 18, 18, yep. And you start going on the road and, and I think when you're young, yeah. You're 18, 19, 20, 21, 22. Like you're playing at some club center, like you're not even 21 yet. Right, right.
Like you're in there playing in the band. It's like, okay, it's fun. At what point you did it for five years, at the end of that, was it kind of like, okay, what are we doing here? Like, that's exactly right. Yeah. It was living out of suitcases and usually he'd get a free room and board and not a lot of money.
And uh, I just knew I had higher aspirations than that. Yeah. Did your parents ever try to push you to go back to college? No, but I will tell you, my grandfather, uh, when he worked at General Electric his whole life, which was a big, big employer in Fort Wayne, his son worked at General Electric. All my family members worked at General Electric one time or another, and he came home so proud one day he says, Chuck, I've got you in the GE tool and die program.
Which is a pretty prestigious thing, and he'd have been set for life. And it was really hard to tell my grandfather that I didn't want to do that. And I thought music was in my future. Kind of broke his heart for a while, but he turned around and, and became my biggest fan. How, how old were you when you had to tell him?
Oh, 22, 23. And he's like, okay, you, you've had your fun. Yeah, exactly. You, you've traveled the country, you've played your music. Like it's time to hang it up and come get a real job. Yep. Wow. And so you had to tell him no? Yes. Wow. That's, that has to be hard. You know, you're 22 and to like, let down someone, I mean, especially at the time.
What year would've that have been when you were 22? Uh, 19, uh, 79, 80. Like you're in the seventies, like early eighties. Yeah. And, and you're like. I don't know, like this is stable. This is a real, like, I feel like nowadays like entrepreneurship is a little more celebrated and like, oh yeah. Like, you know, follow your passion.
But it's like this is 1980. Yeah. They're not like telling you, they're like, Hey, put a paycheck, like build a family, like get a white picket fence and like do your thing. You know? Entrepreneurship was not even a word in the late seventies. No. Oh my gosh. So you start. Off by going around and, and recording with your, your beat up Bondo bus.
Yep. Uh, and then how long did it take for, for them, for you to start getting some traction within this business? Sure. So I did that for a couple years with the bus and literally the, the living room of my mobile home. And, uh, finally at about 19 81, 82, a couple years later, I bought my first little house on the west side of Fort Wayne, a thousand square foot house.
And I built a recording studio off the end of it, a two car garage looking space, but it was a recording studio. And for the first time, I could now have customers come to me as well as I could still go out on location, but I started getting lots of advertising agencies that would come back in those days there were a lot of jingles on the radio.
And so we became the king of doing jingles and had lots and lots of agencies that would use this to write music for them. And then also, you know, people would come in and do their initial solo artists or vanity. Albums, that sort of thing. Wow. The Jingle King of Fort Wayne, that was you, right? I guess whatever that title is.
Yes. Like how were you learning that this was a business and a market that you could go after? I didn't know any better. I just didn't know any better, and I've never been driven by money. Uh, my goal was always just to do a great job and help people and help people's music sound better. That was my goal.
How were you learning about how to help make their music sound better? Reading, listening. Uh, you know, I was a huge, huge listener. There's some very famous producers and, and engineers, um, Al Schmitt, uh, Bruce Swedien, all these old guys that just recorded the greatest of greatest music. Wow. Okay. So you have this recording studio off the side of your thousand foot square house.
Exactly. You still have the bus. Bus is still going strong at that point. Bus still, I dunno about strong VW bus. Never go strong. Okay. But you're still so you're, you're rocking and rolling, but is it just you. It is just me for several years. Where was the point where you hired your first employee? 19 83, 84.
I realized, you know, I was burning the midnight oil. I should, I should back up. There was a short period when I came back after being on the road that I worked for Hobart Food Equipment and I would service microwave ovens and dishwasher control system, electronic stuff. Yeah. But I was doing that all day from like seven 30 to four 30 and then from four 30 till midnight, one o'clock in the morning I'd be recording and eventually I was recording so much and I was having a hard time getting up in the morning to do the day job.
And, and there's where my dad really said, you know, you need to turn this in to a real business. And uh, and I said, but dad, I have a paycheck every two weeks and he's the one that encouraged me to move on. And so I did. I quit my job at Hobart and, and recording just took off from that point. When you originally set out, did you want to be like a famous touring musician?
I don't know if I ever thought. I wanted to be famous. Maybe because I was self-taught. I knew I wasn't quite of that musical level. Uh, I could play well enough to fool people, but I wasn't gonna be that extraordinary level. When you think about what I, I really, and I really liked the backend. I liked producing artists.
I liked making their music sound better. I, I had so many artists that would come in that frankly shouldn't have been the recording studio, but I could help them sound better. Did they ever pull up to the house and just be like, what the, where the heck am I? Like, I'm going into this guy's like home recording studio.
Oh, yes. Oh yes. Oh, yes. So you bring in like a big agency, like Big Wig, and you're like, oh yeah, writer, like past the living room and it's over in the corner. That's how it works. That's so awesome. Yeah. I love it. Well, you talked about, okay, you're self-taught, so you would not say you had the extraordinary musical talent, but here you are many years later have, I mean, so many accolades and impressive things you've done.
What would you say that you were or are extraordinary at that's helped set you apart on this path to success? Uh, I am good with people. So networking is, is always just incredible. Always being willing to say yes. Uh, I, I didn't use the word no very often. In fact, I always say that anything's possible and failure's not an option.
So I never gave up. And I think that goes back to my roots as a Boy Scout. You know, scouts aren't so popular today, but when I grew up, almost everybody was a boy scout and a boy scout learns to be trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent.
Amazing principles to live by personally. Yeah. Also great to live by professionally. Yeah. Oh my God. I think through, uh, I was coming up, I was part of Cub Scouts. Mm-hmm. And then I, when I got to high school, our Boy Scout troop got like dissolved 'cause there was not enough interest. Sure. Um, but yeah. You talk about like learning all of these things at a young age, and I think a lot of people like hear it, but do they really put it into practice?
And when you do put those, I mean, you still remember that motto? Scout law? Yeah. Yeah, the scout law to today. That's incredible. So things start to advance. You hang up the, the job at Hobart and you go all in on recording. So then, you know, you're no longer seven to four 30 doing something else. You're all in on recording.
How quickly do you start to see things grow? Like, is this like a, oh man, one day it's just an overnight success and everyone wants to get everything recorded through you? Or, or how did that journey go? It's a little both. I mean, on the one hand it's slow. The money was never there. But I didn't do it for the money, as I said.
But it was growing and we were very popular. And what really changed my business is 1983, I got invited to go to the NAMM Show. NAMM stands for National Association of Music Merchants. And that show happened to be in Chicago. And so a friend of mine in town owned a local piano and organ store. He says, you want to go to the NAMM Show?
And asked, what is it he tells me? And I said, sure, I'll go with you. And so I go to Chicago and I saw a prototype of a music instrument called the Kurzweil K250. And it was a room bigger than this room, just full of computer memory. And what it could do is play back digital recordings of other instruments.
So when you played its 88 note keyboard, it could play a nine foot grand piano or a 50 voice choir or 45 piece string section. And I thought, well, how cool is that? And, and I thought, well, if I bought one of those for my own studio. I could make my customer's music sound better. At the end of every recording session, I could say, do you want to hear it with a string section?
Do you want to hear it with an upright base? And so I bought one. I bought serial number 32, which is a pretty early machine. It was very expensive at the time, but I brought it back to Fort Wayne. How much is expensive? It was about $20,000. Back then, how did you have 20,000? Well, I had a Yamaha Grand Piano and I sold that because this had a built-in nine foot recording of a grand piano.
Which by the way, today, you know, we do that on our iPads and, you know, iPhones and all, but sampling in the mid, in the mid, uh, eighties, like that was just unheard of. So you had a nine foot Yamaha Grand piano? I had a seven foot in my studio. Oh. Seven foot. And I traded it in, or I sold it and got about, I about $10,000 and I scrapped the rest of the money together to buy this synthesizer.
The Kurzweil K250. So you went all in. All in, all in. Wow. How did you, you just had a gut feeling that this would be great. Yeah, I just knew listening to it, it had, it had about 40 different sounds in it, and I could use those at my recording sessions. Yeah. And today you think of like a keyboard. You Yeah.
Like it's this, your, your iPad does this, like, you know, all the things. But this is what, what year? 1983. In 1983. Yeah. You see this and you go, you sell your current piano. Yep. And you go all in. Yep. On the Kurzweil K250. Yes. Wow. So how long did it take to get it to Fort Wayne? Uh, I don't know. Next six months or so.
It showed. Interesting backstory on the K250. Um, there used to be a, a machine that you could put books in and it would read the books aloud. And Stevie Wonder had several of these machines and they were about $50,000. And again, this is before all the technology we have today, but it was designed by a guy named Ray Kurzweil, a futurist who does a lot of stuff.
And Ray and Stevie were the same age. And one day Stevie just happened to mention to him, I wish I had an instrument that played all the sounds of an orchestra. Ray says, well, go buy one. And Stevie says, no, there's synthesizers, there's electric pianos, there's organs, but there's nothing that really plays back recordings or, or real instruments.
And so, uh, Ray Kurzweil and a few of his MIT buddies, uh, built this instrument and it was all based on having a lot of computer memory. And so it really was an inspiration by Stevie Wonder, what got that instrument off the ground. Wow. Yeah. And so you got serial number 32? Yep. Here's a question. You sell this piano.
What happens in the six months in your studio while you're waiting for your machine? You know, I don't really remember, but probably we did more guitar music than piano music. I don't know. There you go. So it comes to tell, you know the other thing about an acoustic piano, and I love the sound of a great acoustic piano, but they're always in a state of going out of tune.
I mean, every time you play a note or play a chord, it starts to drift out of tune. The digital piano is perfect all the time. Did you ever get pushback from people like, ah, no. I'd rather have the original. Oh, sure. And you know, and if you really have a perfectly tuned big seven Foot nine foot concert, grand Pinot, that's still gonna sound.
Better, but most people's pianos are not in that condition. So the digital piano is gonna sound better. Yeah. So you get, you get this Kurzweil K250 and this is what really starts to send you off on this track. Yeah. Because you now can do incredible recordings for your customers. I can add a couple more hours of productivity at the end of a session.
Would you like to hear your music with that upright bass or with the piano or whatever? Uh, I also got hired to go all around the state of Indiana to other recording studios. So I would go to Anderson or the Gaither Studio or down here to Indianapolis, to other studios, and I would play the Kurzweil. Or maybe they'd have a musician that would use my Kurzweil.
It was very unique. It was, you know, it was the first one in the state of Indiana, so it was pretty rare. And, uh, as I did that I could also, uh, I learned how to record my own sounds into it. It had a, um, a Motorola 68000 microprocessor chip in it, the same chip that was in the original Mac 128K, Mac 512K, and Mac Plus, and you could record your own sounds into it and then store those sounds off to the Macintosh.
And so I started making my own sounds. And, uh, that's where the company really started when I started making these sounds. I wanted to find other Kurzweil owners around the country that had, you know, had machines. And so it was a brotherhood I could call up and go, wow, you have a Kurzweil, I have one too.
And, uh, you could find their names and what equipment they had. And there was a magazine called Mix, and it listed recording studios all over the country and what equipment they used, what tape recorders, what mixers, and if they happened to have a Kurzweil or Kurzweil or other major instruments. And I would just call up as, as a, a fellow Kurzweil owner and offered a trade sounds with them.
Well, I quickly found out that most of these people weren't really technical. They were just musicians playing it, and they didn't have their own sounds, but they wanted my sounds. So before Long Stevie Wonder's getting my sounds and Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton, and Bob James and Lyle, all these famous musicians.
No way. Oh yeah, it's, it was wild. And hold, hold on. Okay. We, we get gloss over that. So you find out that you can record your own. So what was the first, what was your breakthrough aha moment that you could record a sound into your kur? Well, well, one thing I recorded right away was my saxophone. Because I could play it and I could play it well enough to record it.
And, um, but, you know, there were lots of instruments. So how would you, do you have to just like, play all the notes or something? Or you, you would play, it gets complicated. Yeah. But you would play every third or fourth note. And then that was one of the beauties of this instrument. The computer, which is what this curs was, could, uh, interpolate or slow down or speed up the notes to fill in the notes.
So you might record a C and a G, you don't have to worry about the notes. The DEF between it would either speed up or slow down to play those notes for you. Wow. Yeah. So you start to record your saxophone and these other sounds and you're kind of like, that becomes like the Trojan horse sales thing, right?
You're, Hey, do you have any sounds? You guys wanna train? Like playing cards. They're like, wait, you have, sounds like what kind of sounds do you have? You're like, oh, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so then look, what was there a crazy story where someone, a famous. Individual, famous musician, famous artist, calls you up and asks you for a sound.
There were many, but probably my favorite just because I was such a fanboy of, of Stevie Wonder to have Stevland Morris, his real name, call you up and say he wants some really great brass. And so I call a trumpet player friend of mine, a trombone player, and myself on the Saxon, the three of us recorded a really great brass section.
I sent it to Stevie's engineer. And uh, next thing you know, I've got, I've got, uh, credits on his characters album. It wasn't songs in the Key Life or one of his big album, but it was still credits on his characters album. Yeah. And that's, how did you send it to them? Like today we put it into iCloud or I think it was FedEx.
Yeah, you, FedEx like a, A disc. A couple discs. S floppy discs. That's crazy. I guess like I just imagine picking up the phone and he says. Hey, it's Stevie Wonder. No, he says it's Stevland Morris. And I'm thinking, who's that? You know, that's great. Yeah. I just imagine like, that's so, so, so cool. Yeah. And, and that has to feel like, okay, at this point, how old are you?
Oh, mid twenties. Like, it has to feel like, okay, I'm starting to get some traction here. No, I still thought I was really, no, never gonna make it really behind it. Yeah. Wow. So did you, did you battle with that of like, like how close were you to just scrapping it and saying, I'll just go to GE or I'll go to no failure.
Failure's never an option. But you did feel, uh, inferior. I mean, everyone around me just said, why Fort Wayne, Indiana? A recording studio has to be in Nashville. It has to be in la it has to be in New York. Uh, all my professional friends, whether it's accountants and lawyers, they didn't understand my business.
And I probably got frustrated actually. And as I think back today, it was, you know, I can't blame them for not understanding my, it was my dream, my aspiration not theirs. Was it lonely? It was very lonely. Very lonely. Long hours and very lonely. Because I mean, the way you talk about things like Boy Scouts and the way you talk about the brotherhood of Kurzweil owners.
Yeah. You know, like there wasn't, I'm assuming there wasn't, you said the first one in Indiana. How long until someone else near you Hmm. Came around that you could just like pal with and talk about, I dunno, kinda like nerd out about recording stuff. Well, I did start, uh, a recording club, not so much necessarily around the Kurz ball, but just around recording in general.
Home recording was just starting to take off and I was ahead of most of the people around me. So I started a club. We met once a month at the local library and that sort of thing. How much of this early kind of momentum, even if at the time it did not feel like, you know, if it felt like you were behind, how much of this early momentum do you credit to just being like hyper fixated on.
Being a technical specialist, that was part of it. And I, you know, I really think I was at the right place at the right time as the whole revolution went from analog recording to eventually digital. I was just right there and, and I was always into technology. Um, so I, uh, started. Got so busy copying sounds for my friends.
I finally said, enough's enough. And I, I put out a newsletter and had about 300 of my sounds on it called the Sweetwater Sampling Network. And I sent it to friends all over the country going, if you want any of these sounds, I'll copy the discs for you for $5 a piece, which I think the discs were probably a couple bucks a piece.
But I would be running a recording studio and on the right side I would be multitasking and copying discs. And those days to copy a disc on a Macintosh took about 50 disc swaps. 'cause there wasn't a hard drive or anything, but you'd put a disc in, pull it out, put a disc in, it would 50 times to make a copy of a disc.
But I'm charging $5 a disc, you know. And, uh, I became friends with the Kurzweil rep. He was actually from Southern Indiana. He was down in Santa Claus, and he'd come to see me and just get my sounds to take to other dealers around the country. One day, I, I started asking him, I said, I have a friend out in California who wants to upgrade his Kurzweil.
And he says, well, why don't you sell him the parts? I said, nah, I'm too busy running my recording studio. But the Kurzweil was a workstation in a drawer. He could take three screws out, pull the drawer out, and you could put other memory chips in. And I kept getting these sort of calls from my friends that I was giving sounds to.
And uh, one day he said, look, why don't you really become a Kurzweil Parts dealer? I can set you up to be a dealer. And, uh, I said, well, I don't know. I got all these guys. I'm just busy running the recording. I, I kind of pushed it off. And finally I agreed to become a swell parts dealer. It was in the fall, and he and I learned, which I didn't know anything about business at that time or retail business anyway, but I learned at the end of their years, or speci specifically, uh, when they had fiscal quarters that were important, there sometimes were deals or sales.
And so he came to me in November. He says, look, anything that you can sell between, between now and the end of the year, there's an extra 40% discount. I said, wow, okay. So I sent a, a newsletter out that was dot matrix printed. I didn't even have a laser printer yet. And it said, I have these sound blocks for your curse.
Well, if you're interested and if you need help, I'll help you put 'em in. That sort of thing. So through the month of do November and December, I sent out this newsletter to about 300 friends. Mailed it. Mailed it. Yeah. There, there was no email back. It was totally mailed and, but it was dot matrix. And I described these sound blocks that you could put in your machine.
And next thing you know, two days before Christmas, my rep calls me, he says, Hey, how are you doing on those orders? I said, I don't know. I'm really busy doing Christmas recordings. I've got a bunch of envelopes here and you know, checks and all that. And he says, well, I really need these orders in by the end of the year.
I said, I know, but I'm busy running my recording studio. And he says, well, you know, he called me the day after Christmas then. And he says, how are you doing on this? I need these by the 31st. And I said, I don't know. I'm just really slammed getting some Christmas music out. And he says, well, roughly how many?
I said, I don't know, a couple hundred thousand dollars. And he says, well, you need to have all the money. I said, yeah, I do. I have all the money. People have already paid me with checks in advance. And he said, are you serious? I said, yeah. He says, I'll come up and help you count it. So he drove up from Santa Claus, Indiana to Fort Wayne.
We counted, my first order was just under $300,000 of Kurzweil parts. And full margin. I mean, plus a 40% discount. So it was, it was a great money maker for, I made more money selling those curel parts in six weeks than I did all year as a recording studio. And so in January the parts start coming in. I call my friends and, you know, ship some of 'em, some of 'em, they paid me to fly to their location to put the parts in.
And uh, it just really took off in a big way. Wow. Yeah, sometimes it's like that classic thing of you can't see the forest through the trees. No. 'cause youre right there, I don't know, like a couple hundred thousand. You're like, wait a second. A couple hundred thousand dollars is crazy. I literally was handwriting the checks in the amount on a piece of paper.
Didn't have, you know, we didn't have Excel or anything back then. But to add it up, that's, they did it the manual analog way. Just under $300,000. What year is this? Uh, 1985. That's, I don't know what the equivalent is. That's a lot of money. That's a lot of money in six weeks. That's like the first ever, like Black Friday, like holiday sale.
Always. I never thought of it that way. Yeah. Okay. Wow. So you guys, you crush, uh, and did this ends up, like, do you start to see like, okay, this is No, I'm so naive. I still don't really get it. I wanna go back and start doing my recording studio in January, February and March. Yeah. But I have helped my friends install these upgrades.
I put 'em in my own machines. This is an interesting piece. Every single one of these people that you're referring to who are your customers, but you're in this stage, you're referring to 'em as your friends. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And and how much of this success and the trust, the trust to collect almost $300,000 in checks through the mail, through your 300 ish person newsletter like that comes from the fact that you built relationships?
Yeah, and you know, I think about it, it was pre mail order, pre-internet, um, but it was a relationship that I had with each one of those people. And, uh, the bigger music stores quit selling this instrument because there were now newer, cheaper, not as good, but less expensive instruments to sell. And so being a boutique, high-end product, uh, those people sought me out as the way I sought them out actually.
How would you give advice to today's entrepreneurs about, uh, being everything to everyone versus a specialist for a Yeah. A boutique, high-end product? Yeah. I don't know. I mean, I, I've seen both sides of it. I started very specialized and today you could say Sweetwater. It sells everything to everybody, but I just think whatever you do, do it really well.
Do it beyond reproach so you don't ever have to apologize. So you can always put your head on your pillow at night and just take the high road in everything you do and whether it's a boutique thing like I started or mass like we do today. Yeah. So you still go back for three more months of recording?
Well, I dunno, I'm probably exaggerating a little bit, but, but I did, I continued to record for several years, but one day I get a call from a friend of mine down in, in Louisiana and he says, Chuck, I understand you can do sheet music on the computer. I said, yeah, I know how to do that. I now have a, a personal computer and I'm, I had written myself a, uh, cassette labeling program so I could spit out 50 cassette labels all at once.
And, and I had sheet music program that I could do and, and so I became a dealer for that sheet music and the interface that you needed to plug into your Macintosh. And so I sold him that. And then I started getting more and more calls and then I had customers that wanted to buy second and third Kurzweils.
Which is wild because the basic machine was about 20 grand and you could put another 20 grand of options in it. And so next thing you know, Stevie Wonder wants a second and third. And Kenny Rogers at the point when Kenny Rogers quit touring, he had 14 siles that he carried on the road, and this was not that many years ago, but he was reproducing 40 years of his hits and he'd have four keyboard players on stage.
They'd each have two, they'd have one in the green room, a couple on the buses and that sort of thing. Paul Schaefer from David Letterman had one until they went off the air, I guess about 10 years ago, an now or so. And so they were very, very popular for, for successful musicians. What made them so different?
Obviously, like, you know, I don't know, however many years ago, David Letterman. You could have gotten a keyboard or whatever, why would you continue to use a curse mode with the same philosophy that I had, it was really designed beyond reproach. It was an 88 note wooden keyboard, like a piano, but it had the greatest sounds recorded in it.
Other instruments kind of did inferior sounds, but this sounded like a real piano. It sounded like a real string section. And kerl spared no expense when they did those recording sessions. Wow. Yeah. Incredible. So things started and you start to just like kinda get these other almost like mini licenses or franchises es different things.
Yeah. Dealerships. Yeah. So where do you start to bring on more employees and, and like where does this like whole thing come together at a point to become Sweetwater and. You started talk like you kind of glazed over this, but like where did Sweetwater, like why did that name come about? Ah, that's a story I haven't told very often.
Yeah. So I'm out in the country, in my mobile home, and I move into the city with that first 1000 square foot house. And I needed a name where people could find me. I wanted to put a little sign by the road. One of the few things that I have done in my professional life that wasn't quite, uh, by the book is I, the property wasn't zoned commercially.
It was right at the, my next property over was commercial, but I was still residential and I needed a sign, uh,
that customers could find me,
but it would also not raise the eye of the local zoning officials. Well, out in the country there are a lot of farms that have, you know, rolling Meadow Estates, Steve's acreage,
you know, bills Barn whatever.
And so I wanted a name that people could find me. And, and up until then, for a few years, I operated as c and b audio. And I knew I didn't want Chuck and my first wife, Brenda, in the name. Not that we were a problem at that point, but I just knew I didn't want my name in it personally. And our property that we had had a a, I had a couple acres of land.
I had a little creek in the backyard. I said, water, that's kind of sweet. So I put that on a list and a bunch of other names and eventually chose Sweetwater. So I've asked every marketing person who's ever worked for me to come up with a better story. But that's the truth. And the on, so, so a little wooden sign by the road, it says Sweetwater.
And so it became named Sweetwater because you wanted to not get picked up by the local zoning. You're like, oh yeah, Sweetwater. You know, like that's that's hilarious. That's sweet. Yeah. Yeah. That's so funny. 'cause it's like if you would've put Yeah, like audio studio blah blah. Yeah. Nope. You're not allowed to operate that here, buddy.
Exactly. But it's like, oh, Sweetwater Estates back there. There you go. Wow. And to still stick today, that was in the early eighties. And here we are. Oh my gosh, 40 something years later. It's now been,
it'll be 47 years in January
47. We're, we're approaching 47 years. Yeah.
Wow.
So, one more thing on the path that I sort of left out during that 85 to about 1990 when I got that call about sheet music, uh, myself and a friend, we reverse engineered how the curves Ball worked.
And so we designed new sounds. Not only were in software, but also in rom or memory chips. We wrote new software that would work on the Macintosh. So when you would edit it, you could actually visually see on the screen the sound wave or what you were doing. Uh, I made the machine talk, so for blind people, again, it was designed for Stevie Wonder, but so it was a very tactile, a lot of buttons and switches, but there were still things that the little software window would show.
I made that talk out loud. And so I became, I hate to use this word, but kind of an expert around the world as knowing the Kurzweil probably as well as anybody, uh, by reverse engineering it. And that's opened a lot of doors and that's what caused those customers to trust. Wow. Yeah. I, I do think, yeah, there is such a power in one you just became Yeah.
Fixated on the curse wheel, like becoming the absolute expert. And you talk about being a little bit lucky of like, you got the, you happen to go to this show at the right place, at the right time, sell the farm and put it all into the Kurzweil and the Kurzweil ends up being a great instrument for the future of recording.
Absolutely. Wow. On a side note, uh, I met a guy about a year ago and he has now reverse engineered the Kurzweil to a whole new level with all new Chipsy designing in it and taking it to another thing. So I'm, as a side fun project, I'm kind of, uh, reviewing and redoing all that. Again, not that it'll be a commercial thing, but it'll make it still modern, you know?
Well, so this is interesting 'cause today, uh, Sweetwater is a global player. Sure. In the, the music, the audio space, instruments, all the things. But to think that this all started. Basically like really took off because you became an expert in the Kurzweil K250. Like that's wild. Like, I mean, and in the moment, right?
When did you start, when did you get past the like, oh I'm behind, oh, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like all that piece. Where did you start to be like proud of what you were building? I probably even proud more of what I've built, but more proud about the employees and being able to help others. But in 1990, I moved into my first real commercial building.
Uh, had five employees at that point moved in. They weren't now operating outta my house anymore. It was a commercial building and we, uh, had more and more customers calling, not just for music software, but now recording equipment. So I became a dealer for TASCAM and Fostex recording equipment, and then other keyboards and synthesizers and really technology for a long time.
And we quickly grew from the five employees. The next year we had, uh, about 20 employees. And we were at that location for 17 years. And, uh, by the time we moved out we had 200 employees. And, uh, where were you finding these employees? Word of mouth and, and word of mouth Within Northeast Indiana or word of mouth?
Within the music industry? Both. Both. Uh, and, you know, everything from, I think about the, the second or third employee there. Well, the second one was from Fort Wayne, but the third or fourth I guess, uh, one was a, a, a fellow computer guy, a computer nerd like me that I had met. And we would go to Macworld trade shows and I remember one day very clearly.
And, uh, I said, John, you seem to like this better than what you do, and, and why don't you come work for me? And he scoffed because at that time he had a 40 person HVAC company, and he was from Delaware. And he said, are you serious? I said, yeah, I I think it'd be great to have you come work for me. His wife was a piano player and she was a customer.
That's how I met him. And, uh, and he went home and thought about it and sold his business and moved his wife and his two little children out to Indiana. And, uh, you know, he, he became my best friend and for 30 years we worked together until he retired just a couple years ago. Oh man. Um, another employee, lifelong Indiana.
Was he lifelong in Indiana? Well, for 30 some years, yeah. Wow. He was born in Delaware and then the next 30 years there, and now he's down in Florida. Uh, another fellow was, uh, working down in, um, Jeffersonville, Indiana, and a manufacturer's rep said, Hey, there's this new store starting in Fort Wayne and they're pretty successful.
You ought to go talk to him. So the guy comes up, I talk to him, I kind of threw out my vision, which. Not near as big as it ended up being, but, you know, cast my vision and showed him how I was into technology and all that. So he quit the music store that he was working at and came to work for me. And it just story after story like that.
And of course as the company got bigger, it became easier and easier to attract people. Yeah, I think that is a piece of what makes Sweetwater so special today. Even. So, all of our gear in here from Sweetwater, so when you order, you're gonna get a call from a real human being. Absolutely. And within, I don't even like, like a really quick amount of time, like honestly to the point where I'm like, oh my gosh, like what's going on?
You're a little bit alarmed 'cause it's so not, it's so different. It's so nontraditional, right? But then once you get into the swing and learn that this is just your Sweetwater wrap, like this is, this is how it goes. But you guys are able to attract. Talent from Nashville, from la, even there like early on.
Your third employee is from Delaware and then Jeffersonville. This has always been a, a secret sauce to Sweetwater getting people to relocate to Northeast Indiana, to be a part of this team, this culture and this just rocket ship that you guys are building, what would you say was the key to that? Like how did you get people to leave to sell their company?
Move their families and come join this crazy company. Well, and the genesis of it was what I did, you know, developing those relationships with Stevie Wonder and Kenny Rogers, but also lots of people that you didn't know their names, but developed relationships and as my company grew and I couldn't handle any more of those relationships, I needed people to help.
With the relationships. So that's how I got my first few employees. But, but casting the vision, uh, that we were growing and on the move, and this would be a cool thing to do. Yeah. Is what, what it really was. Were people coming from around the country to buy at your store or were you shipping stuff? Like how did that work?
Yeah, everything pretty much was mail order. Mail order started to happen by then. We had a very small 12 by 12 warehouse for quite a while until we built a bigger one and a bigger one. 12. 12 by 12. It was actually a one car garage is what our first warehouse was. Uh, in fact, UPS and FedEx would come in the daytime and until we shipped out today's orders, we couldn't put the stuff away.
We'd leave their stuff sitting outside until we ship today's orders out. Oh my gosh. Pretty modest. As, as you think back through. Oh man.
So Sweetwater's going on 47 years.
Yep. As you think back through, you know, the last 47 years,
where were the moments where you felt, uh, the most proud,
not necessarily of your own accomplishments or anything that you had built of just like, where you, where you took a step back and you looked around at this and you said, oh my gosh, like, this is, this is incredible.
This is amazing. How, how did I get so lucky?
I feel like I've been lucky my whole life, just being able to have a job where I can help others. And I've never had to worry about money, but I also never, as I said, driven by money.
Um,
but it was in the late nineties, you know, I started to go, huh, this thing might be working by then, I probably had 50 or 75 employees.
Um,
but, you know, I'm, I'm very thankful. I've never, uh, not paid an employee. I've never not paid a vendor.
Uh, you know,
I've always tried to do all that professionally and on time. If you're gonna do it, you gotta do it the right way.
And I, I, I totally agree.
I think that's something that's special. Largely about Indiana.
I would say like the, the reputation across the Hoosier State matters to people. Absolutely. we had uh, uh, Jeff Samian on, oh man, this is probably 18 months ago, and he said, you can't be a bad guy in Indiana. 'cause the whole state will know in 30 minutes. It's like so true. Right? Like I'm sure as you were growing, you get to 75, you get to a hundred employees, I'm sure, like you got calls from Nashville saying, Hey, why don't we have a Sweetwater here?
I'm sure you got calls from la. Why don't we have a Sweetwater here? Wa was there ever a thought to, or was there ever, were you ever pulled to move Sweetwater from Fort Wayne? I was never pulled to move Sweetwater from Fort Wayne. We did try a few satellite stores. We had a Chicago store for a while and we had a Nashville store.
Um, but there was just something about having us all under one roof and staying very focused and, you know, lots of vendors coming in and training our people all the time. It kept our, our knife really, really sharp, which caused us to have a great advantage compared to other competitors. Um, so I, I don't envision us ever opening stores.
That's not our model. We did open a, a new distribution center or a warehouse out in Arizona about two years ago that allows us to serve our West Coast customers faster and that sort of thing. I mean, 'cause people talk about, everyone's like, Amazon is like, which Amazon is very fast. Sure. Like it's crazy that I can order something and get it by tonight.
Like, that's nuts. But like, I'll order something on your site and if it's before a specific time, it'll come from Fort Wayne to Indianapolis tomorrow. I don't know what the time cutoff is, but it's cra like it's really, really fast and, and it comes with a couple pieces of candy. Like you can't be, actually we have a one of the little like gift bag or one of the little cutouts right there.
I see it. Yeah. Yeah. That's from our last order. Come on. That's just so awesome. And I think that it's interesting that the model was largely just based out of Fort Wayne. It wasn't the, there's a other huge audio retailers that have gone with big footprints and strip malls all across the country, and that can work at times.
But, but I'm sure for growth in your perspective, uh, being, having the centralized hub really helped. Absolutely. Uh, there are so many advantages to being in Indiana. Uh, you know, cost of living. Of course, homes were very affordable. I could tell someone in LA Yeah, that deposit you put on a house out there that'll buy the whole house in Indiana.
Um, it's, it's a great quality place to raise your family. You know, there's just so many advantages here. As you were growing, did you feel supported by the local community? Once we had enough size and scale, yes we did have credibility. Yeah. Uh, it's kind of, that's been my whole professional life, you know, just always.
Fighting for credibility. You know, I didn't go to college, so I'd sit in business meetings sometimes, maybe thinking I wasn't the most educated in the room. And, uh, as the company grew, you know, we didn't quite have the, the background that other, you know, companies might have. But over time it flipped around and we have a fair amount of credibility today.
I would agree. Yeah, absolutely. Well, this is interesting. So talk to us about what the current life of Chuck looks like. Uh, I, I believe you're not as active in Sweetwater today. Yeah, so four years ago, this last month, it's a long, complicated story because of estate taxes and all that, but we decided to sell a majority of Sweetwater, uh, great firm that owns it.
Now, my wife and I still own a large piece. In fact, we're the largest individual shareholder. Um, but we sold the majority to a capital firm out on the East coast, and they've been great. And nothing's changed. It looks exactly the same to customers and it will forever. I mean, that was one of my goals. Yeah.
Was that a hard. Oh, I mean, I know it was hard. I'm not even gonna ask the question. It was really hard and I still miss it every day. Uh, I am there every couple weeks. I'm chairman of the board. I, you know, go in pretty regularly and help, you know, I did a meeting last week to help the employees. Like, what was that day like?
You sign some paperwork and then you have to, I signed a lot of paperwork. You sign a lot of paperwork and then you have to communicate this, that, that, hey, uh, and I think a lot of times, uh, what, right, wrong or different, uh, firms can and buyouts and that thing can get bad wraps. 'cause there's a lot of, you know, negative side to this.
It seems to be four years in. Like you're having a great experience with that and Sweetwater continues to grow and all, all good things there. But take us through what you were feeling as you walk out of Sweetwater as no longer the majority owner and eventually giving up the CEO role. Yeah, it, it was hard and it is hard.
It was my baby, but the way I finally rationalized it is that I knew I couldn't be on this earth forever, and I wanna make sure that it does continue forever. So we put really good people in charge. Uh, and one of the goals when we were looking, I, I didn't need to sell. We had no debt. I, I didn't owe to anybody.
Um, so I got to choose who we. Went with as much as they got to choose us. So I interviewed them as hard, uh, as they interviewed and eventually chose some partners that understood the, the, the culture and the quality of Sweetwater. And I didn't want to see it destroyed. And I put some very specific pillars in place to the way our process works, you know, to respect our leadership, to continue to donate in Fort Wayne.
And things were really important to me. Now, I can't guarantee they will always do that, but I told 'em it was really important and I gotta tell you, four years later, they've done 100% what they said they would do. And it's been a great relationship. Uh, I'm just thrilled with it. Yeah, I, I would encourage people to go back and listen to our episode with Mike Clem, the current CEO of Sweetwater.
He does a great job of, of kind of laying out a piece of the journey from the other side, like, you know, telling your story a little bit from, uh, their perspective. And yeah, he's taken over leadership for, I mean, the last four years or so. Um, and it does seem like Sweetwater still very active in Fort Wayne, still doing a ton up there and still providing incredible customer service.
Yeah. Which is like, if I had to, I mean, there's a lot of things, obviously being an expert on the Caswell, like all those things, but today being known as like number one in. Customer experience, customer service, like that's what I would say is, is synonymous with supervisor. You're right on the money. And it doesn't matter what we're selling, we just want to be really, really good at it.
And as long as we do that, we're not worried about Amazon, we're not worried about people, you know, biting in our ankles. We're just gonna do a great job at what we do. And frankly, I hope the competition does a great job of what they do. Yeah, I love that. Yeah. Right. Like you guys be good too. Yeah. So, so talk me through what life looks like.
You sell a majority stake of your very, very large enterprise. You live in northeast Indiana still like all year round? Yeah. Yeah. All year round in, in northeast Indiana you could do anything. You could play golf every day. You could take up pickleball like. What gets you up in the morning? Well, there's lots of things that get me up, but you know, when I did sell, I already had a bunch of other businesses and, uh, we've continued to grow those, foster those.
We've started some new things. Uh, today I have 20 other, well, more than 20 other businesses, and I've good people running 'em, good managers and all that, a president of our company. Uh, but what probably motivates me the most right now is what we started last fall. It was a couple year project. Uh, we took an old, a hundred year old building in Fort Wayne and completely gutted it, remodeled it, and we made a 40,000 square foot, uh, space for people to take music lessons regardless of their family's ability to pay.
And it's called Pearl Arts. And so we went to Fort Wayne Community Schools, which is the largest school system in the state of Indiana, uh, larger than the ones down here even. And, uh, we went to the, to the music teachers and all the folks
and said, if you have students that wanna play an instrument.
We want to give them lessons regardless of their family's ability to pay. And so, uh, we hoped for a 100 kids, we ended up with 500 that signed up and we're just now starting our second season. But I think when I fast forward, uh, you know, that'll be my legacy. That's what I'm most excited about, watching these young people have opportunities that they maybe wouldn't have had otherwise.
And I don't expect them to become professional musicians, maybe, if you will, but they may become leaders, they may become teachers, they may become entrepreneurs, and we're teaching them entrepreneurship and business and a bunch of other things as well as music lessons. That is incredible. Oh, I love it.
Yeah. Like, and this started last fall, last October. So almost a year in. Yep. Wow. Oh my goodness. I mean, and talk about making an impact in something that made such a big impact in, in your life. You know, y your dad convinces you that saxophones gonna get you more girls. So you go there and, and you only take one pri.
Private ish lesson, get your mouthpiece situated the right way. And from there then it was through more of the the public. School band classes, but this is, these are private lessons for students up in Fort Wayne. Yes. Wow. Yeah, man. Have you heard any crazy ever? I mean, one year in the first season, let's say?
Oh, we've had so many. I mean, I hear, I hear from parents all the time. We have concerts and recitals, and we have workshops and specialists come in. We had a young fellow that, in fairness, he already had a lot of talent, but he did spend his, his, his last year with us, uh, he just went to Carnegie Hall. He was one of two bass players from the whole country of the United States, one of the best young.
He's a, he's a 16-year-old, uh, sophomore or junior in high school from Fort Wayne. From Fort Wayne. Went and he played bass for a short while with the Count Basie Band. Uh, very famous band. And then he was chosen to go to New York City and do a three week tour, uh, down in the Dominican Republic and New York.
And just so many stories like that. You think about legacy. It'd be really, really interesting to see how many careers in music stem from Fort Wayne. Wow. Like, you know, as you go on and it's like, let's say, let's say 30 years from now, these kids, you know, you've been giving out music lessons to anyone who, you know, was gonna put in the effort up there in, in northeastern Indiana.
It'd be really fun to like track and see how many people end up and how many venues have stem from the, like, you know, that'd be really cool. You know, I can look back now and already see what we've done. We have 2,800 employees at Sweetwater. Uh, and, and many of them have gone on to do their own recording studios or nightclubs or other businesses.
And so it's been just incredibly inspiring to see the success of others. Talk to us about some of the other things that you're working. Obviously 20 businesses, all, all based in Northeast Indiana. Not all. Uh, I have, I have one up in northern Michigan on the west side of Lake Michigan, about two hours north of Green Bay, uh, called Enstrom Helicopter Corporation.
We actually manufacture helicopters. So I bought this, this is like a, a passion of yours is aviation and hot aviation is a passion that. Grown in the last, I dunno, 15 years or so. Why? Why? I don't know. I just, uh, I had a friend that flew into a little air show with his helicopter, personal helicopter, and I said, that's really cool.
And he says, well, you ought to do that. And I said, now I'm 50. I'm too old. He says, no, no, no. I have a friend that did it, did it in his sixties. And I said, really? So I went home and worked on my wife and that Christmas I got an FA log book and how to fly helicopters. And uh, the next year I started taking private lessons and by August I was, had my license.
And so now I've flown literally all over the country. In your, in helicopter. In helicopters. I've been to California and back twice. I've been up into Canada, up New Hampshire. I take one to Florida every winter, you know, for off and on for months. And I've been everywhere but the northwest, I have not been northwest, but I landed in the Rocky Mountains at 12,500 feet.
Got out and walked around, saw a fresh animal dung about the size of a, of a softball, when I finally decided it must have been a bear. So I jumped back in the helicopter and took off. I saw no way I saw hundreds of horses running wild, like, like you'd see on a picture or something. It's just being able to see the earth in a way that you can't see in anything else is so fascinating.
I mean, I guess it would start as a hobby and now is like, I mean obviously you're, you're working in business there, but it gets you around like, how quick can you in a helicopter in a helicopter, how quick can you get from Fort Wayne to Indianapolis? 35 minutes. 35 minutes. It makes going to the Colts or Pacers games, quite a joy to get home right away.
That's so, or or the indie 11. Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Well, 'cause you are also, uh, an investor in the Indy Eleven, I believe. I'm, yes. Uh, what are you a passionate soccer fan? I couldn't spell soccer a couple years ago. Um, but no, I've actually come to enjoy soccer. My daughter played a little soccer in high school and, and the opportunity to join the Indy Eleven team was, was interesting to me.
And, uh, my wife and I have become pretty good fans now. That's awesome. We're going out to a game in a few weeks for the October Fest. Oh, cool. So it'll be pretty fun. Uh, well, this has been a huge piece. I feel like you've been in the news. There's been a lot of news out there over the past year and a half or so about Indy Eleven, about the heliport, about all these different things.
I'd love to hear from your perspective, uh, what's,
what's going on with the heliport and the Indy Eleven and, and what got you so ingrained into. What's going with
this?
this
Well,
first off, lemme say, I wanna be careful what I say, but I also, I'm gonna say the truth. Yeah. And so, uh, Indy Eleven, you know, I, I give a lot of se a lot of credit to Ersal Ozdemir for starting soccer in Indianapolis.
Ersal Ozdemir's a developer done a lot of cool stuff downtown and you know, I don't know how many years, 10, 11, 12 years ago, he, he, uh, acquired the Indy Eleven, or started the Indy Eleven team. And it's grown. I mean, you go to a game and there's now 10,000 people there. It's one of the, in the league right below MLS, it's one of the more attended game.
It is, yeah. One of the most attended teams. Yeah. And it's actually a different franchise or a different thing than MLS, which, that's where part of the controversy comes in. But clearly Ersal Ozdemir has shown this community that there's room for soccer and, uh, you know, we've got lots of other sports in, in Indianapolis, so I, I totally get it.
And, and, uh, he started to. Uh, build and design a, a big thing out in the property that he owns just west of where the Colts play. And so the Mayor Hogsett and the governor then all were at this press conference and said, yep, let's build this project. And it was going to be a billion and a half dollar project with hotels and all kinds of, it was gonna be just fascinating.
Four months later, Mayor Hogsett changed his mind and decided that he had an opportunity or hoped to have an opportunity to bring MLS to Indianapolis. And I'm all for MLS. I think that's great. I'd love to see, uh, you know, major League Soccer here. But, his idea was to build it over where the heliport is.
And I just think the heliport is a great asset, not just for the city of Indianapolis, but for the whole state of Indiana. Um, you know, I, we, we haul lots of people in and out for various sporting events. We, uh, business people and, and politicians go from here to Fort Wayne or Evansville. And it's not just us using it.
There's lots of other people using it. IU Health used it to do transfers. Um, there's also a trend coming very, very soon called eVTOLs, electric vertical takeoff and landing helicopters. These, these will be electric. Think about Tesla, if you will, for helicopter. Yeah. And there's 200 companies around the world building these.
Right now they're all in beta or prototype stage, but within the next 12 months, they'll be licensed. And think about having a helicopter that could fly from downtown Indianapolis to Carmel. in about seven minutes and it cost maybe a couple hundred bucks. In fact, just last week, Uber announced they've done a thing to do it in New York and la I mean, we're just that close.
Well, Indianapolis already has a heliport that would serve as a vertiport or as an eVTOL operator. So, so, well it's already set up with all the infrastructure and all that. And I just think it's sad that a short term mayor, and again, I don't mean that disrespectful, but he's only gonna be here a certain number of terms, has the ability to come in and decide to tear the heliport down when he could easily go back and build that stadium back on the diamond chain site just west of where the Colts play.
And that's where the stadium should be. And, and, uh, the other thing about soccer and MLS is great, and maybe Indianapolis should have an MLS team, but the league that we're in within the 11 is actually bigger around the rest of the world. Uh, just in the United States. MLS is bigger, but in the rest of the world, the league we're in is bigger and they've just announced.
Uh, a, a a a level that is MLS level. Couple of things to dive into there. Sure. Uh, 'cause this is a thing in New York. It's going, it's called Blade Blade, have you heard That's right. Yep. Yep. Where to like zip you around in a helicopter Right. For, you know, X amount of money. And so Blade and Uber just got together.
Yeah. And they've announced that they're gonna have these helicopters or eVTOLs in the next year or so. And so that would be like a, uh, is it manned or unmanned? They'll be manned initially, yeah. And then eventually they'll be unmanned. Wow. I'm not sure when I'm ready to fly in. Unmanned, but definitely manned for a while.
Yeah. Well, what's the, uh, oh, my, have you been out to like Arizona, where they have the Waymo's? Yes. Those are crazy. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so, so this all comes out, they're, they're talking about moving the stadium. Literally on the side of where the heliport is. And I think that you might have gotten a little bit of caught in the crosshairs of this a little bit.
I did, yes. As as the helicopter aficionado of this date. And they're like, uh, blah, blah. But if you think through both sides, one, it is very nice to be able to zip down there and go to a Pacer's game. But also if you had a little bit of futur looking into the future, having a heliport in downtown Indianapolis with for vertical takeoff.
Could be beneficial of helping connect our city and modernize it a little bit. New York City's figured this out, Miami's figured it out. Dallas, la all these big successful cities have heliports in their downtown area. And when you think about Indianapolis trying to be, not trying, but being a world class city and having all this world class sports, these are the kind of things that owners and managers and, and people look at, you know, what kind of infrastructure do we have?
And, uh, you know, the answer to get from the, the international airport to downtown, that's a, that's a 20, 25 minute thing, depending on traffic and all that. And I can get right downtown with a helicopter. Yeah. And that infrastructure's already there. That's the killer. They, they spent millions and millions of dollars putting that concrete in there years ago.
Federal money came to support it. And I just don't understand how a mayor can just decide to take out what the federal people had put in. Yeah, and it's interesting, I think that some people will see this and be like, it's not relevant to me. Like, yeah, it's a rich boys toy. It's a, yeah. I think that some people, but what I'll say is like.
How long ago was the thought of an autonomous driving car picking you up at the airport in, uh, Phoenix and driving you 20 minutes away to your Airbnb, to your vacation home for that? Someone else owns that, you're gonna be there for a week. Absolutely. Like I, we just did this, uh, when we were out in Scottsdale and it's like, I, I can see currently if you're stuck in this, if you, if you sit in this space of what is today like, yes.
Today a helicopter, pa a heliport in downtown Indianapolis is probably, I dunno, there's a couple hundred, maybe a thousand people that's gonna really affect them. But if you fast forward 10, 20 years, maybe 10 years, stuff's moving pretty fast. Now this could be like an accessible piece that makes.
Indianapolis, we go from everything is 20 minutes away. Yeah, well, how far away is that? Uh, 20 minutes. It's a 20 minute drive. 20 minute drive to, okay. This is, there's this future of public ish transportation, um, that we've constantly been trying to figure out from buses to, I don't know, whatever it is. I mean, there used to be a rail system here.
Yeah. There's a lot of crazy interesting things. We could have both, we could have an MLS style stadium, whether it's the MLS franchise or we're the Indy Eleven franchise that could be at the diamond chain site and have a big fancy stadium and have 20,000 people. That would be awesome. And still have the heliport, which would support everything else going on in Indiana I don't know why. We just don't want both. Yeah. It's interesting. Well, I know it's been in the news a bunch of just everything with the diamond chain site and with all the stuff and Yeah. And it's, uh, well, a little bit, uh, I'm sure there's just a lot that goes into it. Um. And, and it is interesting to see, uh, from government to private, like all these different entities that are all getting involved in this, and to just hear from perspectives on, on what we can do.
I think at the end of the day, what everyone in the state of Indiana wants, I would hope, or everyone in the city of Indianapolis, is to continue taking strides to make our city the best it can possibly be. And if we're seeing on one side that vertical, say it again. eVTOLs. eVTOL. Electric vertical takeoff and landing.
Yeah. Like I think that this is popular because we're seeing this in big cities. Absolutely. We're seeing Blade be a thing and if you're not sure, look it up. Um, and then on the other side, yeah, we are seeing that there's a huge presence of soccer fans here. So helping find something that, uh, builds, that doesn't sacrifice today for the future, but also helps, you know, build another property that we're all proud of.
Interesting. Wow, that's fun. Uh, as we kinda wrap up here, uh, we have a few fun rapid fire questions. I literally think I could talk to you for the next 10 hours. Thank you. But, uh, uh, unfortunately, we are coming close on time. When they go back and play this specific episode a hundred years from now, what do you hope people think, feel about Chuck Surack in Sweetwater a hundred years from now?
Well, first off, in a hundred years, I hope the technology still works. You think about going back, you know, uh, tape recorders were analog. They don't work anymore. You think about wire recorders before that. So I'm not sure where digital technology will be in a hundred years, but, you know, there were a lot of things we didn't get to talk about today in our philanthropy.
The stuff we do to support and grow Fort Wayne, I, I hope people remember me from that, uh, that we've made the community better, the state, better than we found it. If you could snap your fingers and fix something or, or create something, or if it just happened overnight, what would be the one thing in northeast Indiana that you would change?
Yeah. Sadly, it's in northeast Indiana. It's in Indianapolis, it's all over the country. I would fix homelessness. Any one of us could be one incident, one accident, one health scare away from being in that situation. And, you know, I know there's mental health issues, there's all kinds of issues, but we live in the greatest country in the world, and we should all be able to have food and all be able to have, you know, a, a roof over our heads.
Yeah. And I wish I could solve that. Amen. I, I totally agree with you there. Uh, this next question is brought to you by our friends at J.C. Hart. They're a leader in creating enjoyable living experiences at apartment communities all across Indiana and beyond. Check them out at homeisjchart.com. My question for you, Chuck, I'm sure as all the success, you end up selling a com.
Like a, a large majority of your company, you could retire to. The South of France. You could live in Miami, you could live in Los Angeles, but why do you call Indiana home?
Oh, I love Indiana.
Uh, everything about it, uh, uh,
the quality
of,
of people that you talked about before, the work ethic is incredible. I love the four Seasons.
I mean,
I have spent time in other parts of the country, but I think our four seasons are just beautiful. And as soon as you start to get a little tired or sick of one, the next one around the corner is more beautiful than the one before. But I'd say it's the people,
you know,
I've owned companies all over the country, actually, and I just love the quality of the people in our state.
Amen. It's, it is interesting. Um, the first snow or the first spring day, or the first summer day, or the Yep. Like the first of it just like brings this newfound appreciation. Yeah, that's true. Uh, I, I love it. I to, that hits the nail on the head. Okay. We're, we're gonna hit some rapid fire quick questions here.
Who's your favorite? Who's your musician of all time? You could go way back and say Hoagy Carmichael. Uh, but frankly, frankly, I think I would probably say, uh, John Cougar Mellencamp. Yeah. I, I just loved all his music. Maybe it's 'cause when I grew up, you know, eighties, he was really popular. Did he ever come up and record anything at Sweetwater?
You know, no, but a lot of his band members have, and I've been around his group quite a bit, but heck yeah. Yeah, that would be a fun one. Uh, what's the best concert you've ever attended? I'm a huge Tower of Power fan, and so I've been to many, many Tower of Power concerts, uh, band outta San Francisco. Been around for 57, 58 years, but maybe the best was seeing ZZ Top, uh, in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
Probably one of the first concerts I went to, they were a three piece, they are a three piece band, and they rocked our coliseum with such clarity. That was just unbelievable. Some of the best sound I've ever heard. One, my first concerts. Well, for those of you looking at home, you'll notice that he's got, that Chuck's got his blazer on.
'cause every girl's crazy about a sharp dressed. Man, come on. That was good. Hey, there we go. I, I can put 'em together sometimes. Uh, where's your favorite spot to relax around Fort Wayne? Well, I have a Lake cottage, uh, about 40 minutes north of Fort Wayne. But, uh, they're just Fort Wayne's, just like Indianapolis.
There's so many great things in our community. Yeah. Uh, we have a great park system. I love doing that. Just all kinds of things. If you're grabbing dinner in Fort Wayne, where do we need to go? Well, we opened a new restaurant last, uh, Thanksgiving called Amoré. So Amoré is a high end, uh, Italian steak and seafood, but it's very approachable in price and that sort of thing.
But it's in our downtown district and it's probably one of the nicer restaurants in town. But again, we're blessed with some fabulous restaurants in our community just like you are here. Yeah. Oh my gosh. I had, this would've been maybe three years ago, four years ago, I had lunch. Is it called Tolon? Tolon.
Oh, Tolon. Tolon right around the corner from us. Yeah. Great restaurant. Oh my G Yeah, this was like an early, I feel like farm-to-table wasn't as popular as it is now. No, they were one of the, they were one of the first. Yeah. So good. I still think about that. Lunch from six years ago, maybe. Tolon is their last name.
Refer, so their last name is, is Noll. And so yeah. Great. There you go. Great people, great company. Yeah. Speaking of, I, I got to hear the whole podcast you did, uh, with St. Elmo. Just fascinating history. Fascinating story. I mean, obviously one of my favorite restaurants in the whole world. Oh my. To hear his whole background and I had no idea.
No idea. His father had done Noble Roman's when I was, when I was, you know, high school age, Noble Roman's was so popular and so good and I I miss it all the time. Isn't that kind of crazy To go from Noble Roman's to St. Elmo Steak House Greatness. All it is, is greatness. You know what I, I, um, I appreciated about this conversation with you as well as my conversation with Craig.
So obviously. Selling the majority stake of Sweetwater had to be hard and, and very, very challenging for like personal, you know? Sure. Like your personal ego and personal, just like you built this thing from literally it was my baby. Yes, it was my baby. But when you're building something to last the test of time, like you end up becoming a, Craig says it as he's a steward of the brand.
True. Like St. Elmo Steak House will be here, I think in the direct quote is like, uh, it was here before I got here and it'll be here long after I'm gone and in this moment of time I get to be a, a steward of this. And what you do is you give the opportunity for Sweetwater to be bigger than Chuck. That's what I want.
Yeah. And I think that that is, um, insightful. I think a lot of times certain individuals can build these spectacular things, but it becomes hard for them to run and operate. After, after they're gone. So I, I think that that is, that takes a lot of, um, self-awareness and I think that very, very great leaders such as yourself and such as Craig, are able to see that and, and see the whole forest instead of just the trees in front of them.
I've been so impressed how Craig has protected that brand. I know you talked about that, but he has, he's made saying almost just beyond reproach, regardless of everything else going on in Indianapolis. Yeah. It is just the place and, and the easy thing to do today, the easy thing is to open up 50 of 'em.
Yeah, right. They, they would do pretty well in every major metro, but the fact that he doesn't makes the one here just Yep. It's just, uh, lower. Right? Yep. Uh, I love it. I'm, I'm pumped that you listen that one, that that one's a really good one. And he is another individual that's, um, so approachable. I think.
You think, oh, Saint Elmo, like, it's gonna be this like, and it's, no, he's a like a very normal person. Yes, he is. Who's cares about the community and. Oh my gosh. It's, it's so great. The piece of gear that changed your life was the Kurzweil K250 today. What's your favorite piece of gear that you own? You know, it's hard to not love an iPhone.
The iPhone is just so, I mean, yeah, you can talk on it, but it's a computer in your hand. Who would ever would've envisioned you could have a computer in your hand, whether it's looking up information or storing information, pictures, family. Uh, it is just so ubiquitous today that I, I, I think an iPhone would have to be it, isn't it cr and it's just been adopted by like everyone.
Yeah. It's totally, wow. I just got the new, uh, AirPods. Mm. That were supposed to have live translation. I'm very eager to see how that works. Uh, I'm going to, uh, south America in the spring. Ooh. And I'm curious, like, walk around and have those on, like, and I can hear everyone talking smack about me. And that'll be funny.
When you have someone, a pre, a prestigious guest visiting Fort Wayne from wherever they may be from, like, what would you put on the itinerary? What, what are the things you have to be sure to take them through so they understand the DNA, the fabric of Northeast Indiana? Oh, there's so many things and, and I am fortunate I get to bring a lot of people to Fort Wayne and, and give them tours.
We could talk about the Embassy Theatre. We could talk about our park system. Yeah. Our arts are really strong. You know, it's a combination of the Clyde Theatre that, that I own that, that now Pearl Arts, Arts United, I say the embassy and we have so much live music in our community, and partly because we have 2,800 employees at Sweetwater, more than half of them we've relocated to Fort Wayne.
Many, many, many of them play instruments or play music or their spouses play. And so our churches have phenomenal music. Uh, it's just a really rich culture. Art artistically. Yeah. I don't know if people think about the, the like second or third degree effects that bringing 1400 music fanatics from across the country to northeast Indiana does.
Yeah. Yeah. Church and live music on Thursday nights down the street at the bar, like I'm sure. And, and their spouses, all these like music. Yeah, fanatic. I love that. Yeah. That's, those are like those second degree things that I didn't really think about. Um, is there a specific, like if you had to, to pin, is there like.
Who's the coolest person you've brought to Fort Wayne that you're like, I can't believe that. So-and-so's in Fort Wayne? You know, we don't normally talk about names, but we, we get the biggest of the biggest names. We'll come to see Sweetwater. I mean, it becomes a mecca where they come from all over the country, all over the world.
Um, just this last week we had a great band called Leonid & Friends. They become good friends. Yeah. They're from Russia and Ukraine and they do Chicago music. You have to look 'em up. Uh, Leonid & Friends and they do Chicago music probably better today than Chicago does because, you know, a lot of the original members of Chicago and honor with the band, and they do all kinds of music like that.
Uh, I had, uh, Vice President Mike Pence up just a few weeks ago, gave him a tour of the Pearl Arts and That's wild. Yeah. Just a lot of fun, man. That's that's so cool. Yeah. And I've, I've heard some, 'cause you have a full like floating studio up there, right? Mm-hmm. Is that, I don't know if that's the right terminology.
Yep. For it. I walked in one that was crazy Cool to just think about the legacy and history there and that one. Concert venue. It's like a smaller venue that can make it sound like you're anywhere. Like you're at the bottom of the Grand Canyon and you clap and it like reverberates. That's so crazy. You have some really real Oh, and the 3D sound modeling studio that's up there.
Yep. That's also crazy. Cool. Uh, I love it. Again, I've said it all day. I could talk to you. We have three questions left for you. These are the same three questions that we ask every guest who comes on the show. First, you've been around, you've, you've obviously flown a helicopter to. California twice. You've seen a lot of things, tops of mountains, down on the beaches, seen the world.
But what is something that the world needs to know about Indiana? Well, the world needs to know that we're not a flyover state. And there are so many great things that are happening here, whether it's at a personal level, level, or an entrepreneurial level. Um, it's just a whole bunch of people who really, really care.
And we're making a difference. We're really making a difference. When you think about, you know, Warsaw being the, the orthopedic capital of the world, or the kind of stuff that's happening at IU Bloomington from a music point of view, and it's just a great state and great people here. Yeah. I, I could not agree more.
The people, the people were met. And it, I'm sure that you get that feedback too as you bring in more, as you brought in a ton of people that didn't, maybe didn't grow up here, that they relocated up to Fort Wayne and they're like, oh, wow, people here are really nice like this. I hear that all the time.
Who's your hospitality thing's? Not a joke. I tell 'em it's our water. Amen. Uh. Now this is where you get to shed some light on a, a place or a thing within the state that, that not enough people are talking about. What is a hidden gem? In Indiana, we're a state with a lot of lakes and something about water just going out, whether you own it, whether you just visit it, there are lakes in every county in this state.
And to go relax in front of one just takes the world away for a minute. And so I love our lakes. Something about the water. Yeah, sure is sweet. Yeah. Very good. Go. What's, uh, what's your favorite lake? Well, we have a place on Lake James. Yeah. Uh, which is the second largest lake in northern Indiana. And, uh, I've been there my whole life.
My grandparents. What's the town? That's by Angola. Angola. Angola. There's a bunch up there. Uh, like we're I, so I'm originally from just west of Warsaw. Oh, okay. Um, so I went to Triton High School, grew up in Bourbon. Sure. But we have friends over on like Tippecanoe Lake and Wawasee. Sure. And Syracuse. Those are pretty good.
But then there's this whole other pocket that's like up more northeast. Is it like Lake James? James, like there's a bunch up there that are also really, really great lakes. Yep. Not great lakes, but great lakes. But they're all over. I mean, you know, you go down to Bloomington and you got Monroe. Yeah. And just all these great lakes all over the state.
Amen. Uh, final question. This is where we find out about new guests or just learn, uh, other people from Indiana that are doing crazy cool things. Who's a Hoosier that we need to keep on our radar? Someone who's doing big things. The few that I would think of and, and you know, these guys get kind of a bad rap, but I think what Dennis Murphy is doing at IU Health is unbelievable.
You know, they're building a, I dunno, $4 billion building or something, but it's not about the building, it's about the life's lives that they will take care of. You know, they, they serve sometimes the worst of the worst, the kind of hospitals. Or the kind of people that are so sick that they have to come to Indianapolis.
So I think that's amazing. In Fort Wayne, I would say Mike Packnett, who ran Parkview Health for a long time, again, Parkview's doing some fascinating stuff. And then a good friend Brian Bauer, who's uh, building the IU Health Hospital in Fort Wayne. He was at Lutheran Health Network before that. A great entrepreneur, very fascinating man.
Um, also a fellow owner of the Indy Eleven, but those three men who get a lot of heat because of what healthcare costs and all that. I think of the alternative, what if we didn't have the healthcare? I mean, I don't wanna pay the expenses anymore than anybody else does, but I'm so glad that we have that level of, of medical care in our state.
Yeah. Uh, those are good. I need to get, yeah, we need to do something. We just had someone on, um, from the, the Indy Health District, which is the area Sure. Like the around there. And it's fascinating, the level of. Detail that IU Health is putting in to benefit the community around them. 'cause it is a very historic, like low income neighborhood and not necessarily the best access to healthcare in that specific neighborhood that it's going into.
And the community outreach that they're doing is pretty impressive. All those healthcare facilities are doing things like that, they don't get credit for all the non-profit work they do. They also don't get credit that so many of their patients. Uh, can't pay and so they take care of them. Yeah. Or like the constant, it is just, the system is just really interesting in general.
Yeah. 'cause it's a, a constant battle between like the insurances, we're not paying that and blah, blah, blah, and they just like argue back and forth and then eventually they settle on something and it's above my pay grade. But it's definitely fascinating. Yeah. It's, but I'm just thankful they're there.
Yeah. Chuck, this has been spectacular. Thank you so much for, for coming on, Get IN and teaching us a little bit about your journey, uh, from, from Ohio. We won't hold that against him, but into Northeast Indiana. The impact that you've made in Fort Wayne by not only growing Sweetwater, but the, I mean the arts impact, I mean, you're, you're educating the youth of Northeast Indiana for free, giving them opportunities to pick up an instrument.
Because truthfully, when we narrow down this whole entire story, your life was changed the moment you picked up a saxophone. Absolutely. Like. And again, we talked about like your love for, uh, the Kurzweil K250, your love for software and learning. The tech side of it all stemmed from your teacher turning that mouthpiece over and like getting you on this path of music and, and your willingness.
Obviously there's a lot of luck in there. There's a lot of hard work, late nights, early mornings, like we're not, I'm not trying to discredit any of that or anything like that, but what I'm really, really inspired by is you found this love of music as a fifth grader. And yet have grown that over, you know, now 47 years of in the, like the company space.
But again, five years touring before that, all this, this crazy amazing opportunity all came from you picking up an instrument. Yeah. And I would just also like to say that it's all about the educators. You know, they're, there are unsung heroes. What these teachers, educators, administrators are doing, they're creating, they're creating and pouring into these young people for our future.
And, and they just don't get paid enough. They don't get enough respect. I love, love, love our teachers. Yeah. And yeah, that's another very unsung role. Yeah. Um. Man, I am just fired up after this one. It, it's a, it's an honor. I feel like a lot of people may have heard of Sweetwater or may have. This is such a, you're, you're such an approachable guy to talk to.
I appreciate you coming down. Thank you. And, uh, and telling us a little bit about the story. If people want to get plugged into any of the stuff that you're doing now, if they wanna keep up with you or any of the updates, what can they do? Well, they can go to our website, surack.com, and that's S-U-R-A-C-K.com.
They can even write me emails. I respond to every email. So it's Chuck. He does, this is true. You could ask him to be on your podcast and he might say, yes, chuck@surack.com, and, uh, I'll respond to every email. Heck yeah. Yeah. I, I have just been, uh, blown away in this conversation. Thank you. You welcome. For all the work that you're doing.
Thank you for coming on the show, but thank you for, for what you're doing to push Indiana forward. I think that the story of. Being willing to chase down your passion and to just keep going. I, I think that's very, very inspiring. I think today in this, this younger internet generation, we think that, you know, we're just gonna grow a billion dollar enterprise overnight.
And to hear about, you know, it takes a long time and takes a lot of hard work, early mornings, late nights, like, yeah, being willing to chase down and, and the less motivated that we can be by money somehow, maybe the more you'll end up getting in the long run, who knows? So appreciate you. Thank you. And, and we'll talk to you soon.
Sounds great. Thank you. This show is made possible by our friends up at Sweetwater. Whether you're looking to start a podcast or take your content to the next level, click the link in the description to see all my gear recommendations at sweetwater.com. If you want a behind the scenes look at everything we're doing across the state.
Make sure you follow me on Instagram and TikTok at Nate Spangle. Thank you so much for listening and being a part of what makes the Hoosier State great. We'll see you next time here on Get IN.
