Fueling Ambition: Jay Sapovits' Road to Recovery and Success

🚀 Entrepreneurial Wisdom Alert! 🌟 Join Ed Drozda, The Small Business Doctor & Jay Sapovits of Ink'd Stores as they dive into stories of ambition, overcoming addiction, and redefining success. A must-listen for anyone looking to craft their unique path in business! #TheWaterTroughPodcast #Entrepreneurship 

Transcript

Ed Drozda 0:10

Welcome to The Water Trough where we can't make you drink, but we will make you think. My name is Ed Drozda, The Small Business Doctor, and I'm really excited you chose to join me here as we discuss topics that are important for small business folks just like you. If you're looking for ideas, inspiration, and possibility, you've come to the right place. Join us as we take steps to help you create the healthy business that you've always wanted. Welcome back to The Water Trough folks. This is Ed Drozda, The Small Business Doctor, and today I'm joined by Jay Sapovits, a lifelong, serial entrepreneur, and the founder of Ink'd Stores. Jay, welcome.

Jay Sapovits 1:02

Ed, good to chat with you today.

Ed Drozda 1:04

It's nice to have you back. Our preliminary conversation gave me lots of insight into you. I think that you've got stories to tell, which would be both inspirational as well as a guiding beacon for a lot of people. Let me start by asking you about your journey. What brought you to where you are today?

Jay Sapovits 1:23

I think my journey started subconsciously by watching my dad, who was a school teacher. The last 10, maybe 12, 15 years of his existence as a school teacher, he was miserable. My dad was always counting days and he was either counting the days left in school or he was counting the days left in summer. But, when you're always counting down days you tend not to live the ones that you're in. He always was sort of in the past or the future. Watching that I became resolved to not live a life where I was miserable with what I did on a day-to-day basis. I didn't sit down and say, oh my dad doesn't like his career path that he chose. In some ways he didn't really choose it right? Him and my mom settled down, had a family, bought a home, wanted to raise kids. My dad gave up his dream of being an announcer. Back in those days if you were on the radio where you were a play by play announcer, or in his case public address announcer and racetrack announcer, which is what his true love was, you would start in a small town and you'd work your way to a bigger town, right? He had choices to make and his choice was he loved my mom and he chose to raise a family and suppressed his dreams. Yeah, that just seeped into me to not do that. As I got older I didn't realize that's what I was doing, but looking back it gives you great perspective and it's clearly the most influential aspect of my journey.

Ed Drozda 2:59

At what point did you start to recognize that what your Dad had gone through was not the right path for you. What inspired you to start taking a different step?

Jay Sapovits 3:10

Necessity. I was a chaotic kid really a C student. Like I tell people I was a 4.0 student, 2.0 in high school, 2.0 in college. Didn't apply myself at all, really just skated by on charisma, charm. I think they have another word for it, BS. You know, people skate through life, and I definitely skated through, till I got into college. I went to UNLV so I traveled from the Philadelphia area where I was raised out to Las Vegas. People ask me, what got you out to Las Vegas? It's like, have you ever been? That's what got me out to Las Vegas. I had a love of gambling, so much so that it turned into an addiction. And I didn't get clean from that until I was 25 years old. And when I eventually did get clean I took a recovery job at a golf course. A recovery job is defined as a mindless activity where you can allow yourself to take and alleviate pressure of your daily existence, and focus on getting clean and in this case, clean and sober from gambling. So I went to a golf course and started changing soft spikes. I was working outside services. I'm 25 years old. I had just come off a two year engagement that I left, as a talk show host on Sports Radio 610 WIP, which was the number one mel Caran owned radio station for sports and guy talk in the country. It was either WIP or WFAN. They were always one, two. I was 23 years old when I got that gig. Didn't have to go to a small market. Living my dad's dream, but didn't feel like I could give my opinion on sports and safety any longer because I didn't want the activity of being right, which was fueling my ego, which was a big piece of my gambling addiction. So I left that job. Went to work for$7 an hour, plus tips in outside services at a high end golf course, Wyncote Golf Club in Oxford, Pennsylvania. And, you know pick the range, caddied from time to time, changed soft spikes, carried people's bags, and clean clubs, all the things that you do in outside services. It was just the break that I needed mentally of the constant race and the constant go, go, go. And when my head cleared, I had an idea to, you know when you work on tips you, and I had worked on tips when I was in Vegas because I parked cars at the Barbary Coast, so I was a valet so I understand the tipping game. And one of the aspects of the tipping game is that you notice dead periods. Because when people aren't flowing in, they're not handing you cash. So I noticed that there were these blocks of time that would go unused at the golf course. So I came up with a plan. I now know it to be my first ever business plan, and presented it to the general manager. That I could sell these blocks of time off the market to companies and corporations at a discounted rate, unpublished, to fill the gaps. So they took me out of the cart barn. I had about four months of clarity in my head, and I became the sales manager at this golf course. And when I became the sales manager of the golf course, we grew sales incredibly the next nine, ten months. You know, it's seasonal, it was March in Philly. March, middle of March you could start making money in the golf business, but it goes till November, December. So it's really only a three month gap most years. But I noticed this other piece which was that our competitive golf course about eight miles away had a Senior PGA Tour event, and having been on the radio at WIP I knew that Philly fancied itself as a pro town, didn't accept minor league sports. And I always thought the Champions Tour, at the time, the senior tour, was equivalent to a minor league, right? It wasn't the best, it wasn't Tiger, so I came up with the concept to put a one day skins game at Wyncote featuring the best players in the world, and cold call player agents. Got a bite from Jim Furyk who was born in Westchester, Pennsylvania, and a client that I had sold golf time to agreed to be the title sponsor. At the time it was Peco Energy. They were deregulating energy at the time, so you talk about a good break was they needed to advertise. Mm-hmm. Was Exelon. And so, the Exelon Invitational hosted by Jim Furich was born and it was a one-day skins game. We got agreement from Comcast to televise it, and we put, I think somewhere around six, seven-thousand people the first year to watch the event live at the golf course. I don't think we had a tee time available for the following 12 months at the course. It just took off. So that was my first business and it was borne of necessity, because I was working in a cart barn. I just ran with it, and that's how my entrepreneurial journey started.

Ed Drozda 8:35

It's a wonderful thing that you're able to emerge from this dark space. You had the vision to see there was something on the other side and the ambition to pursue it. Maybe more importantly, to avoid backsliding in to that dark space. Given what your Dad had gone through, as you said, you're kind of living his dream, which must have been a little bit infatuating and perhaps a little bit intimidating? I think your story is an amazing success story. I'm really grateful that you've shared that with us.

Jay Sapovits 9:12

I appreciate that. It was my dream as well. I did play byplay in radio in college. I traveled with those great UNLB basketball teams with Larry Johnson and Stacy Augman and Greg Anthony. Because I became the radio producer engineer I was always super crazy ambitious and always had multiple jobs. At the same time I was stuck in a rut where anything that came in went out immediately. I share with people that I did Vegas for five and a half years like they do it for a weekend, and that's not a punchline, that's the truth. It was a very, very hard way to live, and I needed to get out of it when I did, or else I emotionally wouldn't have been able to last. As far as seeing through the other side of it, that definitely was true for a number of years. The invitational lasted ten years, but after three and a half I became bored. I'm a big starter. I love starting things. Um, but once I get into the execution mode... you know, there's different levels of entrepreneurs, right? There's zero to one entrepreneurs, there's one to two entrepreneurs, and then there's scalers. I was never a scaler, my attention span was always shorter than that, so, sold my interest in the event, October, 2001, got an opportunity to become part of the startup and founding team of a company called Marquis Jet, zero revenue, which was a startup private jet company led by Kenny Dichter, and Jesse Itzler. I was a top, I don't know what number, 10, 15 early employee of the group. I opened the Boston office. We went from zero to a billion in revenue in about four and a half years, and that was something I had never, ever imagined I could be part of before. I mean my dad was a school teacher and now I'm selling private jets. My clients were, Randy Johnson when he did his contract with the Yankees, the CEO chairman of McDonald's at the time was a client of mine, I could go on and on about lifestyles of the rich and famous. As nice as it is to say that I came out of the darkness on the other side, while I've never relapsed from gambling, my ego definitely got out of control and I had run into some issues later in my career. Coming outta Marquis Jet, in fact leaving Marquis Jet because my ego took over. You know, when you're early stage with a company you do a little bit of everything and you've got that zero to one charge and then as the company grows, layers exist. And when layers start to exist you become, minimized is the wrong word, but less relevant than you were on day one. Even though I had this huge book of business and I could have stayed there forever, I loved everyone, they loved me. To this day, it's still the tightest knit family of people that I ever could imagine. There's very few people that worked in that organization wouldn't, you know, if they saw me come up and gimme the biggest hug and I wouldn't give them the biggest hug back. And we're constantly in touch, even if our lives have all moved on in different paths. So super, super crazy tight. But four and a half years into that experience I decided that it was time to leave and start my own deal again. And that was not as dark as my gambling addiction, but it did lead to financial failure and what I felt was public failure in starting another business. So here I was, successful in college, traveling with the UNLB basketball team, successful at WIP on the radio in my hometown. I mean, I'm 23 years old. Kids I went to high school with listen to me. Look how big and look how great I am. Started the Exelon Invitational. Everybody knew I started it. Wow. Jay's killing it. Part of the Marquis Jet founding team. So it just was like, ego, ego, ego, ego, and then boom, the financial collapse hits in 2008, the business that I had created, I was not good enough, experienced enough, smart enough, whatever you wanna say to navigate through the calamity. Now people have said a lot of people haven't navigate. I don't care about a lot of people. I care about me. There's two ways to go, Ed. Failure's part of life, right? You have a choice when you fail. You could either dissect why you failed and learn and grow from it, or you could bury your head in the sand, and move on with your life. Maybe you repeat the same mistakes, maybe you don't. I don't know what that path is, but for me I tried to learn from it. And what I learned from it is that I was closed-minded to the business concept that we had and unwilling to pivot or make changes based on the feedback that we were getting from potential clients and customers. Because of that, we weren't able to survive and that was a really dark period in my life. Now, I didn't go back to my addiction, but I look at the failure to suppress my ego as almost as detrimental, if not as detrimental as my addiction was if I'm being truly sincere.

Ed Drozda 14:39

Yeah, I think a lot of people don't appreciate the fact that an overabundance of ego, self-aggrandizing or loss of humility, is far more deleterious than many things because it's so pervasive. It really does consume us because it feeds us. It's like pouring gasoline on a fire, I'd say. You become inured to the notion that anybody else or anything else has any impact at all. But you do, as you said, you woke up one morning and realize, oh, oh, it does make a difference doesn't it, out there?

Jay Sapovits 15:14

Yeah. You know, humility doesn't come overnight either. It's a work in progress. Coming off that experience I was again, very fortunate to lean on golf. I had a buddy who asked me to run a local golf course for him, Wentworth Hills Golf Club. I went and I ran that course for the summer. And it gave me great confidence because I was able to stretch my creative wings, grow revenue, get back to something that I loved, be outside every day and intermingle with people at a different level, right? So I was selling luxury services when I failed, and now I'm selling$70,$50,$60 tee times. So it really brought me down a notch or 10, and I was able to reestablish myself emotionally. Again, I sort of followed the same pattern which was, mindless is not the right word in this case'cause it was more mindful than working in a cart shack but I mean, you go from the level of business I was at to running a single location golf course. I gave it my all, but it didn't take my all, if that made sense.

Ed Drozda 16:29

Certainly does. A big part of your journey, a big part of everyone's journey, whether we acknowledge it or not, is self-awareness. You have had the good fortune of being aware, being able to acknowledge the shortcomings of a particular point in time and being able to see potential beyond that moment, which is really the only way to survive emotionally. I mean everybody defines success in a different way, right? Whether it be money, fame, this, that, the next thing, but really the most important success is being alive and being happy, being who you are. Because at the end of the day, you know that's what you got, right? You mentioned that you, as an entrepreneur goes, are one who is attracted to the excitement of the new, the buildup. But I get the impression that despite the fact that that is a part of you, that over time you may not be looking for scale, but you have found contentment because your business Ink'd Stores is not new. It's been around for quite some time now, in stark contrast to someone who's always looking for the next thing. What is it that allowed you to find peace in this space? Or maybe I'm wrong, maybe you haven't found peace here.

Jay Sapovits 17:55

Wow, that's a really good question. I haven't been asked that previously anywhere, and I've had a number of conversations like ours. So kudos for digging down to that. A few things. First of all, I found a business finally after all these years that appeals to almost every single thing that I really like. So, I'm creative. Part of my love of going from zero to one is coming up with an idea and seeing if I'm able to see it through and all the obstacles that are in its way. I have that in the promotional and merch space, across a multitude of clients all the time. It could be a hospitality company, it could be a gaming company, a pharmaceutical company. They have objectives and goals that they're trying to reach, so I almost become an outsourced marketer or thinker on their behalf as to how they can use physical product to do that. I love that and that appeals to me. Second, I think you get older and mature, and even though that zero to one phase is the most exciting, I try to repeat that in where I'm at today. Scaling for me is a new challenge, and that's where we're at right now. I've set it up like that to be a new challenge as opposed to looking at it and saying well, I don't like that. I'm open-minded, and when I talk about my history, I was very closed-minded when I was younger, and that closed-mindedness is what led to the ego inflation, and now I don't know are my three favorite words. I think that's three, right? I don't know. So, you know I'm not young, when you're on the climb you fear telling people, I don't know. You fear how it feels to not know, but yet not knowing is this freedom then you get to explore and learn and absorb and question. It's just growth. The business isn't young, it's just growth. And even though we've got time under our belt, COVID cut us in half. And when COVID cut us in half, we had to pivot and change the business almost entirely. So even though it's a, call it 12-year-old, 11-year-old business, it really only feels like a five-year-old business. You know this, but somebody listening may not. Every business doesn't go from zero to a hundred million in five years. There's businesses that on year 10, on year 12, on year 15 are still trying to figure it out. Nvidia is a perfect example. Nvidia, everybody uses Nvidia like they hold up the video like it's this icon of business, or they hold up Amazon, like Amazon's an icon. Amazon didn't make money, Facebook didn't make money for the first seven or eight years. It's really glamorous to look at the outliers, the 23-year-old who has 2 million in revenue and 90% margins. That's an outlier. There's more people who own a business on Main Street. Be humble, drive down that main street. Do the math in your head. How much revenue does that yoga studio make on a monthly basis? What are their expenses? How much money is the owner of that realistically making? Open-mindedness and staying curious have come to me in age. Without that I wouldn't be where I'm at today. I think we have a really big chance to get to where we're going because of it.

Ed Drozda 21:30

Therein lies the key. It is up to the founder to determine what that will be, where I will go, what it is I want to go to. But to compare to others is unrealistic, is really unfortunate because everybody's version of success is different. But knowing what your version of success is, so that your beacon is legitimately established, you can see what you're trying to get to, is critical. A lot of people are mired in the notion, well if they can do it I have to do it. I must be able to make X and such dollars and so on, when they haven't considered what they're looking to do other than to satisfy the urge to be like somebody else. That defeats the purpose doesn't it?

Jay Sapovits 22:19

It's hard. What you're sharing there is really hard, not comparing yourself to others. Not judging your success by external standards. Being comfortable in your own skin, defining what success means to you. If you get that early in life, bless your heart. You won't.

Ed Drozda 22:40

But listen to your story. Listen to what you just said. We start out with a host of conflicting ideas and we model ourselves after things that we can see because we haven't yet been able to create our own. But as we mature, wouldn't you say, we do become comfortable in our skin and we shed that necessity to be fitting other people's goals. We let those things go. What I'm hearing you say is you move from a space of go, go, go to a space of I get it, I get it, I get it. They're two different things, but they don't come, I don't think they come early. I don't think they can.

Jay Sapovits 23:16

Well, like I said, I think if you get it early, it's a gift.

Ed Drozda 23:19

If you can, very few can. I mean if I knew then what I know now, blah, blah, blah. Okay, fine. You know? Yeah. We've all heard that one, right?

Jay Sapovits 23:27

Yeah, it's true. And youth is wasted on the young, right? All those cute little sayings are actually pretty accurate.

Ed Drozda 23:34

They are, they are indeed. Hey Jay, this conversation has been enlightening for me and of course as enlightening conversations are, they go quickly. So, now I'm gonna put you on the spot and say what are your parting thoughts?

Jay Sapovits 23:48

I'll share this. Last week I wasn't in a great mood. I had some things happen that didn't really go my way and I was a little down, and mopy. My wife asked me what's wrong, I'd say nothing, fine. She said no, something's wrong. I said yeah, I just don't know what it is. I can't put my finger on it. Saturday morning I woke up and I made a choice to not be upset or mopy anymore. It might sound silly, but one of the pieces that I've learned in time is that we have a choice of how we feel. So I had a great weekend and Monday was fine, and today's going okay. Now that doesn't mean everything in my world is perfect?. Right? It's not. I'm dealing with things like I always deal with things. But I'm okay. And I know I'm okay because I can look back at times in my life that were far more chaotic than they are now. And if I was able to get through those times, I promise I'm gonna be able to get through these times. So as far as parting wisdom is concerned, something I didn't understand very early in life, it's come to me later, is that I choose how I am, no one else. So if something's not going your way, and you find yourself down, like I've heard it said, I'm having a bad day. The truth is that you're most likely having a bad five minutes and you're just milking it. So you can have a bad five minutes. There's 24 hours in a day. Take a breath, start over. That's your choice. And be where you wanna be and if you want it and if you're miserable, that's where you wanna be. A lot of people like to sit in that and covet their misery. I've gotten past that. I do it, I do it, but for the most part I don't have any interest in that. I wanna be happy and you can't take that from me'cause I choose if I am or not. So that's my parting wisdom.

Ed Drozda 26:00

Appreciate your honesty and integrity in sharing that. I will say merely this, I needed that too. So thank you for me.

Jay Sapovits 26:10

Well, I understand, there's days I need it too.

Ed Drozda 26:14

Thank you sir. Jay, it has been an absolute pleasure having you here today and I appreciate that you've opened up, dug in, and poured out a lot of things. The goal of this show is to inspire people, and your story I'm sure, will do just that. It has inspired me because you just simply put yourself out there. Thank you for that, I'm grateful.

Jay Sapovits 26:35

Appreciate the visit, Ed. Thanks so much, I enjoyed it.

Ed Drozda 26:38

Thank you. Folks, this is Ed Drozda and here at The Water Trough as always, I wanna wish you a healthy business with a reminder that the health of your business is predicated upon your own health. Self-awareness is a great way to ensure that you remain there. See you next time.