0 (2s):
Lights that spark Fire Nation JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs On Fire brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network with great shows like the salesman podcast today, we'll be focusing on building the next Napa valley in the Himalayas to drop these value bombs. I had brought Michael Juergens and EOFire studios. Michael is a wine expert author, professor drummer, international business consultants, founder of Bhutan Wine Company and owner of SoCal Rum and Drinking & Knowing Things and Fire Nation today, we'll be talking about why, why the Himalayas for the next Napa valley. We'll talk about the key challenges as well as this key phrase, drinking and knowing things.

0 (47s):
What the heck does that mean? You will have to find out when we get back from thanking our sponsors. According to a survey over two thirds of Americans are planning to travel this summer. This means that airlines restaurants and more have been ramping up their hiring, who do they turn to ZipRecruiter? ZipRecruiter technology finds qualified candidates for your job, and you can easily invite your top choices to apply. And right now you can try ZipRecruiter for free at ziprecruiter.com/fire. Are you looking for a proven business coach who has helped thousands of entrepreneurs, just like you to increase their profitability by an average of 104% per year, all for less money than it would cost to hire a full-time minimum wage employee schedule your free consultation today with Clay Clark, a former small business administration entrepreneur of the year at ThrivetimeShow.com/fire.

0 (1m 36s):
Michael say what's up the Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with.

1 (1m 45s):
What's up Fire Nation. And I guess one thing I believe about being successful is you have to cultivate a, a really a mindset of apathy. And what I mean by that is you, you cannot be come to outcome dependent because what ends up happening is as you go along and you're pursuing, you know, whatever the vision is, it's never going to work out exactly the way you want it to. And so if you're a hundred percent focused on the outcome, you never actually see the opportunities. And a good example of that is slack, right? You know, those guys didn't set out to make slack. They were doing something else and they created slack to help them pursue their other vision.

1 (2m 29s):
And then they looked at it and were like, oh, this is pretty cool. We should, we should market this thing. So yeah, this idea of, of not being outcome dependent, I think is, is critical to success. Not just in business, but in life too.

0 (2m 41s):
What is important though, is being action, dependence Fire Nation, because you never know what you're going to stumble upon. You never know what's going to lead to the next thing, but guess what? Sitting on your butt and just wondering, and trying to wait until you're perfect is going to result in absolutely nothing. So, as I mentioned during the intro, we're talking about the building, the next Napa valley in the Himalayas, what an audacious goal, but Hey, if we're not having a big, hairy, audacious goal in our life, what are we really doing on this earth? And Michael, I don't think you notice about me, but I actually tracked the Himalayas. I did a 12 day Annapurna circuit Trek, and it was an absolutely amazing experience.

0 (3m 24s):
And therefore I do know firsthand that it's a gorgeous place, but I also know that it's quite remote. So break it down for us. Why did you choose the Himalayas for the next Napa valley?

1 (3m 36s):
There's a piece of it that said, if I wanted to start a vineyard, I could just go down the street to pass a Robles or Temecula and start a vineyard and be like everybody else. And that's not interesting to me, but I think really the draw to the Himalayas, it wasn't like I set out to go there to explore where we could start a wine industry. I happened to be in Bhutan and I noticed how just magnificently beautiful the place was and how amazing the crops were there. And so I actually thought they already grew grapes there. So I went around asking everybody, what are the, the vineyards? I want to go see the vineyards while I'm here. And everyone was like, we don't have any. That's what I was like, well, you guys should, you need to get on this right away.

1 (4m 17s):
And I kinda, I coached the country around how I thought that they should do it. And I gave them all the information. I, I wrote up the business plan for, for them. And I just wanted them to do it. I thought it would be bitching if, if, if they did it and they, they came to me and said, we really, really want to do this as a country, but we really want to partner with you to do it. And I was like, that sounds like the coolest adventure, pretty much anyone could have in the wine world. So I'm in

0 (4m 42s):
The specifics because a lot of people have dreams. Like I have dreams. Kate has dreams, people listening to this podcast, they have dreams, but there's a difference between having dreams and actually feet on the grounds, accomplishing dreams. So let's get specific. Like, let's really talk this through because I think Fire Nation can maybe learn from the action that you're going to be taking about great ways they can go forward accomplishing their dream. So how are you accomplishing your dream of building the next Napa valley in the Himalayas?

1 (5m 16s):
Recognizing once again that it didn't start off as my dream to be involved. I just thought it would be super cool if they did it. But then once I, once I became involved and realized I could be a piece of this, and actually I think that Bhutan is probably the last country in the world that has the organic potential to grow amazing wine grapes that doesn't already do it like most places that can do it, have been doing it for thousands of years. And it was just to your point earlier, it's remote. And so, you know, Marco polo and the Roman army never got there with their handfuls of grapes. And so they never planted anything there. But what I'm doing is, is we've taken a very collaborative approach with the boonies country.

1 (5m 59s):
You know, there's, I don't know if you're familiar with, with Baton. You spent some time and obviously the Himalayas, but they have a concept called gross domestic happiness instead of gross domestic product, which is an amazing way to live, but they believe that what's more important is the happiness of their citizens rather than any arbitrary economic success. And so they have different pillars that, that guide the gross domestic happiness for us. So what we did is we didn't approach the wine industry as like, Hey, here's a way to make a few bucks. It was, here's a way that we think that this mashes extremely well with what you're trying to do with gross national happiness.

1 (6m 40s):
And, and then we went around and we got buy in from all of the various ministries of the government, you know, that would have a say in this, the ministry of agriculture, the ministry of economic affairs and so, so on and so forth. So we started with that then obviously, you know, there's a enormous amount of logistics to try to get grapes up to the Himalayas in vineyards planted, but we're, we've planted eight vineyards so far we're up to about, we've got a hundred acres or so in total vineyard land, but only about 50 acres are planted. We're we're still trying to experiment and see what's going to work there because no one knows it's never been done before.

1 (7m 21s):
And so, you know, back to your tactical, what do you do? Well, you do as much research as you can, but eventually you just got to grip it and rip it. And, and so we're doing that, but we're doing it in a very mindful fail forward kind of way.

0 (7m 35s):
And one of your most frustrating experiences thus far, and what's been one of your favorite experiences thus far?

1 (7m 42s):
Well, one of my most frustrating was I have about six weeks ago, we we'd spent months prepping these, these two new vineyards for planting and we removed 400 truckloads of rocks out of one of them. And, and, and I have, you know, 35,000 grapevines and the LA Valley and France that I'm trying to ship to Bhutan and, and a ship got stuck in the Suez canal,

0 (8m 11s):
Completely

1 (8m 11s):
Monkeyed up everything. And I was, you know, you only have a small window of time to plant, to plant grapes. And then the growing season's over. So I'm sitting there thinking, man, this is, this is going to throw a huge monkey wrench into things. And we ended up scrambling. I ended up flying the grapes to Kolkata India and then trucking them up into, into the Himalayas. And India was under, you know, complete lockdown because of COVID. And so it was Bhutan. And so we had to navigate around that and it was like every day high stress, my vines are going to die. My vineyards are going to, you know, not get planted. That was most frustrating. And I would say back to that point, you know, what's been the most triumphant and I'll say there was probably two.

1 (8m 56s):
One was when Bhutan, you know, the, the country granted that's the very first and only licensed to make wine in the country. That was pretty awesome. And, but, but the one I'd been riding pretty high on the last couple of weeks is that we finally got those vineyards planted at the last minute, scrambling through COVID. We navigated all that and the gods were watching, man. They were looking out for

0 (9m 21s):
Sometimes it kind of feels that way. When you're following your dreams, Fire Nation, when you're doing the right things, the gods, they seem to be watching, and we're going to be talking about some key challenges. We're gonna be talking about a phrase drinking and knowing things and so much more. When we get back from thanking our sponsors, looking for a business coach who has helped thousands of entrepreneurs, just like you to increase our profitability by an average of 104% per year, all for less money than it would cost to hire a full-time minimum wage employee, Fire Nation meet clay Clark clay has been coaching businesses just like yours since 2006. Yep. Even through the great recession. And he does it for less money than it would cost to hire a full-time minimum wage employee at a time when Inc magazine reports that by default 96% of businesses will fail.

0 (10m 6s):
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0 (10m 47s):
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0 (11m 31s):
ZipRecruiter's technology is so effective that four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. And right now you can try ZipRecruiter for free at this exclusive address. Zip recruiter.com/fire that's ziprecruiter.com/fire. One more time, ziprecruiter.com/fire. ZipRecruiter, the smartest way to hire. So Michael we're back ends. You did tell us a challenge you had in the Suez canal. Of course, I was a very frustrating experience. And you know, we've also talked about some other things that's gone along with this project, but let's really dive deep into just the overall key challenges of putting something together like this.

0 (12m 11s):
Cause what I want our listeners to be at a pull from this is what can they expect when they go after their big, hairy, audacious goals? Like what are the challenges that were presented to,

1 (12m 23s):
If you were going to start a vineyard, you'd start with, let's go get all of the weather data for the last 20 years and evaluate exactly what the weather data looked like. Number two is you'd go get soil analysis done and you'd evaluate, you know, the, the, the composition of the soil and the pH and everything else. Then you would analyze that information, that data and figure out exactly what is the best grape, you know, is it Merlow is a Cabernet and Chardonnay. What's the best root stock. What's the best vine spacing. What's the best trial. So you would have all this data. We didn't have any of that. I mean, there's not that many weather stages in Bhutan, the soil is radically diverse and no one knows there's no history of what's worked there.

1 (13m 3s):
So I think for, for us, this, we could have gotten into analysis paralysis pretty easily, but at the end of the day, you've just got to take some action. And that's what we did with that. We're finding all kinds of new things. Like, for example, we just planted a vineyard. I was just talking about this. And about two weeks in, I start getting photos from the guys working in the vineyards of this weird look and caterpillar that they'd never seen before. That was munching on our, our grapevines. And I sent it to our, our technical team. And they're like, we don't know what that is. And we asked the mutiny, he's like, do you know what this is? And they're like, we don't know what that is either. We know it's likes grapevines. So this, this doing stuff in an, in a new environment with no data poses risk and you, you can't let the risks get in the way of moving forward.

1 (13m 53s):
What you have to do is monitor the risk. And then, you know, we're, we're trying different ways of getting rid of the caterpillar. Now it's a Buddhist country, so you can't kill anything. You gotta sort of figure out ways of getting interested in something other than your grapevines. So that's the stuff I do on a daily basis,

0 (14m 11s):
Putting out fires, Fire Nation, putting out fires, not lighting fires, putting them out. That's what happens when you go out to these big, hairy audacious goals, and you have a phrase, Michael drinking and knowing things, what the heck does that mean?

1 (14m 27s):
Well, so I am working on, on becoming the 46th American to qualify as a master of wine. And so I'm pretty knowledgeable about wine. And my, my friends had been after me for years to, to give them wine recommendations. And so during the pandemic, I started just sending out an email to my friends saying here's a wine that I think is cool and you should go try it. And they would forward those emails and more and more people would, would email me and say, Hey, can you send them to me? And finally, this thing ended up being, you know, thousands of people around the world wanting to hear what, which wines I thought were dope. And so I actually packaged up the first 52 of them into a book.

1 (15m 8s):
And this is for that, the average Joe, who's curious about wine, but doesn't necessarily want to spend any time learning about it. They could take this and go through, you know, and do five minutes every week and drink a glass of wine. And at the end of the year, they'd be as knowledgeable about wine as most Somali eyes. And so that book actually, is it hit number one on Amazon? I think it was number two or three this morning. I checked right before I came on here. Just cause I figured where you might ask me about it, but yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's been a cool, a cool ride in the idea of, you know, we kind of screwed up blind in this country. We made, we made it this big snobby unapproachable thing. And I think that's really intimidating for people who are curious about it, but they're afraid of looking stupid or they're afraid of being judged.

1 (15m 51s):
And so it keeps them out of something that is truly a really joyful, enjoyable thing that brings people together, which is why we've been doing it for 10,000 years. You know, that's wines. Ben is part of the global culture, almost more than anything else.

0 (16m 5s):
This is a fantastic concept. Fire Nation of actually taking something that people do and probably feel pretty ignorant about and pretty naive about and say, Hey, let's make it fun. Let's make it really easy to do. Let's make it kind of like this ritual where you grab a glass of wine, you sit down and you read one thing and boom, before you know it, you've now you're gonna have some real knowledge. You be to impress your friends. You're gonna be at a whole drawer in conversations. So with all this being said, Michael, you've shared a lot about a lot here. I mean, building the next Napa valley and the Himalayas, the struggles, the challenges of frustrations, the excitement, the, the successes. You've had everything in between drinking and knowing things, that idea that you had, and now it's, you know, bestseller and Amazon and doing all these cool things, take the microphone, take us home.

0 (16m 49s):
Like what is the one thing that you really want to make sure Fire Nation gets from everything that we talked about here today, then share the best way that we can connect with you in everything you have going on. And then we'll say goodbye.

1 (17m 2s):
The things that I did earlier in my career as I chased, I chased stuff. And when you're chasing things, especially if you're chasing them for the wrong reasons, you never really achieve in my opinion, happiness and success. And so I adopted a mentality of, I don't know, about eight or 10 years ago, which is only do epic stuff with cool people. And you can apply that to business. You can apply that to your social life. You can apply it to pretty much any aspect of your life, but if the things that you're you're doing are not epic. And if the people that you were doing them with are not cool, then you are not maximizing the ROI on your time on this planet.

1 (17m 48s):
We only get limited time. So spend it in the, in the things that are going to bring you the most happiness and the most success. And you'll get there through doing epic stuff with cool people.

0 (17m 59s):
I think that could be a tattoo that I get across my arm. I mean, I've never gotten a tattoo in my life. I've kind of waited for the right moments, but do epic stuff with awesome people. I mean, to me, what better way to live life than doing epic stuff with awesome people, Fire Nation. You're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. You've been hanging out with MJ and JLD today and Michael, where can Fire Nation connect with you? How can we learn more about what you have going on any call to action for us, let us know.

1 (18m 31s):
People want to jump on the drinking and knowing things, bandwagon and start and start getting those recommendations. They can just go to drinking and knowing things.com and sign up, just put your email in and, and, and you'll start getting the emails to, if you're interested in the book, you can find it on Amazon. If you're interested in following me on, on, on Instagram, that's at drinking and knowing things or at drinking and knowing from a Bhutan perspective, Bhutan wine.com or at Bhutan Wine is a good way to watch our progress. There's some amazing pictures of the vineyards where we're not as great at updating the, the, the website as we probably should be. But, but Instagram usually has pretty current pictures of what's going on in the, in the vineyards.

1 (19m 13s):
And certainly people are welcome to connect with me on LinkedIn at, at Michael Juergens, for sure,

0 (19m 18s):
Fire Nation. I want you to head over to EOFire.com type Michael in the search bar. And the show notes page will pop up with links to everything that Michael talks about, links to everything that he just shared best shownotes in the biz. And Michael, thank you for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation today, for that we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side. Hey, Fire Nation today's value bomb content was brought to you by Michael and Fire Nation. If you've ever thought about creating a podcast of your own, then the podcast journal is for you. It is gorgeous. It is full leather, and it will guide you. Step-by-step in both the creation and the launch of your podcast in 50 days, visit the PodcastJournal.com, the PodcastJournal.com and I'll catch you there, or I'll catch you on the flip side.

0 (20m 7s):
According to a survey over two thirds of Americans are planning to travel this summer. This means that airlines restaurants and more have been ramping up their hiring, who do they turn to ZipRecruiter. ZipRecruiter's technology finds qualified candidates for your job, and you can easily invite your top choices to apply. And right now you can try ZipRecruiter for free at ziprecruiter.com/fire. Are you looking for a proven business coach who has helped thousands of entrepreneurs, just like you to increase their profitability by an average of 104% per year, all for less money than it would cost to hire a full-time minimum wage employee schedule your free consultation today with Clay Clark, a former small business administration entrepreneur of the year at thrivetimeshow.com slash fire.