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Kyle Akin is a veteran, business owner and a Grants Pass native.
Listen in as Kyle openly shares his successes and challenges during the pandemic and his encouraging words to business owners in the community and those who want to own a business in the future.
To learn more about Crescendo Spirits and their fine products ➡️https://www.crescendospirits.com/
Also, be sure and head over to your liqueur store in town and pickup some of their fine products. 😃
Transcription
Brian: Kyle Akin is a marine veteran who went to school to be a civil engineer. He fell in love with the Rogue Valley back in 2008 and knew he needed to create an opportunity greater than that of an employee if he wanted to live here. So he started Crescendo Spirits and then a few years later, Double Taps and Grants Pass.
He’s been living in the Rogue Valley on and off since 2008 with the goal of eventually living here full time when Kyle married his wife, a GP local six years ago, he’s been living here since.
On top of all that they’ll be having their first son in the upcoming weeks ahead. That’s exciting.
Kyle Aiken, welcome to Grants Pass VIP.
Kyle: Thanks for having me on the show.
Brian: Good deal. So other than what I already mentioned, is there anything else that you’d like to say about yourself and where people might know you from?
Kyle: Oh, just that I’ve been going to Club Northwest and I’m sure a lot of people know me from there and obviously from working at Double Taps for two years, a lot of people have come through and we’ve had a lot of events and we raised a lot of money for local efforts and events.
With Double Taps we really tried to integrate ourselves into what Grants Pass was doing. Might knw me from there.
Brian: Very cool. So, how did you end up here? What’s your life story up until this point?
Kyle: Well, I grew up in Northern California and native Mendocino County, five and a half hours from here.
Still have a mother that lives down in Laytonville, then joined the Marine Corps at 17.
Traveled the world a bit, was a Marine Embassy Guard was in the Marine Corps for five years overseas for about seven. After I got in the Marine Corps. I drove to Panama, went to Florida State there because I wanted to go back to Panama after the Marine Corps and worked on getting my degree.
My Dad always kind of had that plan for me growing up, “you’re going to go serve your country, you’re going to earn the right to vote and do right by your country. Then after that you’re going to use those benefits and go to college and get a degree.”
That was the life path I had for me for years. Got my civil engineer degree from Florida State to work for a large civil engineering firm there, Jacobs Engineering.
Then I transferred back to the Pacific Northwest.
So I went back to Bellevue Washington. And while I was up there working doing a lot of construction management stuff, civil engineering, since that’s my emphasis, discovered the Rogue Valley because I had a childhood friend that was living down in Talent and came on down there and discovered what a summer was like again.
You know, because living in Seattle, you don’t get a you don’t get a lot of summer and going from places like Florida, where it’s sunshine all day, and then go on and work at night for six months in Bellevue, Washington. In the middle of winter, kind of a bit of a contrast.
That summer I was rolled on down here on my motorcycle and saw my buddy and that was 2007 and fell in love with the place and decided I need to learn how to be down here. You need to figure it out.
So I got a civil engineering job down in a Rogue Valley and moved down shortly thereafter.
Unfortunately, the market crashed, shortly thereafter, right around 2008-2009. But I was in my master’s program got an MBA from Southern Oregon University.
In the meantime, I got laid off from my civil engineering job because all the construction kind of disappeared, got picked up by another company. Actually worked for a lot of companies in the interim as a civil engineer and went to Yosemite worked as a civil engineer doing the Historic Ahwahnee Upgrade and Yosemite lived there for about a year and got another opportunity to come back to Grants Pass, come back to the Rogue Valley and work on another construction project that was nearby.
Discovered Club Northwest, meet my wife and I fell in love.
Shortly thereafter the project ended and I had to go to Eugene and my wife and I pursued a long distance relationship while I was in Eugene working on another construction project and decided it was time.
I was in my mid 30s by then, and decided it’s time for me to raise a family, you know, meet a wife settle down and wanted to do all that.
So I made a stand in Eugene because I was tired of relocating because I had had over 20 addresses and 14 years. So I made a stand, bought a house in Eugene, and that’s where I started Crescendo Spirits.
I had a lot of people who believed in me that were willing to work with me and invest in my company and we now have 60 investors and Crescendo Spirits, over the years since then that was 2013 that I started it.
It started up in Eugene and all time I wanted to still be down here in the Rogue Valley.
My wife and I finally decided to go for it. She’s a fourth grade Elementary School Teacher in Rogue River.
It’s just been great move back down rented out my house and Eugene and on December 15, 2017 started Double Taps, because I wanted to have something to do here and I wanted to contribute and be part of the Grants Pass community professionally.
I mean, I was with Crescendo Spirits, you know, via bars and restaurants and liquor stores carrying my Distilled Spirits doing different shows and events, but I wanted something more personal more local, and that’s where Double Taps came from.
So we decided to start that, right there in the Grants Pass Shopping Center, here we are two years later. And unfortunately, Double Taps didn’t really survive the COVID thing with me because I found that Crescendo Spirits has kind of exploded on a different scene.
Also we’re about to have a baby, and Double Taps, probably about some 75% of my workload was working with Double Taps.
So while it was fascinating and great to meet everybody, a lot of customers really loved our spot. I really found that between COVID and reopening, and so forth, it just it was time for somebody else to take up that torch.
So we’re in the middle of selling the business to a friend of mine, who is going to be reopening it somewhere in Grants Pass. So we’re not telling anybody where yet because obviously, we want to make sure everything works out right.
But you’ll be seeing Double Taps soon, it just won’t be under my management.
But in the meantime, know that we are doing well here in Grants Pass and we’re soon to have a son. And that Crescendo Spirits is still alive and well and carried in all your local spots.
Brian: That’s fabulous. What a story.
So when you first started Crescendo Spirits, had you ever had any type of business before?
I know you had worked as a civil engineer at all these different places?
Or was that a completely new thing for you?
Kyle: I come from a family of entrepreneurs, there’s was always that hidden kind of impetus to do something on my own. And I always thought that God had that intention for me all along, and I strongly believe in a path that’s is a destiny, if you will.
I believe that things reveal themselves through different parts of your life.
And so for me, I’m construction management being a civil engineer. I love it, absolutely love being outside working in heavy infrastructure construction. We’ve done dams, we’ve done bridges. We’ve done wastewater plants, roads, you name it. But the problem is, is that it’s very much a nomadic lifestyle for a person in that occupation.
With me wanting to start a family and have kids, and really get known in a community and develop my relationships within a community, that job profile didn’t really meet that.
So it required that I think outside the box, that I learned what it’s like to really strike out on your own. And don’t get me wrong, there’s always been…for years I’ve been working on putting those tools in my toolbox, you know, interviewing all the different business owners that I’ve worked with over the years getting my MBA from Southern Oregon.
Learning how to do the marketing and learning how to do a business plan, and so forth, taking care of my finances, developing relationships, everything has essentially been towards that end.
It’s not something that you just wake up one day and go, “I’m gonna own a business.”
Like, in order to properly open a business, you really, it takes time and thought, and setting up the right thing. If you want to be successful, and you just, I mean, I’m sure there are people that wake up one day and just go, you know, I want to do something and they go do it and they’re successful. That’s great.
That’s not how my personality works. I want to be as prepared as I can.
So I take the classes and I get the life experience. But yeah, I always kind of fully expected that one day I was going to have to do my own thing. If I was going to end up getting what I wanted out of life. That did eventually come in Eugene when I made my stand, and I knew I was going to have to pay the price, and sure enough, the project ended and there wasn’t anything else in that particular area that I could go to. So that necessitated the need to start an opportunity.
Brian: So why liquors, why spirits, what led you in that direction?
Kyle: A lot of it is taken a look at your life and what do you do well in your life, and what have you learned in your life, how people reacted to things in your life. And in my case, one of the things I’ve done for years was make homemade limoncello which in of itself is a very complicated process.
But it’s fun and there’s always been an air of mystery around the concept of spirits and the concept of making alcohol.
You take the show Moonshiners, for example. The government keeps a very much an air of mystery around the concept of spirits, and so, making limoncello in my own way, I got to be a little bit of a part of that environment.
My friends who own wineries were always hitting me up for limoncello, you know because they wanted to have it and serve it for fun under the table with their friends and so forth. And just kind of a really, really fun thing to do.
Then, my now wife, she suggested one day that we do lime, and while seeming like an easy step to the left, it was something that made you scratch your head and go, Well, I’ve never ever done that before.
And I don’t think I’ve ever seen that. So we did it. It tasted amazing.
Fast forward to where I’m sitting there scratching my chin up in Eugene and on my property and, you know, thinking about where am I going to go next and it goes well, people really liked my limoncello.
Okay, that’s good. People always said I should start my own business with that. That seems like a good idea.
I mean, it’s a pretty generic story. I think, you know, hey, you make good cookies, you should start a business. Yeah, you know, how many times has that been said?
Oh, you should go on Shark Tank. Yeah. If I had a nickel, but I really seriously contemplated it there.
I’m going okay, wineries and breweries have blown up that everybody loves wineries and breweries don’t see many distilleries running around, that could be a good niche to get in.
There doesn’t seem to be many people sitting in that niche. And when did my market research there aren’t any lime liquors out there and so, okay, let’s do that.
I’m like, okay, well, what’s a better way to even fully protect my niche?
Well, let’s make it organic.
You know, like I’m a civil engineer. I have a passion for paperwork. I know everybody says how hard it is how much of a pain it is but can’t be that bad.
It turned out it wasn’t as bad as people make it sound, not if you know how to do paperwork and you’re used to dealing with organized institutions.
So we decided to do the organic bit and then that actually helped the formula helped refine everything and made our product even better. And because our products have less sugar in them, they have a third sugar of normal liquors and their flavors, amazing.
We’ve taken metals for our products all the way over the Berlin. I’ve shipped my product across the pond and we’re you know, we got a bronze medal in Berlin, which was pretty phenomenal, because that’s a really tough, tough market for anything that isn’t herbal type.
And we’ve had double golds and for our vodka and Seattle and Denver and so forth.
We’ve had an amazing, amazing response to our products.
But yeah, just the the idea to do distillery things seemed really neat, really cool, and seemed like something we could do. And so we did it. And my primary investor, my main partners, my former boss, and he brought him on board, he invested, I invested my own money, put everything, or I put everything together in Eugene. And then he lives in, he lives in Redmond.
So he contributed moral support and financial support, and put together the business and like I said, it’s been a long road.
In the meantime, we’ve done three investment raises, raised over half a million dollars, and we’re at 61 investors. We even have an investors all the way from Colorado to Taiwan.
So we have a real interesting dichotomy in our investor pool. Yeah, that’s kind of the story of where Crescendo came from.
I just noticed a niche there next to no, there’s like three organic distilleries in the United States and we’re one of them and there weren’t any citrus organic liquors on the market at that time, saw a niche, we decided to jump in it.
Brian: That’s great. So, you’ve done the distillery business, you’ve done the tap room restaurant business, would you recommend either of these industries to other people?
Kyle: Um, the distillery industry while being fun, isn’t ready yet.
The average consumer does not even stop to consider the existence of distilleries. It’s been really tough like, it seems like in most industries where there’s a high barrier to entry which distilling does have a high barrier In the entry, we have more permits than I can name. And both federal, state, local, you name it everything records we have to maintain.
We’re the most highly regulated industry you can imagine. We are the most highly taxed industry that exists.
Even in terms of the state we are so marginalized by the state and even local governments. The League of Oregon Cities is against us.
This isn’t just my personal opinion, this is actual fact.
So let’s go back to how wineries and breweries mainly when they first start out how they make their money.
They make their money, take Weekend Brewing Company, for example.
Phenomenal company, phenomenal people.
Great response in the community. People love them, adore them and support them because of their tasting room, where they’re at they come in people interact with them. They sit for days having beers, having a great thing.
But then you take an example like Sundance Distilling, great guy, great company, great products.
He’s forced to relocate out into basically out on Foothill or close to Foothill over by Edgewater. Nobody knows he exists, and he’s a local Grants Pass distillery.
And when I say nobody, yes, I know there’s the occasional person that does, but 99% of the people in Grants Pass don’t know there’s the distillery in Grants Pass.
To go back they go back to that. So a brewery makes his money out of his tasting room primarily. That’s how they exist. That’s how they’re able to grow. They develop their grassroots support.
And they can do that because the money that they make in their tasting room is the money, they’re allowed to keep.
Now take a distillery for example, I go down let’s say hypothetically I opened my tasting room on sixth and G, right there on the corner prime place everybody’s walking by.
People want to come by, let’s say I get swamped. Let’s say I’m as successful as anybody else. And I get 100 people coming in and enjoying cocktails and my bottles, from me that I make, the same way somebody would buy beer to go or what not.
My tax rate from the first $10,000 I make gross is 28% gross sales tax to the state. Now once I go above 10,000, it increases to 42%. So as I increase in success, the hammer comes down harder, and the government greedily reaches in and scrapes more cash out of my bank account. It gets even harder to be successful as you are more successful.
Brian: Yeah.
Kyle: It’s something that we add to the Distillers Guild. We’re a board member.
We’ve been fighting for three years to get a bill passed, up in Salem to address this issue.
Every year, the League of Oregon Cities, which includes Grants Pass and everybody else, and the state, even Hood River distillers as opposed us, again and again and again.
Now why because for example, the League of Oregon Cities derives their money from the General Fund, which is where this money goes. and that in turn is what supports our community.
So anything that jeopardizes that money in their local community, they’re against, it’s very short sighted.
And that if you have a successful business in your community, they support your community. Correct. And so they’re strangling the goose to get the gold.
In terms of being a distillery, I guess what it really comes down to and something that Oregon Distilleries have had to learn is that we can’t make money in Oregon. So it’s ironic that we’re Oregon companies that love our Oregon customers and want to support that.
But the average Oregonian doesn’t notice the distilleries in their minutes. For whatever reason, I mean, people have their own life choices like it’s not a non disgruntled against them. They don’t notice distilleries in their midst because it’s not, we haven’t had the money the market that we exist, we can’t tell them that we exist or if we can we can only do it via facets that absolutely limited disbursement.
Two the state just completely marginalizes us and won’t pass a bill to support us.
And three, even our local governments don’t support our businesses.
So while we have to look at Oregon as solely a manufacturing location, we love it.
We live here, we pay our taxes. But truthfully, in order to make money we have to go out out of the state, which is where we make the majority of our money.
We’re in Costco in Washington. Now we’re at Whole Foods in California. We’ve done amazing outside of Oregon. That’s really sad.
I mean, I’d love to be able to be successful here in Oregon. You take Cannon Beach Distillery, and amazing company up in Cannon Beach that was making $1.4 million out of their tasting room, just simply from tourist sales.
They had no real distribution outside of that.
They just catered the tourist that man made 1.4 million a year.
By any rights, he should be a successful business owner. Right?
Brian: Hmm.
Kyle: I mean, if I may $1.4 million, I would consider myself to be successful.
However, the problem is is the state. He still owes $675,000 to him every year for that, off the top. And by the time you got done with the personnel, you know, you’re by paying your employees paying your rent, paying all your overhead all your inventory, all your raw material costs. He lost money. That’s the long explenation.
The short of it is is if you plan on selling or opening a distillery in Oregon, be prepared for hard times.
Brian: Yeah.
Kyle: It is very brutal. It’s been six years and now we’re finally starting to make money. And that money isn’t coming from Oregon.
So what I recommend that absolutely not.
I mean, if you can stand it, if you could stand bleeding that long and go for it. Aside from that, I mean, it is amazing…let’s see, I’ve grown immensely. It teaches you so many things.
I mean, if you want to go to the school of hard knocks where you absolutely have to learn or die, then yeah, absolutely owning a distillery is for you. But it but it is an incredible challenge.
And if you can make it, it can be incredibly lucrative, if you can make it.
Unfortunately, we have more distilleries closing than we do opening. And while back there were a bunch of people opening up distilleries just like myself, because we thought that Oregon was going to support the new boom, because we’re like, well, it’s great.
Because let’s face it in the northwest, we love our beverages. And I’m not just talking about alcohol. We love our gourmet coffee, our Dutch Bros. We love our kombucha or toucans, you know, we love our beers, our local beer companies, we love our wines. We love our local wineries, even our water is amazing.
You name it. We love our liquids in the Northwest.
And we have amazing liquids in Northwest.
It just made sense that distilleries were going to boom. So a lot of us got in there at the same time.
And suddenly the government is just applauding and Oh, we’ve done such an amazing job. Oh, we’ve done so well. The LLC is going, you’re welcome distilleries.
You are so welcome, while patting themselves on the back.
And then three years goes by and we find out exactly what it is. and now suddenly they have all these distilleries closing because you can only bleed for so long before you die.
Brian: Hmm.
Kyle: Sorry to use this, you got to say stepped on it a little bit of a subject there and I got on my soapbox.
I’ve done it on the radio. We’ve done it all over the state.
Still, we can’t get anything move forward. In fact, we, that’s what caused me to open my taproom a few years back was I was talking to a local brewery owner. And I asked him one day, I was like, So how have you been doing?
Oh, well, I’ve been open for six months. So I’m like, Oh, that’s great. Like, how are you doing financially because I knew where I was after six months.
And he goes, well, actually, if you know, aside from not paying myself a salary, I’m breaking even.
It completely floored me.
After six months, I wasn’t there after three years. It absolutely blew me away.
So I finally asked him like, well, what’s your tax rate?
Oh, well, we pay, you know, like $1.80 for every keg that we have, we have to sell. If you know how big kegs are. There’s a a whole lot of beers and that keg. And if you’re making $5 a pint, and you’re selling X amount of pints out of that you’re paying $1.80 I think it was for 1800 dollars and gross sales.
Brian: What do you think is the reason for that discrepancy?
What do they have against the distilleries versus the brew houses?
Kyle: Well, for one, and you know this, so breweries and wineries fought for years to get out from under that thumb, and they did, they did, they finally did it.
I mean, that was a fight that was 20, 30 years ago. And they did and they lobbied and there’s a lot of money in it. And they were able to get good lobbyists in there and they were able to get bills passed.
Everything that we’ve just started doing. They have a very strong lobby up and Salem that keeps serves as a watchdog over their industry and anytime a politician even gets near it, you know, they have discussions, rightfully so it’s a very good system for them it works.
They were able to get it done. And now we’re having to go through our pains.
The problem lies in. The state doesn’t want to reduce the amount of money that they receive from us. Even though we’ve already shown and proven that if you allow us to succeed, we’re not saying we don’t want to pay taxes.
Definitely don’t get the wrong idea. Everybody pays taxes.
Well, I mean, wineries pretty much don’t, but they pay revenue taxes.
But as far as excise taxes and retail taxes, everybody does, you know, marijuana pays 17%. You know, so it’s not that we don’t want to pay it.
It’s just that we don’t want to pay it to the point to where we’re emaciated and we eventually have to close. Or find opportunity elsewhere, which is what their what their policies do.
So as far as like, why is it like that? I mean, that’s just what it is the government wants their money. They don’t want it reduced. Even though we’ve shown that, because we’re so strangled, we can only produce X amount of dollars, and you’re never going to get any more. But if you reduce the amount of the tax burden on us, we’re allowed to grow.
Therefore, our revenue grows, therefore, you end up collecting more money, but they’re not willing to take that opportunity or that chance. It’s a conundrum.
I don’t feel like there’s really an economist among them. It’s their, we’ve shown it to them. And they adopted an attitude up and Salem is that we don’t need it.
The response we got back this year was you know, we got more pressing things going on. I think last year was, we feel like you guys aren’t really a priority. You know, nobody’s outwardly saying no.
But they keep telling us we’re not worth time. Back to the taxes, we that’s what led me to starting the idea of starting a taproom. And I’m going, okay well, I want to have a child I need to develop business things need to go well.
So I’m going to start a tap room here in Grants Pass, and it’s good. We have a local presence. We got a local crowd, I’m sure it’ll support us. And so I did, I got started and within a couple months, got it opened up. And it was a great business.
We got a lot of good support, definitely encountered some challenges of owning a restaurant and taproom. In the end, it took a significant amount of time and if I had the time to work it definitely personally it would do great.
Unfortunately that particular location is not conducive to business anymore with the way the current business environment is and with the where people make their purchases nowadays, and where people want to go to restaurants and so forth, it’s it’s no longer a desirable location. And so that was my mistake actually putting it there, but my buddy should be able to do better and he’s picking a better spot to put it in.
So as far as what I recommend a taproom or restaurant, if you no longer want to have a life, it’s yourself. But you love interacting with people in general, because I’ve met tons of amazing people. I’ve met a lot of not so amazing people as well.
In the end, I see it as a very positive experience. But I also find that the level of time and effort that it takes in order to manage something as simple. I mean, restaurants in the basic premise are not that complicated, right?
There rooms where people eat and drink. And then you have to manage the kitchen where you make the food for the room, and then concentrate on the bar where you make the drinks for the room.
You know, it’s not really overly complicated. I mean, there’s a few things that make it successful, you know, your menu, your location, location, location, general atmosphere, your population, but the amount of time it takes is overwhelming.
Owning a business isn’t for everyone. And, if you want to be in a public eye and you do want to deal with public judgment, then that’s definitely how you do it. I had to deal with a lot of good opinions and a deal with a lot of bad opinions.
How to deal with people on their good days, had to deal with people on their bad days, had to deal with different personalities, learned a lot about people, how people interact with other people in different situations.
I mean, all and all I would consider it a good experience.
Would I do it again? Probably not, unless it was connected with Crescendo. If it’s connected with Crescendo and we had an actual restaurant we’re opening, then that mean my distillery is probably at a location where I could hire a manager to run that location. In which case, that’s fine. I don’t mind doing it.
Owning a business isn’t for everybody. You have to be resilient.
Admire all those people out there who have taken the plunge. I always do. employees and nothing against employees. Okay, I’ve been an employee. That’s a great deal, right?
But there is nothing, that if you haven’t been a business owner, you will not understand the stress levels and everything else that go into it.
They truly are the heroes of the community.
Because they take care of the employees, they take care of the government, they pay the taxes, everything that they go through.
Even if it’s a franchise, we’ve seen a lot of political stuff going on.
Oh, it’s okay to burn down a Target because it’s a franchise, or it’s a corporation actually was what I was told.
It’s like, no, that’s still owned by somebody in your community.
Be very, very happy that you have businesses in your community. If you didn’t have businesses in your community, you wouldn’t have a community.
Brian: Absolutely. Absolutely.
So with Crescendo now, what’s your top selling product? Is it the limoncello?
Kyle: Yeah, it’s actually our limoncello. That is a very, very popular popular item.
We’re in 170 stores across the state. We’re in five states. I said, we’re in Costco, and Washington.
Brian: Fabulous.
Kyle: And we’re in Whole Foods in California. And we’re even, we’re in Total Wine in Washington as well.
But yeah, our limoncello is amazing. It’s organic, which I know a lot of people roll their eyes at.
But trust me, it is better for you when it’s a liquor because all that junk that gets put into other liquor stores is just, it’s not good for you. And not saying that alcohol in general is the best for you. But if you’re going to do it, do it right. Drinking our stuff. That’s how you do it right.
Sorry. I might sound a little conceded saying that, but that’s how you do it, right.
Our vodka and our liqueurs are amazing. They won multiple awards all over the place. We’re very widely distributed. People try it. Love it. It’s always getting a word out there. That’s the challenge.
Brian: Yeah, absolutely.
If we were to talk again, say like a year from now, what would have had to have happened over the last 12 months for you to feel happy with your progress concerning your life and business?
Kyle: Oh, I’m already there.
I’m very happy where we’re at in business where we’ve grown. You know, we’re pursuing other facets of business in our distillery that that we didn’t know where there.
Selling industrial ethanol now. So anybody who’s doing any kind of processing, whether it’s cannabis, whether it’s hemp, whether it’s doing tinctures, whether it’s making perfumes we’ve identified alternative products that we can sell sanitizer, we were able to help our communities.
We sold over 1,000 gallons of sanitizer during these COVID months.
So we’re very blessed to have had the ability to help protect our communities.
Got picked up by Costco as a regular product during the same timeframe.
COVID might have shut down my tap room but it certainly blew up my distillery where I’m extraordinarily pleased with where Crescendo has gone this year.
If anything, I would say my goals would be to expand our industrial ethanol sales in this state and other states.
Let people know that there’s alternatives out there to competitors, and also maybe pick up another state with Costco. That would be my goal for the next year. And oh, and to have my buddy open Double Taps and be immensely successful on his part. That’s yeah, that’s what I would like to bless him with.
Brian: So what are the obstacles stand in your way of getting there?
Kyle: Oh, just your normal marketing, letting people know that we do it. Do these things and letting people know that we exist.
Like I said, it’s weird as a distillery has been around for six years and we have been living in this community, sometimes you feel kind have like an invisible man. It’s getting the word out and having people spread the word that somebody like us exists and that we’ve done these things.
So that’s the main goal. We have amazing products, we had an amazing place at Double Taps, we’ve done amazing things. It’s finding the people that supported the marketing and so forth. That’s the main challenge.
Brian: Fabulous. Well, what could a listener do, anyone who’s listening out there who’s interested in Crescendos Spirits, where would you direct them to find out more about it?
Well, if you wanted to try our product, just go to your nearest liquor store were there. I would say go to our website, www.crescendospirits.com and go to your local bar and ask for it.
Chances are they’re carrying it and if not, ask them too because chances are they have heard of us and demand creates demand.
Brian: Very cool.
Hey, Kyle Aiken, thank you so much for being on Grants Pass VIP. Kyle Akin with Crescendo Spirits, folks.
Thank you.
Kyle: All right. Thank you for having me.
Brian’s Closing Thoughts: I was really happy to speak with Kyle.
He’s one of those people that I’ve seen around for quite a while and he’s moving from one place to the other so quickly, I’ve never had a chance to really have a decent conversation with him.
So I was happy, we got a chance to sit down. It’s really interesting, there’s a whole bunch about what he said that I really enjoyed.
I want to point out a couple things.
The first thing was when he was discussing the politics, and how it really intertwined everything that he was doing with his restaurant and with his distillery, look at the situation with taxation, whether you agreed with it or not. You can’t ignore the politics.
They affect business so directly, and like he said, businesses are the lifeblood of any area. So there has to be a way around the situation at some point.
I’m interested to hear other perspectives from other people in the community regarding this, but you can’t get away from politics. We’d all like to get so divisive, but there’s really no way around it.
Politics affects everybody.
So if you want to have an effect on the world, you’re going to have to take a position one way or the other on some of these political issues.
One thing I could tell you that’s really inspiring about Kyle is his adventurous attitude.
You look at how he’s handled life and everything else. He just kind of goes in a direction that you never would have seen coming from the last thing he was doing.
So he has this distillery.
He has Crescendo that he’d been working with for a while, and then all of a sudden he opens up, Double Taps. And then you know, before that everything that he had worked as a civil engineer, you would have never guessed him going into those fields.
I think a lot of people can learn from that.
We can all use a little more of an adventurous attitude like Kyle has.
I also really enjoyed his brutal honesty. He doesn’t really care that much about offending anybody or anything else. He just comes right out and says what he thinks. That’s commendable.
He’s got a lot of confidence with where he’s going.
And that little thing that he mentioned about having that attitude of destiny, that things are already set up for you, you just kind of go out and discover them. That’s really cool.
And I can’t wait to see what’s coming out from Kyle in the future with crescendo and anything else he decides to do.