EP296: From Carpenter to Wine Cellar Builder: How Jonathan Hanvy Found a Profitable Niche

I love it. I love it. Well, I'm here and I'm happy to uh share with you any information I may have.

Gotcha. My name's uh John Hanvey. I live out here in the great city of New Orleans, Louisiana, known for great food, great wine. Um grew up in the restaurant business for many years. Um Hurricane Katrina happened, cut my teeth on rebuilding the city, which was very important to me, and uh really screwed up a lot of houses, a lot of flooring, a lot of cabinets, a lot of fences, and uh kind of worked my way through the city getting better at carpentry and the building trades. Um, like everyone else, 2008 market crash happened right back into restaurants, and that's when I became uh certified Sommelier and was really growing through the ranks for some of the uh biggest restaurants out here in New Orleans. Uh, but building always had a calling for me. So I went back to buildings just a few years later, um, leading me pretty much to this point here.

Small yeah, yeah. Very

We're Americans and it's a French word. We all pronounce it wrong.

It's just uh somebody who is in the business of serving wine to the public. It's a French word um typically reserved for a um a trade of whenever you go to a restaurant, they have a chef who handles the food and a sommelier handles the wine list.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, there's two different schools. Um the one that I went through is called the Court of Master Sommigers that's built specifically for restaurants where they have um developed uh a blind tasting um we'll call it system for identifying different wines, where they come from and what makes them unique to that region.

So that's definitely part of it. Yeah, no, that's definitely part of it. But I think more importantly, it's it's finding out what flavor profiles that particular guest has and matching the guest with the wine. Gotcha.

Absolutely. Yeah, kind of like drinking coffee. Do you like a lot of sugar, a little bit of cream, or do you drink it black? Everybody's got different flavor profiles, so matching the personality and flavor profile to the guest is uh probably the hardest thing.

Yeah. All

Yeah, I worked for Emerald Legossi, the BAM guy. Um it was one of the oldest restaurants in New Orleans called Emerald Delmonico. It was a sister restaurant of the famous restaurant from New York called uh simply Delmonico, it was the first full service restaurant in uh New York. Emerald bought this building, opened up a fine dining restaurant there, and I started soon after and worked there for gosh, maybe 10 years.

It was a little bit of everything. I was under the same impression as maybe 90% of all other people in the trades are like I do everything, that's how you make the most amount of money. And that doesn't always go well from changing toilets one day to building a $20,000 bookcase. Like you're kind of all over the place. So yeah. Yeah. A lot of failures along the way.

That's exactly right. Yeah.

It was scary. I had, you know, two small children at home. Um, it was bad all over the country. It was just especially bad in New Orleans because by the time because Katrina happened in 2004. So by the time 2008 happened, the whole country was under the same stress as we were. But with us, the city was still trying to recover. Funds were drying up, all of the storm chasers left. I was sitting there looking at my family, going, What do I do? Um, I really love building things, but there's just no money out there. Um, so I decided to go back into restaurants and um reached back out to my old boss, and they said, Come back, we'll put you in a management program. Um so it was exciting for a little while. But as you know, working, or maybe you don't know, it working in restaurants comes with a whole different lifestyle. It's nights, weekends, holidays. It's it's a big sacrifice, and especially when you're in the Sommelier program, um, there's lots of extra things. It's it's extra late nights. It's hey, this rich guy wants to put you on a private jet and fly to Napa for the weekend. Um it's a lifestyle that's great for when you're in your 20s, but when you're in your 30s and 40s, it's not quite conducive for where I was in my life at that point.

No, but we No, but we'd have to go to dinner parties and mansions and things like that and and pour wine for people and it's a lot of extra things and yeah.

You know, it was a slow trickle. Um, there was a guy that I was waiting tables with over there that was a really good painter. I said, hey, let's team up on the side. So um maybe on a Monday and Tuesdays when we were off, we go out and paint and like, hey, can you repair my deck while you're here? And so we started kind of teaming up and and doing side jobs. And I just really love building. Like I just love building things. I've always been drawn to carpentry. And then I slowly started pushing my way back out of the restaurant, realizing that it just wasn't a fit for me in my lifestyle at the time, and um started buying tools and just really going hard in the paint when it comes to carpentry, which is expensive. You know, every job you get, you buy that, you know, a thousand dollar tool, that five thousand dollar tool, and you hone your skill, you get better. I really thought that was the way to make a living in business was to get really good at doing the work.

You know, it's total fear. Like you keep running out of money after every job, and you tell yourself, I'll just get better at estimating. Or the job took a little too long and you overran this, or you so you you just always kind of broke and you're really exhausted all the time. And I think that's a pretty common story that most people can relate to that are in the trades. Um, if I just hire some people and have them do it for me, then I got to raise my prices, and nobody's gonna pay that much money for for the product that I'm serving. Um you just you don't know, there's no school, there's no way of knowing the proper way to run a business. But it was it was hard. And, you know, I'm a I'm 53 now, so I was around 50 when I joined, and your body starts breaking down and you realize this is not sustainable. Um, I don't know what to do. I'm always broke, I have no direction. And then in the back of your mind, there's this itch where you see other people that are successful, and you just ask one question what are they doing that I'm not? There's gotta be a way to do this. So you just start going down rabbit holes and trying new things. And um so that was that was what happened back then was just running out of money and being exhausted all the time.

I do, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, so I'm not particularly passionate about doing bathrooms, kitchens. It's heavily, heavily competitive. You got guys out there with showrooms and and salespeople, and um, and I'm just not crazy passionate about it. I was like, you know what, I really do enjoy high, high-end trim carpentry. So I was looking into like doing like spiral staircases and just work for general contractors where I'm just an official subcontractor. So we have our weekly meetings with the group, and I can't remember how it came up, but I mentioned that I'm a I'm a certified summelier previously in my career, and I felt like everybody was just staring at me like, John, uh you you don't see what everybody else sees on this phone call. And I'm like, I really don't know what y'all are talking about. Like, you you need to build wine cellars. And I'm still limiting belief structure. Who in the how many people out there need a wine cellar? I mean, come on, all 10 people? Like, I'll go broke. Like, there's no way there's enough business out there to build wine cellars full time. Like maybe I can do it on the side, and you start having this conversation in your head. That's not true. And I didn't get, and I knew this was a good idea because I didn't get excited like all the other shiny objects that were out there in front of me with kitchens or bathrooms, or let's buy a horse trailer and turn it into a bar and go to weddings, or or whatever weird ideas that all of us uh pseudo-entrepreneurs have. This one I was not particularly enthusiastic about. I was calm, cool, collected. I said, let me just sleep on this, let me think about this deeper. I think that my guys in my group have a good point here. So I kind of sat on it for a few days and it just felt right. And I kind of lived my life out of a lot of instinct. And this one felt like it had legs, and I said, And at that point, I had read all the books, I had attended all the seminars. I knew how to think about this rationally and not emotionally. Um, but it did feel right all at the same time. So I feel like the stars aligned and it was just, hey, let's just go all in, burn the ships, let's just see what happens. I'm 53. It's either now or never. So that's how I arrived at that point. I'll never forget that phone call though, because it kind of shifted the next few years of my life.

I did know it was gonna be the right decision, and I didn't care. I had failed at everything else, you know, happily failed at everything else. But there's something about me like I just I can't, I can't stop. And maybe something about my age being 53 and many, many years of of having a business, being successful for a year or two, and then things kind of fall apart, and then you pick back up. And I said, let's just let's just do this, you know. Um it's just what once you make that decision of I'm gonna quit smoking, I just don't smoke anymore, I'm not a smoker. Or I work out, I go jogging every morning at 7 a.m. That's just what I do. It's not up for question. I just reached that point in um my career and my life. It's it's less about the business and more about the the mindset, if you will. It felt right. Um, trust your gut. And I figured why not? Like, let's just go in. Man, I can't imagine anything cooler than hanging out with a bunch of rich guys buying me wine. Like, they're the coolest, and this is their hobby. This is what they do to like get away from life and to relax. It's their it's their man cave. Whenever they need to relax, they go in and crack open a $400 bottle of wine and just kind of meditate and reflect on life. It's their cigar or their fishing or they're going to the gun range. It's it's their way of relaxing, it's their hobby. So I just thought that would be the the most fun way to make money. And um, yeah. So hopefully that answers your question, how I got there.

Yeah, my wine shirts.

Yeah, I went on Amazon, spent a hundred dollars on maybe ten shirts. Like it wasn't expensive, but yeah, yeah.

It is every day, probably on average, three to five times a day. I get stopped by store clerks in the gas stations. Everywhere I go, somebody's commenting on my shirt and being a shameless uh marketer is I tell everybody that I build wine cellars. I wear these shirts because I build wine cellars, and that's it. Not like, hey, if you know anybody, just like, oh, I'm a professional wine cellar builder out here in New Orleans. And if they inquire, like, oh, we love wine. My uncle was just looking for somebody, or maybe we'll just have a conversation about wine and what they enjoy drinking, you know. So I'm just kind of known as the wine shirt guy.

Yeah, yeah. It's kind of was not really planned. I put zero thought into it, but then when I started to get feedback, I'm like, okay, that's it. Every day the wine shirt comes on, even on the weekends. It kind of drives my wife crazy because everywhere we go, like I have my wine shirt on even on the weekends.

Uh so it rarely comes off.

They say love love the shirt, and then we continue on. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it just hits home almost every time.

Oh, that's a that's a great point. And that's really why I do the Hawaiian shirt. It's a more casual thing. I thought long and hard about what does drinking wine and having a wine seller mean to a very, very busy, successful businessman or doctor or surgeon. Um, this is their time to relax. And wine kind of has this pretentiousness uh built around it that us as samoyees are always trying to break down and like, let's not be pretentious. You enjoy what you enjoy. So that was quite deliberate of me not dressing in a three-piece suit when I show up to somebody's house because it may remind them of what they do all day long. And the point of having a wine cellar is it's a little piece of vacation when they get home. So that's why I try to be a little bit more casual, not to mention what are all my competitors doing. Not that I have a lot of competitors here, but I look at the competitors throughout the nation and they all have the branded shirt or they wear a uh a sports coat. They all look the same. So after reading some of these books um on business, whatever my competition's doing, I'm gonna try my best to do the opposite and really stand out.

Yeah, typically, whenever you're trying to run a business, you're like doing the traditional thing of trying to capture leads through uh we'll call it traditional sources, which is uh Google and meta-ads. I'm not sure that these high net worth guys are on those things. They may be, and I am doing that. But I decided to go all in by printing out flyers, dropping it at every single wine shop throughout the whole city multiple times um a month, introducing myself, hanging out in those spaces, playing golf, talking to people in the in the um golf clubs in the uh in the clubhouses. And then my wife is connected and just loves history. She's in the history field for has been for many years. So she's connected with a lot of these high society organizations um that are part of the old money of New Orleans. She's completely unaware that this is even cool, by the way. She she just loves joining all these things, and she just saying, Hey, we're gonna go hang reefs on the gravestones of veterans this weekend. And I just go. So I've kind of met a lot of these men before. But she's like, hey, let me introduce you to all of these clubs that the men that I know are part of. So I was sort of joining these sort of uh men's clubs that are connected to rather wealthy people. Not all of them are are wealthy. They're, you know, um, but they are part of New Orleans history and care a lot about the arts and music and architecture. So that's what I've been doing is just joining every organization that I can possibly join that's associated with old school New Orleans.

I think so. Yeah. I think so. Not only is it fun, but it I'm directly in front of the type of avatar that is exactly my client. I mean, they're all exactly my client. Not all of them drink wine, but a lot of them smoke cigars or they have friends that drink wine. And the thing about a guy that collects wine, when you get hooked on it, just like any other thing that you collect, if you're in the guns, how many guns do you have? It's a little ridiculous. Like you get us men, we get a little carried away when it comes to our collection. Oh, yeah. Um, so same thing applies to wine. So um just being in the same room, I think that's a thinking think and grow rich uh philosophy there. Yep. Um, I just want to be in the same room. So I go to fine dining restaurants and talk to the Maitre D's and ask for the Samuel and give them my card. I mean, you want to talk about shameless promotion. I'm promoting myself everywhere by shaking hands and kissing babies, just old school.

That's exactly right. Yeah, there's nothing more fun than just walking into a wine shop and talking about wine with the store clerk or the owner. Like, for instance, here's a great example. I've been dropping off flyers and cards and hanging out in wine shops for the past year. None of it has transpired into anything. Right before this phone call, I got off a discovery call, which is what we call it whenever somebody's reaching out to kind of get some pricing and thinking about putting a wine cellar in. They picked up my card off of a countertop and asked the clerk, What is this? We're building a $4 million home on the beach out here. We need somebody to do a wine cellar. It's like, oh, that's John. He's a great guy. You'll love him. Give him a call, tell him we said hello. So now your trust factor, that's like better than a Google review. Oh, yeah. They're building it out there, um, had a great conversation, and it looks like they're they're gonna move forward and having me build a wine cellar for them. So it took a year and talking to people and buying 20, $50 bottles of wine every time I go in there just as a courtesy, and that starts to kind of get expensive, but I'm drinking, I'm drinking the wine, and it's really good wine. Um, so it does eventually pay off, but you gotta pay your dues and and give and be patient. So that's the thing

Yeah, yeah.

Gotcha, right? So there's you know, you you can kind of section off different parts of the process from the first time they call all the way to final walkthrough. So there's this one part in between where you have your discovery call, they sign off for a design consultation, which we charge for. And that can take anywhere from two to four weeks because it's a lot of back and forth. Um, it's meetings sometimes, it's Zoom meetings, it's dropping off samples, it's the, you know what, I changed my mind. We're gonna move it to the other side of the house now. All of those drawings take a long time. And then there was just this itch that whenever you go to a luxury store, they have everything really laid out and presented way fancier than the product actually is. So I thought I need to apply this fanciness, this cleanliness to my design proposals. And gosh, I don't even know where to begin, how I arrived there. You know how sometimes you just get this inclination and uh you go down this rabbit hole and then you just can't get it. I probably spent two weeks every day, I maybe exaggerating, 10, eight to 10 hours a day. Like I was getting nothing else done. And I'm like, I need to figure out how to have the best proposals, design proposals ever that's repeatable. And I discovered because I am not a tech person, but I know how to build things. And Claude is the coolest at this. So check this out. You just talk to Claude and go, hey, this is how we're gonna do it. We're gonna like tear this out, there's gonna be a dumpster over there, and you just talk through every little detail from beginning to end while I'm driving on my phone or wherever, because we know how to build the thing, but we can't always put it together. So it goes, give me the dimensions, and then it'll ask me questions of gaps I may have missed. It'll build the entire thing, draw the entire thing, show it to me. I tell it, I don't like that little part over there, um, or it's too long. Can we shorten it? Don't ever use M-dashes. Hey, don't ever mention where we're getting these products from. And you just start having a conversation back and forth, which is no different than training an actual employee. So you train my I train my employee, and then I realize, you know what? I wonder if I can take this exact thing and put together the equivalent of a design proposal, but a a document, a PDF that I can send to my cooling system tech with all of his relevant stuff, to my painter, so he knows what to do, to my racking company, to my electrician. So I'm like, hey, can we do this, Claude? Can can we take this information that you have and subdivide this out? Because that would save me a ton of time too than having to go meet with everybody. And look, include photos and circle the parts that are theirs and not theirs. And it knocked it out in maybe five to ten minutes. So now that's built into the system. So now it goes from design proposal sent out to them, which is different than an actual proposal. It's just the design, just to look pretty. Now they go, hey, John, thumbs up, let's move forward on it. I just tell Claude, send out all this scope of work to all my uh subcontractors, you know which ones it all goes to. Don't send anything before my approval, but put it in my drafts. I make sure it's all correct, it usually is, and it just goes out and it took me maybe three minutes. Once they get all their stuff back, Claude keeps track of it and says, Hey, all of the subs got backward pricing. Do you want to put together an actual uh cost proposal? I'm like, Yeah, put it all together. Just leave the prices blank and then I'll add my profit margin and and all that kind of stuff. But fill out all my scope of work and make it look really pretty. It does it all for me in maybe 10 to 15 minutes. Yeah, and I that's pretty cool.

Yeah, this is that is the final step. I'll touch base as we're doing design. I'll send them 2D kind of rough sketches of the racking, but it's not very, very pretty, and it only has the racking on it. Um, once they approve the racking, I'm like, hey, we have some magnum bottles that are large format. We need a space for that. Can we do some pullout drawers down here, some X-bins over there? We have some what's called splits, which are half bottles. So we're gonna need a section for that. And we just talk about all of that stuff. Once we get all that nailed down, then I can create one image using AI, send it to them and go, hey, here's an image. Before I send you out the proposal, am I on the right track? And this is before I send it out to all my subs because if you start just sending it out to subs and they want to change something, I got to go back to my sub again and back to my sub again. And now I went from two weeks to four weeks to six weeks. So I do like little touch points in between. I'll just send them like a quick photo. Hey, hey, customer, yeah, am I on the right track here? I'd love it, John. But can we add some lighting to the top? Sounds good. Send it back to them. Hey, is this a little better? Yep, it looks good. Then I've moved to the next stage of actually sending things out and getting prices on it. So hopefully that answers your question.

That's right. Yeah, that's exactly right. I find that people have a hard time making seven dishes and decisions at one time. But if you break it up into smaller chunks, they can make those decisions a lot a lot easier.

Uh usually it's bottle count. Okay. Um guys are like, hey, we I have 500 bottles, I need a seller for a thousand. It's usually double of what they currently have. Hey, I have sixteen hundred bottles, I'm looking to get three thousand plus. Is that even possible? Because it's important to me. Or I have a bunch of large format, what they call magnums or double magnums or gyro bones, these huge, huge bottles. They may start there, we're like, I want this, you know, to be displayed. It came from my grandfather, and we're gonna open it up on my daughter's graduation. So yeah, it it depends. Um, but usually bottle count's a good place to start because what happens is I start with the man. He gives me his bottle count, color, or placement, or whatever's important to him, and then I kind of get tossed over to the wife, and then she handles all the aesthetic parts of it.

That is correct, and what it did was it that's my actual product. So we took the time and built catalogs of all of my suppliers, put it in Google Drive, which Claude loves Google Drive, it can access and pull things from Google Drive a lot easier than it can a PDF or just random folder. Um, so yeah, we took our time and like built catalogs and um honed those things so they can pull the same products depending on their choices. Gotcha. It is the exact product that that I sell.

You know, I it it's hard to say to collect that sort of data in any sort of real way, but I know it changes me. It changes me and my confidence and how I move forward past that point. Because remember, at this point, I haven't collected a deposit check. Nothing's signed, nothing's really sold. But I can confidently go back, give this to them, and walk up with my chin high going, I am really a professional here.

they're thinking, I'm not sure, but I carry myself differently.

I do. I do.

I just raised it from 1,500 to 2,000.

Yeah, and for an actual wine cellar, sometimes people just want like a wine display. Sure. Where it's not, it doesn't have a cooling system and all kinds of fancy stuff. I go kind of case by case with that. If it's super small and it's for a designer that's a new client of mine that I want to work with in the future, I may only charge her $500. If it the more complicated it gets and the more subs that are involved, um, the max right now will be $2,000.

They're getting, yeah, uh I think it's where are we at now? Nine pages of everything that goes into it, all the finishes. I'm pretty proud of it. I'm pretty proud of it. I think it looks pretty good. And it you'll always get better. We'll always hone it and make it more valuable to the customer.

No. Eight to ten hours a day for two weeks, built my entire business. We're talking, I went through QuickBooks, we made rules, we did an arca brain, memory resets, backed everything up, built catalogs. I mean, you name it, we built everything. My entire business is in clawed right now.

It's it's amazing. It's actually working out better than I originally imagined. For instance, that phone call today with the uh wine shop guy with a $4 million home, it listens to all my conversations and is connected to my CRM. And I had two different conversations with the general contractor and the owner. I just pick up my phone after the phone call and go, hey, I just had a phone call with that guy Garrett and that guy Baldwin. Can you just make sure all of the information is updated in the CRM? They're in the right um uh flow. Um, everything's updated everywhere, and notes are taken on all of it. And it's like, yep, got it. That took me five seconds uh three weeks ago. I probably would have forgotten to add them and realized it five days later.

So Yeah, no, it's it's it's amazing.

Yeah, yeah.

That's exactly a fair statement, and it all kind of leads to the next thing. Once this thing built and it knows you, I realize this whole design process is taking way too long. Hey, Claude, can we build a training manual so that when I hire somebody to do this, they can just do it and maybe even develop our own software that has the catalogs on it on an iPad and they can just kind of drag and drop and they can deal with the clients during this two to four week process. He's like, Yep, got it. I'm like, I don't have time right now, but can you just shelf it and then whenever just remind me in a couple days when I'm driving? It's like, sounds good, John. I'll remind you at this time on this day. So it's pretty cool. So now I'm building training modules for my first hires.

knows? Who knows? Um, I sure would like to do a few commercial jobs. Um, and I hope I don't regret saying that. Um, but I think that would be fun. But right now, just building this business on paper the proper way is my 100% focus right now. And so that that's that's where I'm at right now, and we'll see what the future holds because there's a lot. I'm reading an amazing book, and I know you always end your podcast with this, so I'll go ahead and and tell you what book I'm reading now because it fits me perfectly. It's funny how these things happen. It's called Ready Fire Aim. And it is exactly my philosophy where I don't even I didn't even really know how to build a wine cellar or how to do these things the way that I can do it now. But I'm like, just sell it. Just sell it. We'll figure it out as we go. Um anything we screw up, we'll fix, it'll be fine, which is costly. It messes up your PLs at the end of the month, but that's part of growth. We have since figured all those things out. And um so that's kind of where I'm at now is trying to find what's breaking before it breaks. And I'm getting better at that. And I think over the next two months, let's say by January 1st, I can sit back and go, okay, the hard part's done, the time-consuming stuff's done. Let's see what we can innovate and get better at. So I'm looking forward to next year.

You can do it two ways. You can just type in wine cellars in New Orleans, Louisiana. I'm the only one that does it, so I get 100% of all web traffic, which is kind of cool. Or you can look up Arca A-R-C-A-WineCellers.com.

I really appreciate it. Thank you, Brad.