Ben & Adam Talk FDL + WiLL History, Government, Manufacturing, the Future, + More

Fond du Lac's Government Structure

Adam: What does the government
structure look like in Fond du Lac?

Ben: Fond du Lac has a unique city
government structure because we have a city manager and a city council. That
means we don't have a mayor. That was changed in the 50s — Fond du Lac used to
have a mayor.

Adam: Is a city manager typically
under a mayor within another structure, or are they two names for the same
role?

Ben: It depends. Some cities will have
a mayor, and then they'll have a city manager or a city administrator that will
be full-time and help implement what the mayor has passed. In our case, he
basically is the implementer — the executive branch — without having a veto pen
or a signature pen. So whatever the city council passes is basically law, and
then it's his job to implement it. In our city government, we've taken the
approach where we've given the city manager and the city staff a lot of power.
They set a lot of the goals, they do a lot of planning, they come up with the
budget every year, things like that. Typically your mayor's office does that,
and we don't have an elected mayor. I think sometimes it helps and sometimes it
hurts. Our city manager does a good job for the most part — we're pretty lucky
in terms of what we have here in Fond du Lac. But then there are times where
really controversial things come up and you want a leader to take a stand, and
he kind of sits on the fence.

Adam: Are you referring to anything in
particular?

Ben: I am. As I get closer to being
done with city council, I feel —

Adam: Sorry — you're on the city
council now?

On the City Council

Ben: Yeah. I was elected in 2018, and
at the time I was actually the youngest ever elected.

Adam: How long is the term?

Ben: Two years. So I got reelected in
2020 — the weird election that got canceled and not canceled. I was on that
ballot, very, very proud of that, not really. My term is up in April, and I'm
not running again. So I've been kind of going around and being a little more
honest with people, because I don't have any voter accountability coming this
April. And who knows if I'll run for something in the future, but I know I'm
not running again in April. Sometimes — especially when things are climactic
and get out of control — it's good to talk about it, because you can learn from
it. I think there's a lot of folks right now that don't want to talk about it,
especially the folks that won this Lakeside Park issue, this huge debate. I
think there were a lot of missteps on a lot of different parts, and even in my
realm too — I can take some responsibility for that as well. But if we don't
talk about it, and if we don't talk about it honestly, then we're never going
to learn, and it's going to happen again. I mean, it happened in 1982 — a
similar thing happened with a park.

The 1982 Hotel/Convention Center Referendum

Adam: There was a referendum?

Ben: Some developers wanted to build a
hotel and convention center, and it got super polarized. This was — they wanted
to build it in Lakeside Park, where the channel is. So you have Lakeside Park
East and West, and there's the channel that separates them. West has the dog
park and the boat launch. On Lakeside Park East, where you can go around that
turn around — kind of my sinking point — they were thinking of building a large
hotel/convention center that boats could pull up to.

Adam: Man, that sounds cool. It would
have been great.

Ben: Yes. And what happened? Nothing.
There was a referendum and it didn't pass, and then within a year or two,
Oshkosh had their convention center on the water. People always compare Fond du
Lac to Oshkosh — and I'm not here to bash Fond du Lac — but there are
definitive times in our history where you can look at instances like that where
it's like, we lost that battle, and we fell behind a little bit.

Conflicting Energies in Fond du Lac

Adam: Do you see conflicting energies
within Fond du Lac? I was at the YPF event a few weeks ago — the Future Five
event — a lot of good energy in that room. A lot of young people that are
excited to give back to the community and grow professionally, but also grow
the community. You go to that event — it's like, man, this is a lot of really
cool, progressive stuff happening. But it sounds like you guys maybe hit a
wall. So what are the two competing energies there?

Ben: A lot of the young energy in Fond
du Lac is great. You've been around it, I know, especially in YPF — there's a
lot of young change makers that are hungry, that want to make Fond du Lac
better. One of the competing ideas is the nostalgia, and people being afraid of
change. I've said that before and I've gotten heat for it. Usually the people
that give me heat are the people that are holding up signs not wanting a nice
amphitheater, ice rink in the park — that was a big thing. And in general, with
history being cyclical — what we've seen is, Lakeside Park is really sacred.

Lakeside Park & The “Slow-Na-Lac” Mindset

Ben: Everyone in Fond du Lac
definitely wants Fond du Lac to be a great city. There are definitely people
who are trying to move that along on both sides — even some of the people who
weren't in favor of Lakeside Park are trying to move Fond du Lac along, just
sometimes disagree on the practicality, or what it is that will move Fond du
Lac along. But then there's a lot of negativity in Fond du Lac that I've seen,
where there's this mindset that, you know, we're Fond du Lac, we can't be
great, we're not good enough. You can see it on social media — that's the
easiest way to see it amplified. But people have these ideas that Fond du Lac
is just “Slow-Na-Lac,” we're meant to be a 40,000- to 50,000-person city, and I
have never felt that. I don't think I would have run for city council, and I
don't think I would have run again, if I thought that Fond du Lac was just
supposed to be complacent. But there are people that just kind of accept that,
like, you know, pizza places, Kwik Trips, and fast-food restaurants.

Ben: I mean, the fact that we don't
have a brewery in Fond du Lac — well, we kind of do, but we give away beer, we
don't sell it here. We have a brewery. I've been talking to Becca about all the
cool things we could do with your little brewing lab that you have here. I
think that's awesome — if you were to have a little tasting room and get
licensed to sell it, I think it'd be vastly popular. You could have a showroom
where people come in, see your product, and drink some beer. This area that
you're in is up and coming — I know people may disagree with that — but Brooke
Street and Military Street have a ton of history, and there are some big
developments coming down the pipeline that I think are really going to make
this area flourish.

Private Investment vs. Political Backing

Adam: It's interesting when you say a
brewery or a restaurant or a tasting room — that really doesn't require any
political backing. It's more of a private investment. You would think that if
there was enough interest in the area, there would be private investment that
would flow into that. So why do you think that doesn't happen? There have been
some nice restaurants that have popped up in the last couple of years, and in
terms of expanding culture, there seems to be things happening at the edges —
that doesn't require approval from the city council, I don't believe — but why
do you think more of that doesn't happen?

Ben: A couple of things. You mentioned
some of the restaurants — when we did the feasibility study for the park, one
of the things the consultants came back and said is that Fond du Lac has the
capacity for a lot more restaurants. Which is interesting, because you think
there are a lot of restaurants. When I first started on city council, one of my
goals was to bring a brewery here. I started working with Envision — at the
time it was a different leadership group than what's there now — and the head
of Envision at the time, her husband actually used to work in a brewery in
Nebraska. So he and I kind of made it our little project to scout some spots
and then try to incentivize some investors to come in and make a brewery. What
we found — first of all, the market data that they had wasn't the best. That
was one of the things that kind of was frustrating to me, because like, why do
they need market data?

Adam: I know.

Market Data & The Brewery That Almost Was

Ben: I don't really understand what
it's like to make a multi-hundred-thousand-dollar investment, and what all goes
into that, because that's not really been my realm of the world I live in. But
that was the first hurdle. We actually had it narrowed down to a few spots, and
we had an interested brewer — like a head brewer — and an investor that were at
the table. We actually started taking them to some of those spots, too. And
then the head brewer decided not to leave the spot where he was at, because he
was brewing in a different community. When their head brewer left, the investor
pulled out, and it all fell apart. And then COVID happened, and then it all
stopped. I know there have been talks to do that again. There was a
restaurant/bar owner who was going to start one, and then there's bad blood —
not my story to tell — they ended up not doing it. So it's been primed for
someone to do it, and I think the first person that jumps on it is going to not
only fulfill a need in the community, but also make a lot of money.

Adam: What do you think it should be?

Ben: Originally I thought it'd be cool
to do the old Train Depot. I thought it'd also be cool, if the Lakeside Park
stuff happened, having a little microbrewery in the Saputo cheese plant that
the city bought, and trying to get an investor to build something there and
have part of it be a brewery. I've been to so many different communities that
have breweries that do so many cool things. I was in Kansas City a couple
months ago, and there was a brewery that had pickleball courts and volleyball
courts behind the brewery. It was a Saturday night at 5 p.m., they were full —
people were playing pickleball, drinking beer. I'm not saying that's what we
should do here, but there are a lot of different creative ways that you could
go about it.

Comparing Fond du Lac to West Bend

Adam: I think it's a great idea. My
wife's from Wausau — a similar-size city — it's just interesting looking at
some of the dynamics there. Wausau has like five breweries.

Ben: Yeah, exactly.

Adam: They've got the Great Dane,
which is also in Madison. They've got a large natural resource in the form of
Granite Peak, or Rib Mountain — it's a ski hill. We have a large natural
resource here as well. There are a lot of comparisons, but they have a lot of
the things that you're describing. So it's just interesting to look at why
that's the case.

Ben: That's one of the things that
I've liked to do in my progression — look at some cities similar to our size.
Oshkosh is always the one that people look to, because it's closest. But West
Bend is one I look at. I was born in West Bend.

Adam: West Bend's great.

Ben: Their downtown is amazing. It's
changed so much since I moved away in the early 2000s. They have this beautiful
art center down there, and they've restored their river. We have a river
downtown that we're hopefully going to do some work on. We just commissioned
the study — I hate that we commissioned a study — to evaluate what we can do
downtown, which is the starting point. But back in 2010 and 2011, they did the
same thing. They had a riverwalk/art district study that was done, and nothing
came of it. We had brought it back to the city council and been like, hey,
there's a lot of good ideas in this 2010–2011 report, and they're like, well,
we need a new study. I'm like, alright, which — it's the starting point, but
it's just frustrating. I've learned that government moves a lot slower than the
private sector, and you have to be more careful because you're spending public
funds.

A Brief History of Fond du Lac

Adam: For sure. So you're the
executive director of the Fond du Lac County Historical Society. If you had to
summarize, if you wrote a book called “A Brief History of Fond du Lac,” what
are some of the major milestones? We touched on maybe some of the negative ones
— what are the chapters of that book?

Ben: Fond du Lac does have a rich
history. Fond du Lac County has been around since the 1830s, and the City of
Fond du Lac followed very quickly after that. Pier Elementary — that's named
after the first white settlers of the area. Fond du Lac in the 1800s kind of
grew really fast. By 1870, Fond du Lac had the second-most popular — we were
the second-most populated city. We were almost capital — one vote behind
Madison.

Adam: Capital?

Ben: Yeah. James Doty, who was one of
the first governors of Wisconsin, had settled here very early, and his house is
actually still here. It pains me, it is in the Taycheedah Correctional
Institution. They use it, but that's the kind of thing that you want out for
the public to see. It's tough to tour. I think they actually use it for
visitations for their families to visit there. So you can tour if you have a
friend or family in the prison. At the Historical Society, we have this
beautiful village of all these buildings that have been brought from different
spots around the county. That's just one of those, you know, if you had a dream
list of different historic sites that you could keep and celebrate, that'd be
one of them.

Manufacturing History

Ben: Going into the 1870s into the
early 1900s, we were really big in lumber and millwork, and then manufacturing.
Obviously you guys are a new manufacturer here — Fond du Lac has a great
manufacturing history. At the turn of the century, in the late 1800s/early
1900s, there were millions of dollars of production of manufactured goods
around Fond du Lac. Fond du Lac was settled — a lot of Yankees had first come
here, and a lot of folks from New York, like the Galloways. A lot of people
think the Galloways were the first founders or settlers of this area, because
we have the Galloway Mansion on the grounds in all of its glory — but that's
not the case. They came here in the 1850s. They were also in lumber and then
eventually banking. There are a lot of families that were super influential as
they had come here. The reason I mentioned the Galloways is they came from New
York — that was one of the popular spots that folks were coming from.

Ben: Then in the early 1900s, one of
the most fascinating things to me is, we used to have a trolley that would wrap
around and go down Main Street and rap down by the park and come back around.
They actually buried those trolley lines when they were getting rid of the
trolley. So every time that we did work, from the 50s till even two years ago
when we were working on the north end of Main Street, kind of by Hoppers and
Taco John's, they had found some buried trolley lines, which is fascinating.

Ben: Going forward, Fond du Lac also
had an extremely rich theater history. At one time, there were five theaters in
Fond du Lac, and the price of a ticket — I can't remember the exact price, but
it was worth over $300 in today's dollars, and it would sell out. The theater
would sell out every show that it did. So we had a somewhat wealthy class here
that could sustain that many theaters — at that price as well. As things
continued to evolve, Fond du Lac relied heavily on some of these large
manufacturers, a lot of which are families. As I was chatting with Becca, she
had mentioned that this is a family business as well, and I was interested to
hear that journey, because the one that sticks out to me the most is the
Aherns. They used to have a building on Main Street. Two years ago they bought
the building back, and they have a little display set up in the window that has
a little company history on it. It's cool to not forget your roots.

Adam: Oh yeah.

Ben: One of the unique things you
touched on first is the city government style of Fond du Lac — it was changed
in the 50s. It's one of three cities in the whole state that still has a city
manager/city council form of government. And then we're best known now probably
for Walleye Weekend, which has been a festival that's been going strong for
over 40 years. It probably will still continue to go strong. I personally — my
job at the Historical Society — I'm not the historian. I don't have to know
quite a bit of history.

Adam: Well, that's where I was going.

Ben: I've learned a lot as I've worked
at the Historical Society, mainly because it interests me and because it's
super interesting. There's so much that you can learn from the past as it
relates to the future. Fond du Lac is a cool place, and it has that storied
history. I think it's our job to celebrate it, and our job to talk about it.
When I get opportunities to do things like this, you know, it's always great
when people are interested in it.

Government by Consensus vs. Decision-Making in Business

Adam: There's a lot to unpack there. A
couple things come to mind. We talked about the style of government — one thing
that comes to mind for me is, it's really hard to make decisions based on a
consensus of everybody's opinion. In a lot of cases, even operating a business,
it's better to make a decision knowing that as you get new information, once
the decision is made, there's the culture that is okay with not always making
the right decision, but always improving things as you go along. Like, get
moving, make a decision, and as you get new information, just adjust. I can
see, if there always needs to be a consensus to make decisions, it just moves
much slower.

Manufacturing's Return

Adam: As far as manufacturing history
— you look at the last 30 or 40 years, there's been an exodus of manufacturing
in the U.S. When you look at other cities that have been affected by that,
where there are these booms for many decades, and suddenly jobs get shipped
overseas, and a lot of that industry that's been built goes away, and the
communities are left with a lot less investment, a lot less resources — I
really think that's going to change. One positive thing about the last two
years — there are a lot of negative things to focus on, but there are a lot of
positives too — is, I think small- and medium-sized manufacturing, there's
going to be a boom in investment. Because of local supply chains, controlling
the supply chain, having a diverse supply chain ecosystem within your county,
within your state — I think that's going to become more and more necessary. As
you know, the last two years, once the supply chain was shut down, we still see
the residual effects every single day. People are scrambling to source things
locally and manufacture locally. So I think there's a really good chance that's
going to shift back.

The Rupp Family Manufacturing Story

Adam: As far as my family's history —
it was funny, my grandpa's dad was born in Montana, I believe, and he left home
at 12 years old.

Ben: Oh, jeez.

Adam: He left home and was like, it's
time for me to make my own. He somehow ended up in Fond du Lac and he started a
dry cleaning business. I think he was in business for maybe 20 years. He had
all these patents — he developed all this machinery for industrial dry cleaning
equipment — and at some point went out of business. So that was kind of my
family's initial business in Fond du Lac. And then my grandpa was in the Korean
War. He came back, and at some point he met the owner of a foundry. There's a
foundry in North Fond du Lac called Northern Aluminum Foundry Company, and he
went to work for that company, and then started a division called Nafco, which
made light poles for one of the foundry's customers. My grandpa never owned the
business, but he worked at — almost ran — a machine shop in a fabrication
department. He's really a hands-on guy. He did that for a few years, and my dad
went to work for him. Then in the early 90s, the foundry went out of business,
and my grandpa retired, and my dad bought the fabrication business.

Adam: Then in 2005, my cousin and I
started an internet marketing company called 1030 Interactive. The first
website we built was for my dad, and then more or less we probably built a
hundred websites or so. Eventually we wanted to get into e-commerce — we wanted
to sell something on the internet. Well, to sell on the internet you need
something to sell. So, what about light poles? We started LightPolesPlus.com.
We operated Nafco, the fab shop, and LightPolesPlus.com independently until
about 2017. We said, let's consolidate both businesses, and we started
Wisconsin Lighting Lab. WiLL more or less acquired both assets. Since 2017,
we've been operating as Wisconsin Lighting Lab. So that's the genesis and the
evolution. I think we're really excited to be in manufacturing. I think it's
going to be a good couple of decades, I really do. A lot of technology is
becoming more accessible to smaller manufacturers, and we have 11 3D printers.

Ben: Wow.

Adam: To have 11 3D printers five
years ago would be a half-a-million-dollar investment. It was $12,000.

Ben: Wow.

Adam: Technology is becoming more
accessible to more people, which is clearly the case with the internet —
podcasting, online media. That same thing is going to happen in the
manufacturing space, so I think there could be like a renaissance type
situation as more people become — it becomes more accessible. So that was a
mouthful, but those are my thoughts.

Ben: You're growing — she told me that
you're expanding.

Adam: Yeah, we're doubling the size of
our manufacturing plant. Prior to COVID, we grew between 20 and 50% every year
for a decade. So we grew 1,000% over the course of a decade. Things have
tapered off a little bit the last two years, but there's an excuse for that —
the COVID situation made things a little bit more difficult. But now we're full
steam ahead. We have a great sales and marketing department, a great
engineering/manufacturing department. The sales and marketing efforts and the
manufacturing and engineering efforts are really starting to come together, and
it'll be exciting.

Sports Lighting Donations

Ben: That's great. I love your story —
how you guys came in. It's good to hear you're growing. But I also love that
you're so involved in the community. I was involved with the city council at
the time when Wisconsin Lighting Lab had brought those in for the city, but I
also play softball, so I've gotten to enjoy those every night of the week.

Adam: Like everybody else.

Ben: I played a very relaxed church
league.

Adam: Church softball can get intense
though. People take it very seriously.

Ben: Back in — I used to work at the
YMCA, so they run the league. So I used to play on the Y team in the church
league, because they run it. When I stopped working at the Y, my church was
like, hey, you want to come play for us? I was like, sure. Those lights are
beautiful. I'm sure it's great to showcase to customers.

Adam: It is. It kind of killed two
birds with one stone — you can showcase to your customers and provide an
amenity to the community. We've made a conscious decision to donate at least a
partial field every year in the area. We did Fondy Soccer Complex, and we
donated all the lighting control systems for that. They bought the light poles,
the light fixtures, but as long as they're making the investment — here's the
control system. And then Mount Calvary — that job's going to be installed in
the next couple months. We did the first field a couple years ago, and they're
going to do the second field, same thing on the control system side. They
bought the poles, the fixtures, and we're throwing in the control system. It's
nice — obviously it's a 360 win. It's good for the community, it's good for the
clubs, and it's good for us. Those are the best wins.

Ben: Do you know that Fond du Lac is
one of two communities in the state that has two outdoor stadiums?

Adam: Really?

Ben: They attract a ton of tournaments
statewide. I just learned that the other day from the president of the soccer —

Adam: That's a big area over there. On
a Saturday, when there's tournaments going on, there are thousands and
thousands of cars. All the cars line all of the — and this is a big chunk of
land. I'm always afraid to drive by because I don't want a kid to run across
real fast, so I always drive real slow.

Ben: Or a soccer ball.

Adam: Or a soccer ball, yeah. I'd
rather have a soccer ball than a running kid, but that's true.

Ben: And you showcase some of your
work too that you've done. I asked Becca why we didn't have any Lakeside Park
lights on the wall.

Adam: What did I tell you? I can't
remember.

Ben: All over the place.

Adam: They're in the bathroom.

Ben: They're in the bathroom?

Adam: Did you tell me that? I'll have
to go to the bathroom after this, check it out.

Ben: That was the look you gave me —
I'm like, they're in the bathroom.

Adam: So what are you guys going to
do, a third field?

Ben: Third field at Lakeside Park, I
don't know. That might be next.

Adam: Maybe that's next year's
partnership.

Ben: That'd be nice. There are three
over there. The first field we did was the current-gen, this middle field was
kind of the next-gen product, and it'd be great to have some future generations
of our products out there.

Ben: I would suggest you reach out to
someone other than me, because I'm sunsetting off in two months. You can make
all the promises though.

Adam: It'd be great. I think it'd be,
like we said, a win-win. That facility in Lakeside Park is awesome. I think
that's one of the gems of Lakeside Park, because there's tons of traffic that
comes through the park, especially when they host tournaments. As you
mentioned, every night there's different leagues.

Ben: Absolutely. They're great about
renting it out too. YPF rented it out for King for a Cause, which you all
sponsored last year. They even let you run the concessions — if you're in the
concession stands, they'll donate some of it back to your organization. It's a
good example of some of the things in the community that help support overall
quality of life and nonprofits and community orgs.

What's Next: Laughable Productions

Adam: What's next for you?

Ben: Great question. I'm going to have
some free time now — the city council is going to be done in April. Definitely
going to keep grinding hard at the Historical Society. In the past year and a
half since I've been there, we've had some pretty big wins, and I've found a
lot of joy in that. It hasn't been easy work, but it's been fulfilling. We just
put $1.6 million into the grounds to rehab and renovate almost all of the
buildings and some of the structures that we have on the grounds. The county
just authorized $500,000 to the Carriage House — that was one of the last
things. So the Carriage House is part of the original donation that the
Galloways made to the Historical Society. It's been around since the 1800s. It
needs some work, but it's a hefty price tag, and the county just authorized
that in the budget. So my summer and going up is going to be a lot of work.

Ben: I might start focusing on the
business more — a small production/entertainment company that has really been
kind of a side hustle for me. It's called Laughable Productions. We do all
sorts of stuff. It's just me and friends, really, that provide some of the
entertainment. But we started to expand — we just did Fondy's Funniest Comic,
where we had a comic competition over the course of six weeks, and we selected
Fondy's Funniest Comic. So they have a show along with us at Thelma this
weekend, which is super exciting. When I first started it, I was the lead
detective in a dinner theater in Madison when I was in college, and I moved
here and I was like, you know what, I could do this here. I could put on these
dinner theaters here. So we started doing murder mystery dinner theaters. I
actually did one as a fundraiser at the Y, and it was really successful — we
had a ton of people there. I recruited some cast members, some friends that I
knew had some acting chops in them.

Improv Comedy & COVID

Ben: I was like, you know what, why
don't I get an LLC and let's try to start doing this for real? We started in
April 2019, mainly doing dinner theater, and then we started doing some improv
comedy. Improv comedy has been the thing that's been most popular since the
pandemic.

Adam: Where's the typical venue?

Ben: Back when we were doing dinner
theaters, we did a couple at the Retlaw, we did some at UW-Fond du Lac Commons.
But for our comedy shows, bars are a pretty good spot. If they have a little
stage in a little area, we can crank out 60 to 90 minutes of improv. But we've
done a lot of private shows too — corporations will have a Christmas party and
they'll want us to come in and do some improv comedy for 60 to 90 minutes.
COVID really, really sucked for us, because all the in-person stuff got nixed.
We haven't done a public dinner theater since COVID started. We did a few
private ones. We dabbled in virtual — I was doing virtual entertainment for a
while. We would log on to Zoom with companies' employees that were all working
from home, and I would host trivia, Jeopardy, Survivor. We did a virtual murder
mystery that was super fun, because you could tell some of these employees
needed it. They're just sitting at home doing their work every day, not a lot
of social interaction. It was like the first five to ten minutes of the Zoom
call was just people being like, hey, I haven't seen you in a month.

VR Headsets & The Metaverse

Adam: Any VR headsets?

Ben: No VR headsets. I did just
recently buy a VR headset though — fascinating stuff.

Adam: This whole metaverse thing.

Ben: Exciting and scary all the time.

Adam: For real. I've seen videos of
people — like, in five years, 25% of all workplaces are going to be in the
metaverse. I'm like, really? I don't think so.

Ben: I was like, really? I don't know,
I don't think so. I think it's really bad for your eyes too. It can't be good
to take your eyes and separate them into two lenses and have you stare into a
very bright fluorescent screen for hours.

Adam: And you essentially have a
router hanging from your head. I've got one at home — I don't use it a whole
lot, but it's a wireless router. The Oculus is cordless now. But it's like
anything — technology in the right dose is really cool. Too much, it's like, ah
— I think there's a line that gets crossed.

Ben: Yeah, I would agree. It is fun to
play though.

Adam: I download a few games — I have
the Oculus as well.

Ben: It's been good. Did you walk the
plank?

Adam: I did. I made my family do it
too. It was really funny to watch my mom and dad do it. It feels so realistic.
You're walking out and you look down and you're like, whoa.

Ben: Have you ever walked the plank?

Adam: No, I won't. I'm not the
coordinated sort.

Ben: I heard — oh, you don't have to —

Adam: I know someone who injured —

Ben: I know. I wasn't going to tell
that story.

Adam: Did they fall?

Ben: Yes — I can't —

Adam: They jumped?

Ben: They jumped. Were they like
jumping and scared-jumped?

Adam: I think they just took it to the
next level.

Ben: I've seen videos of people where
they put out an actual piece of wood and have you walk —

Adam: That's what he says. That was
part of it.

Ben: In this case, yeah. I'm not the
coordinated sort, so I'd be the person who would trip into a fireplace.

Adam: Trip into a fireplace? That
seems really oddly specific to the story.

Ben: Oh, gotcha.

Adam: Gotcha. Wow.

The Brewery Investment

Adam: It seems like your brewery idea
is a combination brewery/restaurant/improv comedy venue and probably a music
venue — stage could be dual purpose.

Ben: Absolutely. Believe me, if I had
all the money in the world, Fond du Lac would already have one.

Adam: What was the investment size
when you guys did the study?

Ben: It was interesting because the
one thing that was really frustrating — the investor wanted to buy the venue.
The venue wanted to lease it and not actually sell off the venue to them, and
they wanted to buy the venue. In terms of the initial investment, they were
looking at $100,000 to $200,000 in just equipment alone. I can't remember the
specifics of what the brewery equipment was. Sometimes you can get lucky — I
know one of the things they were looking at was other breweries that are either
expanding and need bigger equipment, or that have closed. It makes a lot of
sense to buy from those. You guys can maybe get creative if you ever went down
that avenue and maybe manufacture your own equipment. But I conservatively —
you're going to want to have at least $250,000 to $500,000, I think is what
they had said. But you could do it for less if you do it smaller.

Adam: Did they do the hours of
operation, customers per day, average spend per customer?

Ben: Not that I saw. That might have
been in what Envision had given them. But I was mainly the guy that was
connecting people, and shaking hands, and playing point guard, making people
feel good about wanting to invest in the community. Which is funny — that was
one of the things that I got burned for on city council, being that liaison.
You Google my name, you'll find some interesting articles. But that was one of
the things — I had brought all these businesses that wanted to donate to the
city to the attention of the city for the Lakeside Park plan, and some people
were trying to say that was illegal. I was like, what? That seems very
networking.

Adam: I don't know. Story for another
day.

Wrap-Up

Adam: Anything else you want to go
through?

Ben: Not off the top of my head. This
is fun. Thanks for bringing me on.

Adam: Come back anytime.

Ben: Use the equipment — don't say
anytime. I was actually talking about — you should rent this out, this would be
great.

Adam: I've got some ideas kind of
related to that — possibly creating a room dedicated for it, and not even
renting, just allowing people to use it. Whether it's people in YPF or
Envision, or other businesses, just — as long as they maybe give a plug every
once in a while for Wisconsin Lighting Lab. It's a tool — if we're not using
it, why not allow other people to use it as well?

Ben: I love your attitude, seriously.
It's very generous. And the YPF videos that were made here — those were Becca?

Adam: Yeah, she's a rock star.

Ben: It was a great addition to kind
of highlighting those Future Five folks. It was really fun to make too. I felt
super uninvolved as a fairly involved community person — I felt completely
inadequate after this.

Adam: Oh, stop. Stop. You were one of
the nominees. You literally got a nomination for Future Five.

Ben: The nominees this year — the
winners, rather — were incredibly deserving. They're doing some really cool
stuff.

Adam: For sure.

Ben: I'm going to let that one go.

Adam: They are very deserving — but so
are you. I think next year might be your year. I don't want to jinx it —
fingers crossed.

Ben: Well, thanks for all you do in
the community.

Adam: Yeah, come back anytime.

Ben: Thanks for having me.

Adam: Thanks for talking.

Ben: Indeed.