 Welcome to Mechanics Hall. We are pleased to offer our Maker Series and our first maker is Paul Farrell who's somebody that I've known for many years and who's a good friend of my wife's and when we were thinking about this in terms of makers this was Paul's name came to mind and here he is and he can tell you a story about Union Bagel Company. Paul? Hello, thank you for coming out tonight. I'm really honored to be here and a little bit nervous and I was telling my wife I was a little bit nervous and she said don't be worried about it you're gonna be talking about your favorite subject yourself so she made me laugh and then she asked me what I was gonna wear and it all went to but I am I am actually very flattered to be here and you know it's true in some ways that I do like talking about what I do and where I've come from not so much because I like to talk about myself but because I'm I'm truly in awe of where I am in my life right now and to to understand that or to explain that a little more clearly I'm gonna give you a little bit of my background where I come from and how I got to where I am right now. I'm the grandson of four immigrants two were Catholics from Northern Ireland and my mother's parents were Jews from Poland so they all came to this country to escape whatever it was that was going on over there that I have some understanding of but really only can imagine the kind of things that they went through. My grandmother I remember on my mother's side telling several stories that I think about regularly so that had a lot to do with influencing where I went well later on in my life it influenced where I wanted to go and sort of honoring what they came here to accomplish. My parents grew up the children of immigrants went to public schools and became quite successful my father was a journalist and my mother became a school teacher in New York City so I grew up in a fairly comfortable middle-class environment you know we got to travel a bit my father was assigned to a number of different places including Israel so we got to live overseas I got to have some experiences that a lot of people my age at that time didn't get to have when we moved back to America in I think it was 79 or 80 we we moved in we moved to Brooklyn New York and it was a very different environment from the one that I just spent the previous three years living in which was Jerusalem and that was Jerusalem in the 70s which was a pretty interesting time so well I don't think I ever fully comprehended you know the danger so to speak that existed there was that danger there and there were certain things precautions that you had to take and there was a certain style to the way people live that you know that being a part of the daily life made things just a little bit more exciting you could you just took more chances you did more things it was less insulated it wasn't safe the way in many ways the way it is here at least the life that I came back to us so I moved to Brooklyn Maine and it's you know I mean Brooklyn Brooklyn New York I ended up in Brooklyn Maine but that was many years later and I'll get to that hopefully not too long but so we end up in Brooklyn New York and I just felt like a fish out of water and then I had a really difficult time adjusting to being back in the United States to being you know trying to to reintegrate into society so to speak during that time I my parents started to not get along so well and my father left and so things at home started to fall apart and I started to act out I started to just try to figure out where my place was in the world so I'm in this this this city that I don't really like I'm in a school that I don't like I'm doing my best to make things work and it's just not coming together and finally one day I quit school I was at the corner and I went up to the high school I was going in and I just decided that I wasn't going to do it anymore and I was no stranger to playing hooky but I still did pretty well in school despite that and I had several friends that were no strangers to playing hooky and a couple of them and decided that you know the the track they needed to take was to you know be done with school and go to work so I joined a friend of mine and we went down and I found a job that day and I started a long career of of no real career just you know endless jobs this constant search for you know what am I doing what does it mean to what does it mean to be a man what does it mean to you know be successful like what the hell am I doing my life you know and where's this all going you know should I be in school should I not you know it's like so I was bouncing around from job to job trying to figure out what I was going to do I made a couple of but I got my GED and I took the SATs and I made an attempt at college and I went for very brief time and thinking back it was it was pretty obvious what I was doing I was I went to a small school in Long Island and I can't really I can't remember the name of the school but it was a small little school and I told myself I was gonna be a biology major and this place was very close to the beach and I think I went to class three or four times and I spent a lot of time at the beach in the winter too I mean it didn't matter there was a group of us that went out there and we had a great time I had a very good time I don't remember all of it but most of it I do and and that was my that was my first go at college I was I was proud to be silly to say now but at the time I was very proud to be part of the 25% that had a straight zero average and was on instant academic probation so I decided that like all right I'm gonna get it together and try to take this a little more seriously I do have some interest that I'd like to follow up on and that Christmas my father came home and he he was sick he was dying of cancer so I decided that I was gonna stay and be with him and you know help out as best I could and just be with the family and try to salvage what I could of my relationship with my father and we tried you know and I look back on it now it was not a great time but I look back on it now and I'm so grateful that I that I made that that attempt and I know that he tried to and there's there's some solace in that it's taken me a long time to to get to a place where I understand that but I'm finally at that place I'm fortunate that I've I've lived long enough to you know and I'm not that old but you know I've lived long enough to get to that place and that ties directly into something that happened about 12 years after he died which was I got sober and that does eventually lead to me open in a bagel shop I promise but during that time during that 11 or 12 years I you know I continued my search for for meeting I went down I went to I tried college again I went to Buffalo I went to a state college up there lasted about a year and a half did actually manage to get some grades up there I did go to classes the classes that interested me were not the ones that were ever really gonna add up to anything so to speak other than my own they answered some of the old my questions inside early they actually better than that they they caused me to ask more questions and they caused me to just look at the world in different ways those classes were you know one was a history of Vietnam class one was taught by a guy who was a radical leftist at the time of the Vietnam War and was a protester and was involved with the weathermen and all this stuff a lot of stuff he would hint at and not talk about because I don't know if he was being dramatic or not but it definitely had an effect on me and it was a great class so I learned a lot and I learned to think outside of what I had been taught which was you know my mother's a leftist liberal and so she had a very fixed perspective on things and I was really looking for a different way of looking at things and even though this guy was a radical left instructor he still made me look at things differently and see other things other classes that I did well in were design classes I did really well in a sculpture class I took a couple of sculpture classes I did well in those so that kind of thing so anything that was that would challenge me intellectually caused me to question caused me to to basically keep going in a direction that didn't seem to have a direction and anything that might be creative you know sort of fed some things inside of me that that I couldn't seem to find anywhere else and from Buffalo you know I lasted about a year and a half two years and then oh just a quick side note while I was in Buffalo I did play rugby for a few weeks and because I thought it would help me get in touch with the Irish side of my family and I just ended up getting beat up and bruised pretty hard and I didn't last very long as a rugby player but anyway so from from Buffalo I went down to Key West just messed around down there but what was important about that was that I worked in a kitchen I got a job I went down there to work for my uncle who was doing a clothing store and I went to work for him it didn't last very long I found myself out of work I found myself wondering you know once again and in the middle of many more to come you know where where was I what was I doing where was I going what was I gonna what was this all about you know just still like that search still looking and I ended up working in a kitchen I throughout my work life I've often ended up in kitchens whether it's washing dishes or doing prep in this particular kitchen I ended up running his kitchen for him this guy was he was an accomplished chef from Chicago and he had moved down to Key West to open his own place and he had this little it was just a little pasta place and we had a very simple menu and I learned a lot from that guy I was a small kitchen I was walking by one day and I was you know just gotten off the phone my brother it's like I don't know what I'm gonna do I guess I'm coming home you know home was still Brooklyn my mother's home and I walked by this shop I see the guy working and I go in I was like hey do you know if they're hiring and he said no and I said like you know I copped an attitude with the guy I'm like what do you mean no like you know you don't know or no they're not hiring turns out he was the owner and he's like well I wasn't hiring but you know since you're giving me a ration of it here let's talk so he didn't make any promises but I got to help and build out a shop and we got to know each other a little bit and and he showed me some things in the kitchen again he had a very simple menu and it was very small kitchen it was Key West and it got really hot in there but I loved it I felt very much like I'd found something that I could I could I could connect with and I like this guy's way of doing things it was it was outside of the it was outside of what you know I perceived to be the norm it was he was kind of doing it in his own style he you know there's certain rules you got to play by but he wasn't it wasn't a big fancy place he wasn't trying to impress anybody he just had a he just had a lot of confidence in the food that he was doing and he was very passionate about the food he was doing he liked it and he loved it and it was the same menu every day and and people came you know from the very beginning people were coming in and we got busier and busier and I ended up running his kitchen and I was not a young man of much confidence you know but I found confidence in that kitchen I found confidence cooking and taking orders and you know sometimes I was I took it too far you know and but what I discovered was that like you know at the end of the night I could be like hey you know it would all come together if I if I got wound up or some of the wait staff got wound up it was it was just in the moment you know and that's it was a dysfunction that I understood it was a dysfunction that I operated well with and within and I think it's a big part of why a lot of people work in restaurants is you know there's there's a lot of that and that's a whole other lecture for somebody else that has a better understanding of it but you know and it was there that I started thinking about you know I was 25 years old I started thinking about like alright here's something I'm actually decent at here's something that I actually like I've held this job for more than six weeks maybe this is something I could be good at you know and this guy was an accomplished chef and he came from Chicago and he knew a lot of people and so we started talking and I started asking him about you know culinary schools and thinking about making a career out of being a chef and what does that take and you know he gave me some advice and I started thinking about things and then I started talking to some of the wait staff that worked there and turns out they had gone down to Key West from Maine these were women that I worked with their boyfriends and husbands had gone to the school called the Landing School in Kennebunk where they'd learned how to build boats and that kind of thing so I immediately shifted which is pretty typical of often of how I do things or have done things I try to do it less this way now but I was like oh yeah I'm gonna be a chef you know that's the way to go culinary you know and and then these guys talked about boat school and I thought that's it you know it's like boom I'm going to boat school and you know part of was like when I was looking at when I was looking at at what's entailed in the life of a chef it's it's it's it's rough life it's you know there's there's a lot of personal satisfaction from it and and I see that and I often envy you know people that have been able to pursue that life and have accomplished things and they do these amazing things and you know they have these amazing skills but for me it was like I knew that eventually that kind of that kind of drama those kinds of late hours the kind of boozing that I was already doing and that you know what that I was looking at coming down the pike in that lifestyle that like I wasn't gonna make it and that wasn't cognizant thought it was more of an intuition that was more a suspicion because I wasn't very clear headed person at that time but I so I thought all right that's what I'm gonna do and I was living with my college girlfriend at the time she left and went back to Buffalo to finish up school because you know Key West was fun for a little while when you come in from Buffalo but eventually it gets it gets old it's a very transient life it's very it's Key West man and it was Key West in the 80s so there was it was there was a lot of things down there that I needed to get away from so I came back to New York and applied for the school spent a year as a van messenger and then and then came to Maine to go to Boat School I spent two years at the Landon School which were they were an amazing two years I you know I when I had gone to college just a backtrack for a moment when I'd gone to college I thought maybe I I always had an interest in architecture and building and everything and I can never I can never get it together you know I mean it's like I could barely make it to class what let alone like you know really just accomplish anything in any kind of classes that demanded anything other than you know an argument or beating the hell out of a piece of marble I mean that's really what it comes down to I had the brain for it but not the not the the the discipline and that's been a constant in my life so so I went to the Boat School I wanted to do the architecture for the yacht design program they said they didn't have any room do the boat building so I did the year boat building and then I got into the architect the yacht design and from there I got a job at this does eventually lead to me making bagels I promise I ended up at a place called the Brooklyn Boat Yard which was a really incredible place and it still is to this day and I met some amazing people there was they they still do wooden boats they were on the forefront of modern wood technology they maintained a lot of classic wooden boats it was it was a very romantic place to be and it fulfilled all my romantic notions of you know doing this you know being a craftsman and really connecting with something and and you know making some of my something in my life and being a master at something and I didn't take me long to realize that I still lacked the the discipline and the patience that it takes to do a job like that I mean these guys weren't just slapping fiberglass on stuff and they weren't just you know throwing together boats and it wasn't an assembly line they took a lot of pride in what they did and you know God bless him and the owner of the that yard kept me employed for two and a half years I don't know if I would have kept me employed for two and a half years but but he did you know and finally I just decided that you know I wasn't doing him any service and I certainly wasn't doing myself any service so I went back to I went back to kitchens I got a job there was a local in up there and I got a job in that kitchen and I it was 1996 it was the winter and I've been working there for a few months and I had you know the epiphany that people have and I decided you know I realized that it was it was time to sober up and so I got sober and that's really important because it was at that time that I sort of stopped sabotage of my life where I started to learn how to stop sabotage in my life I still wrestle with a lot of the things that I've always wrestled with you know discipline is a tough one for me staying focused is a tough one for me I've always got an idea I always want to do the next thing but I you know you got to finish one thing before I can start another and you know I've learned how to do that but it's been over time and so two years in so during one of my just backtrack for a moment during one of my many sort of wanderings and stints just picking up random work I was in Vermont and I was working at a friend's a friend of mine got me this job at a at an inn there's a big cross-country ski and it was they had like 15 rooms or something it was a man her and it was it wasn't like super posh but it was kind of it was a very nice place and they had a really nice kitchen and you know they took me on as a dishwasher and I spent six weeks up there on a winter break and I you know I slept in the tanning booth and I worked in the kitchen and I drank beer at night and I made a lot of friends and I had a really good time and I you know and I met my first real baker I met this guy from New Jersey whose family had owned a bakery in New Jersey and he had spent his whole life trying to get away from the bakery when I met him and here he was in this kitchen he was really trying to become a chef he wanted you know he wanted to he was a sous chef I think at that time but they were constantly putting them on whatever big products they needed they needed they would put him on so we got to talk in one day and he told me about that and something rang true about that not something that I understood not something that I even understood rang true until much later on probably another 10 years or so when you know I was I was in I was in Brooklyn Maine and you know two years two years sober and I'm trying to figure out what's coming next and I'm driving pizzas and I'm you know working for a landscaper and I was unemployed for a while and this guy owned a pizza shop that I worked for was a friend of mine and I told him that there was this this new bakery over at the Blue Hill co-op and you know it's like I always had this sort of back-of-my-mind fantasy that maybe I could be a baker maybe that's something that would appeal to me and he's like you know you should go check that out like well don't you he's like dude I could find a delivery driver you know it's it's not that hard to find a pizza delivery I hate to break it to you but you're you're easily replaced and and so I went down and I talked to this guy Steve it's Steve Lentzalata is the guy who owns that bakery and he's the fellow who taught me how to bake and somebody might know that name he was the baker at McCoochies for a long time and is now one of the partners in slab the guy is amazing he's just amazing before he was a baker he was a woodcarver and I saw some of his work and it just floored me so this guy is like what him what I had always fantasized about being you know he has the discipline he has the the the where with all and he could figure out all these things but he passed on what knowledge he could to me and I became a baker and I found this I found a place where I felt like I really fit in not just in a kitchen where I could be the boss and I could you know put out a dish that and and yell at people and hit the bell too many times and just basically be a pain in the ass you know I found it I found a job that I could really like really connect with it became it became a part of me I became a part of it I connected to it and the way he does things is very different you know he everything was mixed by hand so even the even the mixing of the dough became this sort of rhythmic exercise it was it was meditative everything about it you know from the very beginning from putting the ingredients into the bowls to mixing the dough to everything that came after to putting it in the oven and he too had a very small space even smaller than the kitchen I worked in in Key West I think he I don't believe he had more than 350 square feet if he had that much and he was just he knew how to set things up he knew how to have an order to things he knew how to just and we put a lot of bread through a single deck pizza oven we did a lot of bread in a short period of time in just a few hours every day and he had a small wholesale part of it and then people would come in all day long and just buy his bread and and I learned a lot from that guy I learned how to use a short space I learned how to slow down a little bit I mean some of it was you know I learned how to stop sabotaging everything that I tried to do you know but I connected with this you know and the thing about baking for me is that you know I mean I've eaten bread all my life it's you know my brothers to this day has always has always into this day still makes fun of me because I'm all about bread and cheese man and pretty much you know it's like pizza it covers it all it's got everything I need it's but I mean from the crappiest roll to like the finest loaf of you know some artisan bull it's like I just love bread it's just part of what I am I was connected with it I just it's where I go the thing about baking for me is that there's a little bit more of an immediate sort of gratification for it to it the results are a little more direct you know I don't have to wait I don't have to put seven coats of varnish on I don't have to worry about this fine cut I mean there are there are delicacies but it's far more forgiving than you know a hundred dollar piece of wood that I have to make an exact cut on that has too many angles and confused me so so I learned how to bake from this guy and I worked for him for a couple of years and then I started getting restless again it was there was a number of things going on and it was just it was just it was time to move on and do something different and and you know I I mean he had the he had the artist and bread thing covered I wasn't gonna be able to compete with him and I didn't want to you know I didn't want to I didn't want to I didn't want to try to like steal that from him or compete with that it's like it was pointless and it didn't it wouldn't have felt right anyway so I went to my friend who had the pizza shop and I said you know I was thinking about making bagels and I made a few bagels at home I missed bagels I grew up in New York you know on and off eating bagels all always it had become a comfort food there were many days when like I'll play hooky and go get a bagel and a Coke from the place down the corner not too far from where I lived and there were days where it just made me feel better you know I don't know if it was a caffeine or what but so I decided to make some bagels you know I made them in my kitchen at home and I thought well these are halfway decent nobody around here is even doing a halfway decent bagel this is again down East Maine and I went to my friend with the pizza shop and he's like sure man once you use it at night you come in and make yourself some bagels and see what happens and so I started doing that and it lasted for maybe four or five months but you know and I learned a lot I went out and I tried to sell bagels I sold them to the co-op I sold them to some restaurants I would deliver them to people's houses but down East Maine is a very you know spread out place and it just I didn't know what I was doing there were a lot of reasons it didn't work out and I just I finally stopped doing it packed everything up there wasn't much to pack up at that point and and moved down to Portland where I went to work for a number of different bakeries tried boat yard again did a number of different things so I ended up in a bar bartending did that for about four or five years I worked at this bar after that I became a mortgage broker wanting to get out of the bartending life and then just as I was trying to become a mortgage broker mortgage broker everything collapsed 2008 it all went to hell and that was probably the worst career decision of my life was trying to get into the mortgage broker business at that time and yeah I failed miserably as it was as a mortgage broker but then when everything tanked there was there was little hope of doing much so I went back to school for a little while and and then I got a job with yeah I went to the community college for a little while and then I got a job with standard baking I managed to get a job with them which was great they're a great place to work and I learned a lot working with them more production bigger place you know learn some things there just real quick got an opportunity to do some political organizing that led to a job with the Southern Main Worker Center and my job with the Southern Main Worker Center was was their interfaith liaison and as their interfaith liaison my job was to create relationships with communities that you know that that we were trying to connect with so that it wasn't just was that they the expression is rent-a-collar so like whenever there's a whenever there's a labor action of any kind whether it's whether it's an organized union or whether it's just a small group of people getting together trying to you know stand up for something they'll go to a clergy of some sort and and ask for their support so rather than just have that kind of a sort of like relationship my job was to start getting to know people connect people let them know what you know what a labor organization was all about what the Southern Main Worker Center was about because it was it was affiliated with the with the labor unions and with the with the labor union committee but it was its own entity and it was not an organized union so it's through them that I started to make these connections and I started to develop this this idea that this is where the bagels start to come back to life for me you know one of the things I realized when when when the housing collapse came and when we went into this big recession and everybody was was so interconnected at such a high level we were basically all been drawn in again this is just my way of this is my way of seeing things but it we're all drawn into this this this big picture thing you know we in order to start a business you have to you have to have a loan and you have to you know you have to have a connection with the bank and you have to go through all these hoops and jump through all these things and that's that to me that seemed like it just it just didn't seem right it didn't seem like it was gonna work like how does a guy like me who has you know the longest job I've ever held is at a bar I don't have any money in the bank to show for you know to really speak of don't have a great credit score don't have a great work history although I have a I've worked all my life I don't have a solid career or anything like that how's a guy like me get into business how does a guy like me do something like this you know and I thought about all the things I'd learned from from the the pasta shop that I worked in in Key West from the baker that I worked for in Blue Hill and you know thinking about how how did people do it when they first came to this country and there were no services there was nothing like you got here and you made it work or you you didn't last and you know I started thinking about my grandparents and I started to develop this idea that I don't need though I don't need that it's not there's got to be another way you know and I started develop you know sort of reinforcing these these ideas that I had of you know that there was just that there was another way of doing things so one of the things I learned when I was in school I was introduced to this company called Mondragon so I've got this sort of socialist bent I guess you would call it although I do consider myself very much to be a capitalist and I'm always trying to figure out if those two can can mesh and balance I believe they can it's part of why I do what I do I want it to we'll see you know I'm still the company's only three years old and we'll see what happens but there's come this this company in Spain was started by this priest after the Spanish Civil War basically because this the Basque region of Spain was just demolished and people didn't have work and he literally still on the corner begged and collected enough money to start the school the school turned into a company that made things and from there it's just grown it's now this huge corporation and it's a completely cooperative corporation it's one of the biggest corporations in the world and it's totally cooperative so they have this incredibly involved and intricate democratic system and democratic way of running their business you know and for a lot of a lot of people it's it's a sort of utopia you know and what I've discovered is that in America utopias don't really work and that's that's all right it's just the reality of how we how we think and how we are and you know there's it's just how we are so 2012 I've gone back to school I found myself unemployed again for a while I went back to I'm very close to finishing a degree but I'm still a few credits away I'm still a few classes away went back to school for a while a friend of mine's like you know I'm like what am I gonna do when when school is done you know what am I gonna do with this degree I'm 47 48 years old who's gonna hire 48 year old with a brand new bachelor's degree in economics and you know it's not that impressive a degree really because I'm not a very impressive economist it's like one of the things that I discovered studying economics is that a lot of it is just you know if you remove reality then this theory will apply and it works that's just how I see it but I haven't I haven't really found anybody that can show me otherwise so all these things I'm studying I just I just get flustered with and frustrated with and I'd start to develop this idea that like maybe I can start a cooperative company here maybe there's there's some merit some variation some American version of what they're doing in Spain and maybe that can grow so I recruited some people that I worked with at Standard and they helped me get this thing started and then you know what we have now that we didn't have a few years ago is Kickstarter and that's been an incredible thing I think Kickstarter has been one of the most advantageous things it got me started and I know it's gotten a lot of other people started so we put together this Kickstarter campaign we figured out what we were gonna need I found a place that we started in the basement of the community kitchen right over here at the public Portland Public Market I'd heard about it it had kind of fallen they'd sort of shut down it hadn't really done much in about a year we went and approached them they said yeah we'd love to see it come back to life worked with them a little bit got the kitchen up and going and then I moved in with these guys and we the plan was I would go out and sell bagels we would make bagels every night and we would build this wholesale bagel company and it didn't quite work out the way I thought it was gonna work out I you know we got our we got our Kickstarter funding we we bought the equipment we needed we got things set up and then these guys all had regular jobs I this was it for me I didn't have a whole lot of money back in me anymore everything has gone into this they had other lives it we sort of went our own way so it ended up being my own just myself primarily and I managed to keep it going for about six months that the thing is is that I couldn't I couldn't really get out and sell and make bagels every night so I was never able to grow past what I had already established and then I finally came to a point where I realized like it was just it wasn't working and it was a really tough decision for me to make but it wasn't even one that I had to make it was more something I had to accept which is that like it wasn't working I had to I had to shut it down I had to I had to pack it up and hope for the best and you know do it as honorably as I could and pay off what I accumulated a small amount of debt nothing huge but it was time to go back into the work world so friend of mine drove a cab I talked to him about driving taxi he's like you know it's pretty pretty low barrier to entry I'm real good at low barrier entry jobs dishwashing you know driving a taxi which is not to say that there aren't skills in those jobs because there are there and I think you know it I get on a high horse sometimes about how like you know people don't fully understand that like those are important jobs you know the dishwasher is a and I've been a dishwasher many times dishwasher is a very pivotal part of a well functioning kitchen you know a good taxi driver I was an okay taxi driver I didn't do it for that long but a good taxi driver will get you where you want to go and make you know just make you feel like you had a great experience you know and and it's an important job their job is to get you from A to B safely their job is to get you there promptly and they put up with a lot you know and it's it's an honorable profession and I was I was thrilled to have the opportunity to just at least get my my my feet wet in terms of doing that and it provided me with a decent living and I really thought I was what I was going to be doing for a while and I started settling into it and and you know I could have a life I can make a decent living I could start planning I could start working on some things I met the woman who eventually became my wife and life was good you know I'd be out driving my cab and she'd call me up and I'd go over and she'd feed me dinner and I'd go back to work driving my taxi and I was really enjoying things you know I'd given it my best and it's like I had all my stuff in storage and I was still holding out hope but I wasn't I was like I was in a really good place I you know it's like I've learned that when things don't work out they're not necessarily failures they're just they just didn't work out and so I've had a lot of those and maybe it's just I don't want to call them failures anymore you know but they what I've discovered is that if I if I don't make them failures they just become lessons and those lessons become really valuable and you know so I'm driving this taxi and a friend of mine gets in touch with me and says that Katie made his moving Katie made bakery is the great ladies and I met them when I was working at the bar they would come in every Sunday Sunday was my favorite night to work at Brian Bruce and there was you know you get the music in the afternoon and then Sunday evening it was all restaurant people so it was super low-key really easy going just you know not never a headache man it was always a great night and I made some friends that way and Katie and Joan were two people that you know I'd become friendly with and Katie made bakery is at 147 Cumberland and then they moved they're now at 188 Congress and I highly recommend them if you ever get a chance if you haven't already tried them definitely get up there and check them out they're great ladies and they do a great job of what they do but friend of mine called me and said they were moving out of the spot the spot is on Cumberland and Smith and I feared well that's great it's a perfect little spot you know it's so I just started showing up I was like hey you know I heard you guys leaving and trying not to sound too you know it's like I didn't want to sound too much of a can't think of the word it might but I you know it's like I was interested in the space and they put me in touch with their with their landlord and and you know the rent was cheap enough to where I figured I could give it a shot so a friend of mine who had helped me out a few times when I was at the Portland Market he did some deliveries for me just basically relieved me on a few occasions so that I could get some sleep had expressed an interest in teaming up with me if we'd ever if the opportunity ever presented itself and he wanted to get in on it on it with me when I was when I was at the market but I just I knew that that timing wasn't good that it was just gonna be an exercise of futility I couldn't I just knew it wasn't gonna work but when this spot opened up I called him and I said you know the spot is opening up are you still interested and he was and he quit a really good job that he had a good corporate job solid benefits pay vacations good salary all that stuff it was killing me hated it and he came and opened up this bagel shop with me and and we started you know and it when we started it was it was it was Toby and myself and my now wife who's my girlfriend at the time and and his wife and it was just the four of us and those guys would man the counters and Toby and I would would make bagels and big bagels and take turns opening up every morning and in the beginning it was both of us at four o'clock in the morning of pulling up the shutters and then we realized like you really don't need two of us here so one of us could come in at six and the other one could come in at four and we took turns doing that and we really expected it to be wholesale we weren't we didn't expect it was gonna be a retail retail endeavor we didn't set up for retail we set up to do wholesale that the original plan was really like I was gonna make bagels he was gonna go out and sell him he was gonna find us customers and all we ever did was for advertising was put up we flipped a pizza box around and wrote you coming soon Union bagel and we put that in the window and then covered the rest of the window with papers so nobody could see what was going on in there although the door was open all the time and and that was it and then our first day we got slammed we had no idea that people were gonna actually show up we opened up the Friday of Memorial Day weekend 2012 we opened that store and we didn't know what to expect and we got our asses handed to us and it was great and you know I think back on that day and it was I remember the floor more than anything else it just it was so overwhelming and exciting and chaotic and frustrating and everything else but I just remember the floor was like an absolute mess all I could think is like we gotta mop this floor and there's people like where are my bagels where are my bagels and it was great you know and you know so there was so we had that and but but something that's always important for me to remember is that you know we were so I had taken all my stuff out of the out of the storage and we got the place set up but it wasn't just me and it wasn't just Toby this isn't like just my success I mean my intent was always that it you know I'm still always looking for something I'm still looking for for a home of sorts you know I want to fit in in the bigger picture I want to make a difference in the world and there's not a lot I can do about most things in this life that trouble me but one thing I can do is is I can make bagels and I can you know I can be a part of my community and you know that becomes that runs the risk of becoming a hackneyed expression but it really isn't it's really important it's really important to me and and you know the the beautiful thing about where my shop is is that it's in a neighborhood that's it's changing the neighborhood is definitely changing it was changing when I moved into it but it's still a very lively neighborhood there's still a lot of it's still a very mixed neighborhood there's still a lot of different you know people and and it just when we first moved in there was a there was a cop on the corner every day every morning sometimes in the morning sometimes in the afternoon that's not true so much anymore but I always like that kind of edge you know there was there was life in the neighborhood and there's still life in the neighborhood and every morning all the kids gather around in front of the in front of the shop to get on the school bus and half of them come inside to keep warm this winter it wasn't as bad as not bad but I mean it didn't happen as much as last winter last winter they'd literally all just crowd in and just stand there and not look at us and just try to keep warm you know we'd like hey what's going on kids and like you know the 12 year old kids mannered last year was high school kids so that's really important to me and that's really important it was important to Toby too it was important to both of us and it was something that you know it's still something important and I don't want to lose that you know it needs to be regardless of where I go from here it needs to be a part of how I proceed and and I say how but it's me but it's not it's partially me but I always feel like I try to remember that it's we it's the people that work for me that are really important because like I'm nothing without these guys I got a great crew that works with me and they care about what we do they buy into what we do they're they're invested you know they come in and they do their job you know it's not just it's not just I'm just throwing bagels over the counter it's like it matters it matters because any job matters anything we do matters and that's important to me you know that shop got set up because so many people kicked in and helped out it wasn't you know it's like I didn't have money to hire contractors I didn't have money to to get a designer or an architect in or any of that kind of things like people came and helped a good friend of mine's an electrician people friends of ours came to help paint that kind of thing people spreading the word you know giving us reviews on Yelp and Google and that kind of thing so it can be done you know and it it's done by it not being about me it's done by it being about those around me I'm wanting to be a part of something you know and I was I was joking around with some friends of mine the other day and talking about how the neighborhood's changed and you know I mean I literally like I've served billionaires and I've served people with like you were literally empty in their pockets for change to try to pay for the coffee and I take a lot of pride in that you know I've had political candidates walk to my door I've had you know all the whole spectrum the full spectrum and that's the beauty of food and that's what I think I've always connected about connected with when it comes to food is that it covers the spectrum you know and and I found that where I am I can do that I can connect with people at every level and walk a life you know the average guy just going to work so many people come make little detours to come and visit our shop every morning on their way to work and that's important that matters to me man that that's making a difference in somebody's life you know just somebody's having a rough day and they're they're having an off moment and maybe they're being rude or maybe they're just like spacey or whatever you know it's it's important to remember that that there's another person over there you know and and so this is this has become my venue for that this has become my I haven't had a raise in three years I don't care I mean some day you know my bills are getting paid and all that kind of thing and don't get me wrong I'm not doing this because I you know don't ever want to have a raise again but it feeds something in me that you know a regular job never fed and and that's that's that's really important I think I've I think I've hit the end so I hope you guys enjoyed it and thank you so much for paying attention to me so part of where we are with the shop right now is we're we're kind of maxed out for space when we started we did have some some wholesale accounts that we started with which were really important and kept us you know sort of working at times when things are slow but now we're we're we're squeezed for space and we're trying to figure out what we're gonna do next and so one of the one of the big things for us is how do we grow you know and it's it's I wasn't expecting this you know I mean I figured it would happen and I had some ideas but I figured that's coming down the pike it's coming down the pike but I'm here we're here Union bagel is there it's you know what do we do how do we do that and so now I'm at this point where you know I'm looking at this location in Westbrook there's a lot of things I like about this location in Westbrook and while the shop is doing well there isn't a deep reserve of cash to just go venturing off into something so I'm really trying to figure out how to make this happen you know how do I how do I take what worked for getting one place started and getting and get another place started what does that look like I'm in the process of figuring that out working the guy who owns the property is excuse me he's he's motivated for a lot of different reasons but he also likes what I'm doing but he's also motivated because he wants to get this space occupied and that kind of thing so there's opportunities there for both of us to negotiate how that might work which you know is again a huge advantage it's like if I can avoid my company is not in debt I have a small debt Toby and I separated last separate this last September for the most part amicably you know as any separation no matter how how well it goes there are always moments of tension but but really I feel like we handled it really well and we just it got into a point where it was just that time you know he's a good man and he's he's he may played a huge part in getting Union bagel started so now I'm at this point where it's just me and you know the company doesn't have any debt do we go into debt to grow or do we continue to try to do it the way we're we're doing it and I'm trying to sort that out so it's it's a great question that I don't have an answer for and it often causes me anxiety and sometimes I have the answer and I'm like yeah let's go and other times I'm like I better not do that it's gonna kill me so you know the the worst place to be for myself anyway is in that place of indecision not making a commitment whether it's a commitment to do it or a commitment to not do it and by doing it I mean move you know move into an additional space I don't want to leave the space I'm in I want to keep the space I have but continue to grow like how do we grow so looking at a number of different things and trying to sort that out and you know I'm working with with score and the small business administration and CEI and I'm driving those poor people crazy but you know they're they're incredible man there's so many resources out there that where people just genuinely want to see you succeed and that's you know I think that's true for all of us I think we all really want to see our fellows succeed in one way or another so sort of a roundabout answer to your question I don't have a definitive answer for you yet so right now we have seven and cinnamon raisins so the nice thing about what I do is that I can take one bagel and make seven different kinds of bagels without really having to change the recipe it all comes down to toppings so I got plain salt sesame you know and we could do more toppings if we wanted to cinnamon raisin is is a whole other mix so I can take one mix make seven different bagels which is nice and our most popular flavor is the everything so we sell about three times of those more than anything else so and we do be always on the weekends which have become more popular so I'm sorry I can't see I'm still aspiring to you know to that taste it was this little play there was a train station called New Kirk New Kirk Plaza and there was this little deli and they made deli and they made bagels and maybe I'll never reach that maybe it's one of those memories that's always in this in this perfect space that we have in our heads but it's what I always aspire to this is sesame seed bagel man sesame seed bagel and a can of coke and I was a happy camper on my worst day so I still go there and occasionally you know it's close it's close again thank you very much well thank you all for coming it was very entertaining and Paul has done a great job and kind of navigating through life and to where he is now we have another speaker coming up in a month that's going to be Scott or Kelly of Black Point Mercantile and we'll be sending you information on that so we hope to see you back and thank you again for coming to Mechanics Hall