 Thanks for joining us here at Think Tech today with Adventures in Small Business. I'm Jane Sawyer. I'm the district director for the U.S. Small Business Administration here in Hawaii. And we're happy to welcome small business owners and other guests to talk about opportunities for small businesses and exactly that, what adventures they have had in their experience and entrepreneurship and business ownership. We've just come off National Small Business Week here in Hawaii. We recognize about 29 small business owners, entrepreneurs, exporters. And just to hear their inspiring stories, see what their accomplishments are and also their contributions to the community. Today I'm pleased to welcome our exporter for the city and county of Honolulu, Bryan Weiland of Wise Gallery. We're going to talk a little bit today about how he got his business started, what motivated him, and where he plans to take this great little business that's located in Haleiva. Welcome to the program. How are you today, Bryan? Good. Thanks, Jane. Good. Glad to have you. I know there's a great story behind your business. You've really built it into kind of a powerhouse and a destination spot up in Haleiva, too. How did you get started in the art gallery business? You know, it's always been a challenge to do my first real small business, and I really have to give it to my family. I've been doing art galleries for the past 30 years, at least since I was born. And my father started our first store in Haleiva back in 87 when I was born. And I kind of ended up growing up in the gallery literally there all the time with my dad. And I started working there when I was 14 in the gift store with a workers permit. And yeah, I guess I was kind of like Pinocchio in the gallery and just kind of grew up in there. And when I got a little older and I got out of school and I really wanted to have my own business, and I guess the art gallery was, I had all the info I knew what I needed to do. I have kind of a different take on what I had to do. The artists have changed. The printing's changed. A lot of technology's changed in the art gallery. So I just kind of wanted to kind of take the information and the knowledge that I've got growing up with it and kind of recreate it into a new… So it's almost like this is a family business. It's a family deal. It's in your blood. It's something that you know very, very well. But you also have kind of put your own brand on it, put your own spin on it. And I think one of the first things is when you first started and kind of took off with a few artists, you weren't actually in a brick-and-mortar structure. Yeah, so I actually started off as a website. I was selling iPhone cases and just kind of, you know, anything I could sell was really small items. I literally was… We weren't really making any money doing that. But I had an opportunity to open a space at Aloha Tower Marketplace because they were going through a transformation with ownership there. And they had some spaces open. And I went in there. I started extremely minimal. There was an art gallery that had closed down in there in the past. And I had taken over the space. It was kind of like the carpets were staying. The walls were kind of dirty. And it was just… It was kind of a rundown space. But it was like perfect for me to get going because I could start in a small enough place where I felt comfortable. I didn't have any employees. I literally just drove out there every day from North Shore to work that gallery and kind of quit all my other jobs that I was doing. And it just… It kind of just snowballed and started turning into a little bit more, a little bit more. I kind of added a couple more artists. I maybe had about five artists during that time. And yeah, just kind of… Was it a very big space at that time? It wasn't a very small space. I'd say it was maybe around like 1,200 square feet somewhere in that range. My new store is 2,500 square feet now. Wow. Yeah. You had a towel marketplace several years ago. When did you make the move to… So, I made the move to Halleva in 2014. So, that's when I basically started up my new store, which is my… My baby. It's basically like… I completely custom… I got the custom build that store. I made it 100% to a certain way that I wanted to have it to look like its own piece of art. And I think you've accomplished that from the pictures I've seen. I can't wait to have the chance to come out and actually visit. Yeah. I'm excited to have you there. To help with that transition, too, you knew you wanted to go to Halleva. You knew you wanted to represent Hawaii art. And you knew that the tourist market would be there as well. So, with those things in mind, did you have to look for a long time for location or how did that all come together? The weirdest thing about business that I've noticed at least in my experience is just how… If you really, really want something to happen and you keep thinking about it in your head and you keep visualizing it and I feel like things start to happen and you get weird opportunities that just kind of show up. And the same way that I got my website was a weird opportunity that my dad had a friend that could build a website for me and it was kind of a trade for something else that they had in the past and that got me that. And then Aloha Tower also came from my dad basically having… He had a little office space in there and then he was able to get me a little space to build a gallery. And then the landlord from my Halleva space approached my dad to ask if he wanted to open a gallery. He was, you know, he's kind of been retired from galleries for a while and offered me the opportunity and I saw the space and I knew the space where it was and I just thought it was totally perfect. I started looking in the windows there on my way home from work, started trying to envision what I was going to try and build in there. I knew I wanted to make it kind of like a rainforest so I could see these big trees going in there and yeah, kind of like everything that was envisioned about that store just kind of came to be. So having an idea or vision of where you want to go, recognizing opportunity and also having some good connections to help put you in the right place made a big difference for you. And you've mentioned your Halleva space in the store. I know it was a real project to get it built out and everything so tell us a little bit about what you did there because I think that is one of the things that is so unique about it. It's look, the number of artists and things like that, but the physical plant that you developed and designed because you designed it all yourself, didn't you? Yeah, so I had a big part of designing the store. I had all these things that I wanted to have in the store. My dad's already built a lot of galleries so he really helped me with kind of the functionality of viewing rooms and a couple little necessities that you have to have in a gallery that my dad has a lot of insight with that. I also had a really amazing professional designer to kind of help all the ideas that we had become a reality in there and make it actually work into the space. Because it does look like it's an outdoor environment. There's beautiful wood everywhere and a lot of wood artists. Yeah, absolutely. I'm a mother nature fanatic. I love everything about the outdoors and I wanted my store to kind of have like a feeling of all the earthy elements. You got the wood in there, the trees, the slab stairs. We have stone in there. We have kind of like, you know, rustic metals and steel and glass. It's kind of just all of mother nature's elements all inside the space. OK, good. It sounds fabulous. What are your biggest sellers? I mean, we sell a little bit of everything. I've noticed photography has been a huge item for us nowadays. I know when my family was doing galleries back in the day, the printing technology was really behind. You couldn't do nearly as much with any representation or presentation of the art nowadays with the way printing is and all the technology. Photography has become a huge seller for us. We also have a huge variety of original paintings, different kind of prints. We have glass art, wood sculpture, bronze sculpture. We kind of bring everything under the sun in there. Anything we can find in the art world. Do you seek out artists or do artists now seek you out? I get seek out a lot for artists, but I also seek out artists. It's kind of, I just let the world kind of bring everything together. I really try and stand out of the way of things happening. But like you said about opportunity, I kind of always look for opportunity. And I think if there's an opportunity there, I try my best to notice it and to encourage it to flow through the gallery. Yeah. And so jumping kind of from the art side to maybe the business side a little bit. Some people may think you have a store in Hale'iwa. You're selling art, kind of an ambassador of Hawaii because you're selling things that are definitely related to our environment and local artists and things, but we call you an exporter. And that's because, well, how much would you say you do export? Your customers are? So I'm really proud to say too that I do have a lot of local customers, which I love about the Hale'iwa. It's not considered a touristy town, but there is a lot of tourists there. I cater to a lot of military, a lot of locals throughout the island. But we also, we do export about 60% of our sales are exported out of Hawaii. And we kind of help people all over the world. They come to Hawaii, they find something really, really special for them to bring back, to remember their trip forever. Or you just even have a good feeling when they're at home. And these collectors buy art all over the world. And I'm really proud to be able to support our local artists to get their work clear across the entire world. So Australians, Japanese, Chinese, everywhere it comes in. And also to take advantage of that and facilitate that, you provide the right kind of customer service. Was that a challenge to get to that spot? The customer service is huge. And I got to say the biggest thing in the whole entire deal that makes this thing work is my office manager is amazing. I needed to find her to do this store. She has been with me the whole way through and she packs, she sips everything. Tracking numbers go out. She looks after all of our customers for us. I have an amazing team in there, basically, is what it comes down to. And I think any business owner, like the main thing that they will tell every single person to ask them is that their team is what did it for them. It really has a small part to do with what we do, as a business owner. How many employees do you have? I only have four employees right now. I have an office manager and I have three consultants that work on the sales We have a really special team right now. I'm really proud of the whole setup that we have. And it took four years to get to this kind of environment that we have and the people that we have there. Do they have to go through special training? I mean, you know, with art sales, it's really about helping the customer get the right information to make a good buying decision. I think that it's a lot of self-taught. The consultants really just have to have a genuine interest in helping the customer find out exactly what they're looking for. No one will ever buy a piece of art unless they're in love with it. It's a luxury item. It's one of those things that you can only buy it out of pure excitement that it does something for you inside. So they're able to convey that and serve the customer, help them find what they want, and that's the top qualities for those salesmen. Exactly. Make sure that they walk out of the store with a really good experience and that they hopefully got a really cool piece of art and that the art consultant did all the info they needed for them, made sure that it's going to get to the right place. Make sure that they follow up and let them know about new products that are coming out that might be of their interest. So it sounds like you've got tremendous inventory, lots of types of artwork, and that would mean a lot of artists. So those are a lot of moving pieces, a lot to manage. Is that unusual? It's unusual, but at the same time, everyone kind of pulls their own weight. The artists are just as involved as we are. They want to make sure that our gallery is stocked. If they're in the store, they want to make sure that everything's there for us to make the sales and to help promote their artwork. It's a huge team effort, really. Everyone kind of does their own part and it wouldn't work if everyone wasn't pitching in to make it happen. And how many artists are represented in your gallery? I'm featuring over 30 different artists. I have about 98% of them are local artists. I have a couple that are elsewhere for my local customers that kind of want to shop for something a little different. And I basically have one of each kind of artists. I don't feature two artists that do the same type of work. So every single artist brings their own unique style to the gallery. That sounds really very, very interesting and seems like keeping a lot of balls in the air and juggling. Absolutely. Well, we're going to take a quick break. We're going to come back. And because it sounds like there's so many pieces to manage, as I said, that I'm interested too in how you brought it all together to make it work and how it works financially. So we'll be back and tell you, talk a little bit more about how this great gallery on the North Shore got moving. And how to go up and visit Wise Gallery. Thanks for coming back to talk with us a bit more. We're here with Brian Weiland from Wise Gallery in Holly Eva. And we've been talking about how he got the business started. Really young man with a lot of energy and really building a gallery that has his special brand. His energy, his love of nature, the beauty of Hawaii and connecting us, almost an ambassador to the world. So this was an ambitious project when you expanded from a tower marketplace. How did you manage to put all that together, Brian? It was absolutely a whole different world. I used very minimal funds to start Aloha Tower Galleries. I very, very just kind of get it started, very minimal. This new gallery took a massive amount of investment. I want to mention that I basically had to write a business plan, of course, and that was a challenge in itself, and I had to make sure all the numbers worked out. Had you done that ever before? I have never written a business plan, so that was my first one. And it took me a good three months to do it, to get everything down there. I kind of got the help from my family, help from different people that I knew would be important for it. And I just started going to the banks and dropping off my business plan and trying to get a meeting with them. I have to say that First Hawaiian Bank in Chinatown was the one that came to meet me. I rode down there on my skateboard. A 26-year-old kid ran down on my skateboard with a business plan. Dropped it off over there, and the manager of the bank came to my store and met me and he was interested to hear my vision. We kind of went from there. I ended up getting the funding through First Hawaiian Bank to start my store. I have one of my loans backed by the Small Business Administration. Without their help, I would have never been able to do a store like this because this is a serious investment to do the kind of build out we did in there. It took eight months to build a store. The pressure was on. Once that happened, everything became really real. You put it on paper, you get the funding, and it's like, okay, now we've got to execute. Exactly, yep. But it's gone very well. It sounds like you were a little surprised. A few rejections at first, but then you found somebody who could believe in your vision and your dream as well. But you also, in putting together your business plan, you said you had to make sure that the numbers worked as well. So did you work with a CPA or an accountant, or was it just getting into the spreadsheets and digging in yourself? I actually, I'll say one thing that really helped me was this website called enloop. E-N-L-O-O-P dot com. They do great business plan formulas. It really helps you structure it. If you don't know exactly how to professionally write a business plan, it's more about putting the data in there. I also went to do counseling with the SBA. I wanted to learn what are the bankers looking for, what are the main parts that I would need to focus on? Where should I really put my energy into to write this plan properly? That was actually really helpful. I'd advise that people go and talk to the Small Business Administration to get that kind of info. There's a lot of details that you would go right over your head if you didn't have that kind of counseling session. Sometimes it's tough if a lot of people don't like to hear that reality check, but in the end, it's a very, very important thing. We do have a lot of opportunities for people to come in and talk to SBA. We actually have a couple of activities coming up. We call them Small Business Resource Days, and we participate with all of our lenders here in Hawaii. We have a resource day coming up on May 24th, Friday, May 24th. This will give you an opportunity to talk one-on-one with an SBA specialist who can talk to you about the SBA lending programs, writing your business plan, where else you can go to find assistance. They're free, confidential, one-on-one discussions. And it just gets you started a little bit faster down that path. So that May 24th activity is with Hawaii National Bank in Kailua, so on the windward side. We also have a resource day coming up on July 27th, so that's a lot of lead time if you have to do some planning or pull together some numbers in advance. That will be with American Savings Bank in Makiki. You can go to sba.gov backslash-hi-hawaii and find out more information about these training sessions, where to find our specialist or other consulting resource partners. But if it's what puts you on the path to the money you need to help you realize your dream, it sounds like you've gotten a good start on that dream. It's going really, really well. You mentioned that your term loan is almost finished and you're ready to look at what's the next step. So what are you envisioning, Brian, is where else would you want to go or what's... Basically, well, my dad, when he did the stores, he bought a lot of stores. He's doing huge volume as far as the stores and output that he's doing. My gallery put so much into building the gallery like a big piece of art that I will probably do much less stores. I would love to do a Waikiki store one day soon to help my customers in town and possibly one on another island, but I think I'm going to keep my business pretty small because I love to get off of work, watch the sunset every day with my dog, and I just want to make sure that there's always a good balance of work and live in your life because that's really the whole reason why we're here, I feel. I think that probably says it all right there is work hard, you dream big, and it's all about quality of life. Exactly. So maybe an expansion to Waikiki, maybe a neighbor island, would you look at adding more artists or bringing in more creative artists? Kind of one of the biggest things about doing a new store is being able to have more artists too. I know I do compete with galleries that have many more stores than I do, and it gets a little hard to get the exclusivity with a certain artist that has the opportunity to be in multiple galleries. So even though we're a really awesome gallery, I still face that challenge, so being able to do more stores will help me to kind of get a couple more of the artists that I'd really like to have featured in my gallery. So there's still room for growth, you think, and still creative areas to move into but you've built this business pretty quickly and you're ramping up the annual revenues. You've broken the million-dollar mark already, which is quite an accomplishment for a very young business. It's been very exciting. So another outlet would help you expand that a little bit further as well. Yes, it'd just be fun. It'd be more fun to have more than one store and get a little more action in the business side and it'd be a lot more challenging though, probably going to have a couple more gray hairs after that one too. Those come along pretty easily. Got my first one at my first store. Okay, the first store. But along with some of the new ideas, I'm just thinking about attracting more exporters or the tourism market. How do you reach these people? I think your brand is pretty well recognized, but a lot of people who come here need to still find you. How do you advertise and reach out in those areas? I advertise on several channels. I use a little bit of print. I try to do the Facebook and social media advertising. We do art walk every second Saturday of the month. We actually have this Saturday. It's a really, really fun one from 12 to 6. We have live music. An artist from Big Island flying in to be there. Basically, word of mouth is one way that gets us through and we're just in a really, really heavy traffic area. This is a really big painting town every single day. I kind of like it that it's this mystery gallery that you have. No idea there's a space like that in Hali Ewa. You can walk down the town and you just see this crazy-looking space with big 13-foot trees in there. It just kind of draws you in and then you tell your friends that you saw this really crazy, weird art gallery space that looked like its own piece of art. I think that's where I find a lot of them. You said you deal with military families as well, providing them something special from there. So, and the advertising reaches them, the tourism publications, and you mentioned Art Walk. You said it's a special one coming up. Tell us a little bit about Halleva Art Walk. So the Art Walk, we have several galleries in town. We all try and make Art Walk, you know, something special for the people that are cruising around the town. Halleva has been a little more challenging with Art Walk the past few years. Me and the other galleries have been trying to get it moving again, but it's been, you know, a steady growth in the amount of people coming out. It's hard to make it through all the traffic from town or wherever you're coming from. That's kind of our biggest setback, but we try and bring a special artist in to hang out at the gallery to meet customers. We have live music. We have, you know, drinks and poo-poo's and just kind of a, it's just a really fun time to come hang out, get to meet your favorite artists. You might find a really special piece that day. You can get a picture with them. You can get a cool dedication on the back and just kind of talk story. You know, there's always little perks to getting a piece of art when you're, you know, standing with the artist. So it just kind of cranks it up a little bit. Just a little bit. So it's a great opportunity for you in making that experience so special. And if you don't find anything, then you at least got to hang out and have some drinks and cruise with the artist and just have a good time with your family. It's a really cool family event to go to. Yeah. I just recently, well, last August, my brother and his family came to town and that was my first time to kind of, you know, with little kids. You got to move quickly. Exactly. So we went through very quickly. So I've been, as I said, introduced, but anxious to come back and spend a little more time in your gallery and see what's going on up there. Awesome. So your experience with winning your exporter award, I think it came out of a little bit that special relationship with First Hawaiian Bank and they wanted to acknowledge what you've accomplished as a young entrepreneur and a business owner. Do you have anything to comment on that? Just thank you so much to First Hawaiian Bank. The most personal people I've dealt with, you know, they're just been, every single person I've worked with in there has just been so cool and they've just been so real with me and it's really cool that they believe in me. Huge thank you to the SBA too for putting that on. You guys do such hard work to host these events and honor all these people and it's really important because people, you know, it really helps to be recognized for something good that you do and it's also good to let other people know that there's a, you know, that that could be a place for them too and there's so much opportunity out there in the world. So much cool help from the banks, the, you know, the government with the SBA and everything. There's just, there's really a lot of opportunity. If you want to do your own business, you absolutely can, but you have to make sure you're having fun. You have to make sure that you keep your creativity and, yeah, basically, if you're not having fun, it's going to be a lot more difficult and you need to just know that there is people out there that can help and you start small and it just kind of grows slowly and you never know where you're going to end up in a few years. Well, you've been very, very dedicated and very involved with your business and how it's growing and shaping it. Were there bigger challenges or, you know, did you ever think I don't want to be doing this? That's funny. You know, you're always going to feel like that. There's always going to be those times where you feel like you're really, I feel like I'm, you know, insufficient enough to run a business like this. Sometimes I face a lot of hardships and, but then, you know, I go home at the end of the day and I think back on everything and it's so special to be able to kind of have your own business, especially in your own hometown. And you always have discouraging moments, but if you really, really love what you're doing and you pick, you know, a business that you just feel comfortable about and you have this kind of energy for you, you're going to get through all the hard times. And I think everyone in the world faces challenges in anything they do and it's just as challenging to work for somebody else as it is to run your own business in its own way. Yeah, sometimes it's much better to be able to be the decider, to be able to accept the responsibility and make the decision and then also make things happen in a big way. And it sounds like, Brian, you've been able to really accomplish a lot and do that with a great vision, with a great idea and a lot of energy and passion about what you do. So thank you so much for bringing all those special things and sharing the artists of Hawaii with so many more people. It's great to have our exporter from the city and county of Honolulu here. I encourage you all to get out to Wise Gallery and check it out, whether it is on Gallery Day or Art Walk Day in Hale'iwa or just a pleasant afternoon to go drop in and see something that can also inspire you. It's also Global Trade Month. So that means we need to look at those opportunities and check on all those other people who are helping us export and bring Hawaii to the rest of the world. Thanks for being here with us again today. And we wish you continued success, Brian. Thanks so much. Thank you very much.