IAM755- CEO Enables Creation of Private-label Cigars in Real-time

Adam Mendler is the CEO of The Veloz Group, where he co-founded and oversees ventures across a wide variety of industries: Beverly Hills Chairs, the leading seller of refurbished Herman Miller Aeron chairs in the country; Custom Tobacco, a one-of-a-kind e-commerce platform where customers can create fully customized, private-label cigars in real-time; and Veloz Solutions, a technology consulting and software development practice. Adam is also a nationally acclaimed thought leader, writer, and speaker on topics including leadership, entrepreneurship, and management. Adam is the creator and host of the podcast Thirty Minute Mentors, where each week he goes one-on-one with one of the most successful people in the country on how they got to the top and how listeners can too.

• CEO Hack: Living a healthy lifestyle and following proper best practices when it comes to fitness
• CEO Nugget: Find your superpower and tap into it
• CEO Defined: Being in charge and making things happen

Website: http://www.adammendler.com/

www.adammendler.com/podcast
www.thirtyminutementors.com
www.thevelozgroup.com
www.beverlyhillschairs.com
www.customtobacco.com

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Transcription

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[00:00:02.20] – Intro

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkless values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO Podcast.

[00:00:30.30] – Gresham Harkless

Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast, and I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Adam Miller of the Hello's Group. Adam, it's awesome to have you on the show.

[00:00:39.00] – Adam Mendler

Gresh, and thanks for having me, man.

[00:00:40.29] – Gresham Harkless

Excited to be here. No problem. Super excited to have you on. And before we jump in, I want to read about all the awesome things that Adam is doing. Adam is the CEO of the Veloz Group, where he co-founded and oversees ventures across a wide variety of industries. Beverly Hills Chairs is the leading seller of refurbished Herman Miller Aeron chairs in the country. Custom Tobacco, a one-of-a-kind e-commerce platform where customers can create fully customized private label cigars in real-time, and below solutions, a technology consulting and software development practice. Adam is also a nationally acclaimed thought leader, writer, and speaker on topics including leadership, entrepreneurship, and management. Adam is a creator and host of the podcast, Thirty Minute Mentors, where each week he goes one-on-one with one of the most successful people in the country on how they got to the top and how listeners can as well. Adam, are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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[00:01:29.70] – Adam Mendler

I am as ready as I'm ever going to be.

[00:01:31.70] – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. That's good to good to hear. You're doing so many awesome things. What I wanted to do to kick everything off was just kind of rewind the clock a little bit, and hear a little bit more about what I call your CEO story. We'll let you get it started with all the awesome pictures you have going on.

[00:01:44.50] – Adam Mendler

Well, thanks again for having me. It's a pleasure to be here with you. A pleasure to be here with your listeners. Definitely have a lot going on. Run a few different businesses. You mentioned them. So Beverly Hills chairs, we're the leading sellers of refurbished brand-name chairs in the country. We sell the Herman Miller Aeron chair, which retails at fourteen hundred dollars brand new. We sell that for about five to six hundred dollars per chair. They look like brand-new chairs. Functionally, and aesthetically, we provide a lifetime warranty. We do the same for other high-end brand-name chairs, the Steelcase Leap Chair, and the Herman Miller Mirror Chair. We've been selling to small to medium-sized businesses all over the country for years, and we sold to a lot of big brand-name companies as well. But since the pandemic hit, a lot of our customers have been individuals buying for their home offices.

So that's been an interesting way that our business has shifted over the last few months. Custom tobacco, you mentioned we have created this platform where customers can go online and create fully customized cigars in real-time. Very popular for gift-givers. You think about how hard it is to find the perfect gift for the man in your life It could be your buddy. It could be your husband your boss your client your dad another really popular Audience for us has been event planners playing corporate events planning weddings planning golf tournaments So that's been an interesting business for us Fellow Solutions, we've worked with early-stage to middle market companies on a wide variety of projects, really, around custom software development.

And then I do a lot of writing and speaking on the topic of leadership. I've interviewed hundreds of the most successful leaders in America and more recently launched a podcast, Thirty Minute Mentors. I launched it in January of this year. Every week, I go one-on-one with one of the most successful people in the country on how they got to the top and, more importantly, how listeners can get to the top as well. Try to keep it to thirty minutes, and I've had founders and CEOs of some of the most successful companies in the country. I've had some really well-known celebrities and athletes, military leaders, generals, and admirals, and it's just been a great experience. So Gresham, clearly enough to keep me busy, but it's good to be busy with things that you're passionate about, and that's what it's all about in my view.

[00:04:16.89] – Gresham Harkless

Yeah. Absolutely. And you definitely get the most of your twenty-four hours, it definitely seems. Since we usually say it's not about the hours. It's how you leverage them and how you use them, and you definitely are able to get a lot of stuff done. Do you feel like that is something that maybe you always had that kind of entrepreneurial tendency or do you feel like that's just something that evolved over time?

[00:04:34.30] – Adam Mendler

I call myself an accidental entrepreneur because I definitely wasn't born with the ambition to go out and start my own business. I actually wanted to run a baseball team from the time I was a little kid, really all the way through my time in college. I'm a huge Angels fan. Anyone who knows me knows that about me and That was my dream man. I always wanted to run a baseball team become an entrepreneur becoming the CEO of my own business is something that was a byproduct of a variety of experiences that took place really from the time that I graduated college all the way through my mid-twenties. I started working for a big hedge fund as soon as I graduated from USC. I worked for a company called d e Shaw. They were the largest hedge fund in the world. From there I got my MBA at UCLA while I was at UCLA.

I worked for Two really large companies in the entertainment industry William Morris Endeavor and Universal Pictures when I graduated, I went back into finance working for Credit Suis huge Investment bank. I worked in their private banking group and when I was in my late 20s, I was twenty-eight I felt like I kind of had a good taste for what life was like in corporate America having worked for these big, you know, four big businesses two in entertainment two in finance And I felt like it was the right time for me if I was ever going to do something entrepreneurial It was that moment. My energy was never going to be higher. My Expenses were never going to be lower That was the time. I also really felt a calling to try to make an impact to try to make a difference to try to do something a little bit more and make a little bit more of a difference and I thought that starting my company in the below group would be a platform for me to be able to do that and The rest is history when you do something and you go all in you put your heart into it, you put your soul into it, and you just don't look back.

[00:06:36.80] – Gresham Harkless

Yeah. Absolutely. I often say, like, the biggest pain I think sometimes people feel is the pain of doing something and not working out or not working out how we hope. But I almost feel like it's the regret, as you said, you know, being able to have a passion, have something that you're interested in and do it. But as you said, go all in. I think it's something that, at the end of the day, we can always say that we attempt at that at the very least.

[00:06:55.80] – Adam Mendler

Yeah. Well said, man. Couldn't agree with you more.

[00:06:58.89] – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. So I know we touched on your businesses and all the awesome ventures that you have. So I wanted to ask you now for what I call, one of my favorite questions, which is your secret sauce. This could be for you personally or the other below group as a whole, but what do you feel kinda sets you apart and makes you unique?

[00:07:13.19] – Adam Mendler

That's a great question. And it's a complicated question because I think that it's a hard question to answer in a quick sound bite because we run a few different businesses and each of our different businesses has a unique selling proposition, has that secret sauce. So what I'll do for you and what I'll do for your listeners is I'll try to run through them really quickly. And if you have any follow-up questions, great. I also am accessible if anyone wants to connect with me or connect with any of my businesses. Great. With Beverly Hills chairs, our unique value proposition is that we offer customers the exact product that they want, but we offer it at deeply discounted pricing. The Herman Miller Aeron chair is the chair that everyone wants. It's the number one best-selling chair of all time. We're not creating demand in the marketplace. We're addressing demand in the marketplace.

And what we're doing is we're offering customers this product, but we're offering it to them at a price point that is lower than they're used to paying. So that's our unique selling proposition. With custom tobacco, we're providing a unique product in the marketplace, fully customized, private label cigars, premium quality, sourced from the Dominican and Nicaragua. Everything is customized, shape, size, blend, wrapper, filler, and flavor, and you can create your own fully customized cigar band. So that's clearly a unique product and a unique value proposition. With our software development company, we've been able to offer businesses access to Google-caliber engineers at a price point well below what they would otherwise have to pay. So we come in and augment existing teams. And in the cases of some companies, we are their team.

We are their engineering team building out whatever technology they need developed and we're able to come in and create highly sophisticated systems highly sophisticated Literally, I mean we've built out we have a few clients in the life insurance industry, and we've been building out for one client a really cool LMS platform. So you name it. We work with a bunch of nonprofits and we've worked with We for one company, we built out a virtual reality experience that wound up getting adopted by the government's Ministry of Tourism. So a lot of really cool experiences for our software development business For my podcast thirty-minute mentors.

What I'm really trying to do is to give listeners the ability to spend thirty minutes and Spend time with the most successful people in the country give listeners access to the best network of mentors possible, and take, call, and pull the best information possible from my guests so that Over the course of those thirty minutes anyone tuning into the podcast will be better able to succeed in their lives to succeed in their careers will be more successful Professionally will be more successful personally so aggression. I know I've given you a mouthful there But I really do think deeply about what is the unique value proposition in each of my businesses. I think about it when I'm speaking to audiences when I'm giving talks to companies, when I'm giving talks to universities, when I'm giving talks to nonprofits. This is a topic that's really important to me and should be important to everyone.

[00:10:56.00] – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. So I wanted to switch gears a little bit, and I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be like an app, a book, or a habit that you have, but what's something that makes you more effective and efficient?

[00:11:08.29] – Adam Mendler

That's a really good question. I think and I don't know how much of a hack this is, but depending on who's listening, maybe this is a hack that everyone is already hacking into but I'm a big believer in living a healthy lifestyle eating right working out Taking care of yourself getting a good night's sleep proper following proper best practices when it comes to nutrition and fitness.

[00:11:38.10] – Gresham Harkless

So I I wanted to ask you now for what I call a CEO nugget. So that could be a word of wisdom or a piece of advice. It might be something if you were to hop into a time machine, you would tell your younger business self.

[00:11:48.10] – Adam Mendler

This is something that I talk quite a bit about when I give, speeches. I think it's really important to recognize that most people in life are bad at most things. Personally, I'm bad at most things in life. And, Gresham, you and I know each other a little bit, but I would probably guess you're probably bad at most things in life too.

[00:12:11.60] – Gresham Harkless

And the listeners will probably agree as well.

[00:12:13.50] – Adam Mendler

Yeah. You guys probably At least if you're intellectually honest, probably acknowledge your bad or most things in life. But we're all good at a few things, and we all have that one thing that we do well. We all have that one thing that we truly excel at. We have that one thing that makes us special. It's our superpower. It's the thing that makes us unique. It's the thing that makes us different. And the more quickly you can figure out what it is that makes you unique, what it is that makes you special, the more quickly you can understand what your superpower is, tap into it, access it, the more successful you'll be in life, the more successful you'll be in business, the more successful you'll be as an entrepreneur, the more successful you'll be as a leader.

[00:12:56.60] – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. So now I wanted to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. And we're hoping to have different quotes, unquote CEOs on the show. So, Adam, what does being a CEO mean to you?

[00:13:07.50] – Adam Mendler

To me, being a CEO, when you start your own company, you go to the print shop and you get a business card and on the business card you say my title is CEO so There are so many people in life out who have the title that says CEO And I don't put a whole lot of stock into it. It actually doesn't really mean a whole lot to me because You could be the CEO of a one-person company you could be the CEO of a Fortune five hundred business and they're two totally different levels of responsibility so being the CEO means to me really just means that you've taken it upon yourself to Be in charge to be in command Now You have responsibility. What are you going to do with it? Is it there is you have the responsibility of a small entrepreneurial venture? You have the responsibility of a huge business regardless When you're the boss the buck stops at the top.

So it's on you to ultimately make sure that things happen. And if anything, CEO means responsibility. CEO means taking ownership. CEO means that you can't make excuses. You can try and make excuses for your spot, but that doesn't really mean a whole lot because no one really cares. Either you're you're the boss. It's like, Gresham, I don't know if you when you were a kid, you watched the show Who's the Boss I've heard of it. Oh, okay. You you never watched Who's the Boss?

[00:14:39.20] – Gresham Harkless

I might have I can't remember exactly but I know I've definitely heard of it progression pony dickens.

[00:14:42.29] – Adam Mendler

Yes, Alyssa Melano was on the show. She was one of the she's a lot more famous now, but so who's the boss? Well, you're the boss right now and, you can't make excuses.

[00:14:55.00] – Gresham Harkless

Yeah. Absolutely. I love that perspective. And as you said, the responsibility and not even just responsibility to say you have the responsibility or because you have a title, but kind of like, well, what are you gonna do with, you know, the opportunity that you have before us? And I think that's definitely, you know, a great reminder and something that we should always take into account with the decisions that we make or the decisions that sometimes we even don't make as well. So truly appreciate that definition and that perspective, Adam. I appreciate your time even more. What I wanted to do is pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional you can let our readers and listeners know, and, of course, how best they can get a hold of you and find out a lot all those things you and your team are working on.

[00:15:30.20] – Adam Mendler

Yeah. Thanks again, Gresham, for having me, and thank you to anyone tuning in for the time with us. Really enjoyed this conversation. Anyone looking to connect can find me pretty easily. It's just my name, Adam Mendler. You can find me at Adam Mendler on social media. So at Adam Mendler on Instagram, at Adam Mendler on Twitter. My website is www.adammendler.com My podcast, Thirty Minute Mentors, is available on all podcasting apps. So whatever podcasting app you're listening to this great podcast on, you can just type out thirty-minute mentors, listen, and subscribe. You could also go to thirtyminutementors.com. And, thanks again, Gresham. This was a lot of fun.

[00:16:12.60] – Gresham Harkless

Adam, I truly appreciate it. We will have links and information in the show notes, but I definitely appreciate all the words of wisdom advice and perspective. And I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

[00:16:22.50] – Outro

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

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