The Action Catalyst
Blackout Punch, with Chris Hunter (Entrepreneurship, Food and Beverage, Business, Leadership)
Tue, 25 Jun 2024
We’re going loko! Chris Hunter, founder of several successful beverage brands, including the iconic Four Loko as well as the health-focused Koia, and the unique Not Your Father's Root Beer, shares insights from his memoir, “Blackout Punch: an Entrepreneur’s Journey from Chaos to Clarity”, including the gap in the market that he identified that led to the creation of Four Loko, what they SHOULD have done at the very beginning to avoid disaster later, how the role of Founder/CEO is ill-defined (and why that's a good thing), hunters vs. gatherers in sales, fighting the government to keep Four Loko legal, creating Not Your Father’s Root Beer, what success means as a younger man versus now, and the value of knowing you’re going to be wrong but taking the first step anyways.Mentioned in this episode:Learn more at SouthwesternConsulting.com/Coaching/StudentsSouthwestern Student Coaching
Full Episode
So I go to Chicago and I refuse to get a nine to five type gig. And that was fine in theory until there was one day where I could not pay rent. And my now wife cut me a check to cover rent. And I was like, man, I really got to do something now. You know, necessity or desperation, whatever you want to call it, will make you do some interesting things.
And I had collected a lot of contacts and business cards. One of them was a guy that was involved in a startup vodka company. And long story short, I bugged him. literally email and call every day until he gave me a job. And that's what got me into beverages.
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Today's guest is Chris Hunter, the founder of several successful beverage brands, including 4Loco and Not Your Father's Root Beer. His new memoir, Blackout Punch, An Entrepreneur's Journey from Chaos to Clarity, tells the story. How are you?
Good to meet you. Good to meet you as well.
Yeah, so you're hailing from Miami right now, but where did you grow up?
Yeah, good suspicion that I didn't originally grow up in Miami. I grew up in Youngstown, Ohio. Historically, if you look back generations of my family, it's probably that there were a lot of Italian and Irish immigrants that were working in the steel mills. Youngstown was once a booming metropolis at a time, top 10 city.
Once the steel mills closed and the auto manufacturers started shuttering, the city just got decimated. So I remember growing up, my great-grandmother had these pictures of Youngstown as this hotspot, right? Downtown was thriving. People were all over. And I'm like, where is this place? Because I didn't know any of that.
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