Zach Sussman is the co-founder of Brick x Mortar, Minneapolis’s exclusive invite-only social club and shared workspace for Twin Cities residents. Brick x Mortar has become the home-away-from-home and networking hotspot for high-profile entrepreneurs, professional athletes, and respected leaders of the Twin Cities business and philanthropic community.
As a hospitality expert, Zach educates others on the fundamentals of opening a successful new establishment and much more.
What is (Brick x Mortar) all about?
Brick x Mortar (BxM) is a members-only social club and shared workspace. Our community comprises creative entrepreneurs and socially minded innovators of diverse backgrounds. We designed our space to be a luxurious retreat located in a historic 4-story brownstone with a rooftop patio that boasts incredible views of the downtown Minneapolis skyline, where our members can work and socialize in absolute comfort.
Tell us a little bit about your background and how you started your company.
BxM was a passion project between four close friends who wanted to bring something special to Minneapolis. The business was originally conceptualized by Blake Baratz, one of our partners, and was brought to life utilizing each of our diverse business backgrounds and skill sets. Our other partners, Drew Levin and Danny Perkins, have a background in real estate, so they were essential in the site selection and build out.
Blake is the owner of a sports management agency, The Institute for Athletes, and has a vast network of relationships that were critical to the funding and growth of BxM. My background is in hospitality, having spent 10 years as the VP of Marketing for Kaskaid Hospitality, one of the largest Hospitality companies in Minnesota. So my involvement in the business has been focused on building out our team, community standards, and member activities, such as special events and brand partnerships. All of us have been actively involved in the vision for BxM and growing it to what it has become over the past 5+ years since we opened our doors.
What would you say are the top 3 skills needed to be a successful entrepreneur, and why?
The top 3 skills needed to be a successful entrepreneur are creativity, perseverance, and passion.
- Creativity is essential for any entrepreneur to thrive and grow their enterprise. You must be able to adapt and change to a huge variety of factors that can impact your business and your vision.
- Perseverance is also critical to succeed in business. Things are not going to always go as planned, and you will run into challenges along the way. The ability to persevere and work around obstacles and solve problems is what you need to succeed.
- Passion is maybe the most important of these three traits. You have to be absolutely passionate about what you’re doing in order to succeed. Passion is what will drive the creativity and perseverance you need, and your passion will create excitement and energy for those who are critical to your success in business, namely your employees and your clients.
What are your plans for the future, how do you plan to grow this company?
We’re exploring options to grow Brick x Mortar through the opening of new locations. This business has always been about passion over profits, so we’ve been slow and methodical in our approach to growth, focusing first on the membership experience and our community before considering any additional locations. After five years of proven success with the concept, we finally feel like we’re ready to expand our community and share what we’ve created with new members in new markets.
How have the pandemic and Lockdown affected you or your new business?
The early days of the pandemic were definitely scary and uncertain, having no idea how long the lockdown would last or what the long-term impact of COVID-19 would be on our business model. We gave our members the option to pause their membership, since they were unable to access the space, and to our great surprise and delight, we only had a few members opt to put their memberships on hold. More so, we received an outpouring of supportive messages from members saying how important BxM was to them, and if there was anything they could do to help ensure we would still be there when the lockdown ended.
We had people tell us they would be more than willing to pay advance dues or anything else they could do to support us. That really meant the world to us and showed us how powerful a community we had created and how important BxM was to our members. It really softened the blow of COVID, and took away a lot of the worry and uncertainty. The lesson for us was that our passion for the community was reflected by our members, and that if we remained passionate about what we had built, we would be able to get through any challenge we face.
How do you separate yourself from your competitors?
We really don’t think in terms of competition; we’re just laser focused on our vision and creating the best possible community and experience for our members. Creating the best product puts us in the beneficial position of not having to look around at what others are doing—we just put all of our energy into executing our vision and putting out a superior product. There’s really nobody else in our market that’s doing what we do, so it’s hard to even look at anyone else as competition.
What were the top three mistakes you made starting your business, and what did you learn from them?
- We built out the space with the intention of having a more residential feel, where members could feel comfortable using the kitchen, accessing refrigerators behind the bar, and other touches that would make it feel more like a home than a commercial space. We ended up having a lot of events in the space, and it would have been beneficial to have a more commercial kitchen and bar setup for caterers to utilize to optimize event execution. We were creating an entirely new concept and business model that didn’t exist, so we knew a lot of our decisions during the startup phase were purely speculative and we would have to be flexible and adapt to where the business led us once we were operational.
- We also had some issues related to the physical space, which is leased, and terms surrounding our lease. While I can’t discuss specifics on what the issues were, the takeaway is that we would have been better off owning the property rather than leasing, so that we had ultimate control over the space and the ability to do whatever we wanted with the physical premise where BxM is located.
- Finally, we would have spent more time on the front end establishing best practices for our employees. From opening and closing checklists to uniforms to community standards, we were really learning on the fly and were more responsive than proactive, which is not a place we wanted to be for the caliber of our club and our members. These were more ‘behind the scenes’ challenges that had minimal impact on the experience for our members, but we learned a great deal in the first few months of being open that we’ve benefited from as we’ve refined the business model, including employee training, best practices, and becoming a better organization for our employees to learn and grow within the business.
Tell us a little bit about your marketing process, what has been the most successful form of marketing for you?
The idea of Brick x Mortar was to be the kind of place that only people ‘in the know’ were able to experience, so our marketing efforts had to be subtle and strategic. Our plan revolved around exposing potential members to the space through events, earned media, and word of mouth.
Special events for members were built into our business model from day one, so we were able to really leverage what we were already doing to draw new potential members to the space while creating buzz with our members through exclusive special events.
On the earned media side, the Super Bowl was in Minnesota about 6 months after we opened, and before we had even opened our doors we had rented out the space for the week of Super Bowl to a well-known talent agency out of Los Angeles. Their use of the space included hosting A-list celebrities for private events. It was really the place to be during Super Bowl week, and no one could get in unless they were extremely well connected. Local and national media picked up on it and ran many stories about the space and the celebrities who were in attendance, and it really put us on the map as an exclusive and exciting place that people wanted to be a part of.
Aside from events and PR, we’ve really relied on word of mouth from our members, who in turn have helped bring other interesting and like-minded individuals into our community.
What have been your biggest challenges and how did you overcome them?
Our biggest challenge by far was the pandemic and ensuing lockdown, and the long-term fundamental shift to work from home and how that has impacted our business. In the short term, having to close our doors during the lockdown and the uncertainty surrounding the pandemic was an enormous challenge. We had to plan for several different potential outcomes, and how we would continue to keep the business operational depending on how long the lockdown would be in effect, and at what capacity we would be able to operate during the pandemic once the lockdown was lifted.
We were fortunate to make it through the lockdown, but our ability to operate was significantly impacted due to restrictions about how many people we could allow in the space after the lockdown, as COVID was still raging. Our top priority was the safety of our members and guests, and we made several adjustments to our model in order to keep people safe and keep the business operating. Eventually, we were able to return to a more normalized business model, but events took a long time to come back, which did have a critical impact on our business.
The longer-term impact of people working remotely, which is still standard for many, meant that many of our members were no longer working downtown, and as a result, no longer had proximity to the club to have their membership be of value to them anymore. On the other hand, since people were working remotely, we had an influx of new members that wanted space to work outside of their home. They also wanted a place to be social that was inherently less occupied than normal places like bars and restaurants who wanted to maximize foot traffic and recoup some of their losses from the pandemic. So the net long-term impact to our business from COVID was a large turnover in membership, but we ultimately gained a much higher percentage of new members than the ones we lost.
What was your first business idea and what did you do with it?
My first business idea was when I was about 7 years old. I would find rocks in my neighbor’s yards that I would paint, and sell them door-to-door. My parents thought it was hilarious that I was selling them back their own rocks, but to me it was a great business model!
What’s a productivity tip you swear by?
Keeping a clean inbox is by far the most effective trick I’ve found to maximize my productivity. Every email I receive I either respond to immediately, if I can, forward to the appropriate member of my team for follow up, or flag for follow up at a later time if a longer response or more research is needed. Doing this allows me to stay organized, minimize time spent re-reading emails, respond quickly to keep projects moving, and keeps me from having multiple things in my mental pipeline that I know I need to respond to.
What is your favorite quote? Why is it meaningful to you?
My favorite quote is:
‘Comparison is the thief of joy.’
– Theodore Roosevelt
This quote has always resonated with me, but now that I have a young son living in the age of social media, it’s become one of the most important concepts I hope to teach him. Both personally and professionally, comparing yourself or your business to others can be detrimental to your success and happiness. On a personal level, being happy with who you are and being true to yourself is a key part of living a healthy and successful life. On a professional level, comparing yourself to the competition or coworkers can make you lose sight of what makes you unique, and can put you at risk of being derivative. It’s important to be aware of what others are doing from a competitive perspective, but being aware and constantly comparing yourself or your business to others is where you can really lose your vision, your passion, and, ultimately, your happiness.
