Beth Rich was a customer at Mix It Up when the associates started asking why she didn't just buy the place. She told them she hadn't moved to Coeur d'Alene to work retail on the weekends. Six weeks after she finally texted the owner to ask what the store cost, she owned it. She was in her late 50s and had never run a cash register.

This week Keenan sits down with Beth, owner of Mix It Up and Mix It Up Home in downtown Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, a certified Main Street district with no chains on it. Eight years in, she has tripled sales, opened a second store, hosts around 125 events a year, and sells more gurgle pots than any retailer in the country. She came to it with 35 years of sales and marketing behind her and no retail experience at all.

She is blunt about how she got in, and she says outright not to copy her. On her first day the previous owner sharpened a pencil, pulled out a printout of a blank Excel grid, and showed her how to handwrite a purchase order and fax it. Beth has spent the eight years since getting the paper out of the business, and she is just as direct about the number she'd inspect if she were buying a store today, which is not revenue.

In this episode:

- What she watched her mother do after being widowed at 47 with five kids, and why she calls it the kind of optimism that changes outcomes

- The emotional trap of buying product you fell in love with, and where she draws the line between feeling and data

- Standing at a stoplight asking Shopify why handbag sales were down, and what the answer turned out to be

- Why profit margin, not sales volume, is the number she'd inspect before buying any store

- The shopping bag conversation that cut a deeply unglamorous line item

- Handwriting purchase orders and faxing them in 2018, and what replaced that

- Why she refuses to fight Amazon on price, and the one thing big box can't copy

- The three things she says make an independent store work

- Hiring associates who don't need the paycheck, and the culture that came out of it

- "Can I start a pile?", the five favorite words in her store

Subscribe to Beyond the Register for conversations with the owners and operators actually running independent retail. Listen on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

Timestamps:

00:00 Intro

01:27 What her mother taught her about optimism

02:38 The yellow rotary phone, and who took charge

04:40 Buying her first store in her late 50s

04:55 The emotion built into buying retail product

06:07 Knowledge is power, and the analytics retailers never used to have

06:48 Asking Shopify at a stoplight why handbag sales dropped

09:36 The accidental retailer

10:47 "Why don't you just buy Mix It Up?"

11:42 Money, money, and money

12:23 Six weeks from a text to closing on the business

13:09 What she'd inspect now: profit margin over revenue

13:51 The shopping bag call that cut her costs

17:21 The handwritten purchase order, in 2018

19:06 The plastic tub of paper under the desk

19:47 Getting the paper out of the business

22:44 Time is money

27:15 Competing with Target, Walmart, and Amazon

28:26 Why she won't fight a price war

28:45 The three things that make an independent store

33:00 Hiring people who don't need the job

42:34 Training storytellers instead of salespeople

44:18 The gurgle pot

47:23 "Can I start a pile?"

56:16 Where to find Mix It Up

Beyond the Register is brought to you by Genius™ (Link globalpayments.com/genius) from Global Payments, the retail point of sale system designed to help busy store owners track inventory, manage customers and take payments.

Tara Hankinson and LeAnn Darland met at a beer e-commerce startup in 2018, filed an LLC three months later after three bottles of wine and a session on Rocket Lawyer, and signed the lease on their Williamsburg brewery in November 2019. Then the pandemic hit, and everything else did too.

5 years later: TALEA Beer Co. runs five taprooms across Brooklyn and Manhattan with a sixth opening on the Upper West Side, and distributes to more than 1,500 bars, restaurants, and retailers across New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. They did it while craft beer had its worst stretch in two decades, and they did it after investors told them, repeatedly, that women don't drink beer.

This one goes deep on the operating decisions. The two co-CEOs walk through the actual math on the highest-margin thing they sell, what they got wrong on site selection and startup paperwork, how long it took them to admit they needed a general manager, and what running this has cost them personally.

In this episode:

- The real ingredient math behind a pint, and what that number leaves out

- Why paying more rent for a better corner beats saving 15 grand on a side street

- The cheap lawyer decision that took three years and a lot of money to fix

- How they decided what to hand to GMs and what they still refuse to release

- What they told the investors who pitched them "Skinny Girl for beer"

- Running a business through the NICU, a funeral, and a stalled construction site

- The tiebreaker rule they use when the two of them can't agree

Subscribe for more conversations with the operators actually running the store.

Beyond the Register is available on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

Beyond the Register is brought to you by Genius™ (Link globalpayments.com/genius) from Global Payments, the retail point of sale system designed to help busy store owners track inventory, manage customers and take payments.

Timestamps:

00:00 Intro

02:00 Meeting at a beer startup in 2018

02:56 Filing the LLC after three bottles of wine

04:17 From first meeting to five taprooms

06:27 The bar is the most profitable part of a restaurant

07:08 The real ingredient math on a pint

09:23 Taproom and distribution as two business lines

10:47 Why they keep a tighter footprint on purpose

13:08 The things they still refuse to hand off

16:22 Eighteen months to admit they needed a GM

17:28 The site selection mistake

19:14 The cheap lawyer decision that took three years to fix

21:04 Where the name TALEA came from

23:16 Community events as a cost center or a play

26:32 The data behind their business plan

27:25 The investors who said women don’t drink beer

27:50 “Skinny Girl for beer,” and why they passed

30:35 Why that model breaks financially

36:53 The season that tested everything

39:32 The hardest part of running the business

44:28 What the two of them actually argue about

47:19 Fifty-fifty from day one

51:38 Where to find TALEA

Sarah Maher spent a year selling crystals off picnic tables in her garage with no business plan, then signed a lease before she'd figured out how to run a store. Three years later, she owns Village and Vessel, a crystal and tarot shop in Oak Park, and she's still building through chaos: this year, the village tore up the entire street outside her door for construction that won't wrap until fall.

Before crystals, Sarah taught and performed improv at Second City, iO, and ComedySports, then spent years working in tech. She walked away from a corporate job after hearing her boss snore through a client call and realizing that if he could get away with that, she could get away with anything. That belief carried her from garage sales to a storefront, and eventually into a hiring philosophy built entirely on energy over résumés.

In this episode, Sarah breaks down how she built a business where the product does the selling, why she refuses to chase market prices even when collectors would happily pay more, and what she's learned about reading a room full of strangers looking for something they can't quite name.

Highlights:

- How a sleeping boss talked her out of a corporate career for good

- Why she believes the crystals sell themselves, and what that means for how she runs her shop

- The ethical pricing rule she uses instead of chasing the market

- How she hires for energy fit instead of experience, and why that keeps her team from clashing

- What she's noticed about which customers show up depending on who's working that day

- Why the skeptics who walk in end up becoming her best customers

- How grown men end up crying during her tarot readings, and what that says about masculinity today

Follow Beyond the Register for more conversations with the owners actually running the register. Watch on YouTube, listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Find Sarah at Village and Vessel in Oak Park, or on Instagram and TikTok @village_and_vessel.

Beyond the Register is brought to you by Genius™ (Link globalpayments.com/genius) from Global Payments, the retail point of sale system designed to help busy store owners track inventory, manage customers and take payments.

Timestamps:

00:00 Intro

01:14 From Second City to selling crystals

02:07 The village tore up the street outside her door

02:37 Was this the hardest year?

05:43 Selling off picnic tables in the garage

06:11 Steward of the crystals, and why selling was the hard part

08:26 Improv is energy exchange, and so are crystals

09:18 Building the tarot cohort on the skeleton of an improv class

14:44 Signing the lease with no business plan

15:29 The year of asking every dumb question

17:23 The Fool's Journey, and the mistakes she'd redo

19:37 Why people are dying for an experience

20:49 The biggest compliment: this is my crystal shop

23:05 The other crystal shop in the back

25:14 Her ethical pricing rule

29:14 Trust your eyes

31:54 Hiring for vibes, not resumes

38:21 The boss who snored through a client call

41:13 How she handles the skeptics

43:05 Why the most resistant customers fall the hardest

45:53 Where to find Sarah and Village and Vessel

Christina Rosso-Schneider and her husband Alex got married six weeks before opening A Novel Idea in Philadelphia's East Passyunk neighborhood. Almost eight years later, the store still runs on just the two of them and a rotating pair of part-timers, and that's mostly by design. When your name and your face are the reason customers walk in, Christina says, hiring around that doesn't lighten the load. It hands someone else the weight of a job they can't actually do for you.

That community has carried the store through two crises eight years apart. A 2020 GoFundMe raised $3,750 to get through a shutdown that classified bookstores as nonessential. A second campaign in 2023, aimed at $10,000, brought in $25,700 in a single weekend. Christina says she still gets chills talking about it. She's also a published writer with two small-press books and a debut novel, The Last Sheaf, coming from Blackstone Publishing in 2027, and she talks openly here about running a retail business with chronic illness and being colorblind, something she says has never come up on a podcast before.

Her answer to the question every small business owner eventually asks, what actually happens when the owners are the product, is the most useful part of this conversation.

In this episode:

- Why closing up shop for a planned summer break felt like both a win and a surrender

- The one steady employee Christina and Alex ever hired, and the lesson about mixing friendship and payroll that came out of it

- What happens when the owners are the product: what can get handed off, and what can't

- The $3,750 GoFundMe that got them through 2020, and the $25,700 one that came in over a single weekend in 2023

- Eight years married and still working the same small space together, and the line they use to check in with each other: "where are you on the page?"

- Running a queer, disabled, woman-owned bookstore, and the accessibility conversation Christina says no one has asked her to have before

- Why success, for Christina, was never about the money

Subscribe to Beyond the Register for real conversations with the people keeping small retail alive. Listen on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

Beyond the Register is brought to you by Genius™ (Link globalpayments.com/genius) from Global Payments, the retail point of sale system designed to help busy store owners track inventory, manage customers and take payments.

Early May 2020. Edy Massih's catering business had gone to zero: weddings canceled, events gone, income at nothing. So he called the woman who'd run the Polish deli around the corner for 43 years and asked to take over her shop. She said no. Three weeks later, on Memorial Day, she called back: she'd talked to her family, and she was ready.

That corner store became Edy's Grocer, North Brooklyn's first Lebanese market and deli. Edy became a Forbes 30 Under 30 chef, cookbook author, and TV regular. But strip away the food-celebrity story and you get one of the purest small-business operators we've had on the show: no investors, one tiny kitchen, and a founder who reinvented the place almost every year until it worked.

This is the operator's conversation nobody else has with him: the P&L, not the personality. How to buy a business, when to pivot, what to kill, and how to build a team that actually stays.

Highlights:

- The exact deal that let him buy a 43-year-old business with his own savings

- His three-strikes rule for killing a menu item that isn't selling

- Why national TV barely moves the register the next morning

- The software he says finally earned its keep and the time-vs-money math behind it

- How he keeps a food team for six years in an industry where nobody stays

- Why he closes for two paid weeks every August and what it buys him back

- What tells him it's time to change the store versus ride out a slow month

Subscribe to Beyond the Register for real, tactical conversations with small-business operators. Watch on YouTube, listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Beyond the Register is brought to you by Genius™ (Link globalpayments.com/genius) from Global Payments, the retail point of sale system designed to help busy store owners track inventory, manage customers and take payments.

Liz Sperman had the idea for a gluten-free donut company in 2013 and didn't sell her first donut until 2022. In between, she worked nearly every job in the kitchen: barista, cake decorator, production supervisor at a gluten-free startup, and supervisor on a donut food truck. A mentor told her you don't earn the right to run a kitchen you've never worked in, so she did the work first. Then she built Hayley's Donut for her niece Hayley, who was diagnosed with celiac at age two, and picked the single hardest thing to make without gluten: a real, fried, chewy donut.

In this conversation, Liz and Keenan get into the parts of the business most people never see. The fryer-and-hood wall that can turn a $10K piece of equipment into a $300K buildout. Why a shared kitchen works for some products and fights against a fresh-daily one. How she holds allergen standards strict enough that a stray flake of peanut dough is a life-or-death problem. And the pricing tension she lives in every day, building a premium product for customers who already pay a tax on everything they can safely eat.

If you're a maker stuck between selling out at pop-ups and opening a real space, this one is for you. It's a candid look at the 1-to-growth phase from someone living it right now, with a real lesson underneath it all: at the end of the day, people remember how you made them feel. Listen to the full episode and subscribe to Beyond the Register for more conversations with the operators building retail from the ground up.

Timestamps:

- 0:00 - How a gluten-free donut brand got its name

- 3:14 - Why Liz worked every job in the kitchen before selling a single donut

- 7:06 - What celiac actually is, and why good gluten-free was so hard to find

- 19:23 - The fryer-and-hood wall that makes scaling a fried product brutal

- 28:24 - Allergen safety and the shared-kitchen reality

- 35:42 - Pricing a premium allergen-safe product without pricing people out

- 47:27 - Why hospitality, not donuts, is the real product

- 54:01 - Where to find Hayley's Donut

Beyond the Register is brought to you by Genius™ (Link globalpayments.com/genius) from Global Payments, the retail point of sale system designed to help busy store owners track inventory, manage customers and take payments.

Half of America walks into a convenience store every day, and almost nobody remembers doing it. Jeff Lenard has spent his career explaining why that matters. As VP at NACS and the most-quoted voice on convenience stores anywhere (6,700+ interviews across CNN, Fox, and the BBC), he has watched the industry evolve from mini marts and gas station sushi jokes into destinations people drive 40 minutes out of their way to visit.

Jeff joins Keenan to break down what separates stores customers never quit from stores they leak away from, and why the answer has less to do with your product mix and more to do with bathrooms, bananas, and the dog photo behind your register.

In this episode:

- Why there are more convenience stores than every dollar store, grocery store, drugstore, Starbucks, and McDonald's in America combined

- The "customer leakage" problem: a third of your customers buy from a competitor within 30 minutes

- How Kwik Trip built a culture that sells a banana every 66 seconds

- The Buc-ee's bathroom rule, and what a dirty restroom signals about your food

- Why your real front door is the gas pump, and what belongs outside the bathroom door

- The Iowa owner who watched her store for a week instead of asking customers questions

- How freedom stickers in restroom stalls turned c-stores into a lifeline against human trafficking

Follow Beyond the Register for more conversations with the people shaping convenience retail.

Listen on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

Beyond the Register is brought to you by Genius™ (Link globalpayments.com/genius) from Global Payments, the retail point of sale system designed to help busy store owners track inventory, manage customers and take payments.

Randall Isherwood spent his career running nurseries with hundreds of acres of inventory. So when he finally decided to open his own garden center, his instinct was to go big. His wife and business partner, Carol, said no: start small. They opened Gardener's Outpost in 1,200 square feet, built around a concept nobody else in Columbia, South Carolina was running: organic, sustainable, no chemical aisle, no compromises.

Fourteen years later, Carol and Randall run two boutique garden centers, source almost all of their plants from two states, and have built a customer base that treats their stores less like a retailer and more like a third place. In this episode, they break down the operational decisions that got them there: why their second location started as a glorified storage unit, how they kept shelves stocked when COVID gutted their vendors, why they still refuse to raise prices despite rising freight costs, and the hiring rule that keeps seasonal turnover at almost zero.

It's a conversation about staying small on purpose, and what that discipline actually buys a brick-and-mortar retailer that will never out-price Home Depot.

Highlights:

- Why Randall wanted to go big and Carol insisted on 1,200 square feet

- The real reason their second store opened as a warehouse, not a destination

- How they kept inventory moving during COVID when vendors dumped stock

- Why 90% of their plants come from two states, and what that buys them

- The hiring philosophy that keeps seasonal turnover at almost zero

- What changes when customers start treating your stores like family

- The advice they'd put on a billboard for every small retailer in America

Subscribe to Beyond the Register for more conversations with independent retailers figuring out how to win without out-spending the big guys. New episodes every week on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

Beyond the Register is brought to you by Genius™ (Link globalpayments.com/genius) from Global Payments, the retail point of sale system designed to help busy store owners track inventory, manage customers and take payments.

A second Starbucks was about to open 75 feet from a dying Long Beach coffee shop. The staff were robbing the owner through the tip jar, the lights were half burnt out, and the place was losing money every month. A year later, sales were up 50%, and Bob Phibbs had a New York Times headline and a new name: The Retail Doctor.

Bob has spent 30 years proving the thing most shop owners refuse to believe: the little guy can beat the big box and the algorithm, and you do it without ever touching your price. He's trained more than 250,000 retail associates for brands from LEGO to Omega, written You Can Compete: Double Sales Without Discounting, and built a following near half a million people who come for his blunt, no-hedging takes on what actually sells.

In this episode he makes the case that discounting is lazy, your best sale is secretly a trap, and "Can I help you?" should be banned from your sales floor. He breaks down why customers buy the person before the product, how a single line sold a hesitant shopper $850 boots, and the one mistake quietly killing conversion in stores everywhere.

In this episode:

- How a dying coffee shop out-sold an incoming Starbucks 75 feet away

- Why Bob calls discounting "lazy" and what to do when sales are slow instead

- The hidden damage your most successful sale does that you never see

- Why "Can I help you?" kills the sale, and the two words to say instead

- How he turned a hesitant browser into an $850 purchase with one joke

- Why your staff can't sell an $85 shirt they think is worth $20

- What separates the retailers who are thriving from the ones blaming Amazon

Subscribe to Beyond the Register for conversations with the people who actually run stores.

Watch on YouTube, or listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Beyond the Register is brought to you by Genius™ (Link globalpayments.com/genius) from Global Payments, the retail point of sale system designed to help busy store owners track inventory, manage customers and take payments.

In 2006, three guys met at a church Bible study in Atlanta, discovered they all loved homebrewing, and started getting together every Monday night after work to make beer. They called it Monday Night Brewing. Twenty years later, it's a $67 million operation across six locations and four states, and Joel Iverson, the operations brain who built the original pilot system by hand, recently took over as CEO.

He did it in a craft beer market that's contracting 4 to 5% a year, where closures outpace openings and entire blocks of breweries are shutting down. On this episode of Beyond the Register, Joel walks Keenan through what it actually takes to keep a retail business alive when the whole category is shrinking, from going a full year without a paycheck to turning a COVID pizza experiment into a permanent revenue stream.

It's a retail story that doesn't look like one, and a rare, honest look at building a company so durable the founders can step away and it keeps running.

In this episode:

- Why Joel left a $100M consulting career and the "10% rule" that kept him from quitting too soon

- The blind taste test that told three friends they actually had a business

- What really breaks when you scale from one taproom to six locations

- How a sourdough starter in the fermentation room became a wood-fired pizza program

- Why "just brew beer" stopped being enough, and how diversifying changed who walks in

- Building a brewery that fights loneliness, not just sells pints

- The succession philosophy where every employee builds their own replacement

Subscribe to Beyond the Register for honest conversations with the people running real retail and hospitality businesses. Listen on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

Beyond the Register is brought to you by Genius™ (Link globalpayments.com/genius) from Global Payments, the retail point of sale system designed to help busy store owners track inventory, manage customers and take payments.