�Ǹ�Թ�

Claire Stewart: Today's LBIdea is that opportunities for entrepreneurship through acquisition are growing as business owners look to retire, and more education and resources become available for prospective buyers.

Our guest today is Spencer Rogers. A Leeds MBA alumnus, Spencer is the owner of celebrated Denver cocktail bar, Lady Jane, as well as the founder and CEO of Third Place Hospitality. Thanks so much for joining us today, Spencer.

Spencer Rogers: Thanks for having me.

Stewart: We are so excited to have you here today to talk about your career and everything you've done. So, tell us a little bit about your career trajectory. You've had a very unique career history. Can you walk us through it a little bit?

Rogers: Yeah, absolutely. It's a bit of a winding road, but I graduated from undergrad in 2014 from Duke University and immediately started working at Apple. I was effectively a product manager there. I worked on the iTunes TV Store, and did that for a few years, and wasn't really sure what I wanted to do.

I always knew I wanted to work at Apple. I worked very hard to get that first role out of undergrad, but I wasn't sure, kind of, overall. I was drawn to startups, and so I thought maybe I'd spend a few years there and then go launch a startup. Ended up staying there for almost a decade. I went from the iTunes TV Store to the Apple TV app to Apple TV+, the actual launch of that, which was a really incredible thing to be a part of, and then also led our live sports team, so the team that sends notifications when games are close and helps with all the integrations with Apple TV, with live sports.

So, did all of that and was ultimately a manager there and was very happy. I learned a ton, met a ton of really incredible people, but had an opportunity in spring of 2021 to jump to a startup. A friend of mine was starting a company called Trauma Brace. It focused on PTSD recovery via app, because she actually survived through a terrorist attack and went through all of that recovery process and realized that the supply-demand gap for trauma therapists is really not where it needs to be.

But prolonged exposure therapy is understood to such an extent right now that you can do a lot of what you would do in a therapist's office in a HIPAA-compliant, on-your-own-time app. And so, I left Apple in spring of 2021 to do that with her. Did it for a little bit over a year. And as is understandable from jumping from an enormous company to a two-person startup, wore a ton of hats and very quickly learned what I was good at and what I was really, really not good at yet.

And those things were things like finance and marketing, things that I just had never done before as product manager at Apple. And so, those were some of the elements where I just felt like I didn't have the knowledge to do what I wished I could do in that context. And during that process is also when I moved to Denver.

So, I was in San Francisco before then, slash Cupertino, at headquarters at Apple. And then when the pandemic hit, and I had left for the startup, it was one of those moments where it was like, "Okay, I can work from anywhere now." So, I bounced around for a little bit. I saw family around the country, and then I ended up settling in Denver with the thought that if I don't love it, then I'll move somewhere else, and I adored it.

So, Denver, I knew, was, kind of, going to be the place for me for the foreseeable future. So, I stepped away a little over a year after leaving Apple for the startup. I stepped away from the startup. It just wasn't working for me, and I didn't totally know what I was going to do next. I wasn't sure. And this is, kind of, the point where I rewind a little bit, and it gets a little bit funky. But when I was 22 years old, I got a job as a bartender. This was while I was working at Apple.

So, it was something I was always drawn towards, something I always loved. I wanted to be around people. I wanted to be working on my feet, have a little bit more social outlet. And so, I did that all through my 20s. I would work at Apple 9:00 to 5:00. Two, three times a week, I'd get in the car, drive to the bar, change clothes, take a five-minute nap, and work a shift. And I did that for years and years, and I loved it. I had a really great time. It felt like I could work one part of my brain at Apple, working on really cool projects, launching products, all that really amazing stuff, and then I could work another part of my brain at the bar, talking to people, interacting, connecting, which is something that I really love to do as a textbook extrovert.

Fast-forward eight years forward, I had been doing that all through the time. I did it part-time at Apple. I did it part-time while I was helping run Brace. And when I moved to Denver, I hadn't gotten a bartending gig yet in the six or so months since I had moved there while running Brace.

And so, everyone had always told me my entire life, you know, "Don't make your hobby or your passion your full-time job, because you're going to burn out on it and you're going to lose the love for it." And I was at a point in my life, in my career, where I could at least test that theory. So, the thought was, "Maybe I'll get a full-time bartending job. I'll see what it's like to be full-time in hospitality, full-time in food and beverage, and if I hate it, fine, I can go do something else. That's okay. I'm not married to this."

And so, I walked into a restaurant down the street from where I was living in Denver, it's called Work & Class, and I asked for a job. And it took a few months, and I met one of the owners, and she and I would get coffee occasionally, and then when they had an opening, they brought me on. And again, it was one of those, "Maybe I'll love it, maybe I won't, but we'll see." And much like moving to Denver, I adored it. Very quickly realized that I love working in hospitality. I want to do this full time. I want my career to be in this space.

And so, went from bartender to lead bartender to bar manager to beverage director for Dana Rodriguez in all of her restaurants. So, Work & Class opened up Carne a few years later, and was doing that for her as a beverage director.

Meanwhile, I was trying to figure out, what do I want to do long-term in this space? I know I want to be in Denver, I know I want to be in hospitality. How do I want to put those together? And I, kind of, thought back to my time helping run Brace and the things I was bad at, the marketing, the finance, the other just business skills that I didn't yet have.

And I decided in… this would've been winter of 2022 or spring of 20... I think it was spring of 2023, I decided to apply to business school. And I only applied to two. I applied to CU and DU. I knew I wanted to be in this area. I knew I wanted to be local. And I went and I toured both, and I met with folks, and I chatted with administration, and I ultimately decided that CU was going to be the right place for me.

And so, the idea was, let me go back to school, let me learn all of these skills that I wasn't good enough at the first time around when I was an entrepreneur, and let me give myself two years to figure out how I'm going to marry hospitality, Denver, startup experience, some tech experience. How do all these fit together? What do I do? And so, that's when I came back to CU.

Stewart: That's awesome. Quite the journey. And I love that you tried new things, experimented, tried to see where your passion lies. And I wanted to go back to what you said a couple times, saying that, like, you were recognizing your weaknesses and trying to figure out what you could do better when you were at the startup and when you were working in hospitality, and trying to figure out how education could, kind of, fill in those gaps.

So, how did your experience at Leeds and through the MBA program at Leeds, how did it help you, kind of, set the path working in hospitality now? What did it help do?

Rogers: That was the main goal of getting the MBA. I know a lot of people get MBAs for different reasons. Some people are career changers, some people are just trying to, kind of, break through a ceiling that they might have hit at work, and some people, like me, just realized that there were things I needed to learn. I wasn't done learning yet.

And so, I focused pretty heavily on the two that I mentioned, on marketing and on finance. I took a few entrepreneurship courses on the side, which is something that I obviously had a lot of background in. But wherever I could fill in gaps, I would. And I also took some venture capital classes because I had some experience talking to VCs during my time at the startup, and I realized that there's a chance that I'll end up across the table from one again at some point in my career, and it would be useful to understand all of the inputs that go into how they make their decisions and how they do their job, because that's the best way to make sure that you're presenting yourself in a way that makes sense and that works for their fund thesis.

So, focused on marketing, focused on finance, kept bartending, kept running bars on the side. Basically treated it like a morning MBA, like we have the evening MBA. So, I was doing it just from 9:00 to 5:00, and then I'd go work at the bar or run the bar, as you will. And one of the biggest moments, I would say, is, outside of marketing and finance knowledge, was actually taking a class called Projects in Entrepreneurial Companies.

So, I took that course in spring of 2024. That would've been spring of my first year of the full-time MBA. And the content of the course was great. It was basically a four-credit internship with a local startup. But what was more impactful for me was the professor, and that was Shannon Jones. He came to Colorado from Florida. He was running a family office's investments, and a lot of what he did was in this world called entrepreneurship through acquisition, where he would identify a young entrepreneur, often someone who had just graduated from business school, who wanted to purchase a small business.

And his family office would fund that entrepreneur in their search to find the business, which could go up to two years, and then also in their actually operating the business. So, you spend some amount of time trying to find the business, and then you buy it, and you operate it. And so, meeting him and hearing about his experience, kind of, planted that seed in my brain, and it was all off to the races from there.

Stewart: That's awesome. So, tell us about Third Place Hospitality's mission and what appealed to you about the idea of entrepreneurship through acquisition after you learned about it at Leeds, and then what that process looked like for you and what were the challenges?

Rogers: Yeah, so Shannon actually convinced me to take an internship with a search fund between my first and second years of the MBA program, and I worked with Olive Ridge Partners to do that. They were setting up a search, they acquired Colorado Home Services about six or seven years ago now, and had grown that and were thinking about maybe acquiring another. And so, I was helping them with that search, and at the same time, kind of, thinking over whether it would make sense for me to go this route.

Ultimately, I decided it would, and so in August of 2024, I set up Third Place Hospitality as an LLC, as a search fund. And the whole idea behind Third Place Hospitality is, I don't know if you're aware of the socioeconomic idea, but basically your first place is home, and your second place is work, and your third place is where you go to build community.

And that could be any type of place. It could be a gym, it could be a coffee shop. Obviously, it's been bars for a very, very long time. Churches are third places. All of those are third places. And for me, it's always been bars and restaurants, just that's, kind of, the way that I'm wired. And so, that was a really compelling idea to me.

And then added onto that, the fact that with the pandemic and since, a lot of people's first and second places are becoming the same place. And so, I think that now third places are more important than they've ever been. I don't know if you read the Surgeon General's report about an epidemic of loneliness, but that's a well-reported and a very real thing. Folks are feeling more isolated than ever, even as we're more connected than ever through technology.

And so, just for me, that really resonated, and being able to be a part of these third places, these places where people can go to meet friends, to build community, to be away from home, away from work, somewhere else that they feel safe and supported and welcome, that's just incredibly important to me. That was the impetus behind the name Third Place Hospitality. But I set that up in summer of 2024, and then as I went through my last year of business school, I was searching part-time while also running bars part-time.

So, I got under my first LOI in winter of 2024, actually while I was TA-ing the class on entrepreneurship through acquisition, the inaugural class. And that deal didn't work out. It fell apart maybe two weeks into the LOI. And then from there, there were a bunch of other false starts, broken deals, some closer than others, some more painful than others, but a lot of learning along the way. Because, you know, the process is you see something listed for sale, or you hear about something, or you chat with an owner, and then you give a letter of intent.

And the letter of intent kind of lays out, this is broad strokes, what the deal will look like. And it gives you some amount of time where it's exclusively yours, so they can't shop it to anyone else. And so, you get under the LOI, and then you have that much time to do your major due diligence, and that's when you start bringing in lawyers and accountants and start spending money on the deal.

So, once you're under LOI, it's yours if you decide you'd like it, but there's a lot of work yet to be done. So, I believe I was under LOI three times before I actually got Lady Jane. That was in... I had just come out of a broken deal in late summer of 2025, and I sat with the owner of Lady Jane, and I'd known him for years. He and I had gotten coffee a couple times a year for the past few years. I didn't know that he was looking to sell, but in the course of that conversation, it came out that it'd be something he would consider. And I think within a week, we had a signed LOI, and three months later, we closed.

Stewart: That's awesome. So, looking at entrepreneurship through acquisition, how does that work in the hospitality space?

Rogers: Yeah, it usually doesn't, honestly. It's not an industry that is a normal ETA target. So, traditionally, entrepreneurship through acquisition focuses on the trades. They'll do HVAC or electrical, landscaping, something like that. Some of the big things that search entrepreneurs look for are low customer concentration, high recurring revenue, and an industry that they might not already know about but that they can learn about on the job. That's the playbook, if you will.

And part of that playbook appealed to me, and part of it didn't, because I knew I wanted to be in hospitality. There aren't that many people doing it. It's not an industry that most people who are in ETA would consider, because the margins are really tight. It requires a decent amount of specialized knowledge. If you don't have a background in it, you're probably going to mess up. You see this all the time with folks who make a decent amount of money and open a bar or open a restaurant and don't really know how to operate it and often end up having to close it.

My thought and hope, and what I'm betting my career on, is that having that background in hospitality and knowing the space really well, combined with what I learned in the MBA program, a much stronger base in finance, I can find and get myself into deals for bars that perhaps other people in the ETA world wouldn't look at, and perhaps other people who are just purely in the hospitality world wouldn't necessarily have the knowledge to structure those deals.

Stewart: So, you, kind of, took the biggest challenge in the ETA world. You didn't start small, you went for the big dog. So, in that vein, what advice would you give to somebody that was, kind of, wanting to enter the ETA space, the entrepreneurship through acquisition space, not even just in hospitality, but just in general?

Rogers: Yeah, get involved in the community. We have a really incredible community of searchers and search investors and resources and mentors in Colorado. Shannon's a huge part of it. Adam Markley is also a huge part of it. He co-taught the inaugural ETA class, which was in the fall of 2024, and I actually TA'd that.

So, Shannon taught it, Adam co-taught it, along with Garth Fasano, and I TA'd that class. And all of them are incredible resources. Adam runs an ETA meetup the first Wednesday of every month. Actually, I'll be at the one this evening. So, that's just a great place for someone who's just starting to think about it to come ask questions.

There's always a cool speaker there, whether it's a lawyer or a banker who knows a lot about SBA, or Adam himself. They're always a great speaker, and it's just a great resource. But on top of the larger ETA community, I think one of the most important things, if this is something that someone wants to get into, is to build your personal community of folks who you're really close with, who you can meet with every week, every other week, and really go through together.

I would recommend it to be another searcher. I have my partner, Jesse Horan. He and I are basically search partners. We are looking for different businesses, and we are searching in parallel, but we have been searching together for over two years. And I think that's just been such a useful and such a beneficial element, because we're both going through it together. We can talk about the ups and the downs, and there are, especially during the search, massive ups and massive downs. You could be feeling great under LOI with a company one week, and then the next week you found a dealbreaker during due diligence, and you have to walk from the deal, and you've sunk so much time and probably some money into it at this point.

So, having both that larger community of folks who have done it, who are there to support, who know how to connect you with investors, stuff like that, and then also having your tighter circle of, ideally, people who are going through it step by step with you, I think is hugely helpful.

Stewart: Yeah. So, when you buy an established, like, highly regarded spot like Lady Jane, how do you bring your own vision to it, really, without alienating the staff and the customers that made it successful in the first place, but also bring your own knowledge, your own flair, and your own, you know, future success to the place?

Rogers: I think a lot of it is knowing when not to say anything, knowing when to just be quiet, take notes, learn, and get the entire picture. It required me to be very intentional, not trying to rebuild any wheels. I came into this business, it was successful, it was profitable. The GM has done a phenomenal job. He's built up a really great program, a really great staff, great regulars. We understand our identity. There are tons of things that are really, really well done, and so my job, especially at the outset, was not to screw those things up.

I spent the first six months of my time at Lady Jane effectively treating myself as a new hire. I went through all of the same training processes, all of the same requirements, the same menu tests as anyone else who would've just started at Lady Jane. And so, I spent six months learning every job. So, I learned how to work the floor, I learned how to work the bar, learned what the managers do, learned how to do door, which I think there are a lot of benefits to that.

Obviously, if I need to, I can fill in in any position that's needed now, which I do occasionally, and I really enjoy, because that's... It makes me happy to work on the floor. I love this industry. I love being on my feet and meeting people. But it also gave me time to understand why some things that, at first glance, might not have made sense and might have been something that my MBA brain wanted to change or, quote unquote, "fix," it gave me time to understand why those things are done this way, which gives you way more context and lets you be a better leader and a better business owner.

Stewart: So, now that you have been at Lady Jane, how long has it been since you...

Rogers: �Ǹ�Թ� nine months.

Stewart: �Ǹ�Թ� nine months, okay. So, what have been your biggest lessons in these first few months?

Rogers: Oh man, there are lots. I think one of the first ones, like, ones that comes to mind, is that unforeseen things are just always going to happen. You can't foresee everything. Things are going to change. Things are going to shake up. And I think a big part of being an entrepreneur really is how you handle those unexpected punches and how you're able to navigate them, go around them.

Sometimes the only way is through them. But it really is just always something different, something new, which is scary and exciting at the same time. I think also another thing that you really don't understand until you're in it with entrepreneurship through acquisition is once you're done with the search process and you close a deal, and you buy a business, you're now responsible for all of your employees and their well-being.

So, overnight, you become the person who makes sure the lights stay on, the paychecks get signed, you make payroll every time you need to, all of that. And that's obviously a... There's pressure with that, but it's really, really fulfilling knowing that you are able to support people in their careers. That's really cool. And then I'd say the last one, this joke got made all the time in business school, but it really is true. The only thing that you know for certain about your financial model is that it's wrong.

Stewart: That's good.

Rogers: Yeah, I mean, you can build it out as complicated as you'd like. You can do all of the sensitivity analysis. You can have all the different scenarios. But at the end of the day, none of those is going to be perfect. None of them's going to be exact. If you did your job right, it's somewhere within the bounds of, you know, upside and downside. But if you expect it to go exactly like the model says, you're in for a surprise.

Stewart: Yeah, absolutely. So, earlier you were talking about how, you know, hospitality is a completely different kind of beast, especially in regards to ETA. But what do you think are some common misconceptions about the business of hospitality that people have?

Rogers: Yeah, there are a couple of them that I get on a soapbox about. One of them is that people sometimes treat the hospitality industry as a stepping stone. You know, you hear Fortune 500 CEOs get interviewed, and they talk about how the job where they learned the most was when they were bartending or waiting tables to get themselves through school.

And that's cool because it does teach you a lot of really great skills. But my immediate thought whenever I hear something like that is, why didn't they stay? And what could someone have done to get that person to stay in the industry? There are tons of incredibly smart people in the hospitality industry, but there are also tons of people who pop in for two years, and then they pop out. And if we could keep them here and have them grow and fall in love with it the same way that I have, and build the industry from there, I think that would be really cool.

So, that's a misconception is that it's not a, quote unquote, "real career." And nobody at Lady Jane feels that way, I believe, and I don't feel that way. And it's very much something that is important to me, that people in this industry feel supported, feel like there's a real future here, and they can grow, and they can build something.

The other misconception I hear is that no one's drinking anymore. That's a big one. I don't think that's entirely true. People are drinking less, for certain, but I think they're drinking more intentionally. You know, instead of it being a thing that happens every night of the week, which isn't healthy, it's something that is once a week. And maybe they're bookending, where they start with an alcoholic beverage, and they have NAs in the middle, and then they end with an alcoholic beverage.

Or maybe they're zebra striping, where they're going back and forth between alcoholic and non-alcoholic. And I think a lot of the best bars in Denver and around the country and world are catering to those folks, because we want people to be healthy. We want people to be safe. Tons of places have really compelling non-alcoholic programs. I'm really proud of ours, and a lot of places do a really good job there.

It's not necessarily that, you know, bars are going to go away because people are drinking less. I think it just requires the industry to shift a little bit with changing perspectives towards health and making sure that you are still a third place for people, regardless of whether or not they're drinking that night.

Stewart: Yeah, those are great points. So, since you've been in hospitality, do you think that's the biggest shift you've seen, or COVID shifts? What has been the biggest change you've seen over time?

Rogers: I think that's a big one. I think another big one is specifically for the cocktail world, is that during COVID, everyone became a home bartender. COVID hit, and instead of going out to a bar and getting an Old Fashioned, people learned how to make Old Fashioneds. And I think that's awesome, because it raised the baseline of knowledge and understanding that your general guest would have. I think this happened for restaurants, too, because people were cooking at home way more.

But I think on the other side, it also made bars step their game up. So, just having a good Old Fashioned on the menu isn't necessarily good enough. Maybe even having something where you do a bit of technique, like smoking it, isn't good enough, because people got little smoke guns at home and started doing that.

And so, bars started stepping their game up in terms of technique. You know, fat washing became more prevalent. People were doing clarified punches. There's acid adjusting. The good, cutting-edge bars are doing more great, cutting-edge stuff, which I think was partially influenced by the fact that you couldn't just ride on the fact that you knew how to make a basic, classic cocktail.

Stewart: Yeah. I love seeing all the cool new things people are doing. I like it. Do you see entrepreneurship through acquisition growing, especially like in the Denver or Colorado area, and why?

Rogers: I think so. The silver tsunami — if you've heard of that — that's this whole idea that there is a massive, massive generation of folks who are retirement age, who own small businesses, who don't necessarily have succession plans. And that is not projected to slow down anytime soon. So, I think entrepreneurship through acquisition is absolutely going to grow.

I think it's morphing. The SBA changes their rules all the time. There's actually a big rule change coming up on October 1st that's going to affect the way people get funding for deals like this. And so, it's a little bit like Whac-A-Mole, where it's the Wild West for a little bit, and then defaults get a little bit too high, and so the SBA changes some rules to keep defaults in line as they should, which then makes deals harder to close, which then means that people who are trying to sell less-than-stellar businesses might not close their deals, which ultimately is a good thing.

But the, you know, the ebb and flow, the churn, affects people. I still think that overall, entrepreneurship through acquisition is absolutely growing, and especially in the Denver/�Ǹ�Թ� area. I think that it's on a really, really aggressive growth path right now, which is great. You know, CU �Ǹ�Թ� didn't have any entrepreneurship through acquisition curriculum when I started, which was in 2023.

And then by fall of my second year, myself and a few students, and Shannon and Adam, had convinced the administration to let us try out this first class, which we did, which has now become two separate classes, an A-term and a B-term course. And I think ultimately, there's going to be growth there in curriculum.

Last fall, we had our first Rocky Mountain ETA Conference, which was a huge success and drew a ton of folks from all over the country, actually. And we'll be doing that again this year. And that's also run by Erick Mueller, the entrepreneurship teams from a few other universities in the area, and then Shannon is a main player in that as well. So, I think a huge credit to a few big players in this area, but I don't see the growth slowing down anytime soon.

And I think that's ultimately very good. Obviously, from someone who is deep in the search, it means more competition, which makes things harder. But overall, I think more people knowing about, being interested in, being involved in this industry is only a positive.

Stewart: That's awesome. It's a very cool space to watch, so it'll be interesting to see what happens next. So, in the spirit of what's happening next, what is next for Third Place Hospitality?

Rogers: We're hoping to grow. We are loving Lady Jane, obviously. It's a fantastic place. I love being there. I love spending time with the staff. I love getting to know all of our guests and regulars. But ultimately, the goal was to make a little hospitality group through a combination of organic and inorganic growth.

So, especially with margins the way they are in our industry, it's safer and more fun to have a few concepts. Time will tell whether that means opening a new place from scratch, buying another neighborhood bar, partnering with a developer to build something out and own some real estate. But nothing's out of the question, and the goal is hopefully this time next year we can be talking about growth.

Stewart: Well, we look forward to seeing all the great things that you're going to do. So, thank you so much for your time today, Spencer. It has been great to learn more about you and the hospitality industry and entrepreneurship through acquisition.

Rogers: Yeah, thanks again for having me, Claire. This was a really fun time.

Stewart: Thank you again for listening to Leeds Business Insights. Make sure you're one of the first to hear every episode by subscribing to the show wherever you get your podcasts. The Leeds Business Insights Podcast is a production of the Leeds School of Business and produced by University FM. We'll see you next time.