February 2015 – DAN REICH

South Beach Wine And Food Festival Beginnings

This post originally appeared on Forbes.com.

If you’ve ever done sales before you know how important customer service is. At the heart of any sale, there is mostly always good old fashion communication and relationship building. That is why I find it fascinating to look at how some of the best people in the hospitality business do what they do and how they think about all facets of an experience or of a relationship.

Take Lee Schrager as an example.

Fourteen years ago, Lee attended the food and wine classic to represent his company, Southern Wine and Spirits. After a wonderful experience, he decided to try to create an event that benefited his brands in a place that he felt would be more conducive to a larger and more influential group of people. He realized that to win people over he would need warm weather and a closer location to NYC.

Shortly thereafter the South Beach Wine & Food Festival was born.

Today, more than 60,000 people attend the events, and Lee is able to attract big names like John Legend, Chrissy Teigen and others.

I was able to chat with Lee to learn about three things that he felt contributed to the successful execution of this event. Here is what he said:

Leverage your unfair advantage. Lee was very quick to admit that part of his success with the event stems from the fact that he works for a large and successful organization, Southern Wine and Spirits. Having the resources of a large organization gives him a tremendous platform to get things in place however, this is just a part of the puzzle.

Engage with tastemaker and influential folks. In the first year of the event, Lee had no track record to speak of when it came to producing such large-scale events. So he reached out to his network and engaged with friends who become early adopters which in his case, were people like Emeril Lagasse, Rachel Ray, Bobby Flay and Giada DeLaurentiis, all highly respectful folks in the food industry. Couple this with the amplification of social media and the popular shows on the Food Network, and building an engaging audience was not too difficult for Lee.

Create great products, programing and listen to your customers. Lee and his team are very conscientious of different demographics, price points and customer feedback. As a result, they recently revamped the festival’s signature event – the Grand Tasting Village – to offer a brand new layout and timing based on festival goer feedback. They also added more late night events with cocktail themes, instead of only adding more of their traditional daytime events, and intimate dinners with chefs ranging from international superstars to local culinary talents.

Lastly, everything Lee does is done with a mission in mind and in this case, it’s charity. To date, Lee and his festival have raised over $20 million for the Chaplin School of Hospitality & Tourism Management at Florida International University. The New York City Wine & Food Festival is hosted by and benefits the Food Bank For New York City and Share Our Strength’s No Kid Hungry campaign and 100% of the Festival’s net proceeds go toward helping these community based organizations fight hunger.

That’s not a bad mission to have, and with right skills and groundwork, it’s easy to see how an event like this can become and remain a success.

Nice job, Lee.

The Most Unlikely Startup: IAF

This post originally appeared on Forbes.com.

In 1948, at the Henry Hudson Hotel in New York City, the most unlikely startup was created. It’s founding members dropped everything to fly across the country to Manhattan for secret meetings to launch their endeavor.

Just a year before, one of it’s founding members Leon Frankel was already running a highly successful business buying and selling used cars making $100 to $200 a pop on every sale. Not bad when you consider this is 1947.

But then Leon and a few others got a phone call that would change their lives and put them in one of the harshest environments to build a new organization.

As Leon put it, “I just made up my mind and nothing was going to stop me.”

When you’re building any new venture from scratch, that attitude is critical. When you’re building an air force amidst an ongoing war, that attitude is absolutely required.

Today, the Israeli Air Force ranks second to none globally, according to a study conducted by military experts for Business Insider. “Pilot to pilot, airframe to airframe, the Israeli air force is the best in the world,” said Chris Harmer, a senior naval analyst at the Institute for the Study of War.

In a new documentary called Above and Beyond, which debuted in NYC this past weekend, Nancy Spielberg tells the story of how a few young Americans started what is today considered the world’s leading air force.

Nancy Spielberg with Israeli F-15, Hatzor Air Base, Israel

I was able to sit down with Harold Livingston, another founding pilot who also happened to write the screenplay of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, to ask him a few questions about how this highly unlikely organization was formed.

Dan Reich: I can’t imagine the numerous challenges you confronted, but what was the biggest obstacle you faced when building the Air Force?

Harold Livingston: The United States Government who prevented us from taking the aircrafts out of the country. They enforced an embargo against any aircraft weighing over 25,000 pounds being sent without an export license.

Reich: In the beginning, there wasn’t a blueprint or playbook for what you were doing. How did you train and recruit new members?

Livingston: We played it as it was, with what we had. Recruiting was achieved through word of mouth, airline and/or ex-military friends of friends, various Zionist organizations, even to the point of scanning Air Guard rosters for pilots and crewmen with Jewish-sounding names. Training was another matter: everyone had to be thoroughly checked out by the handful of experienced people (obviously airline and military veterans) available. This was why we were always so woefully short of skilled crewmen, and towards the end forced to hire some dozen (non-Jewish) mercenaries.

Reich: In any new venture, partnerships are very important to achieve success. Were there any partnerships that facilitated the growth of the organization?

Livingston: Czechoslovakia of course was essential, without their assistance and cooperation, we would have been in deep trouble. Same for the Panamanians, although they (Panama) were led to believe we truly were establishing a national Panamanian airline. That “franchise” allowed us to fly the airplanes out of the U.S., and on to Israel.

Reich: In hindsight, what steps would you have taken differently in growing and building the organization?

Livingston: No, not even in hindsight could we and probably would we have done anything different. Under the circumstances, there was nothing we could have done differently. We were, as stated, a “start-up” organization, and therefore learned as we went. And, for sure, from our mistakes.

Harold and Leon’s “nothing was going to stop me” attitude continues to permeate throughout the rest of Israel’s high tech institutions today. With nearly $15 billion in exits through mergers and acquisitions and public offerings, 2014 was an all-time record year for the Israeli hi-tech industry, compared with a mere $1.2 billion raised in 2013, according to a PwC report for 2014. The exits were spread out between a variety of tech industries, including Internet, IT, life sciences, communications and semiconductors.

According to Hillel Fuld, CMO of Zula and startup advisor, “Last week there were $910 million in Israeli tech transactions. In one week!” This past week, the Israeli ecosystem continued to deliver with both VCs and startups raising substantial capital. Some of the financing announced include companies and firms like like Vintage, Singulariteam, ClickTale, Addallom and Kaminario. That amount of capital is highly unlikely for any set of companies, and yet, these businesses and others continue to grow despite the many challenges the region faces.