Welcome to the Business of antiques where I help you make your passion for antiques profitable.

I'm Tom McLark Haines, CEO of the Antique Steven Company and I'm on a mission to make antiques modern, sexy, fun and profitable.

I hate to break it to you, if you're not making money in your antiques business, then it's just a hobby.

In this podcast, I interview some of the leading antique dealers from around the globe, getting their advice and sharing my own on how to sell antiques to the modern day antique buyer.

We discuss ways to recession proof your antiques business by developing strategic marketing plans, elevating your brand to attract the right target market, and planning for profits.

You make your money when you buy.

Not when you sell.

So we'll discuss some sourcing tips straight out of my antique Stiva little black book.

I'm teaching you the business of antiques.

I am utterly certain that it is five o' clock somewhere.

As a matter of fact, it's six o' clock my time.

But I don't believe that it is evening where my guest is.

So I am sitting here with a Scorpiono.

And a Scorpiono is typically made with with lemon sorbet or lemon gelato, vodka and prco.

I make mine with gin.

And because I have one of my favorite bakers, mixologists, design media celebrities here on the show today, I felt like I needed to be set up with a with a perfectly appropriate cocktail to get us going.

Brian Hart Huffman.

It is an absolute pleasure to have you here today.

I am honored.

I am so excited to be here.

I'm jealous of your five o' clock somewhere.

It's just water for me, but at least it's in a cute copper cup.

What can I say?

Priorities.

It's all in the details.

Everything's in the details.

I will confess, I've drank.

Yes, you've got me dreaming of the afternoon happy hour.

So seriously, I was saying just before we went on camera, I was saying I was so, so excited to actually have the opportunity to get to know you because you are someone I've keenly followed over the years and I've kind of watched your brand grow as you.

You've just dove into a variety of different endeavors and now you are the chief creative officer and president of Hoffman Media.

Your mother was someone.

She would be one of the top 10 women I most admire.

So I'm just so incredibly honored to have you here on the Business of Antiques podcast.

Well, I am super excited to be here with you to talk about, you know, my mom, first and foremost being Such a huge hero and entrepreneurial example for me.

And then now to be, you know, walking forward in life without her physically here with us is maybe the mission of my life.

To honor her and to talk about her would be remiss to not mention that my brother and I are leading the company she started 42 years ago.

Wow.

So it's, you know, it's, it's just one of those things that I, I don't know that I realized that I would literally be in her shoes at this point of my life.

I thought she'd be around and retired and, you know, still momming and talking about things.

But alas, she did not continue her journey with us physically here.

And we've carried her legacy forward in the last two years.

So it's an honor to be here today.

And I agree with you.

She's in the top.

She's the top one woman in my life, but I think a good top 10 for people.

Absolutely.

No, she's a pioneer.

She was a pioneer.

So why don't we start with you just telling our listeners kind of who you are, what you do, from the cookbooks to the mixology to just being a globe set.

A globe setting.

What is the word?

What is the expression?

Globetrotter, Jet setter.

I. I know your career started with being a flight attendant, and you've, I think, tasted your way around the world one pastry at a time.

So just tell.

Let's just start with a baseline of telling our listeners who you are, what you do, and a little bit about yourself.

Well, I love the chance to share.

Maybe what I will say is I am the accidental entrepreneur.

I, I started my life's career dreams at 5 years old wanting to be a flight attendant.

I fell in love with travel when my parents took us to Disney World.

And then my mom would take us on some of her work trips.

And travel was my first love.

The taste of experiencing new places and just the infatuation with air travel and all of these things became my career goal.

And I started working at US Airways ticket counter here in Birmingham, Alabama when I was 18 years old.

I skipped school one day to go interview at the ticket counter.

They had a vacancy and I knew it was the foot in the door for me into the travel world, even though I was still working on the ground and I was going to school here in Birmingham, but skipping school more and trying to spend more time at the airport and being a part of that industry that I had dreamed of for so long.

And US Airways had this program where we could Send in employee ideas and they wanted to hear the voices of the front line.

And I wrote this recommendation that I thought they should hire flight attendants at 19 years old and that I was, you know, dreaming of this moment in my life and being a part of the company for that.

And they accepted my idea, they sent me $500 and I was hired as the very first 19 year old flight attendant at US Airways.

And that is when my career took off, literally.

That's amazing.

It was the dream in my life to see the world and for me to have grown up, you know, in Alabama and not have the view of the world that I have today, it was the education of my life.

To meet new people, to experience new cultures, to taste new foods, to be uncomfortable.

I love talking about travel.

It should make you uncomfortable so that you are absorbing and learning and forcing yourself to see things through a different lens.

And that changed my entire life.

So I spent a career in the airline industry.

Flew during the nine, 11 years and a few years after just such an abrupt, traumatic, dramatic change to an industry.

And then I, my mom had started growing the company, her magazine publishing company, Hoffman Media.

And she sat down with my twin brother and I, he was a, he was doing investment banking in New York on wall and she said, this is a low pressure conversation, but as a mother I would be remiss to not ask, do either one of you have an interest in being a part of my company, Hoffman Media?

I need to be thinking about my future, whether I'm going to sell the company, I'm going to retire at some point.

What is the future for me?

And she said, it is not a pressure for you to join the company, but it is a conversation we should have as a family.

And my brother said yes right away.

He said, you know, I'm in finance and you know, you need the, you know, support there on the business side of the company.

And he jumped in right away and joined mom in business.

And I said, I need, I need to spend some mental energy figuring out whether this first career love of mine as a flight attendant is ready to hang up the wings or whether I need to stay in this career.

And I was at that point of deciding where do things go for me?

And I took a leap of faith.

I left the airline industry, I joined mom and my brother in business and I was living in Seattle at the time and I wasn't ready to move back to Alabama.

And so I said, I'm going to be working from home and commuting back and forth.

This was like the original work from home prior to a pandemic forcing us into it.

I said, I'm not ready to make the move.

And they said, okay.

So for the first three years, I flew back and forth from Seattle to Birmingham and then New York, Louisiana, wherever I needed to be for work.

And I started learning again from my mom and from my brother and from the team members in our company that had been a part of the first 20 years of the business.

And it was the second and also equally important education in my life where I got to see what my mom had built and what she had done.

And you know, for the first eight years or so, I think I was, I was obviously in learning mode, but I was also working for mom.

I was doing creative and branding work, planning events.

I was advising on the creative side of things, but I was managing brands she had started and I understood them and I love them still to this day.

But they were her babies.

They were her entrepreneurial, you know, children that came to life.

And then I had my aha moment, my Phyllis moment.

And I thought the world doesn't have a.

Or the US at least didn't have a media brand dedicated solely to people that love baking.

And I am a passionate baker.

It started during my flight attendant years actually of tasting things around the world and wanting to recreate them in the kitchen.

And I fell in love with the sweet side of it.

So baking and pastry was where I was spending a lot of time in the kitchen and then taking workshops and things.

And I thought, well, why wouldn't we start a brand for people that love baking?

So I started Bake from Scratch.

And that was.

We published our first issue 10 years ago, so maybe 11, 11 and a half years ago, I started working on the concept and the.

And that's when I became the entrepreneur that I now understand my mom was.

And to then walk alongside her as a creative entrepreneur, that was a life changing journey.

And for her to be a part of it prior to her death, to know how proud she was to have seen that I did have this instinct like she did.

It was a really special time and still to this day to continue the brand, but for her to have been a part of that, and now my twin brother and I take the company forward, managing the brands that she started, but also the ones that we are starting and passionate about too.

So tell the listeners some of the titles in your group.

Well, you have been a part of the Cottage Journal, so you are featured in one of our magazines.

And we also publish Victoria Magazine, Southern Lady Magazine, Southern home, Taste of the South.

Gosh, I'm tea time now.

I'm trying to rack my brain on all of the magazine media brands.

I will tell you, by the way.

No, I should be able to rattle them off without thinking.

My very first media mention was actually in Victoria magazine.

And I had just started blogging and I was, I was living in Amsterdam at the time.

I had just started my blog.

This is 2007 ish.

And there was a feature that you guys had a thing that was business cards, people's business cards.

And mine was one of the business cards that you showed.

Yeah, my little antiques diva head.

And on the other side of the page was an article about someone who's my colleague now, Melanie.

Melanie had, was a French blogger who had a French blog called what was it?

It was the Curiosity.

It was like the Le petite, Le petit cabinet, the Curiosity.

And there was an article about Melanie and then you flip the page and there were five business cards and my business card was there.

And I reached out to Melanie and she helped me start Antiques Diva Provence.

And this started with Victoria magazine.

And I will tell you, when my, when my mother in law passed away, there were like things that you receive when, when a family member passes away.

But the thing that I brought in my suitcase back with me to Europe was actually my mother in law's stack of every Victoria magazine that she had subscribed for so many years and then it went out of print for a while and when it started back up and it was the thing that when she passed away, I literally brought back in my suitcase to Europe with me.

So Victoria been a part of my, a part of my career.

And just when I was making the decision for moving to Venice, we had an article in Victoria magazine about our antiques Eva tours in Venice.

So you, you don't know this, but you've been behind the scenes kind of helping me throughout my career.

Well, that is what it is all about and I think my mom's entire mission behind our company, our brands and still to this day it's celebrating the communities.

It's, it's not us.

You know, we have the vehicle by which we share stories and like the, the launch stories of people's businesses, the continued successes, the things that we get to celebrate and feature.

That is why we do what we do.

And funny you say that about Victoria magazine because I will say that if I have ever met any brand, any magazine, even you know, when the first years of publishing it, prior to our, our relaunching, it is that magazine is the most collected in stacks.

People are like, I have every issue.

I will never get rid of it.

And I hear that all the time about Victoria magazine in particular.

And I just love it that it has such a collector's place in the home.

There is.

It is.

It's.

It's a collector's place.

There's something about it.

I think, for me, as an entrepreneur, it gave me permission to believe that what I wanted to create when Antique Steva was just a dream.

It gave me permission to say, there's an audience for this business.

There.

It like, I. I need to just step out on the ledge.

And it really gave me permission to step out and.

And take the chance.

So.

And I remember when you first started your magazine, because I remember saying, oh, wait, this.

He has to be her son.

Like, I remember, like, kind of connecting dots.

And so I've been aware of you for about 10 years.

So I'm your cyber stalker.

I' been following you behind the scenes.

So you also publish quite a few books.

Yeah.

So, you know, and again, I think that's the.

Once I tapped into this content creation part of my soul, I started seeing this land of creative opportunity and, you know, to talk about, like, featuring you and other entrepreneurs.

I've been able to be an entrepreneur in this company that my mom started.

And I've published not just baking magazines and cookbooks, but I've published three cocktail books.

And those cocktail books are not driven by mixology as much as they're driven by my love of the coupe glass.

And I fell in love with collecting.

And something you and I bond over is the antiques and the vintage and the things that make you smile, and you want to see them in your home, and you want them, you know, a part of your space.

I've always loved collecting coupe glasses.

And I thought, you know what?

We're going to do a book for people that have all these coupe glasses.

They think that they're, you know, for champagne, and they can't figure out what else to do with them.

So we're going to have a lot of cocktails, even some sweet treats and desserts to, you know, elevate serving things at the table.

And coupe glasses give people new ways to use them.

But that was the entire mission.

And I've just released the newest version of that book.

It's called Everyday Coop Tales.

So they follow the seasons.

We've got, you know, flavors for the cold days and then the hot summer days, too, and then anything.

And if whatever mood you're in, as long as You've got beautiful coupe glasses in your house.

Okay.

Have you seen the antique champagne glasses that they're.

The glass goes all the way down the stem.

The impossible.

Yes, yes, exactly.

It is my.

I didn't say it again how it's called.

It's like the impossible.

The impossible in French.

So I love that.

I did not know that's the name of it.

So that is my obsession is any time I see the champagne coupe that just continues down the stem, I will buy it.

And in general, because I work in antiques and because I see a lot, I don't, honestly, I don't buy a lot.

Contrary to what my living room behind me may show, I really don't buy that much because I do.

I'm constantly out in the field.

So it needs to be the best example, the best price.

Like, I have so many requirements.

But I will say as soon as I see the impossible, it does not matter.

It can be €150, it can be €30, it can be €300.

I will buy it because they're so rare and they're so special because you see the line of the champagne all the way down, all the way down the glass.

And I use them for my tiramisu.

So when I make tiramisu, I then scoop them into that for serving.

So.

So I am following the Brian Hart Huffman school of clean.

I like it.

I like it.

And you know, I agree with you about that glass.

It's one you buy when you see it and the price can't be sensitive because of how rare they are and they're so beautiful.

I agree.

It's one of my favorites.

So.

Okay, so I always joke, joke that when I do a podcast reading, it's a little bit like a podcast episode.

It's a little bit like a tarot card reading.

I always say we have the past, the present, the future.

So we've, we've talked a bit about the past.

Let's talk about today.

Like, tell me, tell me about your day to day life.

Like, what does your life look like?

My life now is I'm, I'm going to use the air quotes.

I'm gone all the time.

I now lead 14 baking retreats a year.

Ten of those, maybe eight or nine of those being in Europe.

From Sweden to a river cruise on the Danube to my favorite place in the world in France and especially in Paris.

And then in my kitchen here in Birmingham, we welcome groups of bakers for intensive education weekends.

So the baking media side of my life is still going on, but that brand has launched into experiences.

And again, years ago, I had an audience member, like, send me an email that was like, you keep sharing all these amazing places in the magazine, from England to France to San Francisco to New York.

Why are you not taking us there?

You used to be a flight attendant.

You're a travel junkie.

Like, why are you not offering in person experiences?

And that was another aha moment of wow.

I do have this career in a nutshell.

From my travel years in the airline industry to my content creation years.

Now, how do I combine those things and then really live all the dreams all at one time?

And so I started these baking retreats.

And for six years now, we continue to sell out as we add as many as we can.

And now the calendar's gotten to a full point.

I can't really take on many more, but I take people.

Yeah, there's, you know, I am a twin, but I'm not a triplet.

So I need another version of me in, in this, in this world to do some stuff.

But yeah, so now I spend a lot of time with bakers, traveling in the kitchen, going to the bracantes and the antique markets, going to the food markets to taste the local produce again, bringing culture and experience to life.

So we can introduce you to something in the pages of the magazine.

If you really want to immerse in it, you can go with me and then we can do it together in traveling the world.

And it's such delicious a place.

No, it's.

It's incredible.

And it's bringing these things to life and that's.

I mean, it's important.

There's one thing, there is one thing reading it, there's another thing experiencing it and being a part of it.

And like, it's really.

I think it is where the future of media is.

So years ago, I'm 51, by the way.

On my 40th birthday, I hired my former publicist and I hired him because I said, I believe that everything I'm doing online, I need to bring into real life.

Because people, if someone's looking to buy antiques overseas, we're the person they're going to find.

Like, that's, it's what we do.

And we're the leading expert in that.

However, if you're not thinking about that, you're not really going to find me because you don't have a reason to be Googling antique buying tours in Europe.

And so when I hired my former publicist, I said, I'm like, I want you to Bring me in real life to these places so that people are thinking of me not just when they're thinking about coming overseas, but they're thinking of me in general.

And he did a brilliant job.

It was Andrew Joseph, pr.

He did a really genius job with this.

But what I think now, over the last decade, as the world has become more and more virtual, more and more digital, more and more, like, honestly, I don't have to leave my house if I really don't want to.

And.

And honestly, I don't want to leave the house half the time.

Let's just be real here.

But the.

What I think is, over the last decade, real life has become more and more important.

So what you're offering is.

You're offering real life.

I mean, this is huge.

Well, I. I look back at the very first baking retreats.

They took place in 20.

2019.

Yeah, they took place in 2019.

And we sold out.

One, two retreats in San Francisco, one retreat for France.

And I felt the fuel.

I knew that things were.

That things were beginning in that genre.

So my first retreats were in 2019.

And the momentum starts, and people start saying, where are we going next?

What are we doing?

And then we plan an entire year of 2026 retreats.

We're building this momentum only to cancel every single one.

The pandemic hits.

It's a punch in the gut again.

As a business owner, as an entrepreneur.

The fear around that pandemic era of will.

What's going to happen?

I mean, just so much uncertainty then to see travel demolished.

I mean, obviously, we're not flying anywhere.

Places are in lockdown, borders are closed, you can't enter.

You have to test for, you know, Covid to do anything.

I was very afraid that I've started this thing and it lasted a minute and now it's done.

And that was such a hard experience to have, that fear of the unknown.

When will we be able to relaunch?

Will people still want to travel?

Or has this killed an appetite in people?

But in fact, it was the opposite, I think.

The period of restriction, the period of everything digitally.

You're watching Zoom classes, we're participating in things virtually because that was our connectivity, but yet there was this.

They called it revenge travel.

People were ready to get back out into the world.

They wanted to get back in an airplane seat and go somewhere.

And then every retreat we planned after that was selling out.

And it was again, the relaunching of something that I had just dreamed into existence.

Yeah.

And then to now, to this day, still have things onward and going and growing.

It's the euphoria of, okay, we came back.

We came back stronger.

So for me, those things were, you know, those.

Those moments in life of, wow, I'm.

I never missed a moment to be appreciative for it.

And still to this day, just every time the plane takes off and I'm going to meet a group of people, I'm just giddy like a little kid, and I can't believe it's happening.

It's almost like it's the first time every time.

Yeah.

Yeah, I. I so completely understand that.

You know, something you said earlier in the conversation you were talking about, that it's important to be uncomfortable and that travel can make you uncomfortable, but I also think as an entrepreneur, it's important to be uncomfortable.

And it's.

It's.

Those are the moments in which we grow, and those are the moments that we really achieve what our heart desires, what our heart is saying, this is what I want.

This is what I want for me is when maybe we're uncomfortable because we show a little bit of ourselves.

We, like, there's like a vulnerability moment where, like, here I am.

This is what I want.

And then you pray that people want it with you.

That's.

It is.

You know, I think back to a few examples in my life of being in that uncomfortable.

And first was my mom in 1983.

Women starting a business, going to a bank, asking for loans.

Unheard of.

I mean, the husband needed to sign.

You had to have.

I mean, just all these things that my mom walked back in the door and said, that's not happening.

She put herself in an uncomfortable position to say, I'm doing something with determination.

And you look back at those women and people that said, I'm not doing that thing.

And then they changed the course of everyone's future by, you know, staying strong.

And so she was uncomfortable in the launch of.

Of the company, but she did it.

And then there were years that the company had had some economic hardships, and she went five years without a salary, and she continued to pay the team members at the company while she walked in the door every day without a paycheck coming in.

And that's uncomfortable because her life was uncomfortable financially, and my dad was working and supporting our family.

But my mom stayed dedicated, stayed uncomfortable through that period of calling investors, of calling banks.

That's the worst thing you do in business is saying, I have a good idea, but I don't have any money.

And so she put herself back in the Zone of uncomfortable to see our company survive and then thrive with new ideas and having to push yourself beyond.

And then for me to have that moment of why am I telling someone else?

They should be think, you know, the world needs a baking magazine.

And I'm like, how I'm gonna do that?

And then, oh gosh, will people like it?

What will they think when I do it?

Is that first issue gonna resonate with people?

It is horribly uncomfortable, but in the most rewarding way.

And if you don't put yourself in that space, you're never the first one to do something.

You can't be the, the me too on everything.

You've got to be willing to be the oddball to see if it sticks.

I think about these moments in my life when I have shrunk to fit the space that was allowed for me.

And then I think about the other moments in my life where there was not the space.

I mean, I, I.

So I grew up in a very small, small town in northwest Oklahoma.

And I love where I grew up.

It's a beautiful place to grow up.

But I didn't fit there.

There is a big and rich, if you know who big and rich is, it's a country music band.

There's a big and rich song called six foot tall in a two foot town and, or something like that.

It may be eight foot tall and two foot town.

That was how I, I grew up thinking everyone thought I was weird or that I was pushing too hard when I would put myself out there to say what I really wanted.

I remember being 10 years old and we had to like do this school essay and the question was, do you want to be president of the United States?

And I can tell you, at 51, I do not want to be president of the United states.

However, at 10 years old, I wrote an essay on why I want to be president of the United States.

And I was the only one in my class who wrote that essay.

Everyone else chose a different topic because There were like 10 topics you could choose from.

And I grew up in an environment I thought too big, I expected too much, I wanted too much from the world.

I expected too much.

And I'm very, very blessed that I had parents who believed in me.

I had parents who said, you can do it.

You can achieve anything you set out to achieve.

You can do anything you dream to do.

And I'm certain my classmates, even now, I'm friends with most of them.

We were only 19 people in my class.

I'm friends with most of them on Facebook.

And I'm certain they look at me now and think, like, who is she?

Like, why does she think she can do that?

And it's because I've been willing to be uncomfortable, even now.

I mean, I live in.

I live in Italy.

My Italian is decent, but it's not great.

And I make my life.

I make it work.

Not always easily, but.

And that's absolutely.

It is.

You know, I talk about travel making you uncomfortable, but I applaud you and other people that give up residents in the comfortable and move somewhere and live in uncomfortable, even though you love it.

Like, you can love something and still be uncomfortable.

Because it's not the.

It's not the way we think of things in everyday life.

It's a new culture.

It's a new place.

It's a new way of approaching things.

It's not right, wrong, or indifferent.

It's just.

It is different.

And I love that you and some of my other dearest friends have taken big leaps and relocated to places where they knew their heart was taking them.

But the reward is so incredible.

And I love seeing your life and your adventures and seeing what you do, because it fuels my next leap and my next adventure.

Because you see people doing things, following their heart, following their passion, and then landing right where you're supposed to be, even if it's uncomfortable.

And that's the point.

What I have learned at this stage of my life, I have learned that I always land where I'm supposed to, and I don't always like where I land, to be honest with you.

Occasionally I'm like, well, I didn't plan this.

This is not what I planned.

And simultaneously, in any given moment, I receive the lesson that I need to learn in this moment of my life.

I will say I did have a little conversation with God and I said, okay, God, I have learned enough.

I'm very freaking wise.

I don't need to be any wiser.

I'm as wise as I need to be.

So we can stop with the lessons learned.

Yeah, you do have moments of.

All right, I'm good for a while.

Let's.

Let's let other people have.

Have the lessons.

Let's share the wealth.

Yeah, absolutely.

Let's share the wealth.

You know, it's funny, you talked about being an accidental entrepreneur, and that's often how I describe my career.

I didn't know that I wanted to do antique buying tours.

We.

I started writing a blog back in 2008, and the blog people started requesting tours and I gave tours as a result of people were asking for it.

And at first I was emailing people because I'm nice.

I would email people and give them, like, the full itinerary and say, well, you can do this.

I don't really do tourists, but here's what you can do.

And then people kept coming back and saying, but can I just go with you?

And then I did it for free a few times.

And then I decided, okay, well, that's not going to work.

So then I charged.

And there was a moment in my life that.

A moment that changed my life.

Lynn Jaeger, you know, have you heard of her?

Do you know who she is?

She.

So.

I think so, yeah.

I can imagine you've seen her at some point in.

In the world.

So Lynn writes for Vogue magazine.

She's a contributing editor at Vogue.

She writes for Travel and Leisure.

She.

She writes for quite a few different publications.

And Lynn Jager came on tour, and she.

And she was.

My first.

My first media mention was Victoria.

My second was Travel and Leisure.

And she came on tour to write an article with Travel and Leisure.

And she said.

And honestly, she was kind of mean to me.

We're on tour.

And she kept just taking places, and she's.

And at the end of the day, she goes, diva, no matter what I do, I can't break you.

And I said, oh, dear Lord, does this mean you're gonna stop trying?

And she goes, yeah, let's go get a drink.

And we sat down, we got a champagne.

And she goes, you look like a hobby.

I said, well, you're really one of my first clients.

So this was a hobby, and now I've turned this into a business.

And she goes, it's okay to look like it's okay to be a hobby.

You just can't look like it.

And she gave me some of my best business advice I have ever received.

And one of the things she did is she's sitting there looking at this.

This.

Taking her notes and.

And taking her notes for what will be a magazine article.

And she goes, you're not charging enough.

And I said, well, I don't know if anyone will pay it.

She's like, well, who knows who's paying for it now?

I said, well, not that many people.

I just started.

And she goes, you need to double your prices because no one's going to take you seriously.

And I remember thinking, like, I can't possibly do this.

And literally, Lynn changed my life.

I don't even know how I got on the.

Oh, accidental entrepreneur.

My point is that I was writing a blog that was never intended to be a business.

I thought, I'm going to write a book, my life is going to go in this direction, and this is what I'm going to do.

And, and a whole new set of opportunities presented themselves.

And I was very fortunate to get good media with the right publications who sent me the right clients, who helped me build that foundation.

And so I was fortunate and I was smart.

I was smart enough to say, let me shift the cells and say, okay, I was going over here, but now it's time to capture what's in front of me.

But I often describe myself as that accidental entrepreneur.

It, you know, it's, I look at my twin brother who always wanted to be in the art of the deal, the business world.

He, he knew passionately.

He had our mom's business brain, she had the business and creative brain.

I got the creative side.

But I never viewed myself, my life's dreams, my mission in life, to be entrepreneurial.

It happened without me realizing it.

Which I think maybe is the story of maybe most entrepreneurs I don't even know, but I, I know mine.

And the same thing like you just said about when I started doing the baking retreats, it brought a lot of speculation and then a lot of self doubt of like you said, is this something I'm going to do a few of and they're over or is this like a new venture in, in my life and in my business?

And we had participants at those retreats, the first two in San Francisco, we only offered classes.

We did not offer a hotel room, we didn't offer any frills.

We were just like, let's come for baking classes.

And we quickly learned through feedback and through those hard conversations of someone kind of jolting you.

They were like, Brian, if we're going to do this, we want the experience.

We want to be, you know, at the same hotel.

We want to feel comradery amongst the group, but we also want this to be nice hotels.

I'll never forget one of our participants, Ginger, said to me now, Brian, if I sign up to go with you to France, are we staying in nice places or are we staying in like some places I don't want to be?

And I said, you know what we're going to do?

5 star.

It's the way I would dream for this to be.

I want people to go.

It may be a bucket list trip for someone, they come one time with me, or it may be that someone has the ability to come multiple times.

And we have a lot of alumni that come with us.

Time after time after time.

But it's because they want that quality five star experience that we, through their feedback, have been able to create what we have today.

And it's not to say that there's not a model for someone else that works with different approaches, but for me to be the entrepreneur of this, it had to be something that I felt was a mirror of what I would want, how do I travel, what do I want it to be like.

And so that was where it started.

And I have to stay true to that and myself and the feedback that was guiding us.

And now, again, like you said, we have these businesses we probably never saw coming.

Exactly.

So listeners to this podcast have heard me say that every drummer has his beat.

So if you think about a drummer, the drummer beats his drum and every, every drummer has a different beat.

And my feeling is there are.

There's a lot of space for a lot of different people in a lot of industries.

I very much have an abundance mindset.

It's clear you have that same abundance mindset.

It's like, this is where you are, this is what you are doing.

And my feeling is when you do that thing that resonates most with you, that, that is the thing.

That's the thing that sparks joy in you, but it sparks joy in everybody else who.

Everyone else who likes the sound of your beat.

So you're over there, you're marching your drum, you're marching your drum, you're beating your drum, bump, bump, bump, bump, bump.

And the right people are like, oh, I want to follow that drummer.

And that's all we can do as entrepreneurs, is make our own beat.

When you said earlier that you grew up feeling like you were larger than the spaces you were in.

It's that same thing in this journey now in the path of, you know, you and I have both been in business now over decades.

I mean, we're spending now, you know, these careers that have not just been ideas or in their infancy, but the thing I tell myself all the time is staying true to myself if I look like I'm faking it or it doesn't feel like an amplification of Brian's big personality.

You're gonna get loud, you're gonna get dramatic out of me, because that's who I am.

I don't change Brian's version of who he is to be in different professional lanes.

My professional lane has to amplify this.

Of course.

I was looking you up before in the podcast because I followed you over the years, but I wanted a few details that were structured and solid.

And I was looking you up and I read a quote about he's the bald guy with the big personality.

And I thought it was like such an amazing quote because it was like that.

Stay in your space.

Yeah.

That quote happened in a baking class that I was teaching with Carrie Mori in Charleston, South Carolina.

And it was the year that the Today show was doing their broadcast from the Charleston Wine and Food Festival.

And one of our classes had one of the producers from the Today show there with a camera crew.

They were capturing some behind the scenes footage.

And this producer said to, I guess Carrie or maybe to Liba who was doing PR work for the event.

And she said, who is the bald guy with the big personality?

And I said, that might be one of my favorite quotes that's ever come from the who is he?

And we can see him across the room.

And I, I don't mind that.

That at all.

That is the, the role I don't mind being in.

I, I love it.

I loved the quote.

It.

It really made me smile.

I have to tell you, I have enjoyed this conversation so much.

I.

So as I said, I followed you over the years.

I was so happy to see you at our Paris flea market party, at our anti Sea of Paris flea market party during Paris Design Week in January.

And I remember I came over to you and I was, I was just so excited to see you in the room.

It was like, I have a big name.

He's a big guy and he's here.

He's here at my party.

And it.

You gave me immense joy by showing up, but also just by being so freaking nice.

And I'm glad this finally gave us a chance to actually get to know each other with all of our listeners listening.

Well, I will first say thank you.

Thank you, thank you for the invitation to your party.

I was there to support you and to meet you in person and your big personality that have followed for all these years.

So it's the connections like this that give the reason.

It's the fuel in the tank for, for why we do what we do.

But it was so amazing to meet you that day to be surrounded by all of the beautiful antique stalls at the.

At the market and just your party being the perfect Sunday Funday.

But also thank you for having me on your podcast on the YouTube series.

Just, just again to be able to share what my mom was and is to me and our business and my life, but then to also talk about these accidental journeys that I, I want other people to know.

They too can find their passion on a path and they don't have to try to be something that they're not.

And I'm maybe the example of I shouldn't be in the seat that I'm in today, but I am grateful for it every single second that I get.

To be absolutely 100.

Absolutely.

Okay, so tell our listeners how they can find you, the social media websites, etc, they want to follow you.

How are they going to be able to follow your journey?

You can find me on Instagram.

I am just at Brianhart Hoffman.

And then of course Bake from Scratch is at the Bake feed, so that account does not have the same name as the brand.

And then I.

You can find me@bakefromscratch.com you can learn about our baking retreats there.

And then I have some podcast episodes for bakers out there called the Crumb so you can hear my loud voice again if you really want to dive in on the baking side of the world with me.

And on YouTube, I just did a big sit down interview about the 10 years of bake from Scratch where I bear a lot more of my baking souls.

So that video is up on our YouTube channel that you can watch as well.

I can't wait to watch that.

I'll watch that next.

And I really appreciate you being here.

Just so you know, you have an open invitation to Venice anytime.

One, I have a guest bedroom.

Two, there's a hotel directly across the street from my front door if you don't want my guest bedroom.

And three, we clearly need to spend more time together because honestly, I think we are two peas in a podcast.

I could not agree with you more.

And I will stay in that guest bedroom and we'll make some fun cocktails when I'm there.

On that note, cheers.

Thank you for listening and thank you for being here.

Talk to you later.

Ciao, ciao.

I hope you've enjoyed this episode of the Business of antiques.

I'm Tom McLark Haines, the Antiques diva.

I'm.

I'm helping you make your passion for antiques profitable.

Talk to you next time.

Ciao, ciao.