Epic Entrepreneurs
Welcome to Epic Entrepreneurs! What does it take to build a real and thriving business in today’s world? As entrepreneurs and business owners, we went into business to have more freedom of time and money. Yet, the path of growing a business isn’t always filled with sunshine and rainbows. In this chart-topping show, host Bill Gilliland; author of the best-selling book “The Coach Approach” leverages his decades of experience coaching proven entrepreneurs to make more money, grow the right teams, and find the freedom of EPIC Entrepreneurship.
Epic Entrepreneurs
Building Connections Through Creativity: The Business of DIY Workshops with Lynette Stewart
What happens when a military spouse of 27 years finally plants roots and brings her creative passion to a new community? Lynette Stewart's journey with Board Brush Creative Studios reveals the challenges and triumphs of building a business focused on creativity, connection, and handcrafted wooden treasures.
After relocating 14 times throughout her husband's military career, Lynette found herself in Asheville, seeking a business that would provide both personal fulfillment and community engagement. Opening in 2021 as people emerged from pandemic isolation, Board Brush offered exactly what many craved—a space to gather, create, and connect. Unlike traditional paint-and-sip experiences, Board Brush workshops guide participants through creating personalized wood projects from signs and porch leaners to functional items like coat racks and clocks.
The conversation dives deep into entrepreneurial insights that resonate far beyond the world of DIY workshops. Lynette candidly shares how she balances family caregiving responsibilities with business ownership, the challenge of building community connections as a newcomer, and the unexpected difficulty of managing social media marketing authentically. Her practical approach to staffing—requiring all employees to experience a workshop as customers first—demonstrates how empathy drives customer service excellence.
Perhaps most valuable is Lynette's honesty about the emotional reality of entrepreneurship: "Nobody really said you're going to have sleepless nights," she admits, describing the constant mental engagement that comes with business ownership. Yet the rewards are equally powerful, creating a space where solo visitors form friendships and groups strengthen bonds through shared creativity.
Whether you're an aspiring entrepreneur, a creative soul seeking community, or simply curious about the intersection of art and business, this conversation offers practical wisdom and heartfelt inspiration. Discover how wood, creativity, and determination combine to build not just beautiful objects, but meaningful connections in a post-pandemic world still hungry for authentic community.
Thanks for Listening. You may contact me or our team at https://billgilliland.biz/
All the best!
Bill
Thanks for listening. Please hit the subscribe button, leave us a 5 star review, and share this podcast. You can reach me at williamgilliland@actioncoach.com or at https://billgilliland.biz/
All the best!
Bill
Hey there, welcome to this week's episode of Epic Entrepreneurs. I am excited to have Lynette Stewart with us from Board Brush Creative Studios. Welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 2:Well, thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:All right. So, Lynette, tell us a little bit about you and about Board Brush.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I moved back here with my husband. He was coming home. I'm from the Charlotte area, but we moved back here about four years ago after he retired from a 27-year career in the military. So we decided to put down roots after moving 14 times in 27 years.
Speaker 2:And we love Asheville and, yeah, board Brush came to be because we were customers up in the DC area our last duty station for about four years and when we were coming here and I knew I wasn't ready to retire, I just wanted to have something that I could do for fun, something that we were already kind of bought into, and I wanted a place for community, for a place for people to come and just enjoy themselves, especially coming out of COVID we opened in 21. And so it was just people were like dying to get out of their house, and so this was just a great opportunity for us at that time.
Speaker 1:Awesome. So tell us like a little bit more about what it is you actually do.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I tell a lot of people that we're like a DIY paint and sip, and most people immediately think canvas. And instead of canvas we're wood projects. And so we're talking wood signs, porch leaners, coat racks, trays, pedestals, clocks, porch planters, you name it. We have lots of different wood projects, and so people will pick out their project ahead of time. A lot of them can be personalized. You can add like names and dates and whatnot. And then you pick a workshop to come to. We usually have those scheduled on the weekend, sometimes during the week, and we have a calendar so they can pick their date. Grab their friends, come in, we have everything ready for them, and then we have an instructor that leads them through all the steps, and so the DIY part is more for well, they're doing it themselves, but, like, if you've been here several times, you like get to kind of just go at your own pace, and so I have a lot of customers that enjoy just coming in and they just get right to it. So, yeah, that's what we are.
Speaker 1:So is it mostly individuals coming in, or is it mostly groups, or what does it look like?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's about half and half, so we've got a good chunk of them are just our, my local customers I have. I live actually in Haywood County, so I have a lot of friends from Haywood that come over, but just Buncombe, hendersonville, launce, the whole area. And then we also our other part of our business is groups. So we do a lot of bachelorette parties. You know, asheville is such a great destination for that. We do family reunions and I do a lot of team building and corporate stuff. So especially towards the end of the year, that third, that fourth quarter, we'll get people wanting to do their end of year holiday parties. Or we get groups that are coming in for our conference and they want something fun to do while they're here for their conference. So they'll come into the studio as well.
Speaker 1:So I'm guessing some of that got impacted by Helene the hurricane.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it did. Yeah, october we were scheduled to go into one of our best quarters last year. Of course, I'm sure a lot of people had those aspirations and we had several bachelorette parties booked for October and some of them their Airbnbs got destroyed and they had to cancel. We had a couple groups from Tennessee that couldn't get here and so, yeah, it's been. It's definitely been an impact. I haven't seen a lot of those groups coming back to Asheville yet, but I am starting to see some of the inquiries, so that usually means people are starting to think about Asheville again, so I'm hopeful that that's definitely going to start picking up.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean Asheville's open, we're open. In Western North Carolina there is plenty of place, everything is back. I mean it's not. Yeah, you still. There's still remnants and there's still a lot of pain and a lot of people still digging out, but we're open. I mean it is the businesses. The business community is ready for you. The hospitality community is ready for you. Yeah, so tell me a little bit more about the team building, and from a from a business standpoint. Obviously I'm interested in that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So we pretty much sometimes team building. They think, oh, you're going to have fun little activities for us to do, so the activity, the experience is coming here and making a fun project and we can tailor that. So if you have a small timeframe or a large timeframe, we can fit that in. We can fit just about any budget. But basically you're going to come and just with your friends. Mostly what our team building activities are is they're just getting a chance outside of the workplace to hang out with each other and talk about things not business related. Now, not to say, some groups come in here and they end up talking business a little bit, but for the most part it's just a fun way for them to come in and get to know each other on a personal level a lot deeper.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. That's a great way to foster employee engagement is just to get to know your team a lot better. Well, let me ask you some business questions. So if you had to start over in this business, what would you do differently?
Speaker 2:Wow, you know what? Somebody else asked me this just the other day. For us personally, coming back to the area, like I said, my husband, he grew up in Haywood County but I was new to the area and we hadn't lived here in 20 some years and so I think we came back and jumped in really fast and that for me was kind of hard because I'm kind of an introvert. So thank goodness things like the Chamber of Commerce allows you to do networking and to get out there and do some of that. But it was just hard to make those connections and I think for me I wish we had maybe waited a little bit, gotten ourselves kind of acclimated to the area and ingrained in the community a little bit more before we took on the business. I think that's probably my biggest thing, that I would have said hey, hold your horses, get into your community a little bit and then go from there.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, if you'd already had a few connections and networking, all that, yeah, yeah, it's a, that's a, that's a great one. So what have been your biggest learnings as an owner?
Speaker 2:Oh, I'm going to say social media. Wow, I mean I can consider myself I am of the age where Facebook was big for me, but it literally is just a connection thing, just kind of keeping up with my friends and then. So learning that from a business perspective is so different. And Instagram, literally I didn't do much of anything on that. Now it's like, wow, instagram is awesome, but learning how to do reels and yeah, just all that engagement is I? It's a full time job. I don't even know how, how somebody can do it like I do. I mean I wish I could put more time into that social media aspect of it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so do you do it yourself, or did you outsource it, or yeah, I do it myself.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, that was one of the things is trying to find areas that you know. They always say staff your weaknesses. So I found somebody that could do like our builds. I found somebody who can do like my studio prep and my cleaning, because I didn't feel like social media was so personal and you needed to be in the studio talking to the guests, getting the pictures and whatnot. It just felt like something I couldn't outsource. So I found other ways to outsource so that I do have more time to do that.
Speaker 1:I understand. Yeah, that's great. That's great, it's good lessons. So what are some common misconceptions about running a business?
Speaker 2:That it's going to just be easy and it's just going to explode. And yeah, I think for us that was it. We just thought this is the coolest concept, asheville is going to love us and, yeah, asheville has a lot of offerings of things to do, so we're in competition with other people for fun entertainment and so, just kind of getting the word out. I think that's been the hardest thing. I mean print media, you can't do that. Nobody does mailings anymore, so just trying to let people know I still run into people all the time. They're like I didn't even know you guys were here, I didn't know you were in East Asheville. So, yeah, I think that those are definitely some of the things that you think, oh, that'll be the that's the easy part.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's pretty funny. By the way, print media does still work. It's interesting for some people. It may not, it may not be right for you, but it definitely still works. So what do you attribute your growth to?
Speaker 2:Yeah, word of mouth, yeah, and just getting just being consistent with networking, letting people know that we're here, going to events in the community, being a part of the community. One thing that was a challenge for us is we I call us like a dual county citizenship because we live in Haywood but our business is in Buncombe and so sometimes it's like I'm headed back home, it's harder, harder to do things in Buncombe County. So just finding that nice balance, that's why I'm it's harder to do things in Buncombe County. So just finding that nice balance. That's why I'm really big with the chamber here in Buncombe and, yeah, just making sure people know what we are. When you said biggest misconception a funny story really quickly is when we were doing our build out, we had our dogs here and they would sit at the front door while we were getting everything ready and people thought board and brush was literally like for pets boarding and brushing, and so they'd be like, are you a dog grooming place? And so when you said that I'm like that's a big misconception.
Speaker 1:So yeah, yeah it is. It is interesting what can happen.
Speaker 2:So how do you, you know, balance the personal and the business? Wow, yeah, that took a while to figure out. I mean, we were about to celebrate our fourth anniversary here, and so those first couple of years and, quite honestly, one of the reasons we came back to Western North Carolina was we're both from my family's all from here as well but Todd's family we came back to kind of help his parents and whatnot, and so I think the balance came in. Just knowing this is it feels like a very much a full-time job, but I only had part-time hours because I have other responsibilities with our family, and so again, it was that delegation and finding people that could do things that I couldn't, and then me take the sacrifice of maybe, you know, not getting paid for something or whatever you know, my personal time, but you know it was worth it to me to have my schedule be free, to be able to do those other things that I needed to back home.
Speaker 1:So Right, that's great. So do you have team members, do you have people that help you, or?
Speaker 2:Yeah, we have. We have a staff of eight people and so some of them are assistants, some of them are instructors. Like I said, I've got a builder, I've got somebody who does a lot of my studio prep and cleaning. I have a girl that just does our calendar and she, like hand writes our calendar. We have a big one in the lobby, yeah. So there, yeah, we all kind of just I like a deep bench, because you never know when a workshop is going to blow up and suddenly, in two days, I need, you know, two girls to help me out or whatnot.
Speaker 1:So you know, so what do you look for in an employee?
Speaker 2:Somebody. They don't have to be an extrovert, but I like to see that they can connect with other people, even if it's one-on-one. So I want you to be able to engage with the customers. I want you to be able to engage with the customers. I want you to be the hype man to really encourage them about their project. There's several steps where they might be feeling like, oh, I messed that up, or oh, this is not going to turn out like I wanted it to, and we just like to encourage them along that.
Speaker 2:So most of my staff are really good about finding ways to, you know, compliment them on their project and help them out, fix the problem when something goes wrong. And yeah, there's just about nothing we can't fix. So that's like I call that, like my secret sauce. I'm able to just about fix any mistake in our project before they go home. So that's a lot of fun. And then just loyalty and being, you know, responsible, you know responsible adults and being on time and coming when you're supposed to and all that fun stuff. But yeah, the engaging with the customers is probably my biggest thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, I like it. I like it. So let's do a little quick fire. Just a couple of sentences about this. So BEPIC is an acronym, so I'm going to give you the definition of the letters and you tell me what your thoughts are. So B is bring the energy. What are your thoughts around that?
Speaker 2:Oh, stamina, probably we're on our feet the entire time and so you may have been working. I have several of my employees that work full-time jobs, so then they got to come here and they got to be. You know, their game's got to be ready to go. So yeah, stamina.
Speaker 1:I love that. How about E? E stands for education, yeah, stamina. I love that. How about E? E?
Speaker 2:stands for education, education. Yeah, just require anybody that even applies for this to have gone to a workshop ahead of time.
Speaker 1:I want all my employees to have experienced it as a customer, and I just think that gives you a different lens to look at things through and to understand what they're all going through. I'm writing that down. Experience as a customer I love that. Yeah, that's great advice. How about planning? Took some planning to pull this off. What are your thoughts around planning?
Speaker 2:Yeah, planning it took a lot of collaboration and just going. We went to a lot of other board and brush studios before we committed to this. I just wanted to see how they were run there's. You know we're a franchise and so a lot of them look similar but everybody does things differently. So it was just neat to go and talk to other studio owners and kind of glean from what they've done and their experience before we put it all together for our own studio.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I talked to a guy one time who, and I know he owns several businesses, but one of the businesses he opened was a pizza restaurant and he spent a year going around the country trying to find the right pizza sauce the recipe for that. He visited all over the country trying to find the right pizza. It's pretty cool, All right.
Speaker 2:Inspiration. I, you know, probably my mom. She's so, she's very creative and she's all like growing up she never had like that career she was, she was a stay at home mom, but she always had her foot doing something. So one time she was working part-time for a Chinese food restaurant while we were in middle school, or another time she had her own jewelry business or she just always found ways to keep herself engaged and active and working. And that's again that's one of the reasons I wanted to do this when we're moving here is I just want to be there out in the community and meeting. I love meeting people.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so you're an introvert who loves meeting people. Yeah, yeah, it's all about energy, right? I mean, it's about where you get your energy from, so it's it's. Yeah, it's all about energy, right? I mean, it's about where you get your energy from, so it's, yeah, it's an issue. I think a lot of people misunderstand the terminology there, but, yeah, you can be a people person and still be more introverted, I guess. So C stands for commitment. What are your thoughts around commitment?
Speaker 2:Commitment. Yeah, so we were in this for, you know, the long run. Of course you know we have, you know, end of our lease or end of our contract, that kind of thing. But we, you know, we knew coming into this that it wasn't going to be something that, oh, if it didn't work out in a couple of years we're going to bail. So our commitment is to the community to being in this. You know we're in East Asheville, so, um Haw, Creek.
Speaker 1:All that area is very important to us, ac Reynolds, and so, yeah, we just we want to be here as long as we can, as long as it continues to thrive. Love that, yeah, I love that. So what do you wish somebody had told you before you went into business?
Speaker 2:Hmm, that you're going to have a lot of sleepless nights because all that responsibility, bam is on you, and so that, yeah, I did not expect the worry part of it and just having to each month wonder, okay, how's this going to work out? You know, what do I need to do now? And it's just, it's hard for me to turn my brain off from constantly thinking about the business. And so, like, we took our first vacation last year, so it took us three years before we took a vacation, and this year we're doing it a little sooner. So, but it's, yeah, it's one of those things where I had to kind of get to the point where I was ready to trust other people with it and for me to be able to step back and and shut that part of my brain off for a couple minutes.
Speaker 1:But yeah, it's just nobody nobody really said it's yeah, you're going to have a lot of sleepless nights. Wow, yeah, I guess it's a lot different than the military life.
Speaker 2:Yeah, when you're being barked at orders or if somebody else is in charge, I I've thought that several times. I'm like you know, I'm totally good with somebody else being in charge. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I like that. So what words of advice would you give or would you offer to business owners who are looking to grow?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, so definitely, I think the networking part of it is big. I didn't really take that seriously our first year here. All I was thinking was, oh, the people I'd be networking with when that person's going to have a conversation with somebody and be like oh well, have you heard of board and brush? And so I think, just making sure you're out there in the community getting the word out whatever you can. Our marketing budget is really small so I try to find any avenue and like this, I totally do not know how much I appreciate it, because it is really hard just to be able to take this little budget and spread it out there to get the word out. So I would say networking is one of the things that. Get involved in your local chamber, your rotary, your women's club, whatever it is, your men's group. Yeah, get involved and just let people see who you are and always wear your gear.
Speaker 1:Yeah, a lot of people don't really think about the fact that most marketing leads to networking anyway on some level. I mean, you might get somebody to take an action, but then eventually you got to do a people to people thing. So, yeah, that's a pretty good one. So, lastly, what's the best way for people to find you or get in touch?
Speaker 2:Oh, on our website or on Facebook, so we're easy. Wwwboardandbrushcom slash Asheville, so you can. Actually, if you Google paint and sip for Asheville or board and brush, we come up at the top. But, yeah, our calendar's online, so that's probably the best way. We're on Facebook. We're on Instagram. All of our links are there. It's hard not to not to be able to find us, but yeah, you can view our calendar, see when our workshops are and then go from there.
Speaker 1:Well, this has been great. I've learned a lot. Is there anything else you'd like to add?
Speaker 2:No, I just. You know, like I said, this is a great place just to bring your friends or even come by yourself. We have several customers that initially were coming by themselves and they've made friends in the workshop and now they like contact each other. Hey, when are you going to the next one? So you know, even if you're a single person or don't have a, your friends are not available one night and you still want to come. Come. My customers are great, they welcome everybody. So it's just a great place to hang out. And again, if you just want to sit there and work on your project and don't want to talk to anybody, nobody's offended by that either. So yeah, just come and have fun.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's cool. It seems like a good way to meet people actually. Yeah, go to a class, go out. You know, I hadn't thought about it, but going to a class is a great way to meet people. It doesn't matter what the class is, so that's awesome. That is awesome. Well, thanks so much for being part of our community and for what you're doing and building your business, and I certainly wish you continued success.
Speaker 2:Thanks, Bill, I really appreciate it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, thanks, hey, and everybody, just remember it's not too late. Get your tickets now for the Asheville Business Summit. Just go to wncsummitcom Pick up your tickets there. It's a great place to network. It's a great place to learn. It's going to be fun. Just get out there and do it, hey, and until next time all the best.