Brandon Steven
speaker
104 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Brandon Steven’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
dad still today gives the same advice the only advice he's ever given us and that is just keep on trucking and so we just kept on trucking we never had a plan talk to my dad today you're looking you're seeing me all stressed out they're coming so just keep on trucking
First of all, this is your first podcast outside of the motorhome?
And this is my first podcast, and this is the first podcast in the Gravitas podcast. Exactly. That's three firsts.
Okay, so two-minute bio. Yes. Which I hate, so I probably won't even use the whole two minutes. I'm Brandon Stephen. I am from Wichita, Kansas. I still live in Wichita, Kansas. People from Beverly Hills that have known me just from doing Gravitas are amazed that I still live in Kansas, but I love it there. Yeah. I think first I'm a father, husband.
I have six kids, six amazing kids, five daughters and a boy. I did start in the car business early on, like in my teenage years, working at my best friend's dad's car dealership. And then I just fell in love with the car business. Then my brother and I were partners. We opened up a health club. So I think I opened up my first, we opened up our first health club in 95.
74 health clubs.
And 21 car dealerships.
We have a couple of restaurants. We have a hockey team. We have a lot of things. But our core business are health clubs and car dealerships. That's our core business. And my advice to most people is, Stay in your lane, stay in your lane, stay in your lane. And then I keep going outside my lane and doing restaurants and hockey teams and Membership Club.
What business do I have going in the heart of the Golden Triangle and building this massive project? So it was less than two minutes, right?
The answer to that question is pathetic. There is no answer because I didn't plan this. It started out as I literally came to pick up my buddy Paul for lunch. And they had this patio outside that was very underwhelming for where it was at. And they were getting ready to put a restaurant inside in this little 4,000 square foot vacant space they had that was Wells Fargo. And I was talking to him.
I'm like, I just don't understand. It just didn't work for me. It didn't make sense. And I was like, you should put a bar. This should be like a garden bar. This should be an outside bar. I mean, look where you're at. He just kind of shrugged his shoulders like, whatever, you're from Kansas. I'm like, what do you mean? He's like, it's not going to happen.
You're not going to put, the city's not going to approve that. Okay, well, my question to myself was, well, how? How would they approve it? And that's literally how we started. And so it started out to be 12,000 square feet. And now once we started going, I'm like, we need this.
And as my business was growing, this was literally 37 months ago. That's when this project started. And I was like, I need this for my business. I need this. And that's kind of where it's kind of dwarfed to. So it's open. Time has come. Today is day number nine. Wow. Wow is right.
I get a lot of congratulations, you know, because I've been doing this for so long, building this. And so people congratulate me so long. And I don't want to say it just frustrates me. It irritates me when people congratulate me because I've done nothing. We are open. We are open. That's only one-third of it. We built this amazing facility, but that's only one-third of it.
Great service and great food are the other. And the club is 95% done construction-wise. So, Dan, you know me well enough to know what do I see.
Yeah, I see the 5% that's not done. That's just the way I've always been. So I do need to relax. I do need to appreciate how far I've come and how fun this is.
As it got bigger, and so I started expanding here, five, six years ago, my car business, I started expanding to Los Angeles. I build a family in my car business. My team is my team, and they're very important to me. My meetings are super important to me. And my celebration dinners with my employees are super. So it kind of dwarfed it like, I need a space for this. I need a space for this.
there was a need for this in Beverly Hills. And so that's how it kind of dwarfed. And as I was building this restaurant and taking on more and more space, it just became a membership club. Like it became like, okay, I can't just have everyone use this. I mean, I just walked you through and showed you that gorgeous, it's called the poor room, the conference room.
Like it's a gorgeous room that I need for myself, which means other businessmen also need that for themselves. And that was not going to be just open to the public. It needs to be just exclusive to our members.
I like people to tell me no and then to overcome it. I love the challenge. Literally, everybody, my designers, everyone says, you're not going to be able to hang an 18-foot F1 car from the ceiling.
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