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Chapter 1: How did Ty Murphy identify a gap between golf culture and cigar culture?
I don't have that interesting of story I'd say if anything I could relate with probably most of the audience of just being pretty average and just deciding that you know what committing to something you know persevering through stuff and just following you know the little voices in your head that say hey this might be a good idea or you should explore this or you should do that and just going on my journey with me I guess would be kind of the biggest thing.
Ty Murphy is a serial entrepreneur, marketing strategist, and technology-driven business builder, and the founder of Greenside Cigar Company, which he launched in 2018 to bridge the golf and cigar industries.
So how do you ascend your clients? How do you keep them buying more cigars? You almost gamified it.
We did, yeah. It makes it more fun.
Bingo.
The funny story on this is we thought if we came out with better branded cigars for golf, and we go straight to Golf Course and say, sell these cigars, they're cool, they're gamified, guys will have more fun picking these out to play with than anything else you sell, you'll sell more cigars. And they probably sold a little bit more cigars, but after three years of running with that message...
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Welcome to another episode of the Living Your Legacy podcast for Inside Success. I am Ray Gutierrez. Joining me today is something that's very close to my heart because I'm 50% Cuban. And as a Cuban, there is already a well-known fact that my fingers are made to roll Cuban cigars. Watch, see? Ty Murphy is going to help me get more Cuban cigars, apparently, no?
Yeah, if we can. We got to work with the border there.
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Chapter 2: What innovative strategies did Ty use to disrupt traditional cigar distribution?
I'm glad they're in here and nobody else can hear that. But sometimes I get out.
So cigars, I know it was a terrible intro and that's the best I can do. I'm sorry. Yeah.
No, you're good. Yeah. So we focus primarily on golf and cigars. So the sport of golf, we kind of recognize there's not a better pair than other than maybe cigars and like a rum or an old fast. Sure. Right on. But in terms of sports, golf is it right? You're never going to have a cigar playing basketball or tennis. You die yet. Yeah. Yeah. You can try it. You can try it.
And we just noticed that there was a gap there, right? Nobody had really cemented that bond. So you had the golf industry and you had the cigar industry and yeah, they'd sell, you know, the cigars in the golf, but if you're a new up and comer in the cigars and you want to have one on the course for one day, you really don't have any connection to what brands are being sold in there.
So we tried to change that.
Ty, you're telling me that no one goes, Arnold Schwarzenegger, cigars, golfing. No one put it all together?
Either they did and they listened to that little voice that told them not to. I don't know.
I don't know. Well, good for you, Ty Murphy, for listening for all your voices and creating this. One of my favorite conversations that I always like to bring up is I had a surgeon here and they're like, we surgeons like to talk shit when we're like, there's a body and we're standing here for 12 hours. You'd be surprised how much locker room talk is happening there.
And this is coming from a woman. Yeah, oh yeah. So talk about what it's like to network when you're golfing. What happens there?
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Chapter 3: How did influencer marketing contribute to the growth of Greenside Cigar Company?
So I try and always do one of ours. And if I can't do one of ours because I'd like to share. So I have some on hand. I'll give them to somebody else to try. But I also like trying everybody else's cigars because you always want to know how do you stack up against the rest of the market and competition. But I usually go cheaper because.
I have half my brain on the game and I have half my brain on the cigar. Yes. So those I usually light up on occasion. If we're really celebrating something, if I'm playing really well and I want to celebrate with something, or if I'm just not playing well at all and I just want to have a good time. For sure. I'll light a cigar for that.
But yeah, I mean, cigars is kind of one of those things they... They're all handmade, you know, so you have to kind of sit, nurture, take it in. There's so many different ingredients that can goes into the cigar and what experience you get and you want to take that in.
And then if you pair that with a drink while you're on the cigar or out the course, you know, that contributes to a different experience. So you have to, I think, with cigars, have one, some attention to it. And sometimes, I mean, like I say, you know, if I play golf every week, I probably have a cigar experience. As a guy that owns a cigar company, maybe once a month. Wow.
Yeah, I don't do them that as often as I used to when we got started with it. Right on. Yeah, just because when I have a cigar now, I want to sit down. I want to enjoy it. I want to have a good conversation.
Sure, sure, sure.
Set an hour aside to myself. When I'm doing cigars on the golf course sometimes now, it's fun. When I'm having fun and I don't really care about the score, I'll do that. But I just like to sit down and really take in the art of them now.
So you're not getting high on your own supply, sir?
No. No. I try to do one. I'll do one, but I won't. Good for you. I share. I'm a giver. I'm a giver.
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Chapter 4: What role does branding and gamification play in increasing cigar sales?
And they go from the lowest of the low, which is our triple bogey, you know, the worst score you can make on the golf. Of course, it's our worst cigar. I'll never smoke it. That's the only time I'm going to talk bad about my own product. So they're just regs. Yeah, but you got to hit a $5 market price, right? So it's like, all right, what's a $5 cigar?
But then we have our nice ones, our birdies, our albatross, you know, those things we spend time in. They are more quality cigars.
These are all golf references, right, Skofie? Just making sure I got the thumbs up from Kofi.
So, you know, as the score improves, the cigar improves, right? Right on. And it's not a marketing gift. I mean, our Birdies cigar, they age the tobacco for five years before they roll it. I mean, it's four times as more expensive for us to buy and make than it is our triple bogey. So the prices are, all of our margins are pretty much the same across each brand.
So as the brands go up, the quality definitely. And if you put them side by side and tried them and you're a cigar person, you would absolutely know the difference.
So how do you ascend your clients? How do you keep them buying more cigars? You almost gamified it.
We did. Yeah, it makes it more fun.
Bingo.
The funny story on this is we thought if we came out with better branded cigars for golf and we go straight to golf course and say, sell these cigars, they're cool, they're gamified, guys will have more fun picking these out to play with than anything else you sell, you'll sell more cigars. And they probably sold a little bit more cigars.
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Chapter 5: Why is perseverance essential in the journey of entrepreneurship?
The importer sells to a distributor. The distributor sells to a wholesaler. And then all that money gets trickled back down the line. So it's like at each stop, a little piece of margin is being held. And then the golf course finally buys it. And they're usually only seeing 20%, 30% margins. So what do they have to do? They want to make 40%, 50% margins. They're going to want to carry it.
So they mark it up. Well, you also have these distribution chains who say, yeah, I'll sell it to wholesalers, but if I could sell it to a wholesaler for 30% off, why can't I just mark it on my website at 20% off and keep the same percentage as I'm keeping over there and always sell it online to a bigger audience, direct to consumer. So what that done is that that undercuts the course.
So now the course can't sell that cigar for even at MSRP because they're always being sold online for cheaper. Well, we're the only ones that decided to build our own cigars. And because nobody would carry us, we had to build our own distribution channel. So we're the manufacturer and the distributor. We go straight into the course with the best margins they've ever seen.
We don't sell online to these heavy online disc discounters. So when a golfer goes in, they see a cigar that they know they could order for, you know, $20 cheaper. At being marked up there, they're hesitant to buy that. But what they see one of ours, they say, oh, this is kind of made for me. Another golfer. This is kind of cool. They Google us. They know they can't get any cheaper.
Like, I might as well try this thing. And then they usually like it.
So our business is usually like, which is the last part of the list. Oh, that's right.
They usually like it. I mean, we don't get too many bad comments, but it's a bonus if they actually like the product. At this point, I'm just messing with my mom. They don't actually tell me that. I just don't hear the bad. So I figure if somebody didn't like it, they'd let us know. But yeah, we built it going straight through wholesale.
Now, to get to the direct consumer side was a little bit more challenging. Tobacco companies can't advertise. So social media is tough. So the way we kind of built that side of the business, our first three years, we were 80% wholesale. We've moved now to probably almost 55%, 45%. direct to consumer. Now we're building an audience.
We're in these courses and people are coming to the website to buy them instead of going back to the course. Um, but we'd partner with influencers. So, uh, this happened to be paired around the right time when golf was taking off in YouTube. You know, you have all these YouTube golfers out there filming themselves and people are like, man, this is cool.
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Chapter 6: How has Ty Murphy's personal journey shaped his business philosophy?
You know, most golfers, you have to be pretty fit. But I mean, it's weird. You know, my friends were always like, what got you in this? Like, you never used to smoke cigars when we knew you in high school and college and all this. It's like, well, now I'm. I'm on the golf course a lot and I'm working business deals and I'm being social.
It's like it's a good time to just sit down for an hour and have a cigar and talk. It's the only time it'll put me in a chair, keep me off my phone, engage with the cigar and engage with the person I'm sitting with. So, yeah, I mean, if you don't smoke cigars, we don't encourage you to smoke cigars.
Sure, we don't encourage you.
No, don't start. But if you enjoy spending time or need something to slow you down or you want to take in the intricacies of... how a cigar comes to be. Um, I mean, it's a, it's a fascinating little industry.
It is. And like when you, when you encounter like cigar bars and you see this little, like these boutiques, these experiences, little dim lights and like the cigars behind closed glass doors. There's a whole, like it's a total vibe. It's just like, Oh man, I feel like a superhero. I'm like, I feel like I don't belong, but I do belong. Like they recognize me. They see me.
It's like, yeah, just you're engulfed in that experience and you're going to have that whiskey or a glass of wine and then you're going to ascend to that cigar.
Yeah. And it's, it's got a weird rap because it used to be, you'd always see like, it'd be like a mob boss that always have a cigar.
No, it's like success.
Now it's, yeah, it's kind of like Johnson. Yeah, just take an hour and you're having a moment. And it's weird because you look back to the Native Americans. They were all smoking cigars before we came over here. Hoopas everywhere.
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Chapter 7: What unique experiences do cigars offer in social settings like golf?
That's it's I've always said it's not about smoking cigars. It's about the experience I'm doing when I'm smoking a cigar.
Right on. Ty, you seem like a pretty smart guy. We're obviously here, thought bubbling here, and we're minus fasting. Where do you think all of this cigar talk, branding, this perceived notion came from?
Oh, man. I don't know. I mean, mine came from an experience, right? So like we were playing golf one day and this was six years ago. And, you know, I'm married, three kids, got a lot of friends that are married. You don't get a typical Saturday to go out and play golf very often with your buddies. So we did that day. And we were not very good at golf because we were just kind of getting started.
And on one of the holes, we all happened to birdie the same hole. And so that never happened. Like when you're bad at golf, you probably won't have a birdie for an entire year. Right. So the fact that we all suck and we all made really good on that one hole, we're like, let's party. Like, let's celebrate. We're all in good moods. Yeah.
So we get to the next hole and my one of my buddies pulls out a cigar. He goes, when I make birdies, I celebrate with a cigar. And so he cuts that open and I'm not doing cigars very often. Once a year, you know. fantasy football drafts, weddings, that kind of thing, bachelor parties. But the smell of it being outdoors, I'm like, man, that's a perfect way to celebrate.
I go, do you got another one of those? I'll celebrate with you. I made a birdie too, remember? And I was like, I'll pay you for it. He's like, nope. He's like, this is my only one. He goes, I normally carry more in here. They're called my birdie stogies. He's like, I just, I leave them in my golf bag and when I make a birdie, I pull one out. But this was the last one I had.
And this one was probably old and dried up and no good anyways. But It smelled good. So we go on and, um, you know, we go back to double bogey and making bad scores and I'm getting mad again with my golf game, but he's still happy as a clam because that cigars lasted him four more holes and he's still celebrating.
And I just remember a week later, I'm like, you know, why did we not think, or why were we not reminded to get cigars before we left out? You know, like if somebody in that clubhouse would have said big sign cigars like they do alcohol. Yeah. You know, we they missed out on four, maybe more cigars we would have bought for sure to take out there and reload.
So our thought was like, well, how do we how do we get that? How do we get how do we change that? You know? And yeah, sure. The easy answer is you could put a sign in there somewhere. Or you come out with a company that's golf branded that makes you think about golf and cigars more like we did.
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