Leap Academy with Ilana Golan - From SNL Afterparties to George Clooney’s Cocktail Hour: How Jeff Krauss Plans Iconic Events

Episode Date: December 26, 2024

Jeff Krauss went from being a shy kid with no prior experience in event planning to a trusted name in celebrity event management. Despite facing setbacks, including financial struggles and failed ventures in nightlife, Jeff learned the ropes of event planning and built a reputation for trust and hospitality. Over time, he expanded his network by forging key relationships and organizing high-profile events for celebrities like George Clooney and Saturday Night Live. In this episode, Jeff shares how he navigated career challenges, the importance of networking and perseverance, and his pivot to creating impactful projects like Fan Room Live, a virtual event series that blends entertainment with charitable impact. Jeff Krauss is a renowned celebrity event producer, entrepreneur, and influencer marketer. He is the President of IE Group, an event management and production company specializing in high-profile events. In this episode, Ilana and Jeff will discuss: (00:00) Introduction  (01:41) How a Shy Kid Leaped Into Event Promotion (05:24) Finding Mentors Who Shaped His Promotion Skills (07:20) Transitioning to Larger Events Through Strategic Networking (12:50) Navigating Financial Struggles in the Lounge Business (15:20) Tips for Breaking Into Celebrity Circles (19:21) The Long Road to Working with Saturday Night Live (25:17) Moving Past Rejection Without Overthinking It (29:18) Pivoting During the Pandemic to Launch FanRoom Live (32:34) How FanRoom Live is Positively Impacting Lives (36:00) Jeff’s Shift from Nightlife to Other Ventures (38:37) Why Ignoring the Noise Is Key to Thriving in Business (40:09) Balancing Humility and Confidence in Business (41:38) Why a Strong Social Media Presence is Crucial for Success (43:23) Creating Quote Notes, a Platform for Spreading Positivity Jeff Krauss is a renowned celebrity event producer, entrepreneur, and influencer marketer. He is the President of IE Group, an event management and production company specializing in high-profile events. Jeff is also the co-founder of FanRoom Live, a virtual event series that connects celebrities with fans while supporting charitable causes. In addition, he serves as the Chief Inspiration Officer at QuoteNotes, a platform dedicated to sharing positivity and inspiration. Today, Jeff continues to innovate within the events industry, focusing on impactful projects and creating memorable experiences for audiences and clients. Connect with Jeff: Jeff’s Website: https://www.iegny.com/ Jeff’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeff-krauss-86745353 Jeff’s Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iegroupnyc  Resources Mentioned: Quote Notes’ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/quotenotesofficial/  Leap Academy: Ready to make the LEAP in your career? There is a NEW way for professionals to Advance Their Careers & Make 5-6 figures of EXTRA INCOME in Record Time. Check out our free training today at leapacademy.com/training

Patience can be a dream killer. If you don't have patience and you're an entrepreneur, that's really bad. How does a shy kid with no connections in the entertainment business leap into such a career? I want you to meet Jeff Krauss, the founder of IE Group, creating massive experience and events for star celebrities like George Clooney, Saturday Night Live, the LA Dodgers, and many, many more. I have failed many times in my career. The only difference between me and maybe somebody else

is that I always got back on the horse. Ignore the noise, because people who thrive, they have to jump over hurdles to get where they are. If you can stay humble and still do your thing with confidence, you'll be great. So how do you get to people at the top? Here's the thing about that. If you've been curious about how we get into the celebrities, into events with stars, I want you to meet Jeff Krause, the founder of IE Group, creating massive experience and events for stars,

celebrities like George Clooney. Oh, my God, I would love to meet him one day. Saturday Night Live, the LA Dodgers and many, many more. He's also the creator of Fan Room Live, which is a platform that connects fans and celebrities through virtual events. Amazing, Jeff. But how does a shy kid with no connections in the entertainment business leap into such a career? Take us back in time, Jeff. Well, first and foremost, thank you for having me on today. It's great to be here. To give you a

little bit of a snippet, I did grow up in Long Island and I was and still am a very introverted, shy person, I guess you could say. And when I was in college, my friends and I would always go to nightclubs and I would drink a little bit but not too much, enough to drive home kind of thing. So we would be online at a club, you know, and it's just me and my guy friends and we're just pay to get in whatever. And one day we're just standing there and this promoter that we knew from back home walks up, cuts the

line, walks in with all these women. And my friend just says to me, who's more extroverted, "'Jeff, we gotta do that.'" I go, "'Do what?' He says, "'We have to promote parties.'" I said, "'No, I'm not, no, that's just not, no, not for me.'" So week after week, we would just hang out, having dinner or whatever, and he would just

say to me, Jeff, when are we doing it? Do what? We got to promote. We got to promote parties. It would just be ongoing week after week. So finally, I said to him, okay, I will call my sister and ask her if she knows any promoters. I'm sure she does. I will try this once.

If it goes well, I'm open to doing it again." So he says, okay, fine. We'll try it once, but I'm telling you, this is going to be big. You'll see. We're going to get a lot of women and we're going to make all this money, blah, blah, blah, whatever. Okay, fine. So I said, just settle down.

We'll try it. So we start calling our phone book. My sister actually did introduce me to a promoter. We threw a party. It just so happened that that venue was like the hottest place in New York at the time. So we're calling our entire phone book and my friend is calling people from tennis camp he hadn't spoken to in 10 years. I'm calling people from high school and everybody, we're throwing a party, we're throwing a party, the biggest party ever.

Well I show up to the door and the bouncer says to me, okay, let me see your ID. I show an ID. Now I'm underage. I always get into nightclubs. Never a problem. The bouncer looks at it and says, this isn't you. So I'm now standing outside freaking out because we have all these people coming. My friend is over 21. He gets into the club and he starts raising hell,

starts screaming, me and my partner busted our asses to fill this venue, blah, blah, blah. He's going crazy. The guy that was running the place said, listen, I will let him in, but he cannot drink. Okay, fine. So I get in, there's hundreds of people trying to get in. A lot of our friends are outside

or people that we haven't even seen in a while. And some of them didn't get in. We didn't get paid because they didn't count a lot of the people. My sister's friend knew the door person, so anybody that she brought, they counted for them or whatever. And yes, it used to go by a tally system. That's how it would go, is how promoters would get paid if you weren't the top promoter

that has the venue. And we got into an argument with the promoter. We wanted to get paid. We worked very hard. And he wouldn't pay us. But I saw the experience people had. And everybody had such a great time that actually did get in. So I said, look, let's look into and see if we could find other promoters that are maybe not working at the hottest club but it's still good enough. And let's try and work with somebody a little bit nicer that will give us the authority and the rope that we need to do our thing.

And I ended up connecting with somebody named Donnie and Tina. They were great to me and they showed me the ropes. I just wanted to learn more and see if I could see this thing through. I had the itch, so to speak. Tell me, Jeff, because again, you on one hand talk about being an introvert and shy, and on the other hand, you're calling people and hustling to invite them to parties.

Is that a clash? How did that work for you? Oh, it was hard. Because remember, I'm calling people that I'm friendly with, or whatever. Some of them I am close friends with, or was close friends with at the time. But I'm the guy that's off to the right. And then when he sees the person and they have a great conversation, I'm like that guy. I'm not the guy in the middle that's talking to everybody, if that makes sense. I'm trying to give the best

visual to this. This is great. I can see it. So you're starting to create these parties, but from that to George Clooney or Saturday Night Live, it's just not the same. So take us a little bit step by step. How did that start forming? Once I started promoting parties, I got the creative brain, so to speak, to want to throw events. And I wanted to run my own nightclub and do all these things that were more on the operational side of it. Even though I was still front and center in a way, I wanted to expand and I was thinking about what could be.

I was imagining what could be. I did open up a lounge and it worked at first, then it didn't work, and then whatever happens, it didn't work in the end. But I learned a lot from that. After that, I continued to just throw parties. Venues would hire me as a consultant to bring on promoters and book events and stuff like that.

But it wasn't as much. I wasn't the guy that was sitting there at a table anymore with tons of people around. I was more of the guy that was organizing that part. And I started to network though with different PR people and agents and all that kind of stuff, because I wanted to get those people to come to the parties. I wanted to expand my network, but it was more by phone call, by email, not necessarily as much in person. I wasn't going to the networking parties or I wasn't going to the hot club and hanging

out till four in the morning to try to meet a celebrity and get their number. I wasn't doing any of that kind of stuff, which in retrospect probably maybe would have been a little bit easier for most people, but it wasn't easier for me because that's just not who I am. So I put the hard work in by emailing, by calling, by trying to set up more intimate stuff offering happy hours for the PR companies and all that kind of stuff. And I started to work with restaurants. I met my business partner, Mitch Faulkner,

who is a booking agent for Comic-Cons and stuff like that. And his whole thing was he wanted to be able to book the celebrities for paid appearances. I wanted to get them into the restaurants and into any parties that I was organizing. Even if, say for example, I am more in the background, doesn't mean that there's not a couple of

VIP tables that I brought in that I'm catering to, if that makes sense. I could still cater to, if that makes sense. I could still cater to them. I don't necessarily have to be sitting at my own table and being the life of the party, so to speak. So that was my angle, was more try to do things on a higher level of what my skill actually is and showing them a good time

and making sure they're well taken care of, whether it be at the restaurant or if they're coming to an event, and build my relationships and my network off of trust. My partner was building his business as far as getting celebrities to go to conventions and all this stuff that are more paid what happened. What is i would get in a photo with somebody let's just say right and that photo would be posted. No the sudden publicist that i'm friends with that work with brands or are planning an event they reach out and say hey jeff i so Jeff, I saw you did this event with so-and-so. I actually need a celebrity host for my party. I have a budget.

Can you help me? I see what you guys are doing. So now, after that started to happen, me and my business partner looked at it and we were like, this might be a lot better of two versus me just doing this and you just doing this. If we combine forces, we can do a whole lot more than what we're doing. Let me stop here for a second.

I want to make sure the listeners are really understanding. First of all, the way you leaned into your zone of genius, because again, your shyness, you turned it into the tool, I guess, that helps you build better trust, better connections, better relationship to actually nurture and open these doors and actually nurture these relationship, right? But I will say also another thing, you did not let entrepreneurship or fail the lounge or rejections or things that don't go your way. You didn't let that stop you. You just continued. You continued building your network. You continued building your reputation because, again, now people are starting to come your way. So that's just beautiful to see,

and I want to make sure everybody gets that. Am I right, Jeff? Yes, but I do want to say one thing. I have failed many times in my career, fallen flat on my face. The only difference between me and maybe somebody else is that I always just got back on the horse. I just wouldn't stay down and I would just keep going.

There's been plenty of knockdowns. You might see online and you might see of what I'm doing. Yes, it is glamorous to the eye, so to speak, but there's a lot of stuff that goes on in the background. That's hard work so I just want to point that out that I have had my setbacks and my Failures in a sense, but I just never let them get to me can you share a hard moment Jeff because I think it's important for the listeners to Hear it because I can hear it between your story

But can you share a hard moment that was really letting you down? There's been plenty, but there was at one point, maybe 10, 15 years ago, I don't know, but I had just finished running or being the promotional operator of a lounge, that there was a lot of setbacks with that because the owners never actually had any money when they opened the venue. There were a lot of things that were going on

that were not of my control. And things were great, but they weren't so great once you had a slow month because they never had any operating capital. So then I went on to open up another lounge, similar thing, and it just got to the point where I just said, I'm going to take a little break, focus on just doing events.

There were some months in between where it was slow or it was winter, it was a bad winter or whatever the case. I was having to work harder than what I necessarily normally maybe would have because I didn't have as much infrastructure around me. So I had to work all that much harder and lean on my connections that were close to me all that much more to try to get events,

to try to get me indoors. And it was very hard. I just never gave up. I just kept going. And eventually things picked back up and I started doing stuff again. So how do you get to people at the top, like the George Clooney's of the world, et cetera? And we also have a great story about Saturday Night Live, which I want to talk about in a second.

But how do you get to the people at the top? Because everybody's trying to get to them. It's millions of people that are trying to get to the same few people. Here's the thing about that. When it comes to celebrities, they have a team. They have agents, they have celebrities, they have a team. They have agents, they have managers, they have publicists, they have assistants, lawyers, stylists.

They have a whole massive, massive team. Once you gain trust with anybody on their team, pretty much, even if it's for a client that isn't necessarily the person that you're aiming for, you gain that trust and now they're open to at least exploring what you have to say. So when you're asking me about George Clooney, I had a relationship with his publicist that had been built up for many years. Publicist introduced me to his personal assistant,

happened to be, it was great timing, they were in New York, it was Amal's birthday. Jeff's got a couple spots that he might be able to do something at, and now we have a great relationship. But if I were to tell you that that was the first time I reached out to them for George Clooney No For years I reached out, but I also was building that relationship with them on Other clients that they had but they also were seeing other things that I was doing that

Okay, this isn't just some random person Hitting me up, it's Jeff. That's your reputation, that's your connections, that's your trust that you build, and that's the long-term game. I think that's part of what you're saying. But again, I think a lot of us are impatient.

We want everything yesterday, and if it can happen yesterday without a lot of work, even better, right? And I think that impatience makes it really, really hard to realize that some relationship will take years to nurture, to hustle, to work hard in order to start creating that story for yourself. Am I right, Jeff? Patience can be a dream killer.

If you don't have patience and you're an entrepreneur, that's really bad. Listen, you have to have patience because here's what you have to look at. The person that you're reaching out to, for whatever the reason, or even if you met them in person, there's a whole line of people trying to get to them. No matter what, anybody that has any kind of value, regardless of what it is, there is a whole line of people trying to get to them that maybe they do know them a little bit,

maybe they don't, maybe they have a product that they're pitching that could be of value to them and they might not look at it because they don't know you, or they might look at it because the product is so good. Like there's so many different variables to that. But if you're just patient and you're persistent, but not annoyingly persistent, if you're just persistent enough, doors will open. John Maxwell has a beautiful story about the people's pile.

And I think that's exactly it. There's a people pile when you're trying to get to these places, right? And in front of it, it doesn't matter if our listeners are trying to get in front of some VPs and CEOs that are very busy or entertainers or big shots. It doesn't really matter. They all have a big people's pile.

Some have millions in the people's pile. Some have thousands and tens of thousands, but no matter what the question is, how do you rise above the noise? And a lot of it is that consistency, which I love that you're talking about. Tell us about Saturday Night Live, because it's just such a beautiful example, if that's okay talking about. Tell us about Saturday Night Live because it's just such a beautiful

example, if that's okay, Jeff. Sure. This is a very big case in point of being patient and understanding and just going with the flow. Well, I should say going with the flow after you realize what you're dealing with. The way I got Saturday Night Live as a client, I ended up connecting with Chris Rock's assistant and becoming friends with him. Now, I wanna backtrack that for a second. I met him through a New York assistant group for celebrity assistants, which by the way, took me a while to even get to meet them. And I met them through

dinners of one of their bosses, which is a whole other story. So I met Chris Rott's assistant, we became friends, and he said, Hey, Jeff, listen, I should introduce you to my friend that's the head of talent at SNL. Maybe you guys could do some events together or work together in some capacity. Okay, great. So he makes the light introduction. At the time, I was running the programming for a lounge called Troy Liquor Bar in New York City,

which is right below Dos Caminos. So I said to him, hey, why don't you come down and have a drink and we can meet. Cool. Hung out for a while. He invited me to SNL. I went to SNL. It was great.

And we spoke about potentially doing some events, some of the after parties or parties for the writers or whatnot. And I ended up doing one party for them. after parties or parties for the writers or whatnot. And I ended up doing one party for them. It went great. And then I said to them, look, I know you guys, I know we're talking about the after party, which is a dinner, about doing some of those, but what about these secret after after parties?

Who does that? They said, oh, that's a whole different thing. We'll have to introduce you to the people that deal with it on the production side. That's more of like a hush-hush thing. That's not something that's out in the open, press and all that stuff. That's more of like download kind of stuff.

Okay. Am I the only one that didn't know that after, out in the open, press and all that stuff. That's more of like down low kind of stuff. Okay, cool. Am I the only one that didn't know that after, after, after parties exist or whatever you call them? Well, cause they're not public. It's not like NBC is putting out a press release about this. They just go somewhere after basically. So they connected me with the guy that handles it.

And the guy says to me, listen, I will give you a couple parties where you could find the location and do your thing. Everything goes well. Chances are I'm probably just going to give you the reins because I want to not really deal with this anymore. Said, oh, okay, great. So we did a couple parties. It went great, but I didn't realize how they operate.

So I would be, at the beginning of every week, whatever, I'd be texting them nonstop. So finally, he just texted me back and says, hey, don't call us, we'll call you, essentially, in layman's words. So I said, hey, don't call us, we'll call you, essentially, in layman's words. So I said, oh, okay. I was kind of a little bit sad about it, but I said, you know, it is what it is. Six months later, my friend calls me that used to work for the Mets,

that used to bring the owner of the lounge that I used to run the marketing and promotions for back in the day, he used to bring him Mets tickets. Calls me up and he says, hey, Jeff, do you want to work with SNL for their after after parties? I said, well, yeah, of course. But then I told him the story. He goes, listen, I don't think that you understand.

There's several people that are direct or indirect with SNL that are in the family, so to speak, that handle these parties each week. So I'm gonna introduce you to my friends that do them, and you guys can take it from there. So I said, come down to the bar and let's hang out have a drink. They came down we were talking we hit it off and I told him the story about what happened previously and he said okay Jeff let me

just give you the lay of the land here. There's several people that choose this party each week. I happen to be one of them. I will give you a couple parties. If it goes well, you can have my end of the parties. I just wanna show up and have fun and hang out. Great. Everything went well. He gave me his end of the parties. It's great, right?

Well, the guy that in the beginning that I was dealing with, one of the reasons why he wasn't texting me back as much is because I didn't realize that he was moving out of state. Again, you never know what people are going through or dealing with. So now, because he moved, I, by default and hard work and a little bit of timing, have now been given most of the parties at that point, because there was only a few people to choose.

And they kind of just went back to me to rely on. Jeff, I have to stop you here. This is an incredible, incredible conclusion that I want to make sure every single listener understands. We as humans are such a meaning making machine, like we will get a rejection or somebody didn't call us back or somebody didn't call us back or somebody won't tell us something. And we, instead of just taking it as the data, we will start creating these incredible meanings about it. Like, darn it, I didn't do well enough, I sucked, you

know, that's a rejection, etc. And in every single time that I've seen, it's never the challenges that are stopping us, it's our beliefs around these challenges that are stopping us. And most humans will just stop because they'll say, darn it, I had my chance, I screwed up, now I'm going to something else because this is not where I should be doing.

And you just continued, which I love about this story. And I wanna make sure all the listeners are Understanding that you know if you're running you listener running into something that somebody Rejected you told you something something that hurt sometimes people didn't respond. They didn't follow up They didn't want to introduce you whatever it is. It can be a thousand reasons So stop making meanings out of it and just continue. I can't stress it enough. Jeff, that was amazing.

And I just want to say something also to that. A lot of times when people get rejected in whatever the case, you don't know what's going on on the other end. You don't. So if you just take things with the pure thought of, hey, you know know what i really don't know what's happening on the other end i'm gonna breathe. Try again in a month or two months or whatever the case people have a lot of things going on that you probably don't know that's true. Even in this case situation, by the way, what ended up happening is they would call me on Friday night at

eight o'clock and say, where are we going? Now, I had been texting all week. I might be in the middle of an event and I have to step outside the event to start calling owners of venues frantically because all week I heard nothing. I don't know what's going on. And the guy that I'm now dealing with is the real deal. This just isn't a priority to them all week.

So I said to them, hey, look, is there any way of kind of moving this up a little bit? He says to me, Jeff, I'm going to just give you a little bit of a piece of advice as a friend. If you want to work with them, this is how they operate. Party is not their top of mind. The show is their top of mind. This stuff is not their priority. I'm telling you this because I've tried to change it for years.

It's not going to happen. Just go with the flow. Do whatever you got to do. If you want to continue working with them as whatever, this is what you have to do. So I said, okay, noted. So what I did was every week now, now that I know that they are going to call me, I know that call is coming in, I would at the beginning of the week call a whole bunch of venues and say just letting you know I'll be calling you on

Friday at 8, staff up, because the worst that could happen is you have to take staff off. That's a lot easier than putting staff on. So every week I would call on Monday or Tuesday, have a few venues in play. And if they didn't get it that week, chances are they got it the following. I just reverse engineered the whole thing. What you're showing is also you're going to have to create your own luck. You're not just going to wait for some miraculously things to fall on your lap. You're just going to hustle and create your own luck.

And that takes me also amazingly to COVID because whether we wanted to create our own luck or not, COVID created a whole different situation in the event business. Jeff, can you tell us a little bit about what it did and how you, again, found a way to pivot? When the pandemic happened, we're all just sitting in our houses, bored out of our minds. And my business partner, as I told you, he works with wrestlers, he works with football

players, he works with baseball players, basketball players, and a lot of them have become friends of ours. So he calls me up and he says, Jeff, I got an idea. We're sitting at home, everybody's boarded over minds, why don't we get our athlete and wrestler friends online to teach classes, meet their fans, maybe we raise some money for charity. So I said well I like the idea of them meeting their fans and raising money for charity but we can also do that with celebrities as well. Oh what what a great idea.

Let's make some calls. So we called our good friend Cedric the entertainer. Now, when we call them, we basically gave a very skeleton idea. We want to do some events, get celebrities online, meet their fans, raise some money for charities. Loves the idea, but says, I think there could be way more to this than what you're thinking. We could develop a brand out of it. It could be something long term. Even past the pandemic, digital's not going away. So I said, okay, that's great.

We ended up partnering with Cedric. We started brainstorming ideas, concepts, formats, the whole thing, and we ended up creating Fan Room Live. Then we brought on Jay Benjamin, who's a brilliant actor, by the way, producer, very funny guy, very charismatic. He's our executive producer and host. And it's a formatted meet and greet virtual series where celebrities meet their fans, town hall style, but it's engaging.

It's up close and personal. Every celebrity that's done it has come away and said, this was more fun than what I anticipated because it's not like being in a nightclub where a fan comes up and they're trying to get to them and it's a whole thing, or you're online at a Comic-Con and you're being like pushed away by security. You get your one on one time to hang out with a celebrity

and then you get to watch everybody else. And it's this really just beautiful experience that we have created. And we get to raise money for charities. I absolutely love the idea. And I think we're all craving a little bit of that. The Instagram or whatever is just not the same, right? First of all, you did pivoted really quick

to something virtual that adds a lot of value. You know, you have incredible stories about how you made that also create a real change in humans and in people. Jeff, do you wanna share a story? I have a few different stories. One story that I always love to go back to is the story with Paul White, the big show,

and the sick kids. We arranged Paul White to come onto Fandrom Live and we ended up connecting with a charity that brings sick children to wrestling shows. Well, it turns out that one of the kids that was with the charity happens to be a very big fan of Paul White Big Show. So we bring on a bunch of the kids onto Fan Room Live to

meet Paul White and the one kid that is in the UK, very sick, it just made his day. He was just so over the moon meeting him. He even had his action figures laid out and Paul says something to him like, wow, you're a great salesman. You even got your action figures all lined up. So they're having this great interaction and somehow it came up. Paul took his shirt that he was wearing off his back, signed it and gave it to the charity. And they hung out for about 15 minutes. It was beautiful. But we had that recorded.

We posted it a few days later. And something very, very interesting happened. A friend of mine that's a wrestling podcaster named Rob Wilds, he saw the video and he said, Jeff, I saw what you did for that kid, I saw what you did for the charity. I have something for you. I have two signed World Title belts,

one from The Undertaker and one from The Rock. I'll send The Rock's World Title belt to the kid in the UK and I'll send the Undertaker's World Title Belt that's signed to the charity. The charity was able to auction off the Undertaker's Belt and Paul White's signed shirt for a lot of money And it turns out that the kid in the UK, it was his birthday coming up. So the parents took the belt, held onto it, waited for his birthday to come, and gave it to him on his birthday. The Rocks World Title belt signed. The kid was so over the moon, it made his day.

And so that to me is literally one of my favorite stories because no one's tougher than a kid who's fighting an illness that's seven, eight, nine, 10 years old. All of our problems on a daily basis are nothing compared to what these warriors, so to speak, are going through. Amazing, amazing to him and his parents and everybody around. Like it's just so, so, so beautiful.

And I love that story. If somebody's on YouTube, they'll see me have crying. I just love this. What are, do you feel are some of maybe a decision that you took recently or a decision that really you feel changed your life? One thing I will say is that I did make a decision a couple of years ago that at least for the time being, I'm not going to do as much nightlife. I'll work with restaurants.

That's enjoyable. But I'm not really doing as much on the nightlife side. Don't get me wrong. If a nightclub wants to book a music artist, that's one thing. If a talent is in town, I'll bring them to the hottest spot. That's fine. For the time being, I am not going to run a lounge or nightclub simply because the things that I'm doing

during the day, working on charity events, booking celebrities for conventions, we just got two clients in Kentucky by referrals for us to book their music and comedy acts. One is an arena that holds 7,000 people and the other one is a theater. So that side of things is building. And I would rather be building that on that side of it and really focused in and focused on fan room,

focused on quote notes, which I could tell a little bit about, focused on my event planning and production and marketing company, focused on those things versus whether people come to a bar and spend money on drinks and bottle service. Priority, but that's a decision. But it also, it's weighing your what makes sense. Don't get me wrong, I will still do one-off

parties for clients and whatnot. That doesn't change, but I won't, for the time being, put my doesn't change, but I won't for the time being put my foot in the ground, so to speak, into a bar and lounge or restaurant, or I should say bar, lounge or nightclub, because I want to put my good energy, my peaceful energy into what makes sense. We get to choose the type of life we want. And that's part of freedom, right? It's the ability to say yes to certain things and no to other things, and that's freedom. That's the freedom of choice versus going exactly where you've been and just continuing doing it again and again. So tell me, Jeff, if you take yourself back in time, what would be an advice to your younger self and whichever that younger is, right?

The shy boy or later on, you know, in the businesses, what would be kind of an advice that you wish you heard before? Ignore the noise. Whatever's happening today or whatever you're feeling today, doesn't matter, six months, doesn't matter the next day. Just ignore the noise because at the end of the day, people who thrive, they have to jump over hurdles

to get where they are. So just ignore the noise, take yourself a little bit more seriously in the sense that prioritizing what is important not just professionally but also personally know your strengths and weaknesses and think outside the box and actually push on those strengths and weaknesses and realize what can be done, what can't be done, and just keep it moving. That's what I would tell my younger self.

It'll all be okay. Just get to tomorrow. It's actually so, so, so important because the noise is sometimes so hard to deal with. The rejection, the failure, the something that we've done wrong, right? Well, it's not just that I don't look at things going on in Society or celebrity, you know stuff and all that I look at that as It's a business. I do have friends in the business. I do love what I do, but I'm not coming home and putting up a picture on my

wall of the celebrity with me and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, you'll see it on my Instagram, but that's more because I want to show what I'm doing. I want to show the work that I'm doing. I'm not doing that because I'm looking to myself as, oh, I'm this big shot and blah, blah, blah. All that doesn't matter. If you can stay humble and still do your thing with confidence, and that's the key, humility, humbleness, but still be very confident in yourself and lean into your strengths and turn your weaknesses into strengths, you'll be great. That's my biggest advice.

And it is a hard combination because I think some people are afraid to brag, right? And then they don't tell the story or they go on the other side of the ego side. So it's really interesting balance. And you've somehow managed to just continue with your thing and just do it in a way that people are just connected with you, they build that trust and relationship

and things just open up. Just to give everybody just a little bit of piece of information that I think you'd find interesting. Just before the pandemic, a few years prior, I didn't even have an Instagram setup. I didn't care. When I would bring these celebrities to restaurants, I wasn't asking them for photos. I wasn't taking photos with them because I just didn't care. But one of my friends, Steven Grossman, who's a celebrity manager, said to me, why don't you have an Instagram?

I said, nah, what's the point? I have Facebook. He says, Jeff, how am I supposed to remember to send you my clients if I'm not seeing your posts? So I'm recommending set up an Instagram so that it would remind me to text you, hey, so-and-so is in town, can you set them up for something?

So I said, okay, but you're on my Facebook. He's like, Jeff, it's completely different. Just trust me, set up an Instagram. So I set the Instagram up and he actually let me plan his 40th birthday party in LA, just off the cuff of a conversation. What if I never set up my Instagram?

Then I was like, oh, I guess it is kind of important for me to take photos with people and share them because it reminds people of what I do. Because again, you need to be top of mind and that's where opportunities come your way. Oh, I love this story so much. I love all the share. Jeff, thank you for making time being on the show sharing so authentically.

No, thank you for having me. And look, I love giving any kind of inspiration I can. One little thing, I actually did co-create a platform called Quote Notes, which is all about sharing love and inspiration on social media through inspiring quotes and stories. So that is one of my passion projects. If you want to check it out on Instagram, it's at quote notes official. That project keeps me mentally, creatively going to because we're giving back just in a way of like, hey, you know what, there are brighter days ahead for anybody

that has any kind of problem, so to speak. brighter days ahead for anybody that has any kind of problem, so to speak. That's so beautiful, Jeff. Thank you, and we'll have definitely the links and everything for people to reach out. Thank you for everything you do. Thank you for having me. This was fun.