Community, Connections, & Commerce Episode 6 with Dan Milleson

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:17):
Welcome back to Community Connections and Commerce. I'm Drake Watson,
along as always with Wendy Anderson and our special guest today,
Dan Millison, the founder and owner of Waterfront Hall and
president of Milestone Insurance. Dan, we really appreciate your time
and and thank you for coming on this this afternoon.

Speaker 2 (00:34):
Happy to be here, guys. Thank you.

Speaker 1 (00:36):
So we've got a ton of things to talk about.
I think it's just really interesting to kind of pick
your brain with a lot of the things that you
see and especially a lot of the things that you
do throughout the community. And I'd like to start off
by just kind of getting the backstory. And first of all,
I know Milestone came before the Waterfront and just would
be interested in knowing how that got started.

Speaker 2 (00:57):
Yeah. So I graduated from from Ohio University in two
thousand and eleven, and I graduated from there with a
business administration degree. Because I at that time saw myself
as a generalist. I guess I didn't know what exactly
I wanted to do. But my dad, my grandpa, and
my great grandpa had all been in the insurance business,

(01:23):
and so I took the path at least resistance right
out of college, and I had been working for them
through college.

Speaker 3 (01:28):
But.

Speaker 2 (01:30):
Right after I was finished the following Monday, after the
Saturday that I graduated from OU, I was at a
class learning more about the insurance industry to eventually work there.
And there was a period of time in my early
days where I did not want to be there. I

(01:51):
just graduated from the one of the best party schools
in the entire country. I moved back home and got
into a business which was about as far from fun
as you could possibly get. So I started coaching basketball
and got involved in the community as much as possible
to try to like quell my thirst for something else.

(02:14):
And it helped, but it didn't totally solve the problem
until you know, one day, when I mean I was
pretty forlorn about the whole thing. I'm just gonna get
right into it and personal with you guys, if you
don't mind. I went ahead, and you know, I was
going out and having fun in my you know, this

(02:36):
is I'm twenty three at this point, and I went
out and I never came. I never came back and
didn't report into work. The next day. I woke up
on a friend's couch at eleven o'clock in the morning,
and I and so like, okay, I wasn't going into work,
and I went downstairs. Back I lived in my parents'
basement at the time, and so I didn't. I just

(02:59):
kind of like slept it off and then but I
knew I was going to get my rear end shootout
when my dad got home, you know, he was my
boss at the time, and he came downstairs and man,
I remember the thud thud, thud fud down the stairs
and like he'll first like a strong sound, you know,
and my stomach's like, you know. He sat on the

(03:23):
couch and he was like, I fully expected to get ripped.
And he was like, He's like, you know, Dan, if
you're not happy and you don't want to do this,
I'm not asking you to. He said, you can. You
can do anything you want to do, and I'm going
to be proud of you. And ultimately what I care

(03:44):
about is whether or not you live a fulfilling, happy life.
He said, I can see how unhappy you are right now,
and we can make a plan for you to do
something else if you want to.

Speaker 1 (03:55):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (03:57):
So it went from the bottom pit of despair, disappointing
your dad, you know, to getting an olive branch. Essentially,
it's hard not for me to get emotional about that.
But what that led to was not an instant like
pivot and then me going to like having the best

(04:17):
time of my life. What actually well, yeah, what actually
happened was I committed myself to making my dad, honoring
my dad with my work ethic and so I busted
my rear end for two solid years and one is

(04:38):
respect and respect to the people I was working with.
And then he came to me one day and he
was like, I went out of here too. E said,
but what you have to do is you have to
go We have to go back to Nationwide Insurance, who
was the basically the owner of everything we had. We

(04:58):
never really owned anything exce up the servicing rights, which
is nothing. It's a contract. So he said, we have
to go to Nationwide and prove to them, at twenty
four years old that you're going to be able to
take this over. Do you think you want to do that?
And I said, okay. So I got my Series six license,
which is basically I could sell mutual funds and things

(05:21):
like that. That was one of the requirements I sat
for interviews, I took more tests, and then the sales
manager approved what I was doing, and then it went
to the vice president of the company and they signed
off on it. I became the youngest principal agent out
of four thousand agents across the country. Nice and then

(05:43):
that's actually that's somewhat of an assumption. But I can't
imagine that there was anybody else in that position at
that time, And I never met in all the many,
many many meetings and conferences, I went to anybody that
was my age. But that was such a cheat code
because I was always around people smarter than me, which
was a great first lesson. You don't want to be
the smartest person in any room. If you are, you're

(06:04):
in the wrong room. And ultimately what that led to
was me going on a program to prove myself from
a sales perspective. So for two years I had to
meet these goals or else the contract left, My family
went back out into the open market, and millilists and insurance,
which never really existed, was out there for someone else

(06:27):
to get. So obviously it became very very important to
me into my pops, but who didn't sell anything but
just supported me through doing the accounting functions in the
business and other things. It became very important to us
to hit these goals. We did it in a very
short timeframe. Got the respect of the sales manager who

(06:48):
found out another agent in Dylanvale was going to retire
and they said, hey, do you want to buy this
other agency? And that was in twenty fourteen, which I
and then I did it, and then we went really well.
Then I did another one, another, one, another, one another one,
and that led to basically an agency that was of

(07:11):
a pretty good size. And you know, in this process,
I hired my best friend Adam Personowski from Saint Clair's
who you Wendy might know and I know you, Drake,
you know him. And without Adam, you know, none of
this stuff is even possible. Because the whole time that
I'm growing this insurance agency, really utilizing it as the

(07:31):
funding mechanism to buy some commercial real estate and that
kind of thing. And we got this beautiful team that
we created. All the while I was doing community based stuff,
which which you remember, like the school Levy at Harrison
Hills and I was the president of the Harrison County
Chamber of Commerce, and I did it. I did a
poor job at that, but ultimately what it what it

(07:54):
allowed me to do was invent Adam. What Adam allowed
me to do and Diane and a number of the
other members of the team there. I got into the
community in a big way and that led, yes, of course,
the more sales opportunity and insurance stuff, but I wasn't
thinking about it like that. I was thinking, I'm gonna
be here. I better make this thing as good as
I can. So there's a bunch of different paths to

(08:18):
go off of that. I know that's probably not the
answer you were looking for, but ultimately the most the
most fundamentally important day of my life, aside from my
dad handed me that Olive Branch, was when we passed
the Harrison Hills City School District school Levy, which I
became involved in through really the coaching, and that's one

(08:47):
way we can go. But I didn't know. I don't
know where you want to take it next.

Speaker 1 (08:50):
Great coaches up there.

Speaker 3 (08:54):
That's a great story, and I liked the one thing
that you said is when you got in to it
in the beginning and you weren't really feeling it, but
then what you did is you took it to the community,
and you became a coach. See, some people just give
up and that's it and they walk out then like
that's it, shut the door, I'm done. But you did not.

(09:16):
You continued to stay in your community and this is
our local community, which I think is amazing.

Speaker 2 (09:24):
Yeah. I wanted out there, you know, I didn't want
to be in that darn insurance office man sunshine and
eighty degrees. And I feel bad still for our staff
who has to be in there, you know, if they
want to keep that nobody is chained to the desk, right,
But you know, I still feel some guilt over the
fact that our office is not entirely outside and it's

(09:44):
not a more flowery business where you know, we all
get to have a fantastic time. But that's kind of
what Waterfront Hall is. But but but yeah, I I
love Harrison County and I've got times had different moments

(10:06):
with it, and I've got a relationship with it, and
that've had different We've been in different phases, I guess together.

Speaker 1 (10:12):
But yeah, Yeah, likewise, it's a great place, great people.
But you mentioned the water and also I'm sure the
desks in the in the office were appreciated when it
was snowing outside.

Speaker 2 (10:24):
But you know there's two sides every right, I could
I could have been laying blocked. So let me take
that back.

Speaker 1 (10:31):
I guess yeah, but but you did mention the waterfront,
and that was a great segue to to our next
kind of discussion here is how how recently did that
open up? And then kind of the process of first
of all, you know why you chose to do what
you did and and how it all evolved.

Speaker 2 (10:47):
I we we opened August August fourth, excuse me of
last year and uh man that that's along and Windy
Road too. So I'll try not to make this hands
twenty minutes. But I ran for political office in twenty seventeen.

(11:08):
In twenty eighteen, I ran for the state representative in
the ninety fifth district, which is Carroll County, Harrison County,
half of Belmont County, the western half Noble County, and
part of Washington County, which Marietta. And I liked the
insurance business, dumped my entire life into that and built

(11:30):
a really great campaign staff, and I still all of
them a debt of gratitude, but we lost. You know,
I was a d in our district, but I had
delusions of grandeur after I had helped pass the school levy.
It wasn't just me on the school levy. It was
your DJ Watson and Alison Anderson and Brandon Lovewig and
many others. But I thought after we passed the school

(11:55):
levy by three hundred and six votes on November third,
twenty fifteen, that I could do anything. So that's a
big day.

Speaker 1 (12:02):
I remember, I was in fifth grade. I remember they
pulled it that same day. They pulled us into the
classroom and told us all the news.

Speaker 2 (12:07):
They let me speak a graduation after that, I got
to be the keynote speaker. That was another phenomenal moment
in my life. And yeah, I got to talk to everybody,
which was about the experience, which was great. But it
was because I lost that election in twenty eighteen. And
then I pointed my focus after I, you know, after

(12:28):
I felt sorry for myself for a couple of months,
which you do, and I feel sorry for anybody who
loses an election when you really really care about it
and you really want to do something good. But I
had to put my energy, my focus somewhere, and I
had a lot of leftover energy even after the insurance
thing was going on, and I wanted to do something

(12:50):
that was community based again, and got ahold of this
amazing piece of real estate down on the waterfront here
and wheeling and just on it and thought about it.
And I spent probably a year and a half trying
to figure out what I even had because it was
three stories, fifteen thousand square feet, it was built in

(13:12):
eighteen seventy seven with a nineteen sixty six edition. I
had just done like a couple two story office buildings
before this, like just like kind of halfway like repaired
them and got them into a place where they were functional.
This was I quickly, not quickly. It took me a
year and a half to realize, oh crap, what have

(13:32):
I done?

Speaker 3 (13:33):
That was at work.

Speaker 2 (13:34):
I got myself into a position where I come from
a middle class family. This is too much in every
conceivable way, financially, emotionally. You know, there was really no
way for me to see through it all the way.
Yet you know, sometimes you just have to pull on

(13:54):
the rope and just keep see what comes. And that's
essentially what I did. But I spent the first year
and a half for two years, going like, all right,
what do people want? Right, what do people actually want
around here? What do I want to see around here?
What have I seen in Pittsburgh, Columbus, Cincinnati, Cleveland and
elsewhere that I really really think is cool and that

(14:16):
Wheeling could benefit from. And I just kind of ran
that exercise in my mind. I built a business plan,
and the plan was to utilize every square inch of
the building with complementary uses that ultimately worked to create
the longest selling day or open day possible, so that

(14:40):
you could come to the building and effectively spend your
entire day there.

Speaker 3 (14:46):
It.

Speaker 2 (14:46):
So that's kind of the genesis of the whole thing.
And then the other question was and I got to
give some credit to Betsy Sweeney on this one too,
because she helped me with a lot of the preservation stuff,
and she to help me find the question, which was
what's my perfect day look like? And that's that's kind
of how I thought about it. So I built the

(15:09):
business plan and then started to realize how much it
was going to cost. Yeah, and then had to have
that same kind of moment on the couch with my
dad with myself, like, Okay, if you really want to
do this, you're putting your entire financial future at risk.
You are burning the bridge behind you basically, or what

(15:33):
do they say, burning the boats or whatever and so
but ultimately it was a scary moment for me. And
again like this is not life or death, this is
a financial thing. But still, I mean you there's a
lot of fear that comes up. So I did this
thing that I found. I did a fear of setting
exercise which I heard from Tim Ferris who is a

(15:53):
very popular podcaster and author, and effectively, what he says
to do is to write down the absolute and utter
worst case scenario and then write it, make it worse,
make it worse, make it worse, and then see at
the end of that, you know, put it away, come back,
read it. Can you live with that? Can you make
it back? So I did that, rewrote it, rewrote it,

(16:17):
put it away, read it, did that again until I
got myself in a position when I was where I
was like, I would rather try this, see see if
I'm capable of what I hope I'm capable of, then
live in a situation where I'm unsatisfied with myself. So

(16:42):
so eventually, you know, I got kind of shoved to
the edge of the diving board and walking into the
loan or walking into Main Street Bank and signing the
loan paperwork was the finger on my back that pushed
me off off the edge into the water. I was

(17:03):
shocked that anybody would let me borrow that much money,
you know. So, but what saved my rear end was
educating myself essentially on what historic tax credits were, what
was available to me from a financing mechanism perspective out
in the world that could reduce the cost of this project.

(17:26):
And I'm not going to get you into the weeds
too much on that, but I am going to say
that if it weren't for the amazing state and federal
program that is the Historic tax Credit program, the project
never happens, Waterfront home never happens. Then the City of
Wheeling steps up and builds designs and upper floor development
program that helps defray the cost of modern fire code

(17:48):
expenses like sprinkler systems and double drywall. But effectively, what
happened was I got like forty two percent of the
project paid for through completely legitimate grants that are available
out there in the world, you know. And then that
so that you know, educ like pulling on the rope
essentially and learning everything as it came to me somehow,

(18:12):
you know, we opened and then what I didn't expect
was the great response. What I hoped for but didn't
totally expect was the great response from the community at large.
But everybody totally got what I was trying to do
when they got there, and Avenue Eats is a big
part of that.

Speaker 3 (18:32):
They're doing well.

Speaker 2 (18:34):
Yeah, as far as I can tell, Yeah, doing well.
They seem to be. I owe Lara Graves and Phil
Kendall a big debt of gratitude for looking at what
I was doing and being able to see it before
anybody else saw your vision.

Speaker 3 (18:47):
And I love that. Now you have wood Fired Pizza,
oh with Tiffany Dance.

Speaker 2 (18:53):
Yeah, they're amazing people and they have an amazing product.
All I really had to know was that at Ogilby
Fest last year they told me they sold seven hundred
and fifty pizzas in one day.

Speaker 3 (19:06):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (19:07):
I was like, they're They're wildly popular. I kind of
knew that anyway.

Speaker 3 (19:11):
But so you have the waterfront and you it it's
like you said, three floors, so what are on what
are on the floors?

Speaker 2 (19:20):
The first floor is the aforementioned with Fired pizza and
avenue eats who serve food out of their ten by
twenty kitchens into a common space where we waterfront haul
and our staff serve beverages. And so the bar is us,
the restaurants are the restaurants, and the common space is

(19:41):
kind of managed by us, and then that's kind of
the cafe. And then on the other side where you
can also take your food, there's the music venue portion
of it, at which we also operate and my girl
Rachel Rachel Krems and I and then Tim and Yawn
as production p people. But Rachel and I we managed

(20:02):
the bookings and we talked to the bands and we
try to get as many shows up as possible. We've
had sixty over sixty shows since August and many many
different genres we have. She and I just came back
actually from New Orleans for a music venue conference where

(20:24):
we met a lot of other venue owners and booking agents.
And what's going to allow us to do is leap
ahead a year without having to go a year. Oh
wonderful because we have this network of people now that
we can ask all these questions of and a portal
and documents and all kinds of stuff we can, so
we really lucked out and going to that conference. It's
only in its fourth year. And NIVA is what it's called,

(20:46):
the National Independent Venue Association, and it was created in
two thousand excuse me twenty twenty during COVID because they
formed themselves hurriedly and applied for well basically lobbied CONGRIS
and got passed to Save Our Stages Act and they
got funded fifteen billion dollars to save Independent Music Venues

(21:08):
w So they there's fourteen hundred members. It's still very young,
only four years old. So Rachel and I were with
some really cool people, way cooler than us. Yeah, so
we got to learn a lot. But ultimately that's the
first floor, and then the second floor is an Airbnb
which my dear fiance page outfitted and kind of put

(21:35):
together from a design perspective, and that that's available right
now on airbnbvrbo, and then a direct booking site that
we have off of our website and we've had I
think ten night's book there already, so that's that's going
pretty well so far. And then I'm in the final
stages of signing a lease with the SPA on the

(21:55):
second floor, nice which I Hope will open this fall
and they're from Weirdan and this would be their second location.
But you're still in negotiations and still trying to figure
things out. You know, there's a lot of moving parts
and wheeling right now, including a potential hotel that's in
a block away. So the value of that space continues
to evolve, you know, So I got to make sure

(22:16):
that I'm on top of that. But so SPAW on
the second floor, our offices are up there. There's a
prep kitchen on the second floor, and then you go
to the third floor and that's where our event venue is.
We've had two weddings the last two weekends. I think
that makes a total of seven weddings, and then we've
had over twenty five events so far.

Speaker 3 (22:35):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (22:35):
And that that is really where the where the long
term viability of the project is. You know, it's in
it's becoming more and more sophisticated within the private event space.
And then if we're able to do that, it'll carry
the rest of our habits like music right which don't
make any money. We just simply need to have more

(22:58):
capacity in order to make music venue and actual profitable thing, right,
So we take it as almost like a marketing tool.
Now I shouldn't say it like that, because we're passionate
about it and we're going to make it the best
it can possibly be. I know, Rachel and I are
both committed to that, along with everybody else. But it's

(23:19):
it's just hard to make money. Yeah, sure, you can't
sell tickets for what you need to sell tickets for
to pay a band and then to pay your staff,
you know. So it's just one of those things that
you have to learn it by doing it, make it
as efficient as it can be, and really say like
this is part of our cultural thing that we're doing,
you know.

Speaker 3 (23:38):
So I like the so upstairs we had. I think
Amanda and Matt's wedding was that your first?

Speaker 2 (23:46):
It was our first, and it was a great wedding too.
I loved it.

Speaker 3 (23:50):
It was a great wedding, and I loved it because
you have the old and the new. So you have
the old part, which is would.

Speaker 2 (23:58):
You say, eighteen seventy seven, and it was.

Speaker 3 (24:00):
It's gorgeous with the brick, the exposed brick, the floors,
and then you have the other side which is newer,
and that's where like the band and the dance floor
and all that. But it is absolutely beautiful.

Speaker 2 (24:14):
Thank you, and you.

Speaker 3 (24:15):
Guys made it so easy for I mean your wedding coordinator, Carly,
she did an amazing job. I mean she was on
it and I love that.

Speaker 2 (24:26):
Well, like Laura and Phil I mentioned earlier, they had
to be able to have some faith in us you, Amanda, Matt,
the families. Being the first wedding there, that's a bit
of a taxing experience on the Yeah, so we appreciate
the grace afforded to us.

Speaker 3 (24:41):
Well, there was nothing that went wrong. You know, you
guys did an amazing job. But it's a beautiful venue.
And that's what we're lacking here locally is affordable, affordable,
nice venues. That's something that we don't have, and I
just thank you for doing what you're doing.

Speaker 2 (25:00):
We have an open catering policy, which which I think
which I think helps to alleviate some of the budgetary
concerns because it's like and no offense to anybody who
lumps that in. I'm just saying that if people want
to find some room and a budget, they can they
can do it rather than just getting having to pay
the full price of a room and the catering together.

Speaker 3 (25:22):
Yeah, I love it. I'd love that you chose downtown
Wheeling to buy. Are you looking for other properties in
downtown Wheeling or in Saint Clairsville.

Speaker 2 (25:32):
I love what we're doing so much that I almost
want to go inward instead of outward, if you know
what I mean, Like I'm trying to figure out. First off,
I feel incredibly lucky with the staff that showed up
and that we interviewed and hired. I just never expected
that we would hit a home run in the first

(25:55):
few weeks of the things existence. But we have people
that were in a fox hole together during a time
when we were opening that and anytime that you're doing
something very very difficult together, it bonds you. So we
have this team that had a shared experience and now
we're kind of fused together. And I know that life

(26:16):
circumstances will change things eventually, but I want to see
how far we can take it, you know, because one
of the really cool things I was also able to
do here is that every one of our bartenders has
another job in the business. Rachel is a bartender, but
she does all the booking. Rochelle is a bartender, but

(26:36):
she manages the bar and does a lot of the
creative cocktail stuff that we do. Caden is a bartender,
but she does the marketing. Mattie is a bartender and
she helps do the marketing. And yeah, I could go
on down the list, but it creates a vertical within
the business that really helps them steer the whole ship.

(26:58):
And I love that. Of what I learned in the
insurance business, I applied to this as far as organizational stuff, meetings,
how how to, yeah, just how to how to have
everybody engage in rowing in the same direction we.

Speaker 1 (27:11):
Had to guess. I mean, I don't think it's I
think it's pretty obvious that almost everything you what you've
done previously has helped you out now with what you're
doing in the future. And also, what I'd like to
mention about the waterfront is I think, you know, it
really spells out the vision very clearly that there is
something for everybody, and there's it's it's it's so versatile
and what it can do and the types of things
that you can have there. And I think that's what

(27:32):
really draws in so much of the community.

Speaker 3 (27:34):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (27:35):
I hear people talking about it all the time. I
know tons of folks that go there, and they just
they don't say anything but great things about it.

Speaker 2 (27:42):
That's good to hear. I think that one of the
one of the things that was solved without me even
realizing early on, was that I liked I liked that
building because it was it was down on the river
and old and awesome, and the bones are really good
and I just loved it it. But what went in

(28:03):
buying that building effectively, what happened was I bought something
at the cultural center of the Ohio Valley. All the
festivals are down there, and then the West Benkl Arena's
down there, and then the river itself, which is really
what was the original reason that people stopped here to
hang out, you know, back in the seventeen hundreds, and
the whole, the whole wheeling story is about the river.

(28:25):
And yeah, so I I was lucky and it was
I didn't acknowledge it at the time, but know now
that people just have a natural inclination to want to
go down there because of the subconscious pool of the river.
I think, yeah, yeah, no doubt in the festivals too.

Speaker 1 (28:43):
Well, we're we're approaching our limit on time for this
for this block. I guess so to speak. But however,
we could do a part too if we've got more.
I mean, there's a ton more that I'm thinking about
and I'm sure as long as time sure allows for you.
So this has been Episode one with within Mill Listen
who was so kind to come on this afternoon. Thanks
for listening, and we'll be back with Part two.