Welcome to Money Talks, a series in which we interview people about their relationship with money, their relationship with each other, and how those relationships inform one another.
Cheryl Roorda is 51 years old; her husband, Zac Smith, is 52, and together they have two grown children. After a decades-long career as independent musicians, Cheryl and Zac opened SQZBX Brewery and Pizza Joint in Hot Springs, Arkansas. The restaurant has been in business for nearly seven years.
The following conversation has been lightly condensed and edited.
Zac: We’ve been running SQZBX for about six-and-a-half years, but we’ve been working on it for a lot longer than that.
Cheryl: Since 2007.
Zac: That’s when we purchased an extremely broken building on Ouachita Avenue in Hot Springs. It was an old piano shop, and the previous owner was getting out of the business and retiring.
Cheryl: It was full of musical instruments, so we were delighted because we were working musicians at the time.
Zac: Cheryl played the accordion, and I played a tuba-like instrument called an E-flat helicon. We had a regular gig at a German restaurant. The name of our band was The Itinerant Locals, and every summer we’d throw the kids in the car and drive around America playing wherever we could set up gigs. We did specialty tours — we did a tour on Amtrak where we spent 45 days riding the trains around America and playing, we did a tour on a solar-powered boat down the Ouachita River, we joined a circus and traveled with them.
We had a lifestyle that was very much about being present with our children, playing music in ways that felt joyful to us — and we hope, to our audiences — and living in a way that was really great but was not highly remunerative.
We landed in Hot Springs National Park at a time where we could buy a house for $32,000. Even this building was only — what was it?
Cheryl: It was $65,000.
Zac: $65,000 on a main street downtown. It was broken, don’t get me wrong, but it was affordable. We were able to, with sloppy credit and fantasized business plans, get a commercial loan for this building. That was 2007.
We didn’t really have a great plan, but at some point we realized that there was no way to bootstrap our way out of all of this building’s needs. It needed a roof. It needed HVAC. It needed all-new plumbing. It needed all-new electrical. It needed all-new floors.
In 2012, the FCC announced that there was going to be a 2013 opening for low-power FM licenses. At this point it all clicked in my head. I had had a fantasy for years about having a radio station within a community hub. A station within a place that people met and talked—
Cheryl: A place where they could eat.
Zac: Eat and converse and listen to music and stuff like that.
So we filed for the 2013 window with Low Key Arts, a local nonprofit that we were active in. We got the license, put the station on air with sweat equity, cash, and a little bit of credit cards — and from that point we were able to walk a banker into our finished, functional, very beautiful radio station, walk them into the other parts of this building that were still under construction, and describe the rest of our vision.
A brewery. A pizza joint. Restored tin ceilings, wood floors, Arkansas native pine.
At that point we were able to get a traditional SBA business loan for the renovations. We built the restaurant, which was its own drama. Of course we ran out of money and had to get a patch loan.
Cheryl: We got scammed by a brewer. We bought some tanks that didn’t exist. It wasn’t anyone in our community though. It was someone online who had a hipster-trustworthy beard and ended up being a total turd.
Zac: But we got through it all, and we opened six-and-a-half years ago.
Cheryl: December 18, 2017.
Zac: Ten years after we purchased the building. For many of those years, we didn’t really know what we were doing. The stormwater backs up, so we fixed the stormwater drain. The roof was leaking, so we fixed the roof. Then we were, like, we have a space now, so we could record an album!
Cheryl: We could have a music studio in here! We could have artist lofts! The dreams were real.
Zac: But none of that was going to pay for HVAC. So it wasn’t until we put the whole idea together of the radio station with the pizza restaurant and the microbrewery that we were able to fix all the problems.
Cheryl and I really did do the work. We took the tin ceiling panels down in the kitchen and re-hung them in the dining room. We sandblasted and painted. We laid the floors. We did the drywall. We put in the beams. We literally built it by hand.
Cheryl: In 2007, when we initially purchased the building, we put together — if I sent it to you, you would laugh so hard — the crassest business proposal about renovating the building. We were just trying to talk banker talk.
Zac: But this was before the collapse, when they were still going through cemeteries looking for bodies to loan money to. We were able to purchase our home as a tuba-accordion duo, and we were processing the loan, $32,000 on a foreclosure from Fannie Mae, and the strip-mall financier was all, “You know, this would be a lot easier if you took out a $100,000 loan,” and we were like, “What about tuba-accordion duo do you not understand?” We were beneficiaries of that sloppy credit environment.
Cheryl and I have both worked in the service industry. We’ve also worked in bars or restaurants as musicians. For many years, I would stand up there with my tuba and a full liter of Spaten Pils — I was playing music, getting drunk, and bringing everyone along on the journey with me. We were the face of the restaurant. But we’d ask ourselves, “Who’s making money tonight?” and the answer was, “Not us.”
Cheryl: Apparently it wasn’t a lot of the restaurateurs either! But when we started SQZBX, it took off immediately. It was like, “We’ve made a monster.”
Zac: From our projections that they gave us a commercial loan on, our first-year projections, we essentially doubled it.
Cheryl: The first day we were open I sold a thousand dollars of pizza. That’s when I knew it was going to work. Then that became standard, and then that wasn’t even enough. It’s still shocking to me that you can sell this much food in a day, because this isn’t even a big town.
Zac: Our place is beautiful. It’s hand-built. We’ve got all of these details that we pulled out of the music store. The back of the bar is made out of pianos. I could walk you through the building and waste hours talking about every little detail we put in. People really do sense it. It creates an environment that people feel is special.
We have a great group of locals, our regulars who keep coming back, and then tourists find us and try us when they’re in town. We get good reviews on the internet.
We also make everything. All the pizza dough is made from scratch every morning. All the beer I brew myself. All our vegetables are hand-cut every day. It’s just that. We just create a quality product in a beautiful environment, we provide great service, and because of that we have sales every day.
Cheryl: We have a staff of around 30. We’re open seven days a week, lunch and dinner.
At the beginning, our children helped out. They helped me program the point-of-sale system, for example. But I didn’t want to lean on them, and they both got less involved. Our son enjoyed working here, but our daughter is not going to be a restaurant person.
Zac: I’d also like to point out that they spent their youth either onstage or backstage with us, and both of them are seeking technical degrees in university.
Cheryl: I guess it’s going to skip a generation! We’ve also stopped performing. We’ve never played onstage at SQZBX.
Zac: We put in a stage, and then we performed a few shows before the business got started, but it’s way too difficult to go from being the boss to being a musical clown. We also found out that live music in the space just didn’t work at all. During the Covid shutdown, we ripped out the stage and put in booths. Butts in seats make money, and live music does not.
But the radio station is still going! We’re KUHS-LP. We’re programmed by volunteers, so anyone who shows up gets to play whatever they want. We try to avoid music that gets played on other radio stations around town, but otherwise, I invite people to share their musical experiences with our audience.
One of the things that we do is keep a very open and inclusive environment, and I think that people respond to that. We are relatively apolitical in our PR, but you walk in and you sense that this is a place that is not afraid of diversity. I believe that helps our business.
Cheryl: You have to be consistent and you have to be excellent. When we were in our business planning stages, people were like, “People don’t know the difference between good cheese and shitty cheese, why do you care?” We cared. I think, for that, we are rewarded every day.
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