Hide and seek...

There were 1,000 people at the Chase Corporate Challenge 5k race at RIT today...and I was searching for 1 of them. His name was Kevin (my bro knows him), and I've never met him, seen him, didn't have his cell number, and to add to that, he didn't know I was looking for him.

His dad works for Labatts and knows of a distributor in Buffalo and they distribute beverages to Rochester as well I believe. Since we're approaching distributors in 2 weeks, I figured it'd be a good idea to go and introduce myself to Kevin and his Dad, and try and line up a meeting to showoff Vital Energy^TM, our PHENOMENAL DRINK!

I started walking by each of the 200 tents. Then the sky took a dump all over me. I was drenched. DRENCHED. After walking for 40 minutes I realized I wasn't going to find Kevin...it was time to peace out.

Jake's in Florda, my brother wasn't there to help me out, and I didn't bring an umbrella. I started to smile, I mean what can you do, sometimes so many wrong things happen that it's just comical...I took some pictures, and swam the rest of the mile back to my car.

Have fun in Florida Jake!

-Mike


Little video...testing out software basically!

Blue Man Group and abandonment...

Holla,

This is Jake and I am the CMO of Enertia Bev. I will fill you in on my intricate life details at another blog post.

Today I came down to visit my mom and participate in a yoga teacher training intensive. Yea that's right. I also got to see Blue Man Group which was pretty awesome. I have seen the DVD of the complex tour and this was similar but the in your faceness of a live show is always better. Tomorrow begins my short journey to enlightenment and inner peace. When I return to Rochester I will be wise beyond my years and able to fully understand the workings of the world. This substantial gain will allow me to bring Vital Energy^TM to all the thirsty tired masses of the world in a much more timely manner.

My only hope is that Enertia Bev does not feel a sense of abandonment while I am gone. I plan to send emails to her filled with encouragement and love. :P

Not the best time to leave, but plans were made way back. Besides it'll will give us all some reflection time before I get back and we have to hit the ground running.

-Jake

Making moves and color dilemma

Busy week. Met the founder of Jolt here in Rochester earlier this week. It was interesting to hear how he got started and get some useful advice. He doesn't see us as competitors - I have to disagree...respectively of course ;). I see his argument that we aren't 'cola', but we are certainly 'energy', and that's how Jolt set itself apart in the 80's right? At any rate, I wasn't going to try and make us seem like competition haha. Perhaps he sees us as just too small of a company to actually worry about. Whatever the reason, I'm fine with him not trying to run us into the ground!

In other news, we had to do some redesign of our Orange Passion Vital Energy^TM flavor this week. We had issues with color stabilization. The color was disappearing! Don't worry though, we fixed the problem and are ready for some bad ass full scale production runs, just as soon as we find distribution!

The next few weeks are going to flyyy, we'll be talking to our investors, and in around 3 weeks we'll be talking with Rochester and Buffalo area distributors.

We'll also be setting up an online store section to our website so you can purchase Vital Energy^TM online. btw, our website is http://www.enertiabev.com in case you missed that one.

Hey, here's another pic to get you wet. Your mouths wet. Drooling. You know what I mean.

-Mike

Meet Mike (aka Jojo aka Mikey J aka CEO)

I suppose I'll start with an introduction... The name is Mike and a few months ago I left graduate school at the University of Michigan (Biomedical Engineering PhD). No I wasn't even close to failing out, instead I was really really bored. In fact, I spent half of my time there developing my first website & internet company instead of doing research.

I came back to NY and was looking for jobs and hoping somehow I could start a company instead of finding corporate work. Scott (our finance guy), ran his frustrations by me one night about how much he hated coffee but felt forced to drink that or a carbonated drink to wake himself up in the morning. After talking about it for the next week, we came up with a prototype Vital Energy^TM label and I decided I was going to put everything I had into getting this idea off the ground. Convincing my parents to allow me to start Enertia Beverage in their house instead of job searching was NOT easy - they're school teachers, not entrepreneurs. Turning down that job offer with P&G... that was a little hard to explain as well.

Sometimes you have to take risks!

Ok, done with the background story!


Fast forward to today, we've got an amazing product, management team, and will begin selling in NY very soon! You'll hear much more shortly and will meet my 2 sweet business partners.

ttyl kids
-Mike (aka Jojo)

Oh I guess I'll sign off with some pictures, here are pictures of our first pilot plant run before we run it on a much larger more automated scale...