Man Cave Expands to Tampa Bay

The St. Petersburg Times sat down with Nick and Pete Keiner for the first Man Cave MEATing in Florida. Check out the headline!

Man Cave sells every man's dream: beer, steak and a place to call your own

Click here to read the article.

Star Tribune attends a Man Cave MEATing

Don't know how pumped we are about the MANNY KAY moniker, but hey - who are we to tell the Star Tribune what's good news?


www.startribune.com/lifestyle/55039542.html

Show Me St. Louis features... Man Cave!

No Girls Allowed at ManCave Meatings!

ManCave featured on WCCO.com

Great job Nick and Jerry at their Meating yesterday!

Off to meet up with Jim in St. Louis for the "Show Me St. Louis" spot in a few days!



Move over Mary Kay, ManCave is here.

Minnesota College Student Nick Beste created ManCave Worldwide as a way to provide men with tools necessary to be all that is man. Beste says it's the perfect excuse to hang out with the guys, eat lots of meat and drink beer.

ManCave "meatings" teach different grilling techniques to showcase all of ManCave products.

"We got barbeque stuff, we got meats, we got poker stuff, home bar stuff, anything that a man would want, that's what we have," said Beste.

Everything from a bottle opener to beer mugs is for sale; all have the ManCave logo on them. All of the products are delivered to the purchaser's front door and have a lifetime guarantee.

Guys who go to meatings say they're glad men have something to call their own.

"The ladies have their little parties that we can't really talk about. So its really fun to have a time where you can get together with the guys, have a beer and do what guys do without having interruptions," said Brian Cox.

Beske says he hopes ManCave will rise to the top of things to do for men.

"I believe we will be more popular than Mary Kay one day," said Beste.

He says no matter the occasion, be it a bachelor party or just an excuse to pig out, ManCave is what's good about being a man.

Man Cave Featured in Fargo-Moorhead Forum

Half way through our first summer, Man Cave has EIGHT Advisors working to spread the good word about our exclusive line of Man Cave products. The Fargo-Moorhead Forum chimes in on the concept and early growth...



http://www.inforum.com/event/article/id/245514/

Love of grilling leads to ManCave business

Direct sales company focuses on men’s creature habits
Nick Beste wants to sell products to men in the same manner that companies like Pampered Chef and Mary Kay have catered primarily to women.

By: Craig McEwen, INFORUM

Nick Beste started ManCave to cater to men’s interests, including grilling. Michael Vosburg / Forum Photo Editor

Previous Ad

Nick Beste wants to sell products to men in the same manner that companies like Pampered Chef and Mary Kay have catered primarily to women.

The 23-year-old East Grand Forks, Minn., native has launched ManCave, a direct sales company that sells select meats, grilling accessories, in-home bar and poker supplies at gatherings called “MEATings.”

“It’s an enterprise dedicated to letting men be men, no questions asked,” states the company Web site www.mancaveworldwide.com.

Here’s how it works:

ManCave advisers are independent male or female business owners, said Beste.

“They go into somebody’s home and teach different grilling techniques to showcase our products,” he said, cooking beer-can chicken, brats, steaks and other munchies for participants to consume.

ManCave also has a small line of gifts for women: rose petals, body butter and soy candles.

“We figured, you know, if you’re going to spend the night with the guys drinking beer and eating meat, you might as well bring the wife home something nice to get yourself back in the house,” Beste said.

Beste and business partner, Kevin Carlow, both University of Minnesota students, started discussing the idea in October. They launched ManCave in April.

The company has eight advisers selling products in Minnesota, North Dakota and Illinois.

Beste graduated from East Grand Forks High School in 2005, always wanting to pursue a career in business.

In third grade he drew a stick figure. “Below it I wrote, ‘I want to buy and sell companies,’ ” he recalled.

During high school he worked for Grand Forks, N.D., commercial real estate developer Kevin Ritterman, who owns Dakota Commercial and Development.

“That really got me pumped up. Kevin taught me a lot about everything. I owe a lot to him,” said Beste.

“For as young as he is, he’s a pretty driven kid. You could see that when he started working for us at 16-17,” said Ritterman.

“He is aggressive. He will learn and make some mistakes just like everybody else, along the way,” Ritterman said.

Beste and Carlow also operate U-Guide, a community guidebook for students at seven Midwestern universities, including North Dakota State University and the University of Minnesota.

Beste is also Midwest distributer of Village Hot Sauce, which was started 28 years ago by Tom Zimmer in Grand Forks.

A Pair of Thoughts on Global Improvement

The following are the type of thoughts you gotta get out of your head somewhere. Thank you blog o' mine for being the convenient ventee that you are.

ACCESSIBILITY

This passage is the result of months of built-up frustration from one of the business world's most well-loved functions - Sales and (the art that is) Cold Calling. Brrr... makes me shiver just thinking about it.... or maybe that's the blust'ry -20F windchill from our ever-lovely MN winter.

In truth, I like cold calling. I've "met" many successful, interesting, high-powered, energetic individuals over the phone. It's a great way to connect with people you'd otherwise have no chance to. And I've actually met some of them - a few of which have evolved into business partners, career counselors, personal advisors, friends, and of course - advertisers (I call more media buyer types in a day than anyone should have to. Ever. They are great people, I just know that a good percentage of the time, they'd rather have a heart-to-heart with a hole in the ground than listen to my 30-second pitch of how I can guarantee them an ROI while helping them grow their business.)

I think the world would be a better place if more intelligent and well-connected people were more accessible.

I can't over-emphasize how many times I have just straight-up been snubbed after a polite and professional series of voicemails/emails, without a single notion of recognizing my existence. And I promise Mr./Mrs. media buyer... you really DO want to hear what I have to say! I wouldn't be wasting my time calling you if I didn't think there was a sincere chance that we might actually mutually benefit from the conversation, right?

Is the problem that today's current channels (telephone, email, IM) don't suffice? Or is the problem that today's Marketers and business leaders don't understand the value of being accessible and connecting with and learning from the people around them?

I guess I need to invent a way for busy people to easily respond to those reaching out to them, and to motivate those busy folks to want to respond.

WOMEN

My addiction to absorbing a few "TED talks" each night before I go to bed continues. I subscribe to their video podcast, so as they release videos from their archive, iTunes conveniently downloads the new ones for me (although some aren't "new," as opposed to "newly released." Whatever - they're new to me!)

Last night I was flipping through the 117 "talks" I have downloaded (no I don't progress through them systematically - how fun is that?), and I came across the following description

"In one of the most beloved talks from TED2007, novelist Isabel Allende talks about writing, women, passion, feminism. She tells the stories of..." and my screen doesn't show any more. Now, the typical, yesterday Kevin Carlow would have read that preview and almost instantaneously continued his perusal. Reason - something about feminists, generally speaking, doesn't sit well with me. Perhaps it's my naivete, but the few that I know are passionate but stubborn and thus (in my eyes) close-minded about a non-feminist point of view. Passion is always refreshing, just listen to the other side too!!

So I watched it, wanting to believe I possessed this "open mind" I was preaching about in my head. What a fantastic idea - I recommend it highly (Isabel Allende: Tales of Passion). She's not an award-winning speaker and her ideas aren't earth-shakingly profound - but Isabel exudes truth, feminine strength, imagination, and not surprisingly, passion. Plus her sense of humor was refreshing and real.

More and more often I find single thoughts, passages, ideas, philosophies, or quotes which strike a particularly strong chord with me. She delivered one such line in mere passing, but it resonated fully. As she was preaching about the benefits of empowering women and unfortunate truths of the poorest and most backward societies that consistently oppress women, she delivered this thoughtful line:

"Men run the world, and look at the mess we have."

Now, I could go for an hour debating all angles of this point. My broad takeaway on this statement is - she's right. Women have been oppressed and disenfranchised since history can remember. Men hold an absurd majority of seats of power: political power, commercial power, military power, religious power, terrorist power, high-technology power, judicial power, law enforcement power ---- all utterly dominated by men. Of course an increasing population of women excel in virtually all categories above, but globally speaking, this number's still a tiny fraction.

If we had true gender equality, with female instincts, intelligences, and intuitions influencing half of the stuff that goes on, the world would be a HUGELY different place. And I might just go as far as Ms. Allende does and say... a better one.

A potential partner, or two

You know, I was just going to Share this story in my Links feed, but I'm too excited. Maybe I'm too easily swooned by certain people/products/companies/sites that seem to speak my language; alas, I can't resist a short spell of ogling over up-and-comer's, young entrepreneurs, and clever writing.

Ben Casnocha. Just discovered his blog, book, and bio from an excellent post from user Prakblr on the message board of a Shelfari group I started on Entrepreneurship. (Shelfari is a social networking site - you create your virtual "book shelf" and are given a host of sharing and networking features to display your shelf and view others' shelves. My group has grown to 108 members, and I've done next to nil to promote it (i.e. letting Shelfari do the heavy lifting for me). Makes me optimistic about the future of www.thealumniadvisor.com and other networking site ideas we have on the backburner). I digress.

After 20 min of reading, Ben seems to have a definitive edge, carving out a nice niche in the "young entrepreneur success" department. He will have to step up his game after graduating from college to maintain his inertia. With less than half an hour of reading, I feel pretty confident he will do just that.

His book: My Start-Up Life. Yes, I am jealous... jealous that I did not write this book before he did.

This is the post that mandated the formal entry into my blog - What We'd Wish We'd Known In College.

He's merely taking excerpts from n+1's What We Should Have Known pub, but seeing the excerpts he chose seems like a tell-tale sign to me that we're vibrating close to the same frequency.

Taking book smarts to the bank

Two U students took a business launched for a class project and continued to run it after graduation. Now they plan to take their student-themed Alumni Advisor to campuses across the country. And they're well on their way...

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