Zak Pashak sounds exhausted. His plan to temporarily swap life as a multiple club owner and booker of indie bands for that of a carefree backpacker has gone awry. He’s been up all night in Kyoto, Japan, making emergency calls back home to Vancouver, where his Biltmore Cabaret, which opened last December, is struggling. He sighs into the phone like he’s wondering why he’s subjecting himself – with his first club, Calgary’s Broken City, finally turning a profit after five years of operation – to this type of startup stress again. After all, admits the Calgary native, “If I’d known how difficult it was going to be with Broken City, I probably wouldn’t have gotten into it. It’s really hard to get a place going.”
Back then, without having studied much business during a degree-less stint at the University of Alberta, nor having done market research, Pashak ignored bar and nightclub failure rates of around 80 per cent. “I wasn’t really thinking about that,” he says. “I was on a mission.” His objective was two-fold. First, Alberta bands he’d discovered while hosting radio shows on CJSR at the U of A and the University of Calgary’s CJSW needed a new place to play. Second, he needed a club that didn’t make him cringe.
“I wanted a bar where people could be comfortable being themselves,” says Pashak, who’s now 28. “The trend of a lot of bars in Calgary was toward a kind of plastic lifestyle: everyone wearing the same clothes and smelling the same way and talking about the same things. There didn’t seem to be a huge support network for individuality.”
Pashak figured he could provide that simply by building a bar where he’d want to hang out, cluttering it with Calgary-esque paraphernalia scored from thrift shops and hanging photos of his friends like he was decorating his living room. “There’s market research and then there’s just knowing what you think is really good and believing in that,” he says. “If a business person really cares about an idea and tailors something to what they would really love, I think that it’s guaranteed to have success. People would latch onto that.” And for four years running, the approach has earned Broken City kudos from readers of FFWD, Calgary’s alt weekly, as the city’s best live music venue.
Money helped, especially given Pashak’s taste for pricey (but nonetheless obscure) headliners for his Sled Island music festival, staged annually in Calgary since 2006. But even ready cash (thanks to mom Jackie Flanagan, publisher of Alberta Views magazine, and stepdad Allan Markin, an oil and gas mogul and part owner of the Calgary Flames) is “definitely not the magic bullet. It’s not like it alone made things work.” Liking hectic schedules and high-stress situations helped, he says. So has being tenacious. While Pashak sees the Biltmore’s value in bolstering Vancouver’s indy-rock culture, not to mention in routing bands out to Broken City that might not otherwise see the Prairies, the municipal government doesn’t, hence those cross-Pacific calls home and, despite minor burnout, a renewed sense of mission.
“I’ve got to slow down and quit opening businesses and get these ones really solid. I think that’s going to happen,” says Pashak. “I’ll fight it out until it does.” U
issue 8
Category: Entrepreneurship, Profiles, Work
