Fawn Weaver On Raising Over $230 Million To Build A Whiskey Brand That Honors The World’s First-Known African-American Master Distiller

Fawn Weaver’s journey from Pasadena to founding successful businesses has been anything but traditional. In this interview, she talks at length about an interesting concept–how to approach challenges by ignoring them.

Fawn also discusses her journey of building and raising funding for her company and her unique approach toward venture capital, private equity, and growing Uncle Nearest. The company has attracted funding from top-tier investors like Hybridge Capital Management, CB3 Holdings, Mosaic General Partnership, Strand Equity, and Still Capital Partners.

In this episode, you will learn:

• Fawn Weaver’s resilience and entrepreneurial journey are rooted in overcoming challenges, from early independence to thriving under adversity.
• Her storytelling approach amplifies milestones, aligning team and public support with her company’s vision.
• Fawn’s leadership philosophy values character over status, emphasizing mutual respect in business and relationships.
• Uncle Nearest Premium Whiskey was born from a purpose-driven mission to honor untold histories and redefine the spirits industry.
• Fawn’s innovative fundraising strategies, focusing on debt over equity, allowed her to retain control while raising over $230M.
• Marketing ingenuity, including a visitor-centric distillery model, established Uncle Nearest as a globally celebrated whiskey brand.
• Fawn’s advice to entrepreneurs: Ignore distractions, double down on strengths, and embrace competition to fuel continuous improvement.

 

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About Fawn Weaver:

Fawn Weaver is the CEO and Founder of Uncle Nearest, Inc. and the Founder & Chief Executive Officer of Grant Sidney, Inc. In addition to these leadership roles, she serves as a Board Member at Endeavor, and is an active member of YPO and Women Execs on Boards.

Fawn is a New York Times bestselling author. Her educational background includes studies at Harvard Business School since November 2021 and a Bachelor of Arts in Business Leadership from The University of Alabama, completed in July 2023.

Connect with Fawn Weaver:

• LinkedIn
• TheOrg
• Crunchbase
• RocketReach

Read the Full Transcription of the Interview:

Alejandro Cremades: All right. Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Deal Maker Show. So today we have a really exciting founder you know joining us. you know We’re going to be really talking about all the good stuff that we like to hear, like building, scaling, financing. you know In this case, we’re going to be talking about how to approach challenges.

Alejandro Cremades: by ignoring them. We’re also going to be talking about race and gender in business and the approach that she has towards that, as well as thinking differently when it comes to VC, PE, and to the way that maybe you feel growth amongst other stuff. So again, brace yourself for a very inspiring conversation. And without further ado, let’s welcome our guest today, Phan Weber. Welcome to the show.

Fawn Weaver: Hello, thank you for having me.

Alejandro Cremades: so Originally born in Pasadena, so give us a walk through memory lane.

Fawn Weaver: Yes.

Alejandro Cremades: How was life growing up over there?

Fawn Weaver: Sure, I grew up a little above the Rose Bowl and near NASA. And so what will near JPL and it’s ah a bit of a city within within a city. And growing up, it was it was pretty normal to me, but to other people probably not because my father was one of the original hitmakers for Motown.

Fawn Weaver: And he went into ministry the year I was born and so I our house was filled with Motown artists But we didn’t look at them as celebrities even to this day. I don’t see them as celebrities my father was essentially their their minister and So I I see celebrities as having a lot of problems Because that that was really my introduction to them was and all of their issues.

Fawn Weaver: They’d be talking about around the house and

Alejandro Cremades: And how is life for you being able to see such successful people at an early stage in your life? I’m sure that that kind of like fueled a little bit the drive, the ambition.

Fawn Weaver: You know what’s funny is I didn’t see them as successful. i never I never saw them that way. What it did do is it made me completely unimpressed with people as a general rule, including myself. And so I don’t treat a janitor any different than I do the president of the United States, literally. When I am with either one of them,

Fawn Weaver: the way that I speak, my mannerisms, everything is exactly the same. And I think that that has something to do with walking around the house in which people had all of these people on a pedestal, but to me they were just normal.

Alejandro Cremades: So it sounds like up to 15, there was not a lot of changes, but then at 15, there was quite a ah sequence of events that follow. So walk us through walk us through that.

Fawn Weaver: I was a child from very early on that challenged everything. I refused to read novels that the teachers would give to do book reports on because I had the Encyclopedia Britannica set, which is for anyone that grew up here in the US,

Fawn Weaver: you you had these encyclopedias salespeople that would go door to door. And if you could afford to have a whole set, it was a big deal. And I would just sit in front of these encyclopedias and just go from A to Z reading as many stories as I could. But I was ironically had zero interest whatsoever in anything that involved fiction. I only wanted to live in the nonfiction world. I’m that way to this day. I don’t read fiction books.

Fawn Weaver: But growing up, I challenged everyone, my parents, my teachers, not in a negative way, but more of a, you couldn’t just tell me something and I accept it. You had to actually get my buy in on it. You had to explain it to me in such a way that I believed you.

Fawn Weaver: And growing up ah in an African-American household, that’s a problem because we tend to be authoritarian, at least African-Americans, maybe not other Blacks in the rest of the world, but here because we all came from a lineage of enslavement and how we were treated, we’ve passed that down in our parenting. And and I just was not a child that you could simply say, do what I said because I am your parent.

Fawn Weaver: That didn’t work for me. I needed the why. I still need the why. And so at 15 years old, it came to a head. My parents had had a new baby girl and they wanted to be able to raise her without the influence of one of the children questioning every single thing that said. And so they gave me an ultimatum either do things their way. It was their house. They paid all the bills. So I either did them things their way or I had to leave. And I think I stayed there maybe another hour.

Fawn Weaver: and I decided I would leave because doing it their way didn’t make sense to me.

Alejandro Cremades: So then what happened next? Because it sounds like a you know you were bouncing from 15 all the way to 18.

Fawn Weaver: i’m Bouncing yes, I lived in, when I left there I moved in to the projects with some girls from school. I liked the fact that no one in the project seemed to have rules. You just came and went and you did what you what you wanted to do And so I was there for a little while, but it just wasn’t the right fit for me. And I moved into a homeless shelter and what was really a temporary homeless shelter before I went to a homeless shelter that was for people under 18. Then when I turned 18, I had to move to another homeless shelter. And it was that one covenant house that I learned two really important things. Number one, I was very different.

Fawn Weaver: because the nature of covenant houses is every day you go out and either you’re going to school or you are looking for a job. And everyone would go out. The first day I was there, we all went out. We had our resumes. We all came back. We sat around the campfire and everyone there was lamenting about how hard it is to find a job. And I said nothing because I went out and I came back with four jobs and I took, I think three of them.

Fawn Weaver: And, and the beautiful thing about covenant houses is I was able to learn how to save because you basically have all of your money go into an escrow account until you can save enough money. I think at the time it was $5,000 to be able to move into your own apartment. And so that’s, that’s what I did. I went out to work every day. I worked at BB Kings blues club. I was not old enough to work there, but I just happened to forget my ID every time.

Fawn Weaver: and And I worked at Camacho’s Cantina, but I also interned for a PR firm. And that is what really changed the game for me. Because this PR, this publicist, easily the most well-respected African-American publicist in America at the time, had a lot of the big accounts, Lexus, Toyota, AT and&T, which was pretty unheard of for an African-American PR firm.

Fawn Weaver: And she brought me in and she allowed me to participate in a meeting very early on in which they were discussing two clients that they could not figure out how to get pressed for. And I’m sitting listening to them talk about how they were going after it. And I thought they were doing it all wrong. Now, mind you, I’m 18 years old and I have no background in PR, but just from gut and instinct, I thought, I wouldn’t do it this way.

Fawn Weaver: And I shared how I would do it. Now, what we now know that to be is called product placement, product integration. But at that time, outside of maybe Philip Morris on TV, it wasn’t common. It wasn’t common to do product integration out in the real world. And that’s what I was suggesting. Bring the press where the celebrities will already be and have the products with the celebrities.

Fawn Weaver: And i that the person who I was interning for, Pat Tobin, she didn’t understand it. She didn’t get why a celebrity would allow this. and and And she said, but pitch it to the client. and If you can pull it off, go for it.

Fawn Weaver: I pitched it to both clients. They liked it. I did it. I executed on it. It worked. And over time, both of the clients said, listen, we’re leaving this firm no matter what, but if you decide to open up your own, we’ll come with you. And so that’s essentially what happened. It’s how I ended up with a PR firm.

Fawn Weaver: right before I was 19 years old is I started off with these two clients and I began building a PR firm based on storytelling versus press releases

Alejandro Cremades: So you did that for close to five years. So obviously storytelling is um is a big one when it comes to being an entrepreneur because when you are especially starting out, you you have this canvas you know in your own mind, right? and And it’s not as tangible for others, whether it’s investors or employees or even co-founders, no? I guess when it comes to storytelling,

Alejandro Cremades: What were your biggest stakes and how do you think that you’ve used you know some of those in order to enroll people into the future that you’re living into as an entrepreneur?

Fawn Weaver: Really, you have to set really big goals and put them out there and then actually go after them and then celebrate every single win publicly. It’s something that is is’ is counter to how a lot of society, a lot of entrepreneurs operate. They think You should move in silence and you should really just kind of go to the next thing and it seems boastful if you celebrate every win. But what those folks don’t understand in the art of storytelling is it allows you to tell your story 80 different ways.

Fawn Weaver: Every year when I am outlining the press strategy for the upcoming year, there is probably half of the things that I intend to talk about that are our celebrations results that we haven’t yet hit.

Fawn Weaver: So what that does is that puts the entire team in the mentality of this story is coming out in this quarter. So we need to work toward that goal and make sure we hit it because that’s the story that’s planned at that time. So when people watch me and they watch what I’m doing, and it seems like it’s just milestone after milestone after milestone, and how can someone make history that many times? It’s because it’s a part of my PR strategy.

Fawn Weaver: I’m setting the big goal, I’m setting making history and then going after it because I know it allows me to continue to gain earned media. When I look at our press, and we do track this, every day, seven days a week, there are at least five press stories on myself or my my company around the world.

Fawn Weaver: i do I do interviews easily a couple of times a day and none of them are similar in part because number one, I never allowed the questions to come to me beforehand. Most of the time I don’t even know what it is that we’re going to be talking about. That’s intentional.

Fawn Weaver: And so everything is just very authentic and unique and fresh. But how do you talk to so many different media outlets and not have to repeat yourself? It’s very simple. I’m constantly ensuring that I can tell my story 80 different ways from Sunday.

Alejandro Cremades: I love that. And I love that you say that because i mean now I’ve done over a thousand of those and I never send questions, even if they ask me and for them. But one thing that I wanted to ask you here is, after doing this for about five years,

Alejandro Cremades: One thing that hits me is, once an entrepreneur is always an entrepreneur, and you went at it again, obviously, now with what you’re doing. now and We’re going to be talking about that in just in just a little bit, but you decided to kind of like turn the page and go back to into corporate no and work for someone else. i mean how How did that come about?

Fawn Weaver: That was, it was a little longer than that. So as I had my PR firm, there was a, one of my employees actually referred a chef by the name of G. Garvin to me, who was opening up a, a restaurant in Beverly Hills with a million dollar bill with Keyshawn Johnson. And they wanted me to oversee the press and the special event for it. And I just couldn’t do it. I didn’t have the bandwidth to do it.

Fawn Weaver: and but I did tell him I would come and I would share with him what I would do if it were me so that he could find the right person to do it. Well, fast forward, I ended up partnering with that person for his own restaurant, building out the business plan, raising the money, executing the the PR on that, which it ended up being easily the most one of the most talked about restaurant openings in Los Angeles that year. The line was,

Fawn Weaver: literally down, down the block for a fine dining restaurant. You would call in to get a reservation two months in advance and you’d get there. It would still be a 45 minute to an hour wait. So the PR that never actually changed. I continued even throughout that journey.

Fawn Weaver: where I went into so corporate America really for the first time was after I got married. And the restaurant business, the bar business, it’s nonstop. Even when it’s closed, it really isn’t. And so your ability to take off, your ability to really just have downtime as and with your family, every restaurateur will tell you it’s pretty impossible because you’re open seven days a week unless you’re Chick-fil-A.

Fawn Weaver: and And so I made a decision that I wanted to enjoy life with my husband and in my mind, because I didn’t know better, employees, I thought they just put their head down at night and they never thought about the job and that they would just enjoy resting. And I’m sure some do, but if you are an entrepreneur,

Fawn Weaver: at heart and that’s what you do even when you put your head down at night even if you’re working for someone else you’re still you still continue to work and that’s what happened with me I went into the hotel world it made sense to me because of how much I love to travel And because the special events, the PR, it would translate to that world. And my idea was I would simply be an employee. I would oversee special events and that was it. Well, I somehow chose the one hotel in Los Angeles that every single night had celebrity events.

Fawn Weaver: so So it defeated the purpose. I moved to another one of the hotels to again, try to capture this, go to sleep at night and and not have to think about anything. And it didn’t work because I eventually was asked to become the general manager and against my better you know sense, I went ahead and I decided to do it. And what I realized was I’m just built to leave.

Fawn Weaver: because even trying to hide my leadership and trying to be an employee, I was still tapped to then leave the hotel. and And so after about three years as GM, I decided, well, if I’m going to have all of these employees and responsibilities, I might as well just be an entrepreneur. So I went back to that journey and and I can’t imagine ever, ever leaving it.

Alejandro Cremades: So obviously meeting your husband was saying quite a pivotal moment in your life. And in fact, you’ve written three books and then they have to do with marriage.

Fawn Weaver: Yes.

Alejandro Cremades: And you’ll tell us about this now, you know, what those three books are about. But what are the three key ingredients of a healthy and successful marriage?

Alejandro Cremades: what what what What are those three? You know, just to to to share off a few.

Fawn Weaver: Yeah. Well, the great thing is, is that my first book, I traveled the world and I went to 12 countries, six continents, and I interviewed couples happily married 25 years or more to deduce the common denominator. So I can actually tell you the 12, no matter the religion, the background, no matter where they were born.

Fawn Weaver: And the number one is mutual respect in America. It’s very interesting because in America we have a lot of books that tell us that men want respect and women want love. But the reality is is both men and women.

Fawn Weaver: won an equal amount of respect. And we see love within that. So the number one thing across the board was mutual respect. The the thing that I thought was very interesting that I did not anticipate was all of these couples had a daily ritual.

Fawn Weaver: Whether it’s a as an Israeli couple that every single night for an hour before dinner with the kids, they would have port and they talk about their day and they talk about their life. A couple in South Africa every morning would wake up and have coffee in the bed together. They called it their morning board meeting.

Fawn Weaver: From country to country, I was blown away that every single couple that I interviewed all had a daily ritual. And so I think it was around Australia I called Keith, my husband, and I said, babe, we need a daily ritual.

Fawn Weaver: ah The other thing that couples that are are healthy and and have successful marriages is they tend to surround themselves with couples that have healthy marriages, that aren’t complaining about their spouses, that are really building each other up. And when you surround yourself with other people that other couples that are like that, then you just end up in this sort of happy wives club, which is what I named the book.

Fawn Weaver: and And those are the three things that I would say, not necessarily the most important, but the number one most important, the number one most interesting, and then the piece you just can’t leave out.

Alejandro Cremades: So one thing that the that really comes to mind here is that the when you were when you went to Tennessee to do an interview, you know it’s kind of like where the whole, perhaps, you know incubation of what you’re up to now you know came about.

Fawn Weaver: Mm-hmm.

Alejandro Cremades: So how does the whole idea, the whole concept of uncle nearest you know comes knocking?

Fawn Weaver: Absolutely. Well, Uncle Nair is premium whiskey. Uncle Nair is Tennessee whiskey, whatever people want to call it. ah That came from an article. Keith and I were in Singapore just for a few days and there was a photo of Jack Daniel. And even though I didn’t drink Jack Dan, we didn’t drink Jack Daniel, but I think that company has done a brilliant job around the world and making sure we all know what that man looks like.

Fawn Weaver: And you had this photo of him taken in what looked like the 19th century. We now know it to be circa 1904, but it looked like it had been taken in the 19th century. And you had Jack Daniel with an African-American man immediately to his right.

Fawn Weaver: At that timeframe, especially in the South, that would have been pretty unheard of. And so it was the photo that initially captured my attention and then the headline, which was Jack Daniel embraces a hidden ingredient help from a slave.

Fawn Weaver: And the story itself really was didn’t have a whole lot of facts, didn’t have a whole lot of proof. It was more so that the town of Lynchburg was saying, hey, we’ve been crediting this white preacher and distiller as being the teacher of Jack Daniel, but really it was an enslaved man on his property.

Fawn Weaver: And it was the company itself and the town wanting to set that record straight. And I thought what was so interesting about it is at the time I was about to turn 40 years old.

Fawn Weaver: And in my 40 years of living in America, there wasn’t a single ubiquitous American brand that I could point to and say there was an African American at the beginning. But we know that there were African Americans at the beginning of so many of them. We just can’t prove it. We weren’t allowed to patent. We weren’t allowed to trademark. We weren’t.

Fawn Weaver: historically written down by name. And so the idea that there might be a story that we were integrated into from the very beginning was really exciting to me. And going back to me being a little girl who sits with Encyclopedia Britannica all around me, I did the same thing with this. I went down into a rabbit hole trying to research and I was baffled by how little research there was. How, I mean, there wasn’t even a Wikipedia page yet by the time I began digging into it. So that’s what drew me in initially.

Alejandro Cremades: So then what was that the journey like from being in tune into something that you could do and something that you could bring into the world, into that moment where you finally see the product you know being sold and and and bringing it to life? no

Fawn Weaver: Well, the beautiful thing about uncle nearest is that is so different from most brands these days. Most brands begin with the actual product and then they back themselves into a story, a brand story. They’ll hire an outside marketing firm, branding firm.

Fawn Weaver: to help them to craft the story to to to talk about this product. In this instance, the story is what I was after. The story is what I was chasing. And it wasn’t until I got to Lynchburg and I met one of Jack’s eldest descendants and one of Nearest’s descendants and began really talking about the story and understanding and interviewing Nearest’s descendants in ja and Jack’s descendants.

Fawn Weaver: And realizing yes, a book will be great. A movie will be great. But the only thing that is going to make sure that the story of nearest green is known around the world is a bottle with his name on it. And so we began to move in the direction of all three things very quickly. The bottle was done first and the book came out this past June and.

Fawn Weaver: I think 12 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list for business and five weeks on the New York Times bestseller list for nonfiction, it remains a bestseller. And it is something that people are gravitating to because it’s not just the story of how I built this company, but it also is the story of the legacy of Nearest Green and Jack Daniel.

Alejandro Cremades: What was that moment like? Because I know that you guys started really in motion here in 2016. In 2017 is where you ah brought it to market. ah you know Then you opened the first phase of the distillery, which I i think I read somewhere in 270 acres. Is that is that right?

Fawn Weaver: we started with two seventy we’re now at five hundred and forty three

Alejandro Cremades: That’s incredible. So at what moment, right? Because there’s also a tremendous amount of work that that happens along the way. At what moment are you like, I think we’re into something here.

Fawn Weaver: Well, it it just the serendipity of how everything happened. So the very first thing that I did when I got to Lynchburg is I went to the library to do research. We were in there, my husband and I, for a couple of hours before Jack’s eldest descendant came in. And through that conversation she shared with us that the farm where Nearest Green was the master distiller, where Jack Daniel grew up, the home at 313 acres, that it was for sale. Now, what we what we now know that property was, was home to the original Jack Daniel Distillery number seven. We didn’t know it at the time, but we knew it we knew that Jack grew up there. We knew Nearest made the whiskey there. And so we decided to buy that property.

Fawn Weaver: So it went from being, this is going to be a four day trip to Lynchburg, Tennessee for my 40th birthday to now we own a historic 313 acre property. So we have to begin there because it’s there that now you have a brand story coming to life side by side with the story to be written in a and a book. But once we we launched the brand in the market in 2017,

Fawn Weaver: Most bourbon companies, most whiskey companies, when you are new, the last thing on your mind is a distillery. It’s expensive. It’s not really necessary if you’re just trying to build and sell to another company. But for what my goal was, which was to continue to build this so that it continues on for generation and generation. When I’m looking at it, I’m looking at Is this thing still growing 200 years from now? What do I put in place now to make sure that that happens? And so I had to do it differently than the way others were doing it. I was also mindful that no woman or person of color had ever succeeded in this industry. So I had to figure out why that was. And what I concluded is, is because America is 70% women and people of color are spending power is greater than the non, you know, minority group, if you will.

Fawn Weaver: but But that group wants to buy products from someone who looks like them, who they relate to. And yet no one who looked like them had ever succeeded in this industry. So I had to figure out why. And the reason the determination that I came to was because you can’t sell directly to the consumer.

Fawn Weaver: We have a second tier. We have a middleman. We sell to the distributor and then the distributor sells to the consumer. Well, historically in this country, the distributors top to bottom have been white male. And so there is a story translation that gets lost between the maker and the buyer.

Fawn Weaver: So the question became how do I share this story directly with the consumer? How do I circumvent this system so that I still stay within it legally, but so that I can get directly to the customer. And the only way you can do that is to have your own distillery. That’s the only way you can sell to the customer, but it’s not a press story. If I.

Fawn Weaver: put, say some tiny distillery in Tennessee and we began building it. That’s not a press story. A press story is I am going to build a $50 million dollars distillery. It seemed crazy when I said it, but what I understood is that it would generate the press that I needed in order to attract consumers to the distillery once we had something for them to come to. And it’s exactly what happened.

Fawn Weaver: We made the announcement. We worked toward it. We built the distillery and it’s, it’s cost us over 50 million at this point, but we built the distillery, but now we’re the seventh most visited distillery in the world, 230,000 people there last year. And all of those people go back out into the world, sharing the story of nearest green, pouring uncle nearest, introducing it to their favorite restaurants, bars. I wouldn’t have been able to do that if I was relying on the distributor.

Alejandro Cremades: So let’s talk about the, I mean, you were mentioning 50 million there. I want to talk about capital raising because I know that they in this case, you know, with you guys, you know, you definitely have a different um approach or perspective when it comes to venture capital or private equity.

Fawn Weaver: Mm hmm.

Alejandro Cremades: I guess how much capital have you guys raised to date? And then also how has it been through the journey of of going through the different financing cycles?

Fawn Weaver: It’s been, I’ve raised over $230 million. dollars More of that is debt than than equity, which is why I maintain ah control of of the company and the largest shareholder by far. But our journey to raising capital is very simple. The ah initial institutional investors that we went to said no. The original BC we went to said no, and we stopped asking.

Fawn Weaver: you You only have to to tell me no once before I will find another way to succeed. And that’s what happened here. And so our our seed series was essentially six people, ah five Jewish guys and one Asian woman who my husband used to work for. And they really believed in the vision.

Fawn Weaver: and what it was that we were trying to do and they could stomach the w risk because if you think about it there was enormous risk here number one i was about to tell a story that was smack dab in the middle of a very large spirit conglomerate story and we had no way of knowing will they challenge the trademarks Will they challenge us getting distributors? Will they block us from getting on shelves? There was no way to know. And so the the original six that that were our seed series, they really had to stomach the most.

Fawn Weaver: By the time we got to the Series A, we were already in the marketplace. We were in the press everywhere, the earned media. Obviously, that’s my background. There were stories being told on us every single day, which drew in other investors. And I just had a really incredible group that came in.

Fawn Weaver: for Series A of all individuals. And one person would lead me to another person, would lead me to another person. And there was this interesting investment banker who didn’t do it the way that you would normally expect. He he acted more as a person who brought in referrals than anything. I would still be the one to do the pitching. And I got to know all of these investors one-on-one. And I decided, oh, i don’t I don’t ever want to do it another way. I don’t ever want to be on a spreadsheet with a bunch of junior analysts looking at it and deciding whether or not my business is good or viable or up for depth. I wanted to be able to talk directly to my investors and for them to be able to ask me questions directly unfiltered. And so my entire cap table are individuals.

Fawn Weaver: Now, mind you, there are SPVs on there, but I still know the individuals within the SPVs. And so it’s it’s very different than your typical cap table. That’s for sure.

Alejandro Cremades: so Obviously, here, you know we’re talking about raising money. um We’re talking about storytelling, but I find that vision ultimately you know is something that investors are betting on, employees, customers too, the people that are visiting now that are excited at 200,000 plus. The question here that comes to mind, Van, is if you were to go to sleep tonight,

Alejandro Cremades: And you wake up in a world where the vision of Uncle nearest is fully realized. What does that world look like?

Fawn Weaver: That world is a a company that it is not a brand. It’s a portfolio spirits company. And it is invested and has companies in every single sector of the alcohol business. It is doing business in at least 100 countries around the world. And every single one of those businesses is growing. That’s what it looks like.

Alejandro Cremades: Now, as part of that too, and and and obviously you know like building that, which is amazing, I find that founders, a lot of times they they just like work, work, work and work themselves to just burning out. no I know that in your case, family is very important. The way that you balance um family and work is also critical. There’s a lot of founders that are listening to us now. you know what What do you have to tell them about this?

Fawn Weaver: Sabbath is non-negotiable, and it’s been that way for me for close to 30 years. I build my entire schedule around the Sabbath, and I don’t believe the Sabbath has to be on a Saturday, has to be on a Sunday, but it is always within a seven-day window for me.

Fawn Weaver: And that’s usually on a Sunday. So if I have to travel or work on a Sunday, then my assistant knows that that Saturday or that Monday is being slotted for rest. And rest to me is truly rest. It doesn’t mean that I’m you know organizing my house. my My husband calls me an Orthodox Jew on the Sabbath. He’s like, you don’t do Jack.

Fawn Weaver: And it’s true. And now he he’s gotten used to it. We’ve been married almost 21 years. And so now every Sunday he goes, babe, I get the lazy bones every Sundays. And that is the point. But when you begin your week, every single week with your faith and your family,

Fawn Weaver: that really legislates how you live your life, how you run your life, how you prioritize your life. And so there are seasons where it is nonstop where Keith and I, we can’t take the half hour or an hour in the morning to have coffee together like we used to. We can’t have dinner together at night like we used to. We’re currently in one of those seasons where six days a week easily 16 hours a day, it is nonstop. But then on that seventh day, we simply rest. And I assure you, I get more done in six days than most people will ever get done in seven.

Alejandro Cremades: Now, let me put you into a time machine, Phan, and I’m going to bring you back in time.

Fawn Weaver: Mm hmm.

Alejandro Cremades: I’m going to bring you back to the 90s, to that moment where you were thinking about maybe doing something of your own, as we talked about it earlier, when you had those clients you know that were saying, Hey, you know we may want to come with you if you do something of your own.

Fawn Weaver: Mm hmm.

Alejandro Cremades: And let’s say you’re able to show up. and you’re able to have a chat with a younger self, and you’re able to give that younger self one piece of advice before launching a business. What would that be and why, given what you know now?

Fawn Weaver: given what i know now it would be whatever you do don’t give up because failure doesn’t exist unless you give up there is not a single person that has ever failed that did not first give up and so whatever you do continue to do it because this company uncle nearest is built on the foundation of what I was doing in my very first company. What I do so effectively better than anybody out there, I would argue, the only person in the press more than me is Elon. And if you take out the negative articles, we’re probably even. And so they take what you know to be your superpower.

Fawn Weaver: double down on it and whatever you do, do not give up. So there there are different things along the way where I gave up and I really shouldn’t have. When I go back and I look at it, if I had just continued that path, I still would have been here, but I would have had all those other things with me.

Alejandro Cremades: I love that. So for the people that are listening that would love to reach out, say hi, say hi or perhaps even learn more about you know Uncle nearest, what they what what can you tell them?

Fawn Weaver: Go to me on Instagram, fawn.weaver. I am for a CEO. One of my hashtags is the people’s CEO. I engage with people that follow me. I freely share every tip, every resource. I’m not waiting until I’m 75 years old to put out a biography to share the secrets then, but most of the stuff will be outdated by then.

Fawn Weaver: I share what I learn in real time, even if that means I’m creating competition. I’m okay with that because competition makes me work even harder and better and smarter to stay ahead. So I would say follow me on Instagram on fawn.weaver. You can send me a message on LinkedIn. I get to those about every three months. theres

Alejandro Cremades: Amazing. Well, Yvonne, thank you so much for being on The Deal Maker Show today. It has been an absolute honor to have you with us.

Fawn Weaver: It has been a joy to be a part of this with you. Thank you.

*****

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