Kinzie Foods: Walter Kinzie
Walter got his first job at four years old sweeping a lumber yard in Edna, Kansas, a town of 150 people. At seven, his dad co-signed a $125 bank loan so he could buy a pig — and the bank required him to come in quarterly to review his own P&L. By his senior year of high school, that one pig had grown into a fifteen-head cattle operation. One week into his freshman year of college, a rare kidney condition put him in and out of hospitals for three years. From a hospital bed, he taught himself how to produce concerts — a dream he'd had since watching one at his county fair at age seven. At twenty, he met another sick kid whose wish was simply to go to prom and graduate high school. Walter produced his first concert to raise the $70,000 the kid needed for care, using a loan secured against sponsorship contracts he hadn't even finalized yet. They raised $71,000. On the drive home, he decided he'd never put a ceiling on what he could achieve — and told himself that night he'd one day produce concerts for George Strait and Garth Brooks, and produce a presidential inauguration. He'd done all three by age 35, including Donald Trump's 2017 inauguration, and went on to run private events in 76 countries, including parties for billionaires the public never hears about. When COVID shut down live entertainment entirely, Walter refused to furlough his full-time staff — he sold his house and his office to keep paying them. Ninety days in, on a solo road trip to clear his head, he passed three drive-in movie theaters in one afternoon and had an idea: stage concerts broadcast to drive-ins nationwide. Within two days he had 125 theaters signed up. Within five days, Garth Brooks agreed to be the first artist. Within three weeks, 725,000 people were in line for tickets. That summer, Walter's company hosted 1.7 million people safely across drive-in concerts with Garth Brooks and Metallica, inventing the live-stream-to-theater technology from scratch. Kinzie Foods started as mason jars of his aunt's barbecue sauce, given away as gifts for years until the requests got expensive and time-consuming enough that his wife told him to just start charging. He priced it at $20 a jar hoping people would stop asking. Orders spiked. He doubled the minimum. Orders spiked again. He went from strangers' kitchens to his own garage to a real production warehouse, cold-messaged CEOs of major condiment brands on LinkedIn for advice, and built a lineup of bold, unexpected flavors — Pickle, Espresso, Pistachio, Jalapeño Lime, Dubai Chocolate — designed to get used at every meal, not just backyard barbecues. Kinzie Foods is now in 70+ stores just months after launch and recently took first place at the largest BBQ sauce competition in the world. Make sure to check out Kinzie Foods at: https://kinziefoods.com Check out my new book on Amazon: https://amzn.to/4kRKGTX Watch our mini-doc - Starting Small: The Raw Truth Behind Entrepreneurship and the American Dream: https://youtu.be/eHuq93wIxs0?si=eDB-ycngvWNapRLO Visit Starting Small Media: https://startingsmallmedia.org/ Subscribe to exclusive Starting Small emails: https://startingsmallmedia.org/newsletter-signup Follow Starting Small: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/startingsmallpod/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Startingsmallpod/?modal=admin_todo_tour LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/cameronnagle Thank you to this episodes mid-break sponsor, Gozney. A couple years back I had founder Tom Gozney on the show, and it's still one of my favorite stories we've ever featured — the guy started building pro-grade ovens for restaurants before bringing that same technology home, and now Gozney's become the name in outdoor cooking. Their lineup covers everyone — the Roccbox for portable, take-it-anywhere pizza nights, the Dome for the full hybrid, wood-and-gas experience, and the Arc line for something compact that still hits restaurant-level heat. We just got their Arc XL in for hosting, and if you know me, pizza and having people over is basically my favorite combination — this thing gets to 950 degrees and turns out a 16-inch pizza in about 60 seconds. Whatever setup fits your space, Gozney's built something for it. Check out the full lineup at https://us.gozney.com/






