#16 – The Aloha Spirit with Dave Kenney

Dave Kenney [00:00:54]:
You’re very welcome, Rory. Very welcome.

Ryan Doolittle [00:00:56]:
I knew you would be a great guest because I, whenever I’ve come across you, you have me laughing really hard.

Dave Kenney [00:01:03]:
Well, I try.

Ryan Doolittle [00:01:06]:
You live, you live in Henderson and you throw Henderson, Nevada, and you throw some really great neighborhood parties, correct?

Dave Kenney [00:01:13]:
Yeah, we have a lot of fun. Yeah, we have a lot of fun. We’ve, we’ve really tried to create community here, and we’ve got to know all the neighbors, and my wife loves to cook, and so we’ve usually got somebody around at least once or twice a week or maybe. Yeah.

Ryan Doolittle [00:01:27]:
Oh, that often?

Dave Kenney [00:01:27]:
Once. It toys out. Well, yeah, pretty much every weekend we get to, my buddy comes over every day and we sit and have a gin and tonic about 03:00 in the afternoon.

Ryan Doolittle [00:01:35]:
Oh, no.

Dave Kenney [00:01:36]:
But we have, we had some people you might know, Anna and John, over a week or so ago when we got back from our trip, so. Yes. Yeah, we throw a lot of parties. We have a lot of fun.

Ryan Doolittle [00:01:46]:
Yeah. So just so the audience knows, my in laws, Anna and John, they live, what, two houses from you or three?

Dave Kenney [00:01:52]:
Maybe two houses. Two houses next door, but one.

Ryan Doolittle [00:01:55]:
So you were nice enough to let my wife and I come and attend one of your parties. And my son, who was maybe four months at the time, and I don’t know if I ever told you, but he kept, the music was playing and someone kept switching it to a different thing, and it was him. I don’t think I told you that.

Dave Kenney [00:02:15]:
Doesn’t surprise me. We’ve had stranger things happen. Don’t worry. That’s not the end of the world. Oh, dear.

Ryan Doolittle [00:02:24]:
So I was really interested in your story and I was hoping you could get into it, like what you did during your career. You’ve had a pretty interesting backstory. Do you mind getting into that?

Dave Kenney [00:02:34]:
Yeah, no, not at all. I can go right back to the very beginning if you wish.

Ryan Doolittle [00:02:38]:
Sure, yeah.

Dave Kenney [00:02:40]:
I started working full time at about 15 and a half. I left school, had to leave school. My mother, unfortunately, was involved in a car accident, a fatal car accident. And my father kind of went off the rails a little bit and eventually married another woman. I was 15. My mother passed when I was about twelve. So a couple of years he was kind of absent, but he took it really bad and he got me enrolled at a job at the Holiday Inn in St. Nicholas Circle in Leicester.

Dave Kenney [00:03:07]:
15 and a half years old. I was a trainee hall porter. Wow.

Ryan Doolittle [00:03:11]:
Wait, where’s Leicester? Is that what you said is in Leicester?

Dave Kenney [00:03:13]:
Leicester’s Midlands of England, where I’m from the middle of England. And I got onto a kind of a training program and worked my way up through the ranks over a period of several years and became a director of food and beverage with them. Well, actually assistant food and beverage director. I worked in the restaurants, I did three or four years in the kitchen. I worked in night audit. I worked as a night manager. Eventually I got a chance to come to America at the ripe old age of 25.

Ryan Doolittle [00:03:41]:
Okay.

Dave Kenney [00:03:41]:
So I landed in JFK and got a connecting flight from LaGuardia down to Memphis, Tennessee, where holiday inns in those days was. You got to remember now, in those days, holiday Inns was the biggest hotel chain in the world. Oh, it was owned by Ken. It was started by a chap called Kemmens Wilson. And the Holiday inns in the, in the Europe are a lot different from the holiday inns over here.

Ryan Doolittle [00:04:03]:
Oh, okay. I didn’t know that.

Dave Kenney [00:04:04]:
So. Yeah, well, yeah, a lot of them are roadside motels here, which we, the holiday inns in Europe are all basically Hilton standard, top of the four star market. So I came from a pretty good background, f and b wise. And when I got to America, I realized I’d made a fatal mistake. But luckily, luckily I got transferred to the west coast division. They said, we want you to go to Honolulu. I said, where the bloody hell is Honolulu? I had no idea where it was. Okay, so to help out for eight weeks for the international franchise convention, which is basically an excuse for all the franchise owners to go somewhere and party for a couple of weeks and write it off as a tax expense.

Dave Kenney [00:04:45]:
So I get on the plane, I go to Honolulu. I’m driving down Kalakaua Avenue in the cab and I look up on top of one of the hotels and I see the Union Jack flying in the flag, in the state flag, which is seven red and white and blue bars with a Union jack in the corner. So I’m like, hey, how come you’ve got our union jack up there? And he said, well, because the island was discovered by Captain Cook. I’m like, okay. So I started feeling at home. Well, 43 years later I’m still there. I never went back. I came back basically to Las Vegas to pack my stuff up and go back.

Dave Kenney [00:05:20]:
I stayed in Honolulu. I’m still based in Honolulu. I’m still based, well, in both places, but yeah, so I stayed with the hotel there. I became this, the food and beverage director there for that property, second in charge. And then they sold it to the Japanese about four or five years later. And I didn’t want to move back to the mainland because I love the islands. I mean, it was just ideal. So I left.

Dave Kenney [00:05:44]:
They gave me a good severance package and I knew a couple of chaps that had a hotel down the road that was more of a condo hotel. And they said, well, we should start a convenience store because all these people come in, they got to walk half a mile down the road to a local ABC store. I said, hey guys, I got six months off, you know, I’m getting paid, let’s just do it. So I started this convenience store. We built it up. We had to buy them out because of conflict, because they were involved in the hotel side. We had to buy them out because of conflict of interest, which we did. We gave them $10,000 on their 5000 investment within a month.

Dave Kenney [00:06:19]:
So they were happy. Wow. Yeah. I took on a partner. He was in another hotel, he was a GM, so he was a silent partner. I built that into two stores. Then I bought a convenience food concession business with it and then I sold, we sold the two convenience stores to a korean gentleman who was retiring from Korean Airlines and he wanted to buy it for his family. So I took that seed money and went into a business putting photographic images on t shirts in the international marketplace.

Dave Kenney [00:06:49]:
That’s how I got into the international. I was 25 years in the international marketplace. I sold that business at a really nice profit about a year and a half, two years later and started my first bar in 1990 called coconut woodies in the international marketplace. So I went to work for myself, my own business, just for me, just me. But we kept the food concession business and I kept my partner with the concession and he was. That was just like a once or twice a month kind of gig, you know, doing craft fairs and hot dogs and corn dogs and that kind of stuff. Then I opened this bar was going quite well, and I. Over the years, I’ve probably had about nine or ten bars and restaurants and nightclubs in Waikiki.

Dave Kenney [00:07:30]:
Yeah, yeah.

Ryan Doolittle [00:07:30]:
That you own?

Dave Kenney [00:07:32]:
Yeah, I owned and operated. Wow. Now where the beginning, when I had my first bar, I took a trip to Kona and charted a fishing boat because I used to fish as a kid in bath in my hometown off the river, you know, and I got. I got bit by the. I got the hook, man. So I came back and bought a 47 for a 30 foot Penyan sport fishing boat in Honolulu. And I’m thinking to myself, now, how am I going to make money at this? Because every time I take it out, it’s costing me a couple hundred bucks in gas. So I said, okay, what I’m going to do is I’m going to create another corporation called Blue Lagoon fishing.

Dave Kenney [00:08:09]:
Blue lagoon fishing Corporation. And I turned into a business. So, I mean, I guess I really haven’t worked a day. Everything I do, I’ve enjoyed. I’d never had to go to work. So I started it as a business. I formed a corporation, turned into a business, and people are paying me to take that fish into something I want to do anyway. Plus, I get to keep the.

Dave Kenney [00:08:30]:
I get to keep the fish and I could sell them in my restaurant, fresh fish.

Ryan Doolittle [00:08:34]:
Really?

Dave Kenney [00:08:34]:
Yeah.

Ryan Doolittle [00:08:34]:
I didn’t know I would go that far. You could keep the fish and the. Okay.

Dave Kenney [00:08:37]:
Oh, yeah, we. So, well, I mean, if I take somebody fish and they catch a 600 pound marlin, what are they going to do with it? They can’t put in a suitcase and take it home with them. Yeah. So I would. So. Well, part of my deal, what I did with my charters was I would, because I had the bar, I’d pick them up in the morning, give them breakfast on the boat, lunch on the boat, open bar all day on the boat. And I give them a free dinner at night without the booze at night.

Ryan Doolittle [00:09:01]:
Yeah.

Dave Kenney [00:09:02]:
Back at the fish they caught, they’d have a free dinner. They can cook it. Yeah, we’ll cook it for them. And it was. I was charging like $150 a pot back in those days, so I was. I was doing okay. I was making bank. I at least covering my expenses for the fish and I get to go fishing for free.

Dave Kenney [00:09:16]:
Yeah, it made sense to me. Yeah. And then we had our food concession business on the side. So we would do, I would do things like, for 15 years, I did the 4 July celebration at Pasco Phil barracks, which is about 80,000 people. I’d bring in subcontractors under me. I’d bring in a thai person. I’d bring in a hawaiian food person. I’d bring in a shave ice person, and I would run the hamburgers and the hot dogs and the bars, my partner and I.

Dave Kenney [00:09:44]:
And then we’d take a percentage off all the other people and pay the army, and then we’re done. Know, it was a one day gig kind of thing.

Ryan Doolittle [00:09:51]:
Was this near Pearl harbor or the.

Dave Kenney [00:09:54]:
Yes, north of. North of Pearl harbor. Towards the north side of the north side of the island. But I also did, I think I started a thing called Taste of Honolulu, which is based on taste of Chicago.

Ryan Doolittle [00:10:02]:
Okay.

Dave Kenney [00:10:03]:
They hired me to do that as the food coordinator, and I did that for a couple of years. And then I would do street parties, you know, spam jam, for example. Spam jam. Yeah. That’s a big thing. Spam is. Let me tell you something. Every time the, every time the navy went somewhere in the Pacific, they took spam with them.

Dave Kenney [00:10:21]:
So spam is very popular in Guam. It’s very popular in Hawaii. I mean, all through the Pacific islands. Yeah, it’s spam, man. Everybody has spam for breakfast and spam and eggs and. Don’t they spam musubi?

Ryan Doolittle [00:10:31]:
Like, they put spam in a sushi type of dish.

Dave Kenney [00:10:34]:
Is that poke, yes or well, no, that’s musubi. So it’s a better rice with spam on the top that’s usually cooked in shoyu and fried. And then you wrap it in Nori, which is a seaweed, and you eat. That’s like a, you know, we go golfing. We buy a couple of those to take golfing with us for breakfast, you know, so.

Ryan Doolittle [00:10:52]:
Okay.

Dave Kenney [00:10:53]:
Yeah. Spam. Musubi is very popular in Hawaii.

Ryan Doolittle [00:10:56]:
Yeah. And it makes such spam jam such a great name.

Dave Kenney [00:11:01]:
Oh, it’s, it’s, it’s amazing. And, you know, I’ll have, I would have had, like, 15 food booths out there, and they’ve each got to do one spam item.

Ryan Doolittle [00:11:08]:
Oh, okay.

Dave Kenney [00:11:09]:
So you’d have, you’d have a spam burger in one booth. Another booth would be doing spam fried spam vegetables with spamming every. I had to have a spam item, not solely spam, but a spam item. It was fun. I mean, when I did craft fairs, for the blind association, the deaf association. I’d set all the food up and work it for them. And of course, it was a business. I give them a percentage of my sales to help offset their costs.

Dave Kenney [00:11:33]:
We did that for years and years and years and years. And then about 2012, I decided to get out of the business. The rents in Hawaii were getting astronomical. I mean, I had a 3500 square foot nightclub and I was paying 20 odd thousand dollars a month rent. That’s a lot of money. You got to sell a lot of $5 beers to cover that kind of cost.

Ryan Doolittle [00:11:54]:
And there was no rent control. It would just keep going up and up and up.

Dave Kenney [00:11:57]:
Just keep going up and up and up and up. Yeah. And the landlords would charge whatever the tenants prepared to pay. And as a single operator, I’m up against people like the yard house that have got multi outlets up against McDonald’s. I mean, you just can’t compete as a mom and pop. I couldn’t compete. So I said, you know what? Because I worked for myself, I didn’t have an, I didn’t have a 401 or anything like that, but I bought real estate. That was my saving grace.

Dave Kenney [00:12:24]:
So I had three properties. So at 55, I said, you know what? I really don’t need to work. You know, I’ve got some cash reserves at 62. I can take my pension anyway.

Ryan Doolittle [00:12:35]:
Oh, you had a pension?

Dave Kenney [00:12:35]:
So I had a pension. Yeah, I took a pension. I took my pension to 62.

Ryan Doolittle [00:12:39]:
Which, which.

Dave Kenney [00:12:40]:
Social Security.

Ryan Doolittle [00:12:41]:
Oh, Social Security. Okay, Social Security.

Dave Kenney [00:12:42]:
Yeah, yeah. And then my dear wife, she still works off and on. Margie and I help her with that side of the business. So she does, she does real estate? Yeah, she’s licensed in Hawaii and, and Vegas. Yeah. So Margie still works. She’s actually in Honolulu right now. I just got back seven days ago and she’s coming back Sunday.

Dave Kenney [00:13:02]:
She’s meeting with a client over there who wants to move to Hawaii. Move from Hawaii to here?

Ryan Doolittle [00:13:06]:
Oh, the reverse. Okay.

Dave Kenney [00:13:08]:
Yeah, yeah. Move from Hawaii to here.

Ryan Doolittle [00:13:10]:
How many months? Or how often are you in Vegas? And how often are you in Hawaii, would you say?

Dave Kenney [00:13:15]:
So this past year we’re from March to April we were basing in Manila. We were home from Hollywood. From six to the 19. May, May 25 we went to Boston till the 1. April, April, May, June, July we stayed actually in Vegas because I had my grandnephew come over from england for a month. Plus it’s summer. I don’t mind the summer here because we’ve got a lovely pool. But Margie’s still going back and forward, by the way.

Dave Kenney [00:13:41]:
I’m just talking about me right now. Then 16 August went out to Del Mar, Temecula, Torrey Pines, played golf, and we came home on the 22nd. There was the 22 August, then October 9, we left for Europe. For several weeks we flew to the UK to see my mom and my sister, then Madrid, Barcelona, Rome, back to Madrid. And we got on a three and a half week cruise from Europe back to Miami. So that was really.

Ryan Doolittle [00:14:07]:
You did a transatlantic.

Dave Kenney [00:14:09]:
I’ve done a couple, we’ve done a couple. We haven’t done another one this year. Yeah. So we went from, we went from Barcelona to Palermo to Ibiza, to Valencia, to Marseille, Tenerife in the Canary lines and Lanzarote, then down the Caribbean to St. Martin and british virgin Islands, Tortola, then to San Juan, Puerto Rico, and then back to Miami. And then we flew back here three days before Thanksgiving and we had 19 people for dinner for thanksgiving, so we had to cook for them. Wow.

Ryan Doolittle [00:14:38]:
So, yeah, you have a lot of energy.

Dave Kenney [00:14:40]:
Yeah, well, we’ve, that’s, you know, we’ve, we did a month and a half in, in the Philippines in the beginning of the year, and then we did the transatlantic. And we’re going to do another one this October coming. We’re going to do another transatlantic. Really? Yeah. Yeah.

Ryan Doolittle [00:14:52]:
And you don’t run into any u boats out there, right?

Dave Kenney [00:14:55]:
Oh, no, no. Thank God. Thank God. Okay, so we’re home now. I’m home. We’re home now for a couple of weeks and then we go to New York. Our son is graduating from Columbia and London School of Business with two mbas. So his first graduation is in February, end of February.

Dave Kenney [00:15:14]:
So we’re going to go there to London and spend a couple of days there in London. Then, then we’re taking our granddaughter up to, up to, I got an eight hour drive and it’s February. We’re going to Canada. I’m not looking, I’m not looking forward to this. It’s going to be bloody cold. Anyway, she’s graduating from school, college this year and she wants to go into medicine. And there’s some very good medical schools up in eastern Canada, apparently. So she’s looking at some on this side.

Dave Kenney [00:15:38]:
But she wants to, while we’re over there for Patrick’s graduation, we’re going to drive her up and take a look around. And then June, he’s graduating from London School of business. So we’re going to fly to London and go to that graduation. And then when they’re going to go up to Scotland. I’m going to take her up to Margie’s. Never retoured Scotland. It’s a beautiful place to see. So I’m going to take her around Scotland for two or three weeks, and we might shoot up to Portugal to see some friends up there.

Dave Kenney [00:16:04]:
And then we’ll come back, and then that’ll be July, then October, we’re going to do another transatlantic. So we’re just. And that’s, you know, we’re still doing. We’re still doing hops to Honolulu all the time. I mean, every, every, every month of five weeks, she’s off. You know, I’m off or whatever. We might go back in April for a couple of weeks. So.

Dave Kenney [00:16:22]:
Again, with clients. So, yeah, I mean, you find something? You. I mean, yeah. I saw one of your questions here about, you know, I guess my two pieces of advice I could give is, somebody once told me this a long time ago, always be underpaid in your career. That doesn’t mean to say do the job for cheap. It means do a better job than you’re expected of you, you know? Yeah.

Ryan Doolittle [00:16:45]:
Yeah.

Dave Kenney [00:16:45]:
The other one is, do something you enjoy. I mean, like I said, I haven’t worked a day in my life. I mean, I enjoyed the hotel business. I enjoyed coming to America. I was 15. I mean, I was full of spit and vinegar. You know, it’s like, oh, let’s get on with it, you know, and I did, and I had fun. And, you know, it was a land of opportunity.

Dave Kenney [00:17:04]:
Yeah. So life’s been good, you know, I have no, no complaints. And I’ve really, really enjoyed myself, and I enjoy my day to day living. Is. What’s an ideal day for you? Ideal day for me is waking up with my wife. Go when she’s here. Go to the gym. Go to the gym.

Dave Kenney [00:17:22]:
We do zumba together. So, you know.

Ryan Doolittle [00:17:24]:
Really?

Dave Kenney [00:17:25]:
Yeah. We’ve been doing before five days, four days a week, and holy cow, we’ll do that for an hour. And I’ll come home and I’ll do probably 7 miles on the wall. I tried to do 7 miles a day walking active, actively, you know, so that’s.

Ryan Doolittle [00:17:39]:
How many steps is that? I.

Dave Kenney [00:17:41]:
About twelve to 15,000 steps.

Ryan Doolittle [00:17:44]:
That’s a lot.

Dave Kenney [00:17:45]:
That’s a lot. Yeah. Yeah. So that, you know, so I get up in the morning, you know, she makes the coffee. I like to read my broadsheet newspaper, you know, then I’ll go, if there’s no. If there’s no zumba, I’ll go walk for two or 2 hours, plus or 2 hours, and do my 15,000 steps. Or if there’s Zumba, I’ll do zumba. Then I’ll come home and walk for an hour sort of thing.

Dave Kenney [00:18:05]:
And then she cooks. She likes to cook. So we come back and we’ll potter around, and then she’ll go start chopping her vegetables. And then I’ll go outside at 03:00 and have my gin and tonic and my smoke. And that’s a perfect day. But we don’t do it that often. It’s not like we do it every day because we’re out of here. In another two weeks, we’re leaving again for New York.

Dave Kenney [00:18:26]:
She’ll be back, probably back to Honolulu in April. So when we’re home, it’s great to just be at home. So that’s kind of a perfect day. But another perfect day is waking up in the middle of the transatlantic on a boat. And you go to the bar and get yourself a cappuccino. Then you go to the gym for a couple of hours on the treadmill, and then you go to a spa. And by the time you get out of that, it’s 03:00 in the afternoon there, so it’s all good. That’s another perfect day.

Ryan Doolittle [00:18:54]:
You know, it seems like you find a perfect day no matter where you are.

Dave Kenney [00:18:57]:
Yeah, you got. Yeah. You know, you gotta make. You gotta make the best of everything. You know, life hands you lemons, you make lemonade. You know, it’s a typical, typical story. And I just, you know, I have a great life. I have a great wife.

Dave Kenney [00:19:09]:
We have a nice home. We’re probably gonna be here another two or three years, and we’ll move. Contemplating moving back to Honolulu full time.

Ryan Doolittle [00:19:16]:
Oh, you are? Okay.

Dave Kenney [00:19:18]:
Yeah, I think maybe. Maybe five or six or seven years. When we bought this property, we thought we’d be here three years because we were in Manila. We were in lockdown during COVID and we put an offering on a house on the west side of Oahu, and it fell through. And my sister had flew and flown over from England to Manila, and we wanted to show around the Philippines, which we did. Took us several places. And she got out just before COVID hit. COVID hit in, like, the February something.

Dave Kenney [00:19:45]:
Yeah. And we couldn’t get out. We were. There was a curfew. There was no flights out of Manila, nothing to anywhere. So we’re stuck in our condo and BGC twiddling our thumbs, watching tv and eating all day until June. We’re stuck there till June. So I said to Margie, I said, this thing fell through on the west side of Oahu.

Dave Kenney [00:20:08]:
We’ve still got a property here. Let’s think about Las Vegas. She said, vegas? I said it. Yeah, why not? Let’s give it. You know, I was there, you know, 40 odd years ago. We can get a lot bigger bang for our buck, you know, being, being. She’s right on the Internet. Right.

Dave Kenney [00:20:23]:
She’s, you know, finds a realtor here. A friend that used to work for her is working here for another company, and we put an offering on two other houses that fell through, and this one came up bank owned. I said, don’t negotiate the price because the bank just want it off their books. They’re not looking at hassle, you know. So I think we got it for four. It was. It was originally listed at 525. The bank dropped the price to 495.

Dave Kenney [00:20:49]:
We offered them their asking, and they came in, the appraisal came in at 475. So the bank had to honor that. So we got it for 475, you know, so now we’ve probably put about 180 to 200,000 into it. We could probably get eight something for it now. So we’ve done okay.

Ryan Doolittle [00:21:08]:
And it’s going up. I would imagine it’s still going to go up.

Dave Kenney [00:21:11]:
Yeah, it’s still going to go up. Probably by the time we sell, it’ll be a million. But it’s a nice property. I mean, we’ve done a lot to it. Wood floors and french doors, and we redid the pool and pumps, and we put solar in, and we’ve got, you know, we extended the living room, the bedroom upstairs. So it’s, it’s, it’ll be worth the money when we leave. And then we’ll, we’ll probably resettle back in Honolulu because we have a property there which we’ll sell. We’ll take the profit from that and the profit from this and buy it, buy a nice house.

Dave Kenney [00:21:38]:
But that’s, you know, ten, eight or so years from now, and then we’ll probably be getting too old. I’ll be 76, 70, 75 maybe. Getting too old to travel is lot a lot. Then we’ll still do a cruise because cruising is easy. Once you unpack, you’re done. You know, you’re not. That’s like you’re traveling in a car. You’re going to pack up every night, you know, so you get on the boat.

Dave Kenney [00:22:02]:
I mean, that cruise we did was $5,000 for three and a half weeks. It was 2026 days. I mean, you white tablecloth dining. You’ve got.

Ryan Doolittle [00:22:12]:
That was a, and that’s included. You’re not paying for meals.

Dave Kenney [00:22:15]:
Right. Or booze or. I, we had a boost package with it. They didn’t make any. Yeah, they did. They didn’t make any money off of me magazine. I made sure I got my, I made sure I got my money’s worth in booze. It was all good.

Dave Kenney [00:22:29]:
And. Yeah, they have shows and they got a. We’re not gamblers. So they have casinos and they have a, they have a show, a juggler or comedian or an impersonator in the theater every night. It’s just fun, you know, it’s, it’s, you get to meet some interesting people. We’ve met some people from Switzerland, actually, on one of our trips this year. We’re going to go to Switzerland and stay with them for a couple of days and. Really? Yeah.

Dave Kenney [00:22:51]:
And then they’re going to come over here with their, with their kids. So we said, come on over. We got plenty of room now. So, you know, it’s, you just meet good, interesting people, like minded people. And it’s not as, it’s not as expensive as people think it is or cruising, man. You must have a bunch of money. No, it’s not really that expensive when you think about it, but, yeah, especially if you drink.

Ryan Doolittle [00:23:09]:
If you drink a lot and gamble a little, you’re definitely.

Dave Kenney [00:23:12]:
Exactly. Exactly. I don’t gamble when I drink a lot.

Ryan Doolittle [00:23:19]:
That’s the opposite of what they’re hoping.

Dave Kenney [00:23:22]:
Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. They’re not making much money off me. But we have a, we have, we have a lot of fun. We have a lot of fun.

Dave Kenney [00:23:28]:
We got a spa. We go to the spa and spend a couple hours in the spa. Have a massage on the cruise or on the cruise? On the cruise. Yeah. Margie still goes to get her massages. See, I don’t like, I don’t like paying a $100 for a massage when I can get a massage for $10 in Manila for an hour and a girl will come up to our room and, you know, do her thing, you know, so. But she likes, it. Relaxes her.

Dave Kenney [00:23:52]:
It doesn’t really do much for me, but that’s okay. You know, when we’re in Manila, I’ll do one with her. We lie next to each other and the girls come in and they do their thing and walk on my back and all that kind of stuff.

Ryan Doolittle [00:24:00]:
And they walk on your back?

Dave Kenney [00:24:03]:
Yeah, they’ll walk on your butt. So they get on your back and do your spine. It’s fun. It’s fun. It’s fun for $10. It’s not fun for $130, right, because.

Ryan Doolittle [00:24:15]:
Then you’re just thinking about the cost.

Dave Kenney [00:24:16]:
I was thinking about the money. Yeah. I’m not. I tell my wife I’m not tight. I’m frugal, but I’m not tight.

Ryan Doolittle [00:24:23]:
Right.

Dave Kenney [00:24:24]:
And one of my, one of my favorites things. It’s not how much you earn, it’s how much you keep. Think about it.

Ryan Doolittle [00:24:29]:
That’s another good one.

Dave Kenney [00:24:30]:
Yeah.

Ryan Doolittle [00:24:30]:
Yes.

Dave Kenney [00:24:31]:
It’s not how much you earn, it’s how much you keep. I didn’t earn a lot, but I kept a lot. Yeah, but Marty likes to spend, and I like to say. So we’re a good.

Ryan Doolittle [00:24:41]:
We’re a good hair. So, like, you sure you want to.

Dave Kenney [00:24:44]:
Buy that, honey, come on now. Do we really need it? Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Right. So, I mean, like, for me, for example, I’ve never bought, I’ve only bought one new car in my life.

Ryan Doolittle [00:24:53]:
Really? Only one?

Dave Kenney [00:24:54]:
Yeah. When I first came to America, I bought a Toyota Celica fastback sedan here in Vegas and I shipped it to Hawaii. When they sent me to Hawaii three months later, and I was lucky enough to meet a buddy of mine who had a Mercedes shop. He would fix mercedes and I’ve driven, say, I’ve driven mercedes for 40 odd years now because he would always fix it for me at a reasonable rate. And we would buy. We would. We would buy and sell together. He’d say.

Dave Kenney [00:25:20]:
He’d call me up and say, hey, Dave, I got a guy bringing his car and he wants 8000 for it. We could sell it and flip it for twelve or what? I make a couple grabs. Yeah, sure. Why not? So we did that. Wow.

Ryan Doolittle [00:25:30]:
So you’d buy it and then just drive it until he sold it or something?

Dave Kenney [00:25:33]:
No, I would buy it and he would put his money into it, the parts, labor.

Ryan Doolittle [00:25:39]:
Oh, yeah.

Dave Kenney [00:25:39]:
And then we sell it and we’d split the profit kind of thing. So he’d say, all right, this year, for twelve grand, we can get this car. It’s worth about 16. And we put a couple of grand in and we can make. Make a couple grand. So that kind of stuff. We did that once in a while. No, not often, but once in a while.

Dave Kenney [00:25:53]:
But it was just a friend kind of thing. Flipping. Flipping cars.

Ryan Doolittle [00:25:56]:
You find a business out of so many ways.

Dave Kenney [00:25:59]:
Yeah. Well, yeah, you can. Yeah, I guess so. Yeah. It’s, um. It’s just fun. I mean, I. Yeah, I guess I was driven.

Dave Kenney [00:26:07]:
Coming from a. I wouldn’t say we were a poor family. We were kind of middle, lowish, middle class, you know. But my dad was. My dad was a publican, which person that runs pubs in England. And that’s how I got into the business. So, yeah, you just see something, you think, how can I make money? How can I turn this into a business? Like the fishing thing, you know, I was like, I’m going to start a boat. I sold the 30 foot one and I bought a 47 foot one.

Dave Kenney [00:26:31]:
So I got. Now I got a big boat, double. Double diesel engines in it, you know, so.

Ryan Doolittle [00:26:35]:
So then you bring more customers on, right?

Dave Kenney [00:26:38]:
Exactly. Yeah. Well, no, it was a six pack, but it’s business what they call a six pack chart. You can only take six people. But I just. I just wanted a bigger, bloody boat, more luxurious boat. I had two bathrooms instead of what I had my own private, you know, suite, you know. But it was fun.

Dave Kenney [00:26:56]:
It was fun. It was a lot of fun.

Ryan Doolittle [00:26:58]:
But, yeah, the t shirt business. So you would. Were you one of the first to print pictures on t shirts or something?

Dave Kenney [00:27:04]:
Yes. My friend and I, we started this business. We bought a canon copier, which is about the size of a. It’s about the size of an oven. It’s big, you know, and it was $50,000. You know, it’s probably five by four by four or six. You know, big copiers nowadays, you put them in your suitcase, you know. Yeah, this is $50,000.

Dave Kenney [00:27:23]:
And they had a thing called parape paper, which is. Which is. So it’s like a transfer sheet. So we take photograph. We had a stool in the front of the marketplace, and we put hawaiian headdress on you and a parrot on your shoulder or what have you, and say, you know, you know, Ryan and his girlfriend, or Ryan and Julie or Ryan whatever, and we print it, put it on the t shirt, and then heat. Press it.

Ryan Doolittle [00:27:45]:
Okay.

Dave Kenney [00:27:46]:
And you peel the paper off and you’ve got basically a photographic image on the t shirts. Yeah. And we were doing. I’m talking 19, 88, 89. We were doing three grand a day doing on that. We built it up to about three grand a day, which is bloody good money in those days, you know. And then. Then we sold it.

Ryan Doolittle [00:28:05]:
Oh, you.

Dave Kenney [00:28:06]:
Oh, really? We sold the car. Yeah. And I took that money from the car, and that was my seed money to open my first bar, coconut woolies, in 1990.

Ryan Doolittle [00:28:14]:
Okay.

Dave Kenney [00:28:15]:
That was a seed. That was the seed money. Yeah. Yeah. So that was fun. It was a lot of fun. Other people were getting into the photo business, too. By that time, other people were trying to get in on it.

Dave Kenney [00:28:25]:
They had a computer generated one, which was grainier, but it was. Just had run its course. We thought, you know, it’s time to get out. And we had a very good offer on the cart, which is a prime location in the front of the marketplace.

Ryan Doolittle [00:28:37]:
Okay.

Dave Kenney [00:28:38]:
And we sold it. We sold that. And I took. He took his money, and I took my money. We’re still friends to this day. He’s my best buddy. He lives in California. And I took my money and opened my first bar.

Dave Kenney [00:28:48]:
That was my first coconut. What? He’s in the international marketplace? Yeah.

Ryan Doolittle [00:28:51]:
And then it led to coconut Willys and then nine other bars after that.

Dave Kenney [00:28:55]:
Yeah. Yeah. Well, Don Ho and I had a place called the Panelo Cafe in the north shore.

Ryan Doolittle [00:29:00]:
Don ho.

Dave Kenney [00:29:01]:
The famous Don Ho? Tiny bubbles in the wire. Yeah. How did that happen? He came to me one day. I can’t remember how I met him, but he came in the bar. I think he said, I like the way you operate, because my modus operandi was I would go into old bars that have either closed or about to close, and I’d basically take them over, put some lipstick on the pig, and run them. I basically went to the. It was run by another company that closed down, and they took all the furniture out and put it in a warehouse. I went to the warehouse and bought the furniture from the warehouse manager and put it back in the bar and opened the bar and basically hired the same bands and changed the menu and, you know, souped it up a little bit.

Dave Kenney [00:29:46]:
And I did a million in my first year in sales, which is. Which is amazing.

Ryan Doolittle [00:29:50]:
Yeah.

Dave Kenney [00:29:51]:
Then the Gulf war. Then the gulf war hit, and I did 700,000 last year.

Ryan Doolittle [00:29:55]:
Okay.

Dave Kenney [00:29:56]:
Yeah. Because tourism went like that.

Ryan Doolittle [00:29:58]:
Yeah, yeah. Okay.

Dave Kenney [00:30:00]:
But it’s all good. I mean, it was just, you know, it’s an up and down ride. You know, when you work for yourself, you just gotta. You gotta be bloody minded enough just to keep going. Every time they knock you down, you gotta get up one more time to keep punching. That’s what I always say. And I got to keep punching. So, yeah, I had coconut Willys.

Dave Kenney [00:30:17]:
I had the down under bar. I had the blue lagoon cafe bar and the cafe. I had patiolo Cafe. I had CWS on Lower street, which is. Which is my last venture. And I had the banana patch lounge in a hotel next door. They asked me to open their bar for them. So, yeah, I just kept moving from one to another.

Dave Kenney [00:30:35]:
People come to me and say, hey, do you want to open this bar, or do you want me to open your bar and get it going kind of thing? Yeah, it worked. You know, it’s just basically light on your feet and, you know, jab and move.

Ryan Doolittle [00:30:49]:
So when you retired, I mean, do you feel less limitations or. I mean, you’re still so busy. Do you still. Do you feel different or what? How does it.

Dave Kenney [00:30:57]:
Yeah, it’s a different lifestyle. I mean, I used to. I mean, I used to go to work on a weekend at 09:00 at night on a Friday, and then I’d come home 07:00 Sunday night from the nightclub business because I was always there on weekends because that’s when the money’s in the till. Yeah, midweek, I didn’t go in much, but I enjoyed when I was there. I mean, it was a party lifestyle, and I drank, you know, drinking and, you know, having fun. But now I’m. My wife says to me, do you ever miss that side? I said, no, I don’t miss that business. I’m happy in my.

Dave Kenney [00:31:23]:
I’m happy where I’m at right now. I couldn’t wish for a better lifestyle right now.

Ryan Doolittle [00:31:28]:
So you never technically, or as you say, you never worked a day in your life, but you still love the retirement lifestyle?

Dave Kenney [00:31:35]:
Yes.

Ryan Doolittle [00:31:36]:
Okay.

Dave Kenney [00:31:36]:
Yeah, I love it. Yeah, I love it. I don’t, you know, I don’t want to go back to work. I’m not interested, other than, you know, what? I can help her with the real estate side.

Ryan Doolittle [00:31:44]:
Tell me a little bit. So there’s a huge hawaiian population in the Las Vegas Henderson area, right?

Dave Kenney [00:31:49]:
Yeah, they call it the 9th island.

Ryan Doolittle [00:31:51]:
Oh, okay.

Dave Kenney [00:31:52]:
They call Las Vegas the 9th island. There’s more Las Vegas people from Hawaii and Las Vegas, and there is everywhere else, I think.

Ryan Doolittle [00:31:58]:
Wait, there’s more Hawaiians in, in Las Vegas than anywhere in the world other.

Dave Kenney [00:32:02]:
Than Hawaii, I think so. There’s a big. There’s a big group in California somewhere, but there’s a lot of people from Hawaii here. There’s a lot of people from Hawaii here. I mean, every time I drive, I see a hawaiian flag on the back of a car or aloha or a shaka, you know, so I know there’s a lot of them. I don’t. I don’t know if it’s the most, but there’s a lot of. Lot of people from the islands here.

Ryan Doolittle [00:32:23]:
Has that helped you feel at home in Las Vegas? Because it’s got so much of that.

Dave Kenney [00:32:29]:
Well, you’ve seen my house. It’s like a hawaiian house here. We’ve had a couple of people from Hawaii over. Yeah. In fact, our granddaughter is now going to UNLV. She’s from Hilo, so we see her once in a while. So she just started school this year in UNLV. And we had a couple over when we got back from.

Dave Kenney [00:32:48]:
From our trip. She wanted to learn how to cook Filipino food. And this is the niece of the couple we bought the house for. We sold the house in the condo in Hawaiian, bought that. So their niece, which we invited, we’ve had them over dinner before. She wants to learn how to make filipino food. And my wife, being Filipino, she said, come on over. So he’s a local boy, right? So he came over and we, you know, other chat and talked about Hawaii and all that kind of stuff.

Dave Kenney [00:33:12]:
But, yeah, it’s. It’s good. It’s good. It’s a good mix. I’ve, you know, we’ve got all the Howleys here, too, which is nice. You know, the Howlies are white people.

Ryan Doolittle [00:33:20]:
Howlies are what Hawaii native Hawaiians call white people. Right?

Dave Kenney [00:33:23]:
Yeah, exactly.

Ryan Doolittle [00:33:24]:
Yeah. I’ve been to a few filipino parties and they love to cook. At least the people I know.

Dave Kenney [00:33:31]:
Yeah. Yeah. A lot of food. Yeah. Well, I’m lucky because Margie cooks. She cooks everything. I mean, our favorite food is Italian and Thai and French and German. I mean, everything.

Dave Kenney [00:33:42]:
Our favorite is italian, but she’ll cook. She’ll cook german strudels and, you know, whatever. And chicken schnitzel. She’ll do beef bourguignon, which is french. I mean, she’s a good cook. I mean, she doesn’t cook a lot of filipino food because. Yeah, it’s okay. But I’m not.

Dave Kenney [00:33:57]:
I’m not Filipino, but I don’t. I don’t mind. Her pond sits good and her beef dishes. Pork. Pork adobo is good, you know, but there’s some stuff is a bit, you know, it’s a. It’s a bit. Not my taste.

Ryan Doolittle [00:34:11]:
Not enough spam.

Dave Kenney [00:34:12]:
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. She makes. But she makes. She makes spam whisper bees, too, so.

Ryan Doolittle [00:34:16]:
Okay, there you go.

Dave Kenney [00:34:17]:
Yeah, she makes famous. And banana bread. I love the banana bread.

Ryan Doolittle [00:34:21]:
Would you say? So, a lot of the listeners are either people who are retired or they’re thinking about doing that. What advice would you have for them? I mean, do you think Henderson’s a good area to retire to? Is Hawaii a good area? You know, do you have any advice?

Dave Kenney [00:34:35]:
Well, yeah, I mean, a gallon of milk in Hawaii is $9. Gallon of milk here is 325. Or 190 if you get on special. So, I mean, we go shopping in Hawaii, and we have sticker shop. I mean, we’ll buy. We’ll buy $150 worth of groceries from Hawaii, and it will be 60, $70 here. Yeah. So one of the reasons we chose Vegas is because your butt goes a bit further.

Dave Kenney [00:34:56]:
You know, plus, the main reason is it’s more central to Manila, and it’s more central to. Well, it’s not central to Manila, but it’s more central to Europe. Okay. And. And Manila. So we can be in Manila in 12 hours. We can be in Europe in 9 hours, and we’re only 5 hours from Hawaii, so we make that journey all the time. So.

Dave Kenney [00:35:13]:
Yeah, plus, it’s cheaper. So that’s basically why we chose Vegas. But we thought three years max, but we’ve decided to give it another four or five years, which means you must.

Ryan Doolittle [00:35:24]:
Like it because you. You want to.

Dave Kenney [00:35:26]:
Yeah, I like it. I mean, it’s a bit cold right now with it being February, but I don’t mind the summer because we have a beautiful pool.

Ryan Doolittle [00:35:32]:
Yeah.

Dave Kenney [00:35:33]:
The spring and the fall are spring in the. They’re great. I mean, the weather’s 75, 80, you know, 985. It’s beautiful. You know, it’s nice. Yeah. It’s not as balmy. It’s not 80 in trade winds like Hawaii, but it’s fine.

Dave Kenney [00:35:48]:
And ideally, we would spend. We were aiming to spend the winters in Manila because that’s the summer. It’s warm there, and it’s nice. The temperature there is now about 80, 85, 90. So we would spend the winters in Manila, and the summer’s probably back in Europe. And then the spring and the fall, we’ll spend here in Vegas.

Ryan Doolittle [00:36:07]:
And when you say Europe, do you mean back in bath or just all around?

Dave Kenney [00:36:10]:
Yeah. But basically Europe. Traveling Europe or Italy? We love Italy. We were thinking of buying something in Italy.

Ryan Doolittle [00:36:16]:
Oh, okay.

Dave Kenney [00:36:17]:
The reason we went over there is because Anna has the house ine we’re going to look at. Yeah. And we decided against it. It was too remote. It’s too far from Rome. It’s too far. But we found a place in a place called Archie, which is halfway between Rhone and Flaine. Archie is a 800, 900 year old little town with cobblestone streets and thick walls.

Dave Kenney [00:36:36]:
You know? Yeah, we might. We might buy, but, you know, we’d like to go there and just do an Airbnb and use that as a central point to go to different places in Italy. The Amalfi coast, for example. We love the Amalfi coast. Pompeii. You can drive to Pompeii. You can go. Drive to Rome in a couple hours.

Dave Kenney [00:36:57]:
So, yeah, it’s kind of. We liked Archie. Fra inne was just too far, too remote, too far in there. There’s 180 people there, right.

Ryan Doolittle [00:37:10]:
So, yeah, that’s a little. Okay. I don’t know if you’ve seen the latest Denzel Washington equalizer movie.

Dave Kenney [00:37:17]:
I did. I think that’s on the Amalfi.

Ryan Doolittle [00:37:18]:
Is that the Amalfi coast?

Dave Kenney [00:37:19]:
Yeah, this film. Some of this on the Amalfi coast in the room.

Ryan Doolittle [00:37:22]:
Yeah, man, that looked.

Dave Kenney [00:37:23]:
Amalfi coast is beautiful. Oh, it’s beautiful. Amalfi coast is absolutely gorgeous. Yeah, I love it down there.

Ryan Doolittle [00:37:29]:
I love it because his character is this really hard assassin, but as soon as he sees the Malfi coast, he’s kind of like, I think I want to live here.

Dave Kenney [00:37:36]:
Yeah. Yeah. That’s what it’s like, man. I mean, we’re in love with the place as well. There’s so many places in this world that, you know, I’d move to Manila tomorrow or the Philippines tomorrow because there’s some beautiful islands and crystal clear water and beautiful sands, you know. But my wife doesn’t want to live in the Philippines, and she wants to live in bath, which is cold and wet and damp. I’m not going to do that. We have a compromise.

Ryan Doolittle [00:38:02]:
So she wants to live where you’re from and you want to live where she’s from.

Dave Kenney [00:38:06]:
Exactly.

Ryan Doolittle [00:38:06]:
Okay.

Dave Kenney [00:38:07]:
Exactly.

Ryan Doolittle [00:38:08]:
So that sounds like marriage to me.

Dave Kenney [00:38:10]:
Yeah, exactly. It’s a perfect union, as they say.

Ryan Doolittle [00:38:13]:
Yeah. Well, so we have what we call core pursuits. They’re just kind of like hobbies on steroids, you know, like things you’d love doing.

Dave Kenney [00:38:22]:
Right.

Ryan Doolittle [00:38:22]:
You kind of have mentioned some, but are there any others you want to mention? I mean, exercise seems like one for you.

Dave Kenney [00:38:29]:
Exercise is my thing right now. Yeah, I used to. I used to love fishing. I was. I mean, I had 47 foot boat. I would go fishing. Loved it. But, you know, the sun, you know, they sliced me up, slice me, and dice me every six months because I get.

Dave Kenney [00:38:43]:
I get the stuffs coming out of you, you know. Yeah. After all years and years and years, it’s the basal cells coming out, so I have to. Have to keep doing that. So. But no, I exercise and just, you know, traveling, basically. Traveling is. Yeah, yeah.

Dave Kenney [00:38:58]:
That’s basic, but basic for us.

Ryan Doolittle [00:39:00]:
We survey retirees, and travel’s always at the top of one of the ones people love. Yeah.

Dave Kenney [00:39:05]:
Yeah. Well, I didn’t do much traveling when I was in business. Cause I was, you know, at the nightclubs and I’d be there every weekend making sure that the money was in the register and I enjoyed it. And I didn’t really travel much, so I’m basically doing that now. My wife and I, we just thought, we’re off and off we go. We’re gonna go do it. So it’s all good.

Ryan Doolittle [00:39:21]:
Do you think. Have you had to recreate your identity or anything like that once you retired or.

Dave Kenney [00:39:26]:
No, no, I think I’ve been pretty much the same all the way through. You know, I really haven’t recreated anything. I’m just a regular guy and, you know, I enjoyed being the boss in that respect, and I. But I don’t. I don’t miss the lifestyle anymore. Yeah, I’m settled down with, you know, I’m settled down now and, you know, staying. Throwing kids out at 04:00 in the morning is, you know, it’s a young man’s game. Right.

Dave Kenney [00:39:50]:
It’s not my. Not my cup of tea anymore. Right.

Ryan Doolittle [00:39:52]:
They can throw you out now. You don’t.

Dave Kenney [00:39:54]:
Yeah, exactly, exactly, exactly. You.

Ryan Doolittle [00:39:56]:
You strike me as someone who is just himself. No matter what situation he’s in, you’re. You’re who you are.

Dave Kenney [00:40:01]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It doesn’t. Yeah, nothing phases me. I could talk to lords and I can talk to louts, you know, it’s. It’s. Yes, I am. I am who I am, and that’s it. You get what you see.

Ryan Doolittle [00:40:14]:
Right? Well, do you have any advice for people who want to be as happy as you are? Like, what should they do?

Dave Kenney [00:40:22]:
Yeah. Buy high and sell low.

Ryan Doolittle [00:40:24]:
Oh, great. Okay.

Dave Kenney [00:40:26]:
Buy low. That’s it. Buy low and buy low and sell high. No, just. Just follow your dream, man. I mean, if you want to do something, do it, because life is a one act show. It’s not a rehearsal. So live every day like it’s your last.

Dave Kenney [00:40:39]:
Enjoy your life. Look for the good in people and just, you know, be careful and have fun, and don’t take yourself too seriously.

Ryan Doolittle [00:40:48]:
Okay?

Dave Kenney [00:40:48]:
That’s the basic it. That’s about it for me.

Ryan Doolittle [00:40:51]:
That is great advice.

Dave Kenney [00:40:53]:
Okay.

Ryan Doolittle [00:40:54]:
Well, Dave, thank you so much for joining us on the Happiest Retirees podcast.

Dave Kenney [00:40:59]:
You’re very welcome. You’re very welcome, Ryan. So hopefully we’ll see you again back at the house here one of these days when you come back and see.

Ryan Doolittle [00:41:05]:
Anna and John, I can guarantee that as long as you’ll have us, because we’ll be wanting to come in if we’re here.

Dave Kenney [00:41:11]:
You’re welcome in, my friend.