Part 1 with Adam Slack of Two Roads

Adam Slack (0:00)

You know, people will ask me, like, are you glad you're out of it?

But yeah, it was great. I mean, at 24 years old, I was given, I was named the general manager of the bookstore business, so, you know, this is now at probably six locations, and charged with expanding, and I went up to the location in Bristol with basically a blank check.

Paul Sponsia (0:32)

From the IT Company, it's Made Right Here, the stories of East Tennessee founders, creators, and builders. From the idea behind it, to the impact it had on the community, their employees, and their personal lives, we're taking you behind the scenes of the movements they built.

Hey, it's Paul Sponsia. So how many of you started looking at financial statements when you were 14?

And how many of you were looking at them with your dad? That's a little bit of the story of Adam Slack, coming from a family of entrepreneurs and risk takers, a dad who wanted to expose him to the financial side of a business early, to parents who worried less about the specifics of the grades, but gave him kind of the broad range of, here's what we expect, and we're going to let you kind of manage that, as long as you don't get too far off the rails. This is Adam's story. It's a cool story. He's helped a lot of people in our community. His company, Two Roads, is making a big impact on businesses in the Knoxville community. And his story is just a cool story.

Adam Slack (1:40)

This is part one.

Paul Sponsia (1:41)

We get to hear a little bit about his background, his life, his family of entrepreneurs, how he kind of got to the point of starting to take these kind of risks, so listen in.

Adam Slack (1:52)

Born and raised in Knoxville, East Knoxville, actually. In about 87, 88, we moved west and went from East Knoxville to Sequoia Hills. It was a little bit of a transition.

Yeah, so lived out there as a very idyllic life. I mean, it was, you know, didn't really want for much.

Paul Sponsia (2:14)

What were your parents doing at the time?

Adam Slack (2:16)

So my dad, at the time, had just started Late Flight Sea Ray, which was a boat dealership here in town.

A lawyer was a partner of his, and they did that from about 87 to 92 And I think that's what really pulled us west was, my dad also had been in television advertising. He sold TV ads. Once Late Flight really started getting going, it was west, we moved west.

And that was very interesting business. I mean, selling boats, not for the faint of heart. I mean, it's Easter famine.

Paul Sponsia (2:47)

Was he always an entrepreneur? Like, did he have like a traditional career that he left?

Adam Slack (2:53)

Yeah, I mean, doing advertising was definitely one of the traditional career. I mean, first he sold Peterbilt trucks, and then after Peterbilt trucks went into advertising, sold advertising, but people ask me that, you know, and this is probably the fitting time as ever to tell this part of the story, but the Slacks came over around the turn of the last century.

And since then, every Slack has started a business. So it's, you know, people say, like, what, your dad was an entrepreneur? I'd say, yeah, just because of that nature. My grandfather was an entrepreneur, my great-grandfather was an entrepreneur, my great-grandfather was an entrepreneur.

Paul Sponsia (3:26)

I'd love to take it back a little bit. Came up from where?

Adam Slack (3:29)

England.

And this story is fuzzy, depending on which family member you talk to, so you can get like different examples of it, but apparently there was some pretty serious famine going on over there, and so they put a 14-year-old on the boat by himself and said, go to America, there's opportunity. He came to America. He ended up making it to Denver, Joseph Slack, and then he came back to Knoxville after getting married at like 17, and by like 20 had started a plating business for the railroads. Here. In Knoxville, yeah.

Paul Sponsia (4:00)

Is this like great-grandfather, great-great?

Adam Slack (4:02)

Great-grandfather, okay.

And then, you know, I also tell the story that none of those Slack businesses have transferred to the next generation. So we're really good at lifestyle businesses, not so much legacy businesses.

Paul Sponsia (4:15)

Yeah, you're the Vanderbilt's, not the Rockefeller's.

Adam Slack (4:17)

That's right, yeah, exactly.

Not even close to either one of those, for sure, yeah. But yeah, so that, and then my grandfather had, equivalent to the IT business of the 60s, he fixed TVs. So he had a TV repair business.