Part 1 with Bryan Allen of PopFizz

**Bryan Allen** (0:01)
It's just this notion of hard work. He just worked, he was a worker, and he just hustled out in, he worked all day, he'd go to night school at night, he planted a huge family garden. All this stuff, I just saw him work. I know that had a huge impact.
And then I think I also attached, maybe this is starting to see this as a negative, like, I don't really value things that don't take hard work.

**SPEAKER_2** (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, welcome, Paul Sponsia. On today's episode, we've got my chat with Bryan Allen of PopFizz. And, man, what a fun chat. Bryan's my friend.
And you're just going to hear, really, like, one of the key threads, really, two things. Like, the influence of sports in our lives, both positively and negatively, as you listen a little bit of Bryan's story, and the influence of a dad. And I think we've heard that on other episodes, thinking about several ones that we've had. But Bryan's is just really pertinent, as he really kind of zeroes in on the influence that a father has on a son. So excited for you to hear this episode and hear a little bit of really part one of Bryan's story.

**Bryan Allen** (1:45)
I grew up in Lynchburg, Virginia, not too far from here. Very family kind of town. You're near the Blue Ridge Mountains, Blue Ridge Parkway. Sports, high school sports, youth sports is a big part of our life. So yeah, I grew up there, lived, born and raised in Lynchburg, lived there my whole life until I went off to college. And I had an interesting childhood.
My parents did divorce when I was five. Both of my parents remarried and both had a daughter. And I have a sister from my original parents. We have my family. They always, my mother and father lived in the same hometown. I mean, if you want to get into all the details, initially, I went with my mother for a while. The story I was told is no one would babysit me because I was a crazy kid. I think I was a bit of a delinquent kid. I was super hyper and just going, I guess, athletic at some level. Until that energy got channeled into sports, I think I was probably sort of a handful to deal with.
So my dad, he kind of put me into every sport. I played five sports, I played something year round.
I'll tell you, the other thing that's coming to mind as we think about it is they did sort of end up in like different socioeconomic strata. My father owned a company.
Initially, he kind of worked his way up through the company, ended up owning the company of Land Survey and Civil Engineering Company.
And had some financial success in that regard. And so our lifestyle sort of changed over those years as we kind of moved through the middle class ranks. We're never super wealthy or anything, but maybe middle class to upper middle class. And then my mother, her lifestyle sort of stayed the same. And over the years, there was like a disparity there. I think that had some subtle, maybe not even so, impact. I think I developed a lot of drive to succeed and be successful. And my father also is an extremely hardworking man, who grew up kind of in a farming community, farm settings.
And he went off. The day he graduated high school, he left the farm and went to the big city of Lynchburg, and set about kind of charting his own course. I spent most of my time with my dad where I live, but my mother and father always got along. We came and went freely. There was never any tension or animosity or anything hard in that way. So I kind of felt like, even though I went through this divorce setting, I don't feel like that had a huge impact until later in life kind of not wanting to have a divorce of my own. I think living with my father and seeing how he handled that situation, how he always treated my mother, just never having anything bad to say, and having all that grace, I guess, in that situation has probably affected me. I mean, he's definitely my hero. I just remember he coached all my youth teams and all that kind of stuff. But even all the way through high school and into college, he was just there. He never missed a practice, never missed a game. That's all definitely played a role in my life, too. My kids are super important to me. They're also very, very athletic and play all kinds of sports. I think between them, we've been in like seven sports. But I definitely have this sense of wanting to pay that back to my kids and just knowing how positive that was in my life. And sports, both team and individual sports, I think both had real big impacts on how I am and the person I am. So I want them to have those experiences.