Tiffany and Chris Best of The Rust Belt Market

**Chris Best** (0:04)
Okay, hey guys, welcome to Best Practices. This is the inaugural episode between Tiffany and I. I'm going to ask her some questions. You're going to hear me talking a lot. She's my better half. She is my business partner. And I figured if we're going to do this podcast about interviewing other businesses, about their stories, that it's only fitting that we do ours first. This was a very emotional episode. You won't hear Tiffany crying, but a few times she got close and I could kind of, I kind of steered her away from the topic at hand. Because you know, when we start to look back at what it took to get this thing off the ground, it was very emotional. There's a lot of sacrifices that were made, just like most every other business that takes a lot to get off the ground.
You know, we're talking about money. We're talking about the start up time, which was, you know, the first five years was the hardest. But yeah, it was an emotional journey, and that'll come through a little bit in our conversation. I just want to say that I am profoundly grateful to have met my wife, and because without her none of this would have been possible. But I hope you enjoy the episode and stay tuned for many more good conversations with other entrepreneurs and their emotional journeys of figuring this thing out and making it all work. And I just thank you for listening. Tiffany, we've been married for what? I have 16, 17 years.

**Tiffany** (1:48)
Sure.

**Chris Best** (1:50)
It was 2009, right?

**Tiffany** (1:52)
I think so.

**Chris Best** (1:53)
And then we started The Rust Belt in 2011 So we were only, we were married less than two years when we started this thing. Tiffany's not chronically online. She has deleted all of her social media a long time ago. So she is a bit of an enigma. Nobody knows too much about her. The lack of an online presence coupled with being a little bit more introverted has led to her being colloquially named Mr. Chris or Where's Chris is her name. Because people assume that, I guess it's because I'm a dude that I'm the guy that's like Mr. Rust Belt or something. That's not the case. So anyway, she's kind of the, we came up with this concept together. And today I wanted to have her share her perspective and in joint with my perspective. And I want to start with a story. And she's not expecting me to tell this story. So this is kind of a little bit of a sabotage to kick things off.
So Tiffany punched me in the face one time. And it has to do with the Rust Belt Market. And this is a good story.

**Tiffany** (3:17)
We were in a drive-through at Tim Hortons. It was the trashiest moment of my life.

**Chris Best** (3:21)
Yes, yes, we said that was, it was so good. And we've been married. We had, I think we'd been started, we'd been in business at the Rust Belt for maybe like three months tops. And we were driving every day from Oxford, Michigan to Ferndale. We live there.
And so we were starting this crazy concept business that not a lot of people had started before. We'll get to, we'll get to the other concepts that inspired us that we sort of emulated in a minute. But first, the story really kind of illustrates the amount of passion and just we had no fucking clue of what we were doing. We were so out of our depth. Like I said, married less than three years. So a lot of the vendors that we were trying to, we called it Hurting Cats. A lot of the vendors were, you know, Tiffany was 26 when we started this. I was 31 and neither one of us had started or owned and operated a business before. So we were faking it till you make it. And the vendors were taking full advantage of us being like a babe in the woods. And I was raised by a cop. So all I knew was like, show me your war face. And these vendors were being total jerks to Tiffany, and they were really getting to her. And it was terrible to watch her go through getting beat up mentally by these vendors. And like, they were just asking so much, and they were just kind of taking advantage of her kindness, which she has in spades. And she was bitching about it, and I was listening, and my response was basically like, you need to tell her, you know, whatever I was saying. Do you remember what I was saying to you about this?