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When the spring weather warms in 2024, a new and unique structure will open to the public: The Rock Island Bridge. EAG is thrilled to be the marketing partner of Flying Truss, the firm that has made a miraculous metamorphosis of this 118-year-old railroad bridge that spans the Kansas River near Hy-Vee Arena. The transition of the Rock Island Bridge from an abandoned railroad conduit to a multi-purpose recreation and entertainment venue is a massive “4P” endeavor of public, private and philanthropic partnership.
In this episode, EAG chief marketing officer Jeff Randolph brings us Mike Zeller, CEO of Flying Truss, to share his inspired vision of transforming an old, unused bridge into a useful place where energy, attention and half a million people will gather every year.
Transcript:
Jeff Randolph:
Welcome to the Small Business Miracles podcast. I’m Jeff Randolph. This small business podcast is brought to you by EAG advertising and marketing. We’re going to talk about marketing and we’re also here to celebrate entrepreneurs. We have marketing news and advice that business owners can use to keep moving forward. Plus a featured interview you are not going to want to miss. Today, we are talking with Mike Zeller with the Rock Island Bridge. We’re not broadcasting for 40 feet over the Kansas River right now, it’s chilly. But the bridge is coming right along and you will soon have music and dining and coffee shops and bars and trail head services and we are all here for it.
Let’s get right to it. A marketing tip for your content today, whether it’s an ad that you’re building or a fundraising appeal letter, the tip is to be clean, uncluttered, and easy to read. It’s that simple. Avoid the temptation to fill every square inch of space with text and images. Blank space is necessary. It’s necessary for the viewer to focus on the essentials. It draws the eye to where you want the eye to be and be careful choosing fonts. Your design software will allow you to pick the most ridiculous frilly cursive type faces. There’s a glorious example of that called Herr Von Mueller Hoffstein that really fits the bill, but a simpler font will be much easier to read. Make your type large enough for eyes of all ages and abilities and remember your message is going to be seen on mobile phone screens as often as laptops and bigger monitors.
Test your designs by viewing them on a phone before you publish. Your audience may almost exclusively look at what you’re sending on a mobile device depending on the kind of industry you’re in. Pay attention to that first. Finally, avoid all the text and background combinations that have low contrast like a white type over a bright photo or light blue text on a medium blue background. It can be gorgeous but it can really distract and keep everyone from being able to read your message effectively and efficiently and it makes just people will leave and go away. We don’t want that. Those are just some of the tips and the importance of being clean, uncluttered, and easy to read.
All right, welcome back to the podcast. I am here with Mike Zeller. He is CEO of Flying Truss. You are the … First, let me say welcome to the podcast. Welcome.
Mike Zeller:
Thanks Jeff. Great to be here.
Jeff Randolph:
You’re the CEO of Flying Truss, which makes you officially the bridge guy. You’re one of the Rock Island Bridge founders. You’re creating America’s first trail head and entertainment district over a river. Could you give us the origin story of the Rock Island Bridge and I’ll tee this up by saying we may hear great phrases that we didn’t expect in here, like chicken on a bridge or potato gun. What’s the origin story?
Mike Zeller:
Well, it goes a long way back to 2007 or 2008 and my oldest son and I had built a potato gun. It’s about five foot high collection of PVC and a friend had brought a boat into town and we were with my wife and his wife and a couple of other friends and my boys and we were going up and down the Missouri River looking at the city from the river, which is really cool. We’re this river city and we rarely get to experience the water and the bridges are enormous when you’re down there and it was a pretty day and I was familiar with it because I went to high school nearby over in North Kansas City there and it spent a lot of time on that a SB bridge as a younger man.
I said, “Let’s go up to the Kansas River.” Because I was really unfamiliar with it and what I recall is there were a lot of bridges and we were blasting spud on the bottom of the bridges.
Jeff Randolph:
As you do. As you do.
Mike Zeller:
Yeah, having a grand old time with the boys out on a day, I don’t want my sons to miss the finer things. As we came south going upstream there, we came out into the open and there was this bridge looming in the distance and as I remember, it’s been quite a while, but we got kind of quiet looking at that thing and I think the other folks were doing the same thing. I was puzzling at it like, “What the heck is that? Is that a car bridge?” As we got closer, realized it was a railroad bridge and got closer still. I could see that it was an unused railroad bridge and I just quipped. I said, “Man, somebody ought to do something with that. Put a restaurant out there and call it Chicken On A Bridge.” It was just a joke, a throwaway line, but inside of that was this idea that you could think of and treat a bridge like it’s land, especially a really robust bridge, like a former railroad bridge and you never salt railroad bridges, so they tend to continue to be robust.
Jeff Randolph:
Chicken On A Bridge, what was that phrase? How did that come along?
Mike Zeller:
I don’t know where that came from. I eat chicken, but I’m not a big chicken fan. It was just a joke. Chicken On A Bridge.
Jeff Randolph:
That was a joke.
Mike Zeller:
I named the restaurant Chicken On A Bridge.
Jeff Randolph:
Got it. Okay.
Mike Zeller:
Someday we need to have a little shack out there called Chicken On A Bridge. In fact, a friend of mine is a local chef Phillipe. He owns a Buffalo State. We for years we’ve talked about coming up with some fun garlic or lemony chicken recipe and putting it in a cone or something and having a little chicken shack called Chicken On A Bridge.
Jeff Randolph:
Well, let’s back up in history a little bit. Your background leading up to this point involved a totally different bridge, 90.9 The Bridge. Give us a little of your background and what prepared you to make this kind of big step.
Mike Zeller:
Well, I worked for Kansas City Public Television for 17 years and I started out in education and I was pretty good at putting projects together and over time they made me the development director or the chief engagement, I forget what it was called, but I came up with project ideas for television shows and a lot of things and managed the fundraising as well, although I’m not really a trained fundraiser, but the last thing that I did there was help the CEO Cliff Keel find the money to buy that license from Central Missouri State and bring The Bridge to Kansas City, which is really one of the great things I did.
I still listen to that station all the time. In fact, we have a kind of a handshake agreement with those guys to bring them out on the bridge here, The Bridge on the bridge. Soon after we’re open they can do tiny concerts and stuff, whatever works for them and us both. But before that, what prepared me for this, I think I traveled a lot. I lived in Taipei and Prague and Munich and I saw a lot of things in the older world that have been reinvented and I always liked reinvented spaces because you’ve got limitations and it forces creativity and you end up with these crazy funky spaces like this room that we’re in right now here in the crossroads. It’s really charming.
Jeff Randolph:
Yeah. I’ll paint us a picture for the listeners. This is our studio at EAG studios and it’s a little chilly in here. There’s no ac, there’s no heating. We just get hot in the summer and cold in the winter and we’re enjoying a quirky fun space with lots and lots of bricks, so great look. But yeah, function, not exactly what we want it to be. The Rock Island Bridges is under construction right now. Paint a picture for us of what that looks like when it’s open. What can I do? What’s it going to be like?
Mike Zeller:
First off, I’ll just put the setting down. This is a 700 foot long bridge. It’s longer than the St. Louis Arch is tall. It’s down in the West Bottoms across the street from Hy-Vee Arena, what used to be the old Kemper Arena, and it’s over the Kansas River. It’s in the middle of the Stockyards district, which was vast. It was on both sides of the river. Second biggest beef processing center in the world for almost a hundred years after Chicago. We are reinventing that bridge as three things. It’s a public crossing, people can cross and connect to these levee top trails on both sides that are coming into place in Kansas City, Kansas right on the border though, and it’s a trail head service too. We’ll have 15 public restrooms for people to use. You can come out and just sit there. We have seating for 400 or 500 people.
The third thing is it’s also an entertainment district. We’ll have a full on commercial kitchen and serving some really nice cuisine. This is going to be more than pigs in a blanket kind of thing and malts. We’ll have real high-end street food, smaller portions, things you can carry around, but more than sandwiches. It’ll be nice stuff and you can have dinner there and a couple of bars. This is double-decker. Upstairs, downstairs. There’s a full on event space up top for everything from concerts to Saturday morning lecture from, these are our strawman examples. It could be a UMKC professor given a lecture on the history of The Stockyards or The Flood of ’51 on a Saturday morning and that afternoon we’ve got a concert there that evening. Maybe there’s a wedding happening up top Saturday morning over on the Western Truss. We can have the Kansas City, Kansas Farmer’s market out. We’ve got room for 40 or 50 produce stalls out there on the bridge on a lovely July morning.
Jeff Randolph:
That’s right. I noticed that on the website it says that we’re taking some reservations for events in next year, so 2024 in summer it looks like.
Mike Zeller:
Yeah, it’s all coming together, Jeff. We started construction in March. LG Barcus, KC K, great construction company. They actually put those lift gates on after the Flood of ’51 that are out there. They showed up in April and oiled them up and applied some force and ran the bridge up another four feet. We are on schedule to finish construction late spring, April, may. You never know exactly when you’re going to end a construction project, but should be in full swing by summertime.
Jeff Randolph:
Perfect. Yeah, the phrase, “They don’t make them like that anymore.” You could say that quite a bit, but man, that bridge is a machine.
Mike Zeller:
It is. My buddy calls it a battleship and it’s just a really heavy, we got one and a half inch thick steel on this thing. It is rusted, but that’s by design. There’s a term for that. I think they call that rusting metal. Anyway, the rust on the surface creates a barrier to the oxygen in air and water and prevents further rusting inside, so it kind of encapsulates it.
Jeff Randolph:
They don’t.
Mike Zeller:
It’s weathering steel. Weathering steel. That’s what it’s called.
Jeff Randolph:
Weathering steel.
Mike Zeller:
Yeah.
Jeff Randolph:
It was no small task to get this project moving. It’s the elusive P4. It’s a public private philanthropic partnership. How did this all come together? How did you wrap your arms around this? I think I’d get tired even thinking about it.
Mike Zeller:
Yeah, it’s been an odyssey and it’s been about six years in the making and I don’t know, had I known in the beginning how hard it would be if I would’ve started, but I’m glad I did because it is all coming together now and we got the new decks on briefly. Here’s the way it worked. The bridge was actually owned by Kansas City, Missouri, even though it sat in Kansas. It was purchased by the city in about 1980 when Casey Moe was buying the land for the railroad tracks that came off that bridge that wrapped around Hy-Vee Arena. Excuse me.
I think the receivers of that bridge, which they’d received in bankruptcy by the St. Louis Railroad, even though it was built by the Rock Island Railroad in 1905, I think they kind of threw in the bridge wanting to get it off their books.
The story that we’ve heard is that Kansas City, Missouri folks thought they would build surface parking on the other side of the river there, well into Kansas City, Kansas and use the bridge as a pedestrian connector. That never happened. Instead, the city built that multi-story parking garage just to the north of Kemper Arena. The bridge just sat there for another 40 years, the very definition of benign neglect.
I originally leased that bridge from Kansas City, Missouri. Had a 50 year lease for it. They were like, “Sure, go do something with this. Make good happen out of it.” Soon after that, KC K approached us and said, “I’ve got two junior partners, John McGirk and Mike Ladin.” KC K asked us if we would enter a public private partnership with them because they needed to connect the levee trail tops on both sides of the river because Eastern Wyandotte County really lacks that public infrastructure that’s really important. Families need a place to be able to go and walk and ride their bikes and be in nature and that’s close and doesn’t cost money. Levee tops are a great place to do that because you get a view of the river.
At first we thought, “Well, how’s that going to work? If we got Chicken On A Bridge out here and we got people blasting through on their tent speeds.” They said, “Well, it can be a dismount zone.” It’s a public crossing. It’s not a trail at that point. It’s like riding your bike through an Italian city and you come upon a piazza. It’s great, it’s cool. You have people drinking coffee and there’s street performers and you get off your bike and work your way through that because there’s a lot of people there. That’s kind of like what this is. We said, “Yeah, let’s form a public private partnership.”
Their elected officials wanted to own the bridge, which was fine by us. We didn’t really want to own it. We wanted to lease access to some of it. The bridge was transferred to KC K for a dollar. KC MO was happy to give KC K that railroad bridge that was in another state. They didn’t really want to own it. Then we set about working on a public-private partnership agreement with KC K.
Essentially, we lease about 35% of the bridge and we’re responsible for taking care of all the new decks that are on there and cleaning the bathrooms and paying for the utilities and securing it. In the long run, KC K is putting in about 15% of the construction costs, and they get that back by a sur-tax on the bridge when you buy a hot dog or something on the bridge that’ll go to pay KC Kansas back.
Really, they’ll end up with a free piece of public infrastructure and we have a great platform to run some really interesting kiosks, if you will, on the bridge that are going to animate that bridge and make it a place that people want to be and that generates the revenue to take care of the bridge. We’ll also, I think importantly, it’ll put a focus on the Kansas River and that’s the big play here. The bridge is cool, and I think that on Monday night football, there’s going to be lots of images. We’re going to have boats on the water and barbecuing and dancing up top.
Jeff Randolph:
Absolutely. Red lights.
Mike Zeller:
It’ll all be lit up. Oh yeah, yeah.
Jeff Randolph:
It’s a landmark.
Mike Zeller:
And that river though, the big play is the river right now, that Kansas River, that’s the same river that flows through Lawrence and Topeka, Wamego, Manhattan, but they think of it differently up there. They think of it more as a recreational river. Well, it’s the same water that flows through. It’s muddy, but it’s not particularly polluted. It’s not a lot of industry upstream. After heavy rains, there’s some feedlot runoff, but other than that, it’s really a safe river for boating and it’s still stuck in the folder in our collective imagination as to where it was put in the 1870s when it was frankly a running sewer for the stockyard district.
Well, that’s all been gone now for half a century, yet it continues to be in that folder in our mind and one way to overcome that and to start to rebrand it as the recreational river that it is to get people to engage with it. We’re going to have, I don’t know, 500,000, 600,000, 700,000 people a year over the Kansas River having a glass of wine and enjoying a meal, listening to live music regarding the Kansas River and people down there boating on it and fishing, and we think that’s bound to … Energy follows attention.
Jeff Randolph:
True. Yeah. Now this is a heavy lift. This was a giant project and it started out paddling around on a river and today you’ve got construction we’re going to open. It’s going to be an amazing kind of thing. You don’t shy away from a challenge. If you had advice for entrepreneurs, what kind of advice would you give that entrepreneur brain that’s out there?
Mike Zeller:
Well, you got to always be asking yourself if you’re drinking your own Kool-Aid and if that thing’s really going to work and be willing to acknowledge when it won’t or when you got to adjust. I really like strawman. I like to paint a scenario that I really believe in and I share that with people and I watch them and I listen to them, and then I’ll adjust my straw. Man, that’s really my target of where I’m going, and that gives me comfort that I am willing to be open-minded about where the destination is rather than just deciding on a destination and following that blindly because that can end in real disaster.
Jeff Randolph:
Yeah, and you pitch that idea, you pitch that strawman to somebody and that person then has an opinion. Do they share that legitimate opinion or are they telling you what you want to hear? You’ve got to be able to tell the difference between those two things so that the strawman you put up is an actual workable concept and somebody is giving you honest advice on, “Yeah, I think that can work.” Or, “Here are the issues you’re going to face.” It takes some energy to be able to differentiate the two so that you’re not drinking your own.
Mike Zeller:
Yeah, yeah. And we’re Midwestern nice here.
Jeff Randolph:
Exactly.
Mike Zeller:
People are reluctant to give criticism even when it’s constructive, but I ask for it and I get it.
Jeff Randolph:
Yeah. Yeah.
Mike Zeller:
I’ve adjusted. We did not start out to build this sensational double decker piece of art that goes to the top of the bridge. Remember we started with a chicken shack and a wooden trail across this thing, and this evolved largely from input from people.
Jeff Randolph:
Man, that’s an amazing story for that progress. Let me switch us into the lightning round. Lightning round rules are, we will ask some kind of question. It’ll be a short answer more, it can be soundbite. If we need to dive in and ask some follow-ups, we can do that, but just kind of get your just immediate response for these. Are you ready to go?
Mike Zeller:
Yes.
Jeff Randolph:
All right, here we go. What’s the best advice you’ve ever gotten from someone?
Mike Zeller:
Well, I don’t know if it’s the best, but the most, the one I think about a lot that I’ve not really been able to follow that I’ve been trying to was Frank Hicks down at Knuckleheads told me to build incrementally, start small and keep adding on, which is totally what he’s done down there. It’s this crazy world. I love it, and I’ve not really been able to do that because we got one shot to build this thing. I can’t come back later and build cantilevers without tearing the whole thing up, but I try to be incremental because incrementalism is, it’s a surer path as you’re finding your way through the woods, you take it one tree at a time and you work your way around and as long as you know the corner of the woods you’re trying to get to, often it’s a better way to get there than to slavishly follow something imposed from top down.
Jeff Randolph:
Great advice, and thanks to knuckleheads for throwing that out there. You have a master’s degree in economic geography. What should everyone know about economic geography that we were never taught in school?
Mike Zeller:
That place matters. That how we organize ourself in space is just as important and hand in hand with sequence of events in time. Place matters. I look at things and I don’t go around every day thinking about my coursework in economic geography from 1992, but-
Jeff Randolph:
We need to though. It’s time for the world to hear this.
Mike Zeller:
I think as America, we’re kind of realizing that starting in the forties, we fell in love with the automobile and we thought plays didn’t matter anymore and we could put things just scatter them out across the landscape and it wouldn’t matter. Well, it turns out it does that there’s synergy when you bring things next to each other and people like environments that they can move around in under their own steam. It brings the scale down that’s at a human scale, and so I think about that with the bridge and all that’s coming into focus around it with the trails down to the waterfront that KC Kansas is building and the docks and the other stuff, the apartments and the zip lines and how this whole thing is going to come together somewhat serendipitously as a composite.
Jeff Randolph:
Next question. You’ve been described as a mad genius by some, but in a good way. I imagine that means that you have a very noisy brain. Do you stop having ideas at some point? What’s it like to live in your brain?
Mike Zeller:
Well, right now, you wouldn’t want to be in there because I got a lot of things going on in this project. We’re working with a true genius, a guy named John O’Brien that does a lot of these really cool interiors around the city and around the country too, and he said, “Mike, you’re going through the needle right now.” And it does feel like it. We got designs. We’re interviewing tenants and we’re raising a little bit more money here, which is going well, and there’s a lot going on. I feel pretty agitated right now. I get in an agitated state. I don’t mean like angry, but I just feel like there’s some stuff I got to get done. A friend of mine who’s a doctor, he’s like, “Everybody’s taking these anti-anxiety medicine. Hell, that’s what gets the farmer out of bed in the morning is you get out.” And he said, “Anxiety’s good.”
Jeff Randolph:
Embrace that a little bit.
Mike Zeller:
Yeah, yeah. It’s a motivator.
Jeff Randolph:
Interesting.
Mike Zeller:
I’ve started something here. I got to finish it.
Jeff Randolph:
Well, and once you finish that, does that start to quiet down for you or is it onto the next thing?
Mike Zeller:
I think it does. Through this whole odyssey, I’ve not always been as kind, vigilant as I feel right now. Yeah. I’m looking forward to being the old guy on the bridge that’s watching people and talking to them and realizing, oh, it’s kind of windy over here, or maybe if we could block that sun or how about we get some vines going on the bridge over here? That’s what I’m looking forward to spending my retirement doing. Oh,
Jeff Randolph:
Man. It sounds like that would be a wonderful way to go.
Mike Zeller:
It’d be fun. Yeah.
Jeff Randolph:
Let’s imagine that you could have all of the bridges in the city, every single one of them, all the bridges are now yours to control. Would you rather make more entertainment venues or just use it to keep all of the northlanders away on their side where they belong?
Mike Zeller:
Hey, I’m from the northlands, the zephyr winds blowing up there. There are a couple bridges around or that might come onto the market. Wouldn’t it be great to be the city of bridges? And they don’t all have to follow the model that we’ve found our way to on this one. Maybe one’s a children’s museum, another one’s an arboretum or a tea shop, or who knows, and they could all be public crossings at the same time. I just think that what a great brand for Kansas City as a river town.
Jeff Randolph:
That’s right. Combine the rivers with the fountains. There’s got to be a fountain outside of every bridge.
Mike Zeller:
We could have some fountains, we could pump river water and have fountains pushing out a way so you don’t get splashed.
Jeff Randolph:
Keep your eyes peeled for the next opportunity here. When this project is over and it’s time to celebrate, not to retire, but to say, okay, done. How do you celebrate a big win? What is it that you do to say, “I’ve accomplished something?”
Mike Zeller:
Well, I don’t really know. I guess we’ll have some parties on the bridge.
Jeff Randolph:
Parties are a good thing. Parties can be a delightful thing.
Mike Zeller:
This has been a barn raising is a term I came up on a while ago. It’s magic how so many friends and new acquaintances and companies have all rolled up their sleeve to help us get this thing over the finish line. Really, what I want to do is embrace all those people and bring them all out on the bridge for a big party.
Jeff Randolph:
Man, it’s a great excuse, and how much happier will they be because there isn’t only a chicken shack.
Mike Zeller:
Yeah, they’ll probably be relieved, although the chicken shack could be a lot of fun. What’s great though is everybody that’s been a part of this, whether they’re lenders or investors or idea people, I’ve got friends who would help people onto the boats. We would have these events where we had to help people see what an activated river could look like. There’s friends down in Armourdale who rebuilt my little trail when it burned down. Some guys got out there at night and burned it down. There’s companies that are reducing their prices to help us get it done. Everybody’s doing this really for some pretty fun reasons that everybody just wants to live in a city where we can go hang out over a river and listen to music and have a beer.
Jeff Randolph:
Absolutely. I look forward to it. I know that a lot of Kansas City and the rest of the world too, since this is unique for everyone, is looking forward to it as well. Tell us where people can find more information about you. Where can they get more info on the bridge?
Mike Zeller:
Well, we got a website that EAG has done a fabulous job creating.
Jeff Randolph:
Very, very kind.
Mike Zeller:
At rockislandkc.com. There you can also sign up for a monthly newsletter that we send out with a lot of photographs and information on tours, and soon we’ll be shifting into information about what’s happening on the bridge. We promise not to abuse that. It’s about once a month and we’re also on social media, Facebook and Instagram at Rock Island Bridge.
Jeff Randolph:
Perfect. All right. Mike Zeller, CEO of Flying Truss. Thanks for being with us today.
Mike Zeller:
Yeah, thanks Jeff. See you over the river.
Jeff Randolph:
That is our show. Thanks for listening to the Small Business Miracles podcast. Remember to subscribe. Leave us a five star rating and review. Drop us a line on the website at eagadv.com if you have any thoughts. Until then, we’ll be out here helping entrepreneurs with another small business miracle.