2019 PCA Magazine

44 PCA The Magazine | JULY-AUGUST 2019 PREMIUMCIGARS.ORG “So after graduation, I moved to Charlotte and thought, you know, I’ll do this for two or three years. I’ll have some fun and figure out who I want to be when I grow up,” he says. “But when I moved down here, I fell in love with it and fell in love with retail. That was 30 years ago now. For 10 years I was the young guy in the industry. Everywhere I went, I was the kid, and so I really grew up through it and then one day I blinked, looked around, and thought, damn, I’m the old guy in the roomnow.” Soon after Cass came into the family-business fold, they started expanding throughout the area, opening Tinder Box locations in Roanoke, Virginia; Wilmington, North Carolina; andMyrtle Beach, to name a few. The timing couldn’t have been better, as the cigar boomdays were starting to pick up steam. But they soon realized the geographical challenges to expansion and started reevaluating their long-term goals for the business. “Retail absentee management is very difficult,” Cass says. “And we could see that growth in the Carolinas, particularly Charlotte, as it started to emerge as a banking center, was really the place our business needed to be. At the time, I was living inMyrtle Beach working to get that store up and running. We decided I wouldmove back to Charlotte and start adding stores within the city while selling off some of our peripheral locations.” Location, of course, is an essential component of success, but it’s only part of the picture. As Cass would prove, recognizing opportunity is just as important. Opportunity, however, doesn’t often drop into the humidor as a gift from the cigar gods. Rather, youmust be aware of it and then capitalize on it—something Cass discovered early in his career. “It was the early ’90s and I read an article about Davidoff moving their production fromCuba to the Dominican Republic and they were going to have a kickoff party in New York with the goal of having 40 appointedmerchants,” he says. “And, you know, they’re identifying the best operators in Chicago, New York, LA, Dallas, Atlanta, and I’m thinking, wouldn’t it be awesome to be a part of that.” Call it the brashness of youth or more accurately an innate business acumen, Cass decided to fly up to New York and get himself invited to the party. “I said to them, ‘Look, I’m a young guy, the Carolinas are really exploding. We need to be one of those 40merchants.’ All I did was make the ask and they gave it to us.” Through that Davidoff appointment, Cass was able to connect withmost of the retail titans in the industry and forged friendships that still thrive 30 years later. “Looking back now, it was like anMBA for me. I learned somuch from those successful people who understood the industry and were so gracious with their time to talk tome about their businesses. I didn’t know it at the time, but that was a game changer for me.”