[00:00:02] Speaker A: Ramping up your business. The time is near. You've given it heart, now get it in gear. It's Passage to Profit with Richard and Elizabeth Gearhart. I'm Richard Gearhart, founder of Gearhart Law, a full service intellectual property law firm specializing in patents, trademarks and copyrights.
[00:00:20] Speaker B: And I'm Elizabeth Gearhart, not an attorney, but I do marketing for Gearhart Law and I have my own startups and podcasts.
[00:00:26] Speaker A: Welcome to Passage to Profit, the road to Entrepreneurship, where we talk with entrepreneurs and celebrities who tell their stories about their business journey and also share helpful insights about the successes that they've had.
[00:00:39] Speaker B: Did you know that 2 in 5Americans want to start a new business or are business owners? Well, we have lots of information to help them too.
[00:00:46] Speaker A: And we also talk a little about the intellectual property that helps them flourish.
[00:00:50] Speaker B: Now we are on to Yana Ostiech. Full disclosure, she is a Gearhart Law client. She has a very cool modular system for events. It's called Podular P O D U L A R and the website is Podular Us. So Yasnep, please tell us all about it.
[00:01:07] Speaker C: My Podular system is a modular sectional 12 foot around bar. So it's like a little kitchen. It's a whole system that can serve as a food service counter, but it can be a cooking demonstration system. It's made for urban spaces. So people have asked me, why not a food truck? Well, food trucks, you can't pull up to the 57th floor. And so this thing you can put in your elevator in sections, in quarter sections and take it up to wherever, even a rooftop and set it up and then you can start your business. Like if you're selling beer, you can do under counter beer dispensers. If you're selling juice or smoothie bowls, we have systems that we put together with refrigeration stovetop for cooking surface. You can set up a system within hours rather than months, which typically would take six months to build out a restaurant. And it would take you possibly a lot of money, quarter million to half a million to set up a restaurant. So that eliminates that startup cost to a small entrepreneur. Now if you want to set up two or three stands, this is also possible. Like a small food hall. You can put it all together and maybe you want to serve different items, sandwiches or juices or whatever, coffee. You can set it all up into a food hall system in a building lobby or a shopping center or a kiosk. Currently I'm working with the city of Chicago. One person wants to put it in the park. Like a concession stand.
[00:02:44] Speaker B: Yeah, they do that in Bryant Park. Here in New York, you're selling to somebody that's in the food industry who wants to have a little pop up restaurant somewhere, or even a restaurant that stays somewhere, right?
[00:02:54] Speaker C: Yeah. It could be permanent. It doesn't have to be a pop up. It's perfect for popups. But you could have it as a permanent fixture. That's your food service counter. Instead of having to order a build out by a carpenter or a whole team, we have UD walls, which is patented by Gearhart Law.
[00:03:15] Speaker A: I'm smiling. I can't help myself.
[00:03:18] Speaker C: All our systems are patented by Gearhard Law. A wonderful attorney, David Fustolsky, who guided me through this step by step system because I didn't know how to go through that process. But we have a utility distribution wall that's hidden under this beautiful surface. And you don't actually see, but there's like wiring, there's plumbing, cold and hot water supply, gray water disposal. All these things are set up so you can have a little kitchen and go and sell your product.
[00:03:50] Speaker A: That sounds great. So where did you come up with the idea for this?
[00:03:53] Speaker C: Well, I was working in the real estate industry as a commercial industrial broker and I was representing clients in a small restaurant space. And I realized everybody was limited to like these huge leases, long term leases. You had to do 10 years, five year lease. And I thought, couldn't it be a little more flexible? Like if I'm starting up a small business, I don't want to be burdened with this huge lease and this huge build out and I may not have the funds. So I want to start up small. Maybe I want to sell my homemade smoothie bowls or juice packs or whatever it is that I want to sell. How would I sign a 5,000amonth lease? How would I get the money to build these systems? So I thought maybe I could put it into one system that you can buy and set it up anywhere. And if your business is slow, let's say in New York, you may want to move down to Florida and then sell your products in another location. And you're not obligated to your build out. You may have to renegotiate that lease with your landlord, but at least your build out is ready to go. Put it in a truck and move, right?
[00:05:00] Speaker B: Yes. Now, your brain never quits working because you have developed other products since.
[00:05:05] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:05:06] Speaker B: And I want to hear about the robots in the food.
[00:05:10] Speaker C: So we developed technology that goes as an IoT, Internet of Things where we have the tech is actually regulating your temperatures in your food service equipment. It's reading the temperatures currently. Each individual owner has to go in or the manager with a thermometer. So our technology has built in systems that can read your temperatures, that warn you of failure, tell you when things are dropping, and it can intervene and fix your systems immediately. And you can do this remotely. You can do it on site. We also have order and pay systems. If you're, let's say in a building, your tenants can use this app to order food delivered or drinks or coffee delivered up to their unit. And they don't have to go to the local big chain to buy their coffee, but they can order from you and you can offer it as an amenity. I'm thinking about adding robots to my coffee stands and that is because there's these cool robots just came out and they match my stands perfectly.
They look beautiful. They're like white and with blue lights.
[00:06:17] Speaker A: I think I've seen videos of them where they're like serving beer and they're talking with the patrons. Right? Like just like in a normal type of voice, right?
[00:06:25] Speaker C: Yes, yes. That's what I wanted to incorporate. So I'm working with a company that builds the robots and they're going to put them in to our stands. So it took me a while to get this off the ground, but we're ready to sell. Anybody wants to order it, go to Podular Us and we can talk about how to order this. Send me a message and we can take it from there. Do you think schools could do it? Yes, I had a program for like school lunches and that would be amazing. Especially the robots that make vegetables and bowls and things like that. You could put that into a school and use our technology apps to order the food, pre order it so it would cut down your student wait lines. Because I don't know, I've been in high school and there's like hundreds of kids waiting to pick up their lunch.
[00:07:12] Speaker A: These things can be taken apart and put back together again pretty easily. Right.
[00:07:16] Speaker C: That's the big, big advantage of having something that you can take apart comes together in 12ft. So you can fit like four or five shafts inside the unit, but you can take it apart. I've tried to fit one into an elevator here in New York on fifth Avenue and it fits one quarter section.
[00:07:34] Speaker D: Fits seems amazing. Yeah, like talking to brands. Like I could imagine them wanting to get into those spaces like offices and events.
[00:07:41] Speaker B: So Yaz, are you using a marketing agency to get the word out on these?
[00:07:44] Speaker C: Not yet. I just started with. I'm a low budget, self funded bootstrap. So everything, you know, I just started working with a company that outsources marketing to underrepresented countries to help women. So these college graduate women sign up and they do your marketing. It's called iWorker and they'll match you with a person that can help you. And I started doing that recently. So we started doing a little more social media, a little more presence, because.
[00:08:13] Speaker B: I feel like if you could put the pictures of these everywhere, everybody would want them. I just feel like it could be the next biggest thing. You just got to find the right marketing.
[00:08:22] Speaker C: I think so too. I have not found the right marketing agency. I'm working on it. Maybe we can put one in Times Square.
[00:08:29] Speaker D: There's also these massive ghost kitchens in New York. If you're ordering food on like Uber Eats and like, oh, very beautiful pictures, like food comes, you know, that was not done in a small like, you know, mom PA restaurant. It's like done at scale. I feel like they'd want more distribution.
[00:08:44] Speaker C: It's a really cool idea though, I would imagine. I saw they're doing a lot of things with Walmart. I'd love to get into Walmart and have one of my beautiful pods in there serving coffee or whatever. I'm working on all channels. If anybody knows anyone and wants to help, we're open.
[00:09:02] Speaker B: Right. So if somebody was going to use it for a corporate event though, they would probably not buy it direct from you. They would have somebody that bought one from you come and set it up and do their corporate event with this kitchen. Right.
[00:09:14] Speaker C: Right now I am the only one selling it. So my manufacturing is in California. That took me a long time to get to. We try to get estimates from different countries and California came in as our best manufacturing company. So we're just starting to build them, we're just starting to sell them. So we're in the beginning of this whole process.
[00:09:37] Speaker B: So really, like an event planning company would buy one?
[00:09:41] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:09:42] Speaker A: Are you open to investors?
[00:09:45] Speaker C: We're open to investors. If somebody's interested in investing again, we can go to our website and send a note and then we can have a conversation.
[00:09:55] Speaker B: I would encourage everybody to go to the website and take a look at these things. They're amazing. It's P O D U L A R Us. I see these popping up everywhere in 2025 and people are going to be like, wow, she was on that radio show Passage to Prophet.
[00:10:10] Speaker C: That would be amazing.
[00:10:12] Speaker A: Passage to Profit is a nationally syndicated radio show appearing in 38 markets across the United States. In addition, passage to profit has also been recently selected by Feedspot Podcasters Database as a top 10 entrepreneur interview podcast. Thank you to the P2P team, our producer, Noah Fleischman, and our program coordinator, Alicia Morrissey, and our studio assistant, Rishiket Busari. Look for our podcast tomorrow anywhere you get your podcasts. Our podcast is ranked in the top 3% globally. You can also find us on Facebook, Instagram X, and on our YouTube channel. And remember, while the information on this program is believed to be correct, never take a legal step without checking with your legal professional first. Gearhart Law is here for your patent, trademark, and copyright needs. You can find
[email protected] and contact us for a free consultation. Take care everybody. Thanks for listening and we'll be back next week.
