On Air: The Art of Industrial Real Estate — Episode 25 (Holiday Special)
Host: All right, welcome, listeners — we have a couple guests here for the holiday special, episode 25 of On Air: The Art of Industrial Real Estate with Team Jensen, and we actually have a couple more Jensens here today — well, now a Leonard and a Jensen. We’re honored to bring the other half of the clan into the studio — full Team Jensen. Our siblings, Betsy Jensen Leonard and Charlie Daniel Jensen.
Host: They’ve given us a lot of flak over the past two years about the podcast, so we figured we’d bring them in and embarrass them a little bit — maybe even quiz them on Kansas City industrial market stats to see how much they actually know. But really, excited to have you both share your own backgrounds for our listeners. Betsy, you want to go first, since you’re the oldest?
Betsy: I grew up in Leawood. I’ve got three little brothers — they’re all still very little, still look up to me for guidance and call me daily. I work at Evera InTouch, VP of Client Services. I started in more traditional advertising and now I’m on the pharmaceutical side, as the client liaison. It’s been an interesting year, like a lot of industries — a lot of our pharma clients have plenty of funds, but marketing is usually the first thing to get cut, so we’ve seen some losses but also growth here and there.
Host: I always thought InTouch was more digital-focused compared to somewhere like VML — is that right?
Betsy: It started that way, though we’re moving away from being just that, since you can’t really be a one-stop shop anymore in this industry. Pharma in general is a niche within advertising, and then there are variations within that — plus digital on top. InTouch — now Everson InTouch, after we were acquired a couple years ago — started really as a dev shop, with websites as the bread and butter. Over the years, in advertising you can’t just do one thing anymore, you have to check a lot of boxes. We do a lot of agency-of-record business now, everything from websites on up, though digital and web expertise is still our strong suit.
Host: Does pharma marketing go directly to consumers, or mainly to medical providers?
Betsy: Both — the U.S. is actually one of the only places in the world where pharma companies market directly to the end user; in most other countries that’s not really the case. It depends on the client — I have some global clients too. That’s part of what makes pharma nuanced: you can work on HCP advertising, DTC (direct-to-consumer), or things in between.
Host: Do you guys have internal compliance people making sure everything stays within bounds, given how strict that world can be?
Betsy: Yes — it’s a very hairy world of advertising, honestly. That’s part of why a lot of people in the industry don’t always love moving into pharma versus something less regulated — there’s a lot of red tape, but you find your ways around it.
Host: Small world — Betsy’s office in Johnson County is in a building Kessinger Hunter manages and leases.
Betsy: We’re on a few floors there — I think we went from one-through-five to two-through-five. I only go in about one day a week now, roughly 9 to 4.
Host: Charlie, want to introduce yourself?
Charlie: I also grew up in Kansas City — Charlie Jensen, the youngest brother. I’m running a small family winery in Napa Valley. My fiancée Kay and I moved out there because we’d both kind of lost job opportunities to COVID right as we were graduating — she figured she’d work out there for six months and then get a “real” job, and I thought I’d try following a girl to California. Glad I did. I’ve taken on more responsibilities than I expected running a small business, but it’s been fun — I even know the right questions to ask about our marketing provider now.
Charlie: I jumped into an industry I wasn’t expecting to work in, and it’s been a lot more fun than I expected. When we first got out there, I started working for another small family winery, Hill Family Estate in Yountville — amazing people who took me under their wing and taught me the business, and really showed me it is a business — people go out for vacation, enjoy themselves, and forget there’s a whole world that keeps operating day after day behind that. I landed with some really good people in Napa Valley, and if it weren’t for them, I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing now.
Host: It sounds like that also reflects how collaborative the whole Napa region is with its neighbors.
Charlie: Definitely — my first visit, I figured everyone out there would be pompous, but you realize they’re farmers first, and it’s really a farming community, which reminds you of the Midwest. There’s a strong sense of community within the valley and the industry — like what’s good for Kansas City is good for everybody in Kansas City. The bigger wineries bring people out there, but we’re not really competing with them since we serve a different part of the market — honestly we need the bigger wineries feeding customers into the pipeline, since people want to visit the well-known names first, then get a recommendation to check out a smaller place that doesn’t have the marketing budget to be front and center.
Host: Those small tastings are really intimate too.
Charlie: Exactly — I think it’s a good parallel to something like Kessinger Hunter, where sometimes you get a higher level of service from a boutique operation. People who are more in touch with what they’re doing tend to be more committed to it. At the big wineries, people might be there eight months and move on; at small family operations, it’s the same five people who’ve been there ten years — that culture comes through in the product. There’s also been a broader shift in the last 15 years or so toward people prioritizing experience, which has driven a lot of the change in consumer expectations in Napa — it used to be you’d belly up at a bar, try four wines, get 30 minutes of someone’s time, and leave for free. Now people expect a two-hour seated experience with food pairing and a dedicated host, and there are real costs tied to that.
Host: [brief aside about earthquakes and California natural hazards]
Host: It’s cool seeing you keep building the brand locally even while you’re back in town — working with a local distributor, getting the product and brand awareness out here.
Charlie: That’s part of the beauty of the industry — you can really make it what you want. Real estate’s similar in that you cast such a wide net, you never know who you’re sitting next to that could open a door.
Host: [conversation shifts to family dynamics, sitting arrangements on car trips, and lighthearted sibling banter]
Host: Betsy, tell us more about your other job — being a mom.
Betsy: We’re still waiting for one of Dan’s grandchildren to turn into an athlete — Henry might be our best chance so far, though there’s no height in this family to rely on. It’s nice that InTouch offers work-from-home flexibility, which really helps for being a full-time mom too, though I still have to hype myself up to go into the office one day a week. I think I’d have a harder time with full remote work right out of school than I do now, 13 years into my career — I needed the structure early on. I do think there’s a learning curve for newer employees who came in during COVID and have never really worked in an office, and I worry a bit about the transfer of knowledge from older to younger generations in a remote-first world. But I’m also protective of my time now that I have kids — if I ever went back to full-time in-office, I’d set clear boundaries around drop-off and pick-up.
Host: Charlie, what’s your day-to-day actually look like?
Charlie: People assume I just hang out drinking wine all day — like when clients visit and do a tasting, they think that’s what I do constantly, but when they leave to go back to a hotel or restaurant, I’m the one cleaning up and getting through the rest of my work day. It’s not fun to have a buzz on while trying to finish work. Every day looks different, which is both freeing and can bleed into evenings if I’m not careful about setting boundaries — we’re actually finishing a project at the winery that’ll give me a dedicated workspace so I can separate the admin side from living on property. I make myself available seven days a week because in hospitality and leisure businesses, people reach out on weekends and evenings, not just during normal business hours — but the nice part of the wine business versus, say, a restaurant, is we still get to go home around 5.
Host: You must develop a feel for who’s actually a serious customer versus just passing through.
Charlie: Definitely — you learn pretty quickly to read people, the same way you might sense whether a cold-call lead is a real prospect. Someone once told me you can have a 30-second conversation with someone about wine and have a pretty good sense of how much they know. I’ve always made a concentrated effort not to make people feel stupid for not knowing something, though — wine should be approachable, and if you make people feel dumb about pronunciation or lack of knowledge, it plays against that.
Host: It’s relationship-driven business too — that’s where you get the big connections, like a distributor here in Kansas City needing a lot of wine.
Charlie: Definitely — and it’s fun that we can send some of our wine to clients as a gift, especially with that family angle, since people like knowing it’s literally our brother’s wine.
Host: [Martin City “crack it open” segment — question about pharma budgets]
Host: Betsy, earlier you mentioned marketing budgets get cut first when times are tough — have you seen less business overall, or lower budgets with the same expectations?
Betsy: Both, honestly — there are drastic cuts happening, and pharma is a little protected since pharma is pharma, but companies want the same output for less. A lot of bigger companies, not just in pharma, are pulling services in-house, which has always cyclically happened, but what you lose when you pull in-house is that third-party perspective and strategy — a lot of those companies are hiring people straight out of agencies to do it internally for less.
Host: How does working with pharma clients compare to more consumer-facing brands you worked with in the past?
Betsy: My budgets have always been pretty healthy since I’ve worked on big brands, but pharma moves a lot slower because of FDA regulation — everything goes through regulatory review. There is something rewarding about it, though — we do a lot of unbranded, disease-education work, and there are times you feel like you might genuinely be helping someone understand their condition, even though at the end of the day it’s still pharma companies pushing their own drugs.
Betsy: There was also a huge merger in advertising recently — a couple of the big holding companies that own most agencies in the industry combined. Big pharma clients often restrict themselves to working only with agencies under a specific holding company’s umbrella through procurement rules, which creates both opportunity and risk — you can get boxed out of business even if you have a great relationship and the right expertise, simply because you’re not on an approved list.
Host: [continued conversation about client relationships, firing difficult clients, wrapping up the pharma/wine discussion]
Host: Charlie, can you give us a bit more background on your time with Hill Family and now Spence Vineyards?
Charlie: When we first got out there, I thought Napa would be a short-term stop — I applied to wineries with “family” in the name through Indeed, planning to work a tasting room for a few months before going back into the music industry, which was my original plan. I started with Hill Family, an awesome small winery that’s been around since the early ’70s. Doug Hill, the patriarch, actually started as a vineyard-farming business, Oak Farming, in the ’70s — a lot of people don’t realize wineries and vineyards in Napa aren’t always the same business; some companies just farm and sell fruit to others. Doug farmed and sold grapes to some of the biggest names in Napa Valley for decades — Silver Oak, Opus One among them — so almost anyone who’s had Napa wine has likely had fruit grown by the Hill family without knowing it. In 2001, Doug’s son Ryan convinced him to vertically integrate and start making their own wine in addition to the farming business. Working there, I got a ground-up look at how those businesses operate — their winemaker, Allison, was the seventh professionally hired female winemaker in the world, and I got to spend time in the vineyards with Doug on days without tastings. Ryan’s been a great friend and mentor — genuinely, if it weren’t for that family and seeing how they built a sustainable lifestyle around the business, we wouldn’t have thought it was realistic to do something like this ourselves.
Charlie: What actually brought us out there originally was my fiancée Kay’s family — her aunt and uncle started a small wine brand on Howell Mountain, one of Napa’s sub-regions, about 25 years ago, almost as a hobby after winning a home winemaking kit at a charity auction. They eventually sold the business to Kay’s parents, Dave and Susie, as part of their legacy planning since they never had kids of their own.
Host: How many acres is the vineyard?
Charlie: The property is 10.13 acres on Howell Mountain, with three and a half acres of Cabernet vines. Ten acres is the magic number in Napa to qualify for an on-site winemaking permit — there are loopholes, but they’re uncommon. We keep an eye on adjacent properties for potential expansion down the line, though land isn’t the only consideration — sometimes it’s road access or terrain. You can’t plant anything over roughly a 30% grade, partly due to erosion but mostly OSHA regulation, since most Napa vines are farmed and harvested by hand.
Host: [conversation touches on wildfire risk and fire mitigation in Napa]
Charlie: Fire mitigation is something everyone in Napa takes very seriously — whole towns and neighborhoods have been devastated, and evacuation notice can be as short as minutes. Fire moves incredibly fast, something I didn’t appreciate until living out there. My line to people during tastings is that no matter where you live, Mother Nature is trying to kill you somehow.
Host: Did the 2020 wildfire smoke affect your harvest?
Charlie: We didn’t make any red wine that vintage — we did make our Zinfandel, since it ripens earlier and came in before the smoke set in. People assume no wine gets made because vineyards catch fire, but vineyards actually don’t burn well — what damages the crop is smoke taint, since a chemical from dense wildfire smoke can bond to alcohol once you ferment it into wine. In 2020, the smoke in Napa was dense enough that you couldn’t see across a table.
Host: [Martin City “crack it open” segment for Dan]
Host: Dan, easy question — which of your four kids is the most successful?
Dan: All four of you are doing well at your chosen endeavors, and your mom and I are proud of you all. Keep up the good work.
Host: [laughs about the diplomatic non-answer, transitions to wrap-up]
Host: It’s been fun seeing you both branch into industries — wine and advertising — that have historically been resistant to change, and get out there actually shifting how you market your product and reach people.
Kurt (Host’s brother): It’s been a good way for us to stay front-of-mind and keep brand awareness strong for Kessinger Hunter — a firm with great history and credibility in Kansas City, but maybe not as well known with our generation and peers. We’re trying to build that back up.
Host: Let’s hear your projections for the 2025 Kansas City commercial real estate market.
Kurt: I’m bullish — activity’s picked up a lot the last couple months. I came into the industry right at the peak of a cycle, so it’s been interesting watching things come back down to earth relative to where they were, though it’s all I’ve ever known as a baseline. It was certainly a slower start to 2024, but things are picking up, and we feel good about where we’re at on a number of deals. Kansas City’s been on an incredible run the last seven to ten years — it’s wild how much things like the Chiefs’ success and the city’s general swagger have shifted outside perception of Kansas City compared to when I was graduating college.
Stuart (Host): Kansas City’s brand awareness nationally is honestly rivaled by maybe only a couple other markets that have grown as fast, like Nashville or Austin, relative to our size. I think we’re also starting to see the payoff of relationship-building — Kurt put in a lot of legwork the first few years, and I had good relationships from my previous sales career that I stayed in touch with, so we’re starting to see that synergy pay off now.
Charlie: I’ve experienced a version of that too — people who knew me at Hill Family have followed me to Spence and wanted to check out what I’m doing now. It’s rewarding knowing you provided a level of service in a past role good enough that people make you their first call afterward.
Stuart: In my old sales job, I had a captive product and install base, so my goal was always to never give a client a reason to look elsewhere — make their job easier, make them look good to their own end users, and repeat business follows. That mindset’s carried over — we want to be the first person a client thinks of when they have a need, whether that’s transactional real estate work or being their long-term consultant and confidant in the industry. It’s the most fun part of the job when you look up and realize you’re working with someone you genuinely consider a friend.
Host: To close the loop — 2025 for the Kansas City industrial market: I think it’ll be a much stronger year than 2024. A lot of last year was “wait and see,” largely due to election uncertainty and rate expectations, and it’s nice to have that behind us. Kansas City’s also got the World Cup coming in 2026, which has been a factor — I’ve heard some wedding venues are already booked around those dates.
Charlie: We don’t have any world-famous vineyards here, but the first recognized AVA — American Viticultural Area — in the United States was actually in Augusta, Missouri, near Hermann.
Host: [lighthearted banter about viticulture and wine terminology]
Host: We’re coming up on an hour — appreciate you both coming on, it was fun having the siblings in. Charlie, what’s a good way for people to check out or buy your wine?
Charlie: You can check out our newly redone website, spencevineyards.com, or follow us on Instagram at Spence Howell Mountain to see what we’ve got going on — we’d love to see folks out in wine country.
Host: [closing banter about hiring/internships at InTouch]
Host: That’s a wrap — thank you to everyone for a great year, and thanks to all our guests for coming on this year, except for these two — you’re welcome. That’s a wrap on 2024. Excited for 2025 — we’ve got some good guests lined up. Thanks, everybody.
