Welcome to TAPintoTV.
I'm Stephanie Willoughby, coming to you
from East Main Media Studios
in Little Falls New, Jersey. On this
week's show, we speak with Meghan Lukin
of Hoboken's Washington General Store,
Joe Travers, also known as "The Vaultmeister" discusses
his role as archivist for the Zappa Trust,
Cheryl Mucha tells us about her
financial consulting business
and how she helped clients during the
pandemic, but let's begin with my
conversation with Captain Bill
of Hackensack Riverkeeper.
I'm joined by Captain Bill of Hackensack
Riverkeepers.
Captain Bill, how are you today? 
Oh fine, thank you for having me.
I'm so happy to have you here, I want to
get right into it.
Can you tell our audience about the
devastating fire at your headquarters?
May 16th, I had been out on the river all day
aboard one of our vessels and I got 
home around five o'clock in the
afternoon, and at 5:30, the phone rang and it was my
program director, and he told me, "you better get up
to Hackensack, the building's on fire" and I
was totally astonished by this message.
So, I jumped in my truck and I drove
up there, and as soon as I got out of
Secaucus and heading north
on, through Bergen County, I could see a
column of smoke in the air
from miles away, from five miles away, and
I was like "oh my god", and when I got up to Hackensack,
there was three different fire companies
there. They had
a couple of aerial ladders that were
dropping water on everything
and the flames were shooting through the
roof of the building next door.
Some of those flames shot through the
roof of my building, through a skylight
that we have in the office,
and there was only one big scorch mark
inside the building, but the rest was all
water and smoke damage. The smoke damage
was, it smelled like the inside of a
fireplace, and the water damage, we had over two
feet of water in our basement,
just standing water that came in through
the skylight, came in through the front
door and the back door.
One of my friends, who is a
professional firefighter,
he saw some of the pictures and his
remark to me was,
"the Hackensack Fire Department did a
great job of saving your building."
Of course, all of the contents are gone.
Right now, Hackensack Riverkeeper is the
proud owner of a empty box on Main Street, and we're
trying to put it back together.
I'm so sorry, that is really devastating.
And the enormity of it, if you could see
it from five miles away and then knowing
that that's your building.
Yeah, it was a pretty devastating moment,
you know, but, like I said, my staff
rose to the occasion.
And I want to do a shout out to
the SERVPRO because SERVPRO came
that night they boarded up the building
and they were back on Monday morning
and they stayed with us right through
the whole process of emptying out the
building. You know, the optimistic part of my life,
I say to myself, this is a way to start
over
and when we go back into the building,
hopefully it'll be more efficient and
it'll serve our purposes even better,
but we have a long way to go.
Captain
Bill, where can people go to 
find more information on donating?
The easiest way for people to donate 
right now would be
to go to our GoFundMe page,
gofundme.com. They'll find us,
the page should come up and, you know,
they can help
with the cause, you know, we're gonna
have a lot of expenses and
some of them are going to be unplanned
expenses because I've been around long
enough to know that you can't plan 
for everything.
Captain Bill, let's take a look at our
interview with you from last year.
In the 1990s, the Meadowlands, which is
the estuary of the Hackensack River, was
under siege by developers
and we were losing habitat, we were
losing species, we were losing
water quality and nobody really was
worried about that, they were more
worried about building office buildings
and warehouses. When I founded Hackensack
Riverkeeper, that was my primary focus
for the first several years, that the
organization was running. 
In order to reach the public, we
have several programs
that we do. We do our pontoon boat
cruises, where we take about 3,000 people a
season out on the river, and then we have our river cleanup
program and this year, we broke
any records that existed. We did over 40
cleanups within the watershed of the
Hackensack
and the nearby Passaic, and we've
mobilized about 1,200
volunteers to do that work, took out
about 25,000 pounds of garbage.
Our most recent victory is the victory
to stop another fossil fuel power plant
from being built in the Meadowlands.
It took us a little bit over a year to
get Governor Murphy to come 
to his senses,
but he did and he announced about a
month ago,
a little bit more than a month ago, that
he was opposed to the project
and the very next day, the principals
that were promoting the project
backed away. We had 50 towns that
passed resolutions in opposition to this
thing happening, 50 towns did resolutions to the mayor
and council and almost all of them were unanimous.
You know, so I guess they finally realized this is
not a popular idea, you know,
and if we're ever going to wean
ourselves off of fossil fuels,
you can't do that by building new fossil
fuel facilities, you have to spend your money, if you're
going to spend your money, spend it on
renewables
and if you're not ready to do that, then
get into another business.
We're pragmatic, we know these in
post-industrial sites,
it would be next to impossible to
restore them to any habitat value,
but they can be restored for
economic value
and for community benefits and that's
what we look for,
you know, we want the best deal for the
river and the best deal for the
communities.
Over the years, we've been able to, you
know, bring the Meadowlands to a much
better place. We now have over 8,000
acres of wetlands that are permanently
preserved in the Meadowlands,
and I've got over 275 species of birds
and about 70 species of marine life that
are back into the Hackensack River now.
So the river's in recovery, it's got a
long way to go, but I'm working on it and my staff is
working on it, day in and day out
and we're making a difference.
Captain Bill, thank you so much for
joining me in-studio today. It's really
great to see you.
Well, it's really great to get out of the
house and be here in the studio, so we can see
each other, distanced but face-to-face.
Agreed.
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Hi Meghan, thank you so much for joining
me today.
Hi Stephanie, it's great seeing you.
It's awesome to see you
too, it's been a minute. I haven't seen
you since HomeGrown was in Hoboken
at your store, Washington General and
I'd love to just check in with you, see
how things are going.
You know, it's been a whirlwind, for sure.
I think if anyone told me this was gonna
happen six months ago, you know, it would have
blown my mind, so we're 
just making adjustments and we
keep, you know, plowing through, trying to eke
out as much business as possible, with the help of our supportive
community here.
What kind of adjustments have you had to
make with the business?
We've been taking orders on Instagram,
it's been an interesting way of doing business,
but technology is a wonderful thing,
and I think that we are taking advantage
of everything at our fingertips right
now. We don't have an e-commerce website, so we had to immediately figure out
how we could continue to do business without
that website there, so we take
orders on Instagram, we've been posting
several items a day, with sort of a quantity and a price
attached to it, so customers,
it's just like they're in the store. They
can go and browse our Instagram
and they can just message us or text us
with whatever they're interested in.
We'll put packages together, we'll put
gift packages together,
we've been doing a lot of quarantine
packages, which has been really fun to see what
people put together, and we've also 
been creating those boxes
ourselves, so whether it be the health care box or
the Mother's Day box, those have been
really well received as well.
Awesome, let's take a look back to when HomeGrown visited the Washington General
Store.
You know that feeling when you need a
gift or a chandelier, or just to go someplace
that's totally inspiring,
that is the Washington General Store.
Let's go on inside and explore what
makes this
a favorite in Hoboken.
I'm Meghan Lukin. I'm a Hoboken resident,
Hoboken mom,
and a Hoboken store owner.
So, we're in Washington General Store.
I love your store, I love everything in it
It's really tempting to just touch
everything, do you have people in here
constantly just touching the items?
Yeah, but I think you know that's the
really important part of still shopping local
is that you can't get that online, so you
know, you're finding the product, you're
picking up, you're smelling it, it makes
it really tangible.
Yeah, I think that that's a really good
point. It's one of the things I love
the most about shopping small
and supporting small businesses is that
we also see you here, right, and we get to know
you and then I think there's like this
emotional connection between I'm sure
yourself and then customers that come in. Can you tell
us a little bit about
the people that are shopping here at
Washington General?
Yeah, you know, they're the Hoboken
resident, we run the gamut from
really the student who just graduated,
the student that goes to Stevens, maybe
their parents are visiting.
We've got young families that are moving
into town, maybe they needed a little
more space for Manhattan, and then we've had people that have been
here their entire lives, so we have a
really great
mix of people in this community.
Like I feel like it's kind of nice to give
somebody a gift certificate to some
place like this too, so that they can
kind of choose,
because all the items in here seem so
personal, which is a credit to you, I think that's,
I'm sure that attributes to, you know, your success that you guys have
had here yeah we really try and curate
the products, we buy from over
200 vendors, so that you're not just
walking into a store that seems
like a mall store that you can kind of
find anywhere,
we really try and make the assortment
something that seems special,
so every item you pick up has like sort
of a story behind it or
you kind of can pick something up and
know exactly who that's intended
for.
Yeah, that's how, exactly as you're describing it is exactly how it
feels in here, yeah I know it does, it feels
like, you know, it just, it feels like a hug it really does because
it's just all of these things
in a certain, I guess, period in your life,
especially in the kind of adulting era
of your life, you know, where it becomes a
priority to give a gift
to someone or a housewarming gift or a
new baby or whatever the heck
it is, and it seems like you guys have
it all here.
So, it's really beautiful. I want to
talk to you a little bit about
Since you've been here for the past five
years, we've been talking a lot about how
Hoboken has been in this like
renaissance, right? So,
moving out maybe a little bit less of
just the bar
culture, and your store, I think,
attributes
to kind of welcoming in that
like family vibe
and modern female vibe. Can you talk
to us a little bit about the changes or
transformation you've seen in Hoboken?
Yeah, well actually, I started seeing
that when I moved here eight years ago, 
and was kind of where the whole
idea came from, was,
I had that need, I was looking for,
you know, I was no longer going out to
the bars, I was going to housewarmings or
you know, my niece was born and I
needed a great gift to give her.
So, it really kind of followed my own
metamorphosis into adulthood as well.
How has it been for you as, not just a
business owner, but also a resident, how
would you describe Hoboken to someone
who hasn't visited here?
It's a very unique community, very much
rich in history,
our waterfront is unrivaled, for sure, but you know, it's so interesting, we
have a really old history of people who have
lived here for their entire lives and have been
generations of family
members who have lived here, so you'll
see old shops that have been here forever,
and then you have the complete other
side of it, where it's new
families moving in, so it's kind of this
combination
that is really nicely married together
in what feels like a small town, but is actually
a very urban lifestyle and that's for me
what's so important about living here, is
that, you know, you live the urban lifestyle.
I barely ever get in my car, I can walk to everything I need, but at
the same time, I pass familiar faces all day long.
What kind of community support are you seeing 
there in Hoboken?
We have, we have the Hoboken Business
Alliance, which has really helped
kind of re, you know, repost some of our posts 
which has been
helpful. We have a great blog in town, 
Hoboken Girl, who's
done a number of shout outs
for us, and then you know, we
really do have a local, loyal clientele. The minute they found
out that our doors were closed,
we had an influx of people just wanting
to support, you know, no fees, no rush on delivering
it to me or shipping it to me, I just want to support. 
Well Meghan, I just
want to thank you for your time today.
I know that you are a super busy woman,
but I'm really impressed with the way that you have
pivoted your business and I'm so glad that 
we got a chance
to speak with you again today.
So nice to see a familiar face.
Same, same, hopefully we will see you soon on the other side of this.
Exactly, all right thank you so much.
Take care, Meghan, thank you.
You too.
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It's time to get back to business!
Well, I am thrilled to be joined by Joe
Travers on the show today.
Joe Travers, "The Vaultmeister" of the
Zappa Trust,
fabulous musician, toured with so many
people including Mike Keneally.
Joe, thank you so much for joining me
today. We have so much to talk about.
Yeah, nice to see you again, Brian. Thanks
so much for
letting me come on and chat with you.
Would you tell my audience
what your job is as the archivist, as "The
Vaultmeister" for the Zappa Trust.
Yes, well I started in 1995 doing the
archiving and the
digital preservation of the assets in
Frank Zappa's
vast vault and it's been, you know,
28 years or so now and it's been an
unbelievable experience, you know, 
for the longest time, I worked,
you know, right next to Gail
doing all these projects and now,
Ahmet and I are together as a joint production team,
just pumping out release after release.
You mentioned the vast archive of Frank Zappa.
Can you give us a little sense of what
that really means and
I've been lucky enough to see the
old archive, the former location, in the
Hollywood Hills,
and it truly was vast, but can you
give me a sense of
what that really means, how big it was?
Yeah, of course, well you know, Frank was
recording as much as he possibly could
for the longest time and I think he
started in the 50s. The thing about Frank is that
because of the timing of his career, I mean, literally
he's like a pioneer with all the
different formats, so when you go on the
vault, there's like every format that you can
freaking think of is in there and it's such a
trip because you have to have the
machines to try and play all that back,
but also his scores and his music
and pictures and articles and
slides, master slides and and all the album
art, the original album art from all
the releases.
I mean it's a lot of stuff, a lot of stuff.
I want to ask you about a
couple of these releases,
one of the most recent releases was
"The Mothers 1970" release, could you tell me about
that?
Yes, well every year, we have a
production meeting, we always talk about 
what are we going
to do for future projects, the upcoming future projects for the
following year or whatever
and one of the things that we always
take in account is "what are the significant
anniversaries in Frank's career?", you know, for that
particular year and so, when we were
talking about
the stuff that we were going to do for 2020,
well, what were the significant, you
know, things that happened in Frank's
career? So, for 1970, what happened in 1970? Well, a
lot of stuff did but significantly the formation of the
Flo and Eddie Mothers was kind of a big deal. In the vault,
there really wasn't
a lot of stuff in there
that significantly represents
that band. Frank did release things,
but not that much live stuff from that
band. It was the following year, 1971,
that it got a lot of attention, because
there was more opportunities for that
band to be recorded professionally like
multi-track, okay, multi-track live recordings and
stuff like that. In 1970, that didn't happen that
much at all.
So, when we talked about "well, can we do
an anniversary release on the formation
of that band?", it's like "well, what do I
have to choose from?", and I knew that
there was a lot of
just kind of like stereo recordings
that weren't really unbelievable but
stuff that Frank was recording on his
own and
and even though the sound quality of
that stuff isn't unbelievable,
historically, it's really, it's a really fun listen and so I
tried to gather up as much 
as I possibly could
from that band, which lasted eight months
and or something like that, and see if
we could put together something that
would be an enjoyable listen and so
thankfully we have these really great
studio recordings that happened at
Trident Studios in London, 
all of which nobody has ever heard
before except for one song,
so that was just like "oh my gosh, there's
so much stuff here" and then you
implement some live material from
that time period and there you go,
that's how that came together and
and it's doing really well, people
are very excited about it,
because it's such a rare time period, you
know.
Sure, well what's interesting, I want to point
out for people who aren't
closely aware of the arc of Frank Zappa's career,
I wanted to point out this idea of the
different kinds of bands that he
assembled and what vocalists meant in those bands.
When you look at later in his career, in
the later 70s, into the 80s and you had
him working with Ray White and Ike
Willis and then you look at the
more earlier Mothers work, where it's
really his 60s sound, right?
And that 1970, this switch to
working with Flo and Eddie, and then what
comes out of that band
heading towards his album like "One Size
Fits All", down the road and yeah, this is beginning a very
interesting period for you, looking back at these 50th anniversaries.
There's a lot of incredible, really groundbreaking music
that's about to start hitting these
anniversaries, so
you're really in the cat bird seat here,
you've got some good stuff.
Joe Travers, thank you for joining
me. It's always great talking to you.
Joe, thank you man, be well.
Thank you.
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I'm joined by Cheryl Mucha 
from CFO Your Way.
Cheryl, thanks for joining me today. 
Thank you for having me, Brian.
Oh, it's my pleasure. Of course, you recently took part in
our ABA roundtable discussions here at 
East Main Media and
I wanted to make sure, to follow up and 
learn a little bit more
about your company and your background.
So tell me about CFO Your Way. Tell me
how you got started and how you help
businesses.
I realized in the local family-owned
business community, the need for
financial accounting support.
At the time, I was working for a
family-owned business
and saw that I could do this for
more than one entity at a time, more than
one business owner at a time. So, I moved over
from that full-time position into helping, you
know, all of our clients, many clients at
the same time
realize their financial goals and
prepare them to grow and
become a really integral part of their
communities.
As you know, businesses are the heart of
any local economic community and an
essential part of keeping them viable. So
we at CFO Your Way
create pathways for these businesses to
remain a part of that community
for many, many years to come. We work with the business owners
to kind of broaden their scope of how
they use their numbers,
so that they can be more strategic and a
little less transactional.
Our team, the CFO Your Way team, becomes an extension
of each and every business that we work with.
We roll up our sleeves and we work side
by side with them so that they can grow
and remain a part of their community. You know,
especially in these economic times that
the last thing a business owner wants
is to be caught by surprise, by not
having enough cash flow, so
planning is a key part of what we do for
our clients.
I'm well aware that you and your team helped
countless small business owners during
the pandemic,
especially with PPP applications
and requirements and
can you tell me a little bit about how
you helped your clients during these
past three, four months?
We received a lot of
phone calls from
clients and even potential clients that,
you know, there was panic in the air. "Do I apply? Do
I not apply? Am I eligible for
forgiveness?" and whatnot.
And those non-clients that called us
did not even have the financial records
they needed
in order to apply for the grants and the
funding.
And it puts them at a great disadvantage.
Our clients were ready to apply for whatever they qualified for
and we helped them through those
application processes to make sure that
they, not only applied for the right
funding and grants,
but also had the information they needed
to make that whole process very smooth.
So, a business
wants to take things to the next level,
maybe they know that their
financial records and accounting are not
up to par. They come to you, what's the
first thing you do to get them on the
right track? How do you
embrace these new clients?
So the first thing we do
is learn the client and what they're
doing currently
because we don't want to recreate the
wheel or force the client into doing
something they're not comfortable with.
The next step would be
setting them up on an accounting
platform if they do not have one.
We use QuickBooks online, pretty much 98% 
with our clients, we do use other
accounting software but QuickBooks
online
is teachable, easy to use,
easy to train a client to be able to
access it and get the information that they need.
Once we get their accounting records up
to date,
we then start talking them about what
those numbers mean.
And then once we have a good
understanding and the client has a good
understanding of the numbers and what
they mean, then we can start looking into
the future. How do we save some some cash flow?
How do we look at profitability,
for maybe, different business verticals?
What is their debt and are they using it
transactionally, not strategically? And by
that, I mean if you're using your debt strategic,
you're determining
how you're going to use it to further
the growth of your company,
as opposed to transactional, it's just
"how am I going to pay this debt back?"
So Cheryl, tell me about the different
levels of services that you offer. 
So we offer services
ranging from bookkeeper to accountant
to controller to CFO. All these rules are
part of our firm and we customize
who we put in the client job, depending
on the needs of the client.
So, what's the key takeaway for
entrepreneurs
and family owned business owners, what's
the key takeaway about how you can help?
Not only do business owners need to be
aware of their expenses and their
revenue
and the cycles around those two
categories, but they need to look at their
profitability as well, from a vendor service point of view.
Cheryl Mucha, CEO and founder of CFO
Your Way, thank you so much for joining
me today.
Thank you Brian for having me, I
appreciate your time.
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Wow, am I lucky to have Mr. Joe Travers on
the show today.
"The Vaultmeister" at the Zappa Trust,
you know, joining us from the west, west
coast, of course, I blew that.
I'm a blooper machine, Joe.
That's okay.
