The Flora-Bama bar and grill has served up great food and entertainment since 1969. Straddling the boundary line between Alabama and Florida, Flora-Bama has become a cultural icon and haven for lovers of music, good food and beach life since John McInnis III took over as majority owner in 2009.
McInnis and his business partner, Cameron Price, helped usher in a new era for the business, establishing more accountability and expanding its entertainment offerings, all while not changing the down-home feel of the place people have come to know and love.
On a recent episode of "1819 News: The Podcast," McInnis detailed how he went from building bridges in the family business to being one of the top names in the coastal restaurant industry.
Watch the full interview:
A Mobile native, McInnis graduated from the University of Alabama in 2000 and joined the family business, McInnis Industries. He helped the company complete $1 billion worth of projects, including building roads and bridges and contributing to disaster relief projects like the Hurricane Katrina cleanup.
"The only business my dad and I said we'd never get in was the bar and restaurant business. And here I ended up pretty much full-time in it… it's, Flora-Bama is, you know, what everybody's heard, it's a wild, crazy beach bar honky tonk, but it's just so much more than that," he said.
"We ended up with a church that meets there every Sunday, you know, almost a thousand people, 7,000 people on the beach at Easter. That's been going on for almost 15 years now. You know, we built the restaurants across the street. So we've tried to make it better without changing it. And I think we've been successful," McInnis added.
SEE: Flora-Bama celebrates 60 years of 'good music, good people, good food'
"One interesting note about Flora-Bama is, you know, you have, it's cool," he stated. "It's got, you know, one to two million visitors come through that big old shack every year. But most notably, we book over 3,500 musicians a year. And you know, to our knowledge, I don't know that anybody else does that, especially for a bar restaurant, but even for a music venue, that's a lot of artists… So we just continued, you know, to build upon these things and it just ended up where it has today."
McInnis credits his business success with Flora-Bama and other ventures to his faith in Christ.
"It guides everything in my life. And if you look, if anybody wants to look at what I've accomplished, it's all because he saved me, and protected me, and blessed me. It's not because, I mean, mathematically, it's impossible to have done as good as I have," he said.
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