Be a Weeble.
“If you want to be successful in business, you have to be a Weeble,” says Colorado Springs entrepreneur JW Roth, whose dream of a nationwide network of luxurious amphitheaters kicks off in a month with the opening of Ford Amphitheater on the far-north side of the city.
Weebles, an egg-shaped toy popular in the ’70s, “wobble but don’t fall down,” as its advertising stated.
Like a Weeble, a successful businessperson might get knocked down, “but they bounce back up, because failure is inevitable,” Roth says. “Staying down is where you lose.”
It’s a philosophy that has helped Roth, a fifth-generation Coloradan, found, finance and/or govern and help take public a host of startup and early-stage companies over his decades in business, culminating in Venu, the entertainment and hospitality company behind Ford Amphitheater.
The amphitheater is set to open with three nightly shows, Aug. 9-11, by pop band OneRepublic. Acts announced for the rest of the season range from the Beach Boys to John Fogerty to Dierks Bentley.
“It’s gone from close your eyes and imagine it,” Roth says, to musicians taking to the stage in just weeks.
Beginnings
The idea of even attending a show at a “luxurious outdoor music venue” would have been a stretch for Roth in his childhood. Roth, now 60, grew up on a small ranch just north of El Paso County; his parents got married in their teens and his dad did “a little bit of everything to make ends meet.”
Rabbits and deer culled from the property helped fill the dinner table. “I was not born with a silver spoon in my mouth,” he says.
Roth had various jobs as a teen, including helping clear trees from the site of the then-future Renaissance Festival in Larkspur and selling the resulting firewood.
He saw an ad for a job as a jailer and dispatcher with the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office, but it required a high school diploma or the equivalent; instead of waiting to finish school, he got his GED in the summer between his junior year and what would have been his senior year.
He started work with the Sheriff’s Office on his 18th birthday in November 1981. He also worked other jobs “to keep my head above water” and ended up working at a small food distribution company — “so Sheriff’s Office at night and a food sales guy during the day.” He went from Douglas County to working a radio car with the Denver Police Department for a few years, then left his fledgling career in law enforcement to work on his business ideas.
“And then my break happened,” he says. He was asked to be one of the founders of AspenBio Pharma, an animal-health company based in Castle Rock. When that company was sold, it gave Roth the capital to make investments in packing plants and other ventures.
In 2015, growing out of his agricultural investments and fulfilling a desire to start a business he could run with his son, Mitchell, he founded Roth Industries, which manufactures premium prepared foods under a family of brands tied to Roth and under other companies’ brands. Roth Brands includes Ioli, Prep Chef and the nutrition brand Whole30. It was Mitchell’s idea to acquire the rights to Whole30 a year or so ago, JW says.
“My son has done a better job there expanding the business than the old man did,” JW says. Mitchell is now CEO while JW is the chairman and controlling shareholder. That’s so JW can focus on Notes Live, now doing business as Venu, which in addition to the amphitheater includes the music venue Boot Barn Hall, Bourbon Brothers Smokehouse & Tavern and Notes Eatery in Colorado Springs. (There’s also a Bourbon Brothers and an adjacent Boot Barn Hall in Gainesville, Ga.)
But the centerpiece of Venu is Ford Amphitheater (initially Sunset Amphitheater before the naming rights were sold) and future amphitheaters in other cities.
Bouncing back
Not everything Roth touches, of course, turns to gold.
Take Kilyn’s Kitchen, a line of prepared foods rolled out in 2018 by Roth Premium Foods, part of Roth Industries. Kilyn’s Kitchen’s meals — with recipes from Roth’s wife, Kilyn, and her mom, that were fine-tuned by the chefs at Roth Premium Foods — were designed to feed a whole family; unlike most prepared meals made to toss into the oven or a microwave, the Kilyn’s Kitchen meals came in a pouch and were heated by being put in boiling water.
“If you can boil water, you can eat like a gourmet chef,” Roth said at the time. Initial meals in the line included chicken alfredo over fettuccine, smoked meatloaf with seasoned roasted potatoes and carrots, and pasta and meatballs.
“It didn’t work,” Roth says simply. While he believes the product was good, the market wasn’t there. Most consumers who grab prepared foods are single or are older couples who don’t want to cook, he learned. “The family market for prepared foods didn’t exist like I thought it would.”
And while AspenBio ended up as a resounding success, it wasn’t always so; the company struggled to get FDA approval for a key product, SurBred, a bovine pregnancy test.
“Our first three runs through the FDA,” Roth says, “were a failure. … We had to recapitalize that business three times before it became successful.”
Such struggles are not atypical. “One step back, two steps forward is kind of how I built my businesses,” Roth says. “I’ve had far more failures than I have had successes.”
Which brings us back to the Weeble.
“Oh, yes, he talks about the Weeble,” says son Mitchell. “Everybody is going to get knocked down. It doesn’t matter if you’re the smartest guy or have the best business plan, you’re going to get knocked down and you have to get back up.”
And he has seen his dad emulate the Weeble. There were times when things were really difficult and others might have thrown up their hands, Mitchell says, but that didn’t stop his father.
“His willingness to take risks, coupled with his determination and his hard work, is really sort of the recipe that has created the success that we are all now witnessing.”
While growing up, Mitchell often got a close-up view of how his dad did business. When JW would go to New York for business meetings, “one of the things he did for me that I’m forever grateful for and that I think is very unique is he would bring me along” Mitchell says. “I was 11 years old, walking around New York City with a beige suit that was bought at Walmart and a briefcase.”
Mitchell would sit in on meetings and the back and forth between his dad and investors was sort of like watching a tennis match, he says. “These weren’t joke meetings. He needed to raise money, he needed to do this and that.”
That real-world experience had an impact. Mitchell received a bachelor’s degree in business finance and economics from Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va., and went on to work at an investment-banking firm in New York City. It was a call from his dad, asking him to join in starting Roth Industries, that brought him back to Colorado.
When his dad years later presented the idea of a network of amphitheaters, “I said, that sounds like JW Roth. One of the things about my dad, he doesn’t like to think small. When he comes up with ideas, they’re big.”
The music business wasn’t new to them — they had a venue in Boot Barn Hall, Mitchell notes. “But when he told me the next step was to go from that to the world’s most luxurious amphitheater here in Colorado Springs and we were going to build them across the country, I was just nodding along.”
Birth of an amphitheater
It was a visit to winemaker Peter Mondavi’s property in California’s Napa Valley, where Mondavi had “kind of a super cool, outdoor amphitheater set up literally in his front yard,” that sparked Roth’s vision of a luxurious amphitheater on property he owned on the north end of Colorado Springs.
But that vision also resulted from a lifelong passion for music, particularly live music. As a kid, though, “the problem was coming from a family that didn’t have a lot of money, so going to a concert always involved climbing a fence for me; that’s just the way it was.”
Guitars and memories fill a room at JW Roth’s Colorado Springs office Wednesday, July 3. Roth has a collection of more than 1,500 guitars.
That love of music is reflected in his extensive collection of guitars — more than 1,500, he estimates — plus a collection of 2,500 to 3,000 “of the most classic albums.” He also has a bandstand in the backyard of his home on the northern edge of Colorado Springs, along with what he believes is the largest residential firepit in the country, where he hosts private concerts for family and friends.
But why music?
Some of JW Roth’s 2,500-3,000 classic albums line the window of his office Wednesday, July 3, in Colorado Springs.
“Music is a uniter,” Roth says. “Nobody hates music. People gravitate toward different genres, but nobody hates it.”
A restored jukebox from Benny’s Restaurant & Lounge on Colorado Avenue stands among some of JW Roth’s signed guitars in his Colorado Springs office.
His vision for the 8,000-seat amphitheater at the Polaris Pointe mixed-use development, southeast of Interstate 25 and North Gate Boulevard, wasn’t a uniter, though. The project, which was approved by the Colorado Springs City Council in January 2023, was opposed by some residents in nearby neighborhoods who worried about noise, congestion and people parking on their streets.
“Is entertainment more important than housing?” one homeowner asked during the hours of debate that preceded the council vote. “I don’t believe so.”
Following the council’s approval, a lawsuit was filed in September by a Colorado Springs homeowner and a newly formed homeowners group, alleging, among other things, that sound from the amphitheater would violate the state’s Noise Pollution Law. Early this year, though, an El Paso County judge dismissed the suit; the Northside Neighbors Association went on to appeal that ruling. That appeal “is going through the process,” Roth said.
Colorado Springs attorney Ian Speir, who represents the homeowners, said the goal of the appeal is to require the amphitheater to comply with the state’s Noise Pollution Law and ensure the venue’s decibel levels are within limits spelled out in the law. In addition to appealing the lawsuit’s dismissal to the state Court of Appeals, Speir said he’s asked the Colorado Supreme Court to consider the appeal directly. There is no timetable on when the Supreme Court might decide to whether to take on the appeal, he said.
The debate at times has become personal, Roth says.
“I have been called everything under the sun. There have been people that said I’m a California developer who came here to ruin the community. My family has been here since before Colorado was a state.”
Still, he says, “the support has far outweighed the criticisms.” And he’s dedicated, he says, to being a good neighbor to those around the amphitheater.
Among those supporters: former Colorado Springs Mayor John Suthers. Suthers was mayor when Roth came to his office, “introduced himself as a businessperson here in town,” and laid out his plans for an amphitheater “of the scope and prestige of Red Rocks. I kind of looked at him and said, ‘Really?’ And darned if in the course of a fairly lengthy conversation, I became convinced this guy was really serious.”
Over the course of some follow-up meetings over a significant period of time, “I became a believer,” Suthers says. He also has become a friend of Roth; the amphitheater will include a concourse named after Suthers.
“He is one of the most affable guys I’ve ever met,” Suthers says of Roth. “I find him a great person to be around because he’s very uplifting.”
Roth learned not from Harvard Business School, but from the school of hard knocks, Suthers says — “a person who has a good feel for what the world is all about, how it operates, how the business world operates. … He’s on a spectacular ride right now and I think this (the amphitheater) is going to be a great benefit to the community, I really do.”
George Fuller, the mayor of McKinney, Texas, north of Dallas, feels the same way about the 20,000-seat Sunset Amphitheater — more than double the seating of the Springs amphitheater — planned for his community.
He points first to the economic benefit — the project is estimated to bring over 1,300 direct and indirect jobs to the community, with an economic impact of roughly $3 billion over the first 10 years.
“Secondly,” he says, “it’s an entertainment amenity that I feel fits within the fabric of our community.” McKinney is designated as a Texas Music Friendly Community by the Texas Music Office.
“And beyond all that, for me, music is a great unifier,” Fuller says, echoing Roth. “A venue like this brings people together.”
That belief in the power of music helped Fuller and Roth bond. Fuller is a musician himself and is owner of The Guitar Sanctuary, a guitar store and music venue in McKinney; Roth calls him America’s rock ‘n’ roll mayor.
“I like dealing with people who are direct and forthright,” Fuller says, “and in all of my dealings, I have perceived him (Roth) to be that way.”
The city announced it would provide $18 million in incentives for the project as well as millions in grants from the McKinney Economic Development Corp.; most of the incentives are performance-based, Fuller says. An opening in the first quarter of 2026 is envisioned.
The McKinney deal is an example of the private-public partnerships Roth envisioned when he dreamed up the Sunset amphitheaters. Other amphitheaters are in development in Oklahoma, Tennessee and El Paso, Texas, and others are close to agreements, Roth says; his dream is to have 10 open in the next three years. And he doesn’t expect that to be the end.
“I view our business as a tide that lifts all boats,” Roth says. “So when I go into a municipality, I’m not there just to talk about what we’re going to do, but what happens to all the other businesses. We will build a venue that will be profitable and good for our company, but also good for the economy of the municipality.”
Not everyone has embraced the enterprise, though. While Roth says site work has begun on Sunset Amphitheater in Broken Arrow, Okla., a suburb of Tulsa, the plans for a second amphitheater in the state were stalled when the Oklahoma City Council in April rejected a zoning request for a 12,000-seat amphitheater in the southwest part of the city. In doing so, according to reports, the council sided with residents living near the site who worried about noise and traffic — the same concerns raised by the amphitheater opponents in the Springs.
Roth isn’t giving up on that market, however. He says Venu is “within a few weeks from announcing a new site in a neighboring city with municipal support.”
Roth has put his own money on the line in pursuing his dream. In addition to incentives from the community and money from investors, “I’ve invested millions of dollars in this company personally and in personally guaranteed loans,” he says. The selling of naming rights — as in the 10-year, “multimillion” dollar agreement with 40 Ford dealerships in Colorado to change the name of the Springs Sunset Amphitheater to Ford Amphitheater — is another source of funding. So is the selling of luxury fire pit suites in the amphitheater — “like selling condominiums in a condo unit,” Roth explains.
And momentum is building, Roth says. Instead of reaching out to municipalities, as in the beginning, “now our phones are ringing. A lot of municipalities are calling us, asking, ‘Look, will you come do what you did in Colorado Springs in our city?'”
To do all this, Roth needs a team. Between Venu and Roth Industries, his companies employ about 1,000 people.
“In order to play on our team, the No. 1 thing I look for is loyalty,” Roth says. “I want a team member who is loyal to what we’re doing, passionate about what we’re doing, and hard-working.”
And those on his leadership team need to be problem solvers.
“If you’re going to bring drama to my life, I don’t need you, and I tell everybody that,” Roth says. “There’s nothing more unproductive than drama in your business. Problem solvers don’t cause drama.”
Heather Atkinson has worked with Roth for 14 years, from Accredited Members, an investment research company, to the birth of Roth Industries and now Venu, where she is chief financial officer and treasurer.
“He expects 100% dedication, and he should expect that,” she says of Roth. But he’s also, she says, “a very generous boss.”
“He basically draws you in. … You become part of that vision, part of that dream.” But she acknowledges it can be challenging to keep up with him.
“No rest for the weary,” she says.
Roth has a medallion he passes out to select people that’s inscribed with, “Be generous, be grateful, be kind, work hard.”
“If you do those four things,” he says, “something will have to have gone very wrong for you not to be successful.”
He was lucky, he says, to have had some great people and mentors to emulate in his life. “God’s dealt me some really good cards.”
He grew up in a family that didn’t have money, but they were still grateful, he says, and still generous.
“At the end of the day, you have to have that heart about you.”
