In business, luck isn’t random. It’s engineered. As Louis Pasteur said, “Chance favors only the prepared mind.” See an opportunity, seize on it—a common mantra for business success. But there is some value in recognizing the randomness of serendipity. Life, and business, is filled with moments of chance, and whether it is recognized and acted upon frames the difference between a trivial moment and a creative epiphany. “Serendipity always rewards the prepared,” said playwright Katori Hall. The history and evolution of Capital Cigar Lounge in Lincoln, Nebraska, could offer us a case study.
One could say much of this can be chalked up to the character of Lincoln, a Midwestern city with a small-town feel, but that would dilute the acumen and skill that Austin Hillis and Tony Goins exhibited in building their thriving business. To start, as a college junior, Hillis could have walked into his local cigar shop and bought cigars for a spring break trip without a second thought. But he didn’t. And Goins could have walked into that same shop a few months later and purchased his cigars without acknowledging the new young kid behind the counter. But he didn’t.
Says Hillis, “It just happened that the 10 minutes I was in the store, the prior owner, Don, was talking to another customer about selling. I guess his wife was like, ‘I’m moving to Florida with or without you.’ I didn’t think much about it then but when I came back from spring break, I thought, you know, I bet I could buy that business, grow it in a couple years and sell it to pay for law school. So, I approached Don, got the books, went through them with my dad and we thought it made sense.”
Hillis put together a business plan, convinced a bank to give a loan to a broke college kid and suddenly found himself taking a full course load for his senior year and working 40 hours a week at his cigar shop.
Says Goins, “I walk in one day, and the retired police officer was gone. And it was this young 21-year-old kid behind the register, and I thought he was basically the stand-in for Don. But the kid quickly informed me in a real respectful way that he was the new owner because Don had sold the business to him. I asked him his name, and he said Austin Hillis. And so, I said, well, are you related to Jeff Hillis? He said, yeah. Jeff Hillis is my father. Well, lo and behold, Jeff and I worked together.”
When Hillis told his father about meeting Goins, Jeff Hillis recommended that Austin cultivate a relationship with Goins. “He called me later on and asked me to be his mentor,” says Goins. “But I had already had into my head that at some point in time I wanted to get into this lounge business, and I felt like the time was optimal simply because there was a void in Lincoln. So, I said, ‘How about we be partners instead?’”
As Hillis puts it, “Within three months, Tony had derailed my plan for law school.” Thirteen months later, in 2018, they moved to a new, spacious location, complete with a bar, conference room and public and private lounges. Capital Cigar Lounge was born.
For Goins, this felt like a natural progression in his career. Following a stint in the Marines, he had embarked on a nearly 30-year career in banking and finance, which took him to a number of cities across the Southeast. And one of the first things he would do when moving to a new city was to find a cigar lounge that he could call a second home.
“The first lounge I ever went to was Emerson’s,” says Goins. “Scott Regina had just opened a new lounge in Chesapeake, Virginia. I went to the grand opening. And he just had a phenomenal sales team with phenomenal people, and I fell in love with being a lounge guy. The friends and relationships I built at Emerson’s, the time I spent there, it was just amazing. I caught the bug at Emerson’s.”
Goins would go on to be a regular, inspired by the likes of Havana Phil’s in Greensboro, North Carolina, Kieth and Tiffany Rumbo at Club Humidor in San Antonio, Texas and Jeff Doll at Safari Cigars in Omaha, Nebraska.
Eventually, he made a permanent home in Lincoln, Nebraska, where he is now global head of enterprise risk management at Fiserv, but he wasn’t finding the same experience in Lincoln that he so fondly recalled elsewhere. He wanted that second home experience, and when he couldn’t find it, he recognized an opportunity with Hillis that he couldn’t pass up.
What Goins learned at those establishments, and what Hillis recognized quickly as the new owner of a cigar shop, is that creating the right atmosphere was essential. It starts, they say, with a “mini vacation.”
“You can clearly see that when you go into a good cigar lounge, it’s a place where people can relax,” says Goins. “You don’t see a lot of people on their phones. Instead, you see interactions of different ethnicities, different socioeconomic status, even different religions and political beliefs. So, we came up with a mission statement where we’re going to create mini vacations for our friends. This is the age of digital where people are texting and tweeting and nobody’s talking. It’s creating the highest level of polarization. But when people come together in a cigar lounge and you actually spend time together, what you find out is that you have more in common than you do apart. Cigars force you into an hour to an hour and a half, maybe a two-hour long conversation with someone that you may not know. And over time, you start to find the commonality. And then from there, you start to create trust. And from there, from that trust, creates relationships.”
Establishing the “mini vacation” concept as their foundation, they then created a set of uncompromising values that they instill in their staff. “Number one is we treat our customers like friends because relationships matter,” says Goins. “Number two is making sure it is an unparalleled experience with every visit. Number three is that our staff is professional, but they still have fun. And number four is we operate for the greater good of the community. So, we hire with those values, we coach to those values, and we make sure that everyone understands those values and what we believe is the way we behave.”
To reflect their mission statement and values, Goins and Hillis were very intentional in how they designed the lounge. The public section has an expansive bar, large, plush chairs arranged in a pod format to encourage conversation and a strong ventilation system. The private lounge, catering to those who want a bit more exclusivity, has the conference room with writable walls, a second ventilation system, a service portal to the bar (they even have an app that private club members can use to order drinks and cigars without interrupting meetings) and personal lockers, all to foster and enhance a business meeting experience.
That same intent has now translated to their next project, a private social club in Omaha, Nebraska, about an hour drive northeast from the Cornhusker State’s capital. The Apiary Social Club opened in 2024 and is a collaboration with Paul West, a financier and loyal Capital Cigar Lounge customer who thought a similar concept needed to be introduced in Omaha, with some noticeable differences. First, the club would be private.
“The name Apiary was important to us because apiary means a collection of bee hives,” says West. “We wanted Apiary to be a community buzzing with energy, excitement, networking, and a place where our members felt comfortable being together.”
Unlike Capital Cigar Lounge, Apiary is fully private and the club has a non-smoking cocktail lounge set apart from the cigar lounge section with the intent to offer a place for smokers and non-smokers alike.
But most important was to create a space that fosters communication. “One of the things we’ve built is called the Infinite Stage,” says West. “This came to me years ago—I want people to think infinitely about life. So, the club is going to be a chance to help people do just that because great conversations happen with the leaf. So, we have a weekly speaker series where business leaders, community leaders and philanthropic leaders come in and tell their story.”
Recently, Apiary hosted the Omaha Community Foundation, the University of Nebraska head football coach and a panel of minority community leaders talking about what’s needed from affordable housing, workforce development and financial opportunities in developing and revitalizing neighborhoods in Omaha. Says West, “The idea is to bring people in to talk, but then everyone gets to ask questions and discuss, and it’s the conversations afterward that speak to thinking infinitely about life.”
What began as an almost accidental spark in a Lincoln cigar shop has grown into a testament to the chemistry of preparation and chance. Hillis and Goins, and now West, remind us that serendipity isn’t just stumbling into luck. It’s having the foresight and daring to shape it into something lasting. Capital Cigar Lounge, and now the Apiary Social Club, are more than businesses; they are living rooms for a community, sanctuaries of conversation in a noisy world. In their spaces, trust is forged over smoke and glass, and strangers leave as friends. Serendipity may whisper, but it takes vision to give it voice—and that’s the story they continue to write.
– Photography by Kaleb Duncan Photography. Story by Greg Girard, managing editor of PCA The Magazine.
This story first appeared in PCA The Magazine, Volume 3, 2025. To receive a copy of this magazine, you must be a current PCA member. Join or renew today at premiumcigars.org/membership.