Jimmy Lewis had dreamt of opening his personal cigar lounge since school, when he seen a spot within the Virginia market: Individuals have been driving over an hour from Roanoke to Lynchburg simply to purchase cigars and sit in a correct lounge. Roanoke, he thought, may need sufficient cigar lovers to assist a lounge of its personal.
So, a decade later, Lewis took an unlimited danger by shifting his household there and attempting to show his dream into actuality.
That dream grew to become the Bison Head Cigar & Lounge in downtown Roanoke. The lounge is comfy, unpretentious, and stuffed with straightforward dialog. It’s the form of place the place strangers can sit subsequent to one another, mild up, and discover that the one factor they’ve in widespread is “a bundle of rolled-up leaves,” Lewis tells Purpose.
That, he says, is a part of the magic. “I don’t know how many individuals I’ve seen stroll into cigar lounges alone, sit subsequent to someone they’ve by no means met, and so they find yourself changing into the most effective of associates.”
However Lewis’ dream virtually didn’t come true. Beginning a small enterprise from scratch is hard, and the numerous regulatory hoops the town and state made him soar by means of made it even more durable.
As of 2023, the Virginia Administrative Code incorporates 145,818 restrictions and over 8 million phrases, making Virginia the Sixteenth-most-regulated state within the nation, in accordance to the Mercatus Middle. Mixed with the Code of Federal Laws, the state imposes over 1.2 million laws.
For somebody attempting to show an amazing concept into an precise enterprise, these seemingly summary numbers are a demoralizing actuality. Lewis and his enterprise companion started severely planning the cigar lounge in 2022. They wrote a marketing strategy, constructed profit-and-loss spreadsheets, selected furnishings, and deliberate “precisely the best way we might need a cigar lounge to be.” Lewis moved to Roanoke in September 2024, signed the lease in March 2025, invested his life’s financial savings, and hoped to be open inside 60 to 90 days.
As a substitute, they confronted delays and restrictions from the sluggish, grinding equipment of native authorities. “The primary massive step was getting the constructing allow,” Lewis says, “in order that we are able to construct in our area legally and with the approval of the town.” It took round two months to get permission to construct the humidor, which he says is “primarily…a huge walk-in closet.”
Whereas his beneficiant landlord spared Lewis from having to pay lease as he waited for metropolis approval to open his store, the lounge couldn’t keep away from one of many metropolis’s extra obscure guidelines involving indicators. Below Roanoke regulation, companies should submit a everlasting signal allow software, and if the signal is in a historic district—which Bison Head is—a Certificates of Appropriateness can also be required.
Earlier than Bison Head moved in, the constructing had been a dry cleaner that displayed an outdated, damaged signal that was apparently essential sufficient to be deemed historic by a neighborhood preservation physique linked to the town. Lewis says the town needed him to place it again up.
“One massive subject with that’s we’re not a dry cleaner,” he says. “One other massive subject with that’s the signal is damaged.” The signal was outdated neon, the type that requires specialist labor to restore. The estimated value was “upwards of $10,000.”
Lewis supplied the town a deal. If it needed the dry-cleaning signal preserved as a historic landmark, Bison Head would preserve the signal, invoice the town for the roughly $10,000 refurbishment, and let taxpayers know precisely what their cash had been spent on. “Rapidly,” Lewis says, “the signal subject went away.”
This delay value them months. When Lewis tried to place an order in for a easy signal with a neighborhood producer, the producer warned him to not hassle but. It had just lately made one for one more downtown enterprise, Lewis recollects, and “it took six months for the town to approve it.” He acquired his signal accredited a few month later.
For any entrepreneur, cracking the federal government’s regulatory puzzle is a tall process. If a enterprise occurs to promote one thing that the federal government deems a “sin,” the forms is much more troublesome to navigate. Whereas each cigars and alcohol are individually authorized, and adults over 21 might buy each, cigar lounges face a regulatory construction in Virginia that makes it extraordinarily troublesome to let grown adults get pleasure from them collectively.
“You can’t deliver your personal alcohol in right here, and we won’t promote it or serve it,” Lewis explains. “So there’s actually simply no alcohol, no cigar bars or something like that, nowhere the place you may smoke and drink on the similar time.” If Bison Head needed so as to add bourbon to its menu, it could must grow to be a restaurant. However that might require complying with a regulatory framework constructed for eating places, together with a regulation requiring at the very least 45 p.c of income to return from meals and nonalcoholic drinks, a hangover from the state’s Prohibition-era angle towards liquor. A brand new regulation that takes impact this yr removes the ratio totally for eating places with at the very least $48,000 in common month-to-month meals gross sales, and lowers it for some smaller eating places. To qualify, Bison Head would nonetheless must make meals a significant a part of the enterprise—however meals service brings its personal restrictions round indoor smoking, air flow, and separated areas.
So Bison Head sells cigars, equipment, shirts, locker memberships, and no matter else it might legally and creatively provide. Lewis and his companion host pop-ups with breweries and different native companies.
Lewis says that between taxes and different prices, “between 26 and 36 cents of each greenback goes straight to the federal government.” Virginia taxes most tobacco merchandise, together with cigars, at 20 p.c of the producer’s gross sales value. That cash is gone earlier than a small lounge spends on lease, workers, stock, insurance coverage, utilities, or the rest.
The result’s {that a} native enterprise—attempting to create neighborhood, make use of folks, fill a spot out there, and make an space extra enticing—has to spend its youth combating the state for permission to exist.
Many American entrepreneurs have shared Lewis’ expertise with navigating the allowing, licensing, zoning, and alcohol guidelines that usually serve as boundaries to new companies. In April 2026, People filed greater than half 1,000,000 enterprise purposes, however the Census Bureau initiatives that solely 28,479 of them will really grow to be companies with payroll tax liabilities inside a yr.
Whereas the U.S. is likely one of the best locations on the earth to function a enterprise, beginning a enterprise is extremely troublesome. Within the World Financial institution’s most up-to-date “Doing Enterprise” report from 2020, the U.S. ranked sixth total on the index. Nonetheless, within the “beginning a enterprise” class, the U.S. ranked fifty fifth.
“If individuals are adults, they will make their very own selections on what to place into their our bodies,” says Lewis. “The federal government limiting these companies does nothing however damage the financial system somewhat than assist it.”
America rightly celebrates entrepreneurs, and but it continues to make their lives needlessly troublesome. Bison Head Cigar & Lounge survived, however numerous different American goals are smothered by pink tape earlier than they ever grow to be actuality.
