Restraint is a competitive advantage. Consider poet Elizabeth Bishop.

Over a brilliant 50-year career, she published only 101 poems.

Marvel at the math: that’s an average of just two poems per year. Yet her unrelenting focus, rigorous discipline, and absolute refusal to rush substandard work won her both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. 🏆

Drinks leaders and entrepreneurs could transform their businesses by acting more like Bishop.

It’s only when you aim for quality over proliferation, things grow (and, oddly, proliferate).

I’m not just talking about liquid quality, but:

• Relationship quality 🤝

• Process quality 🏗️

• Decision quality 🔀

• Data quality 📊

• Brand quality 🥫1

• Customer and Consumer quality 🛒

Here’s a link to a favorite of mine, Bishop’s “One Art.”

Sales reps require reinvention in order to stay relevant. Like certain pop stars—The Beatles and Madonna come to mind—successful salespeople evolve. This could mean fine tuning their presentation style or honing certain timeless traits. One’s market awareness must be constantly revised in light of changing tastes. Still, it’s better to develop a toolkit of skills that will allow you to adapt with the new economy. These skills, rather than product trivia, are often what need updating. After all, the ability to quickly find a payphone prior to order board cutoff is no longer in high demand.1 This brave, new world requires these eight, learnable skills that will help you level up your sales:

AI Literacy

• AI isn't going to walk into an account and sell a case for you, but it will save you ten hours a week on back-office admin. If you aren't using LLMs to synthesize market reports, clean up messy account lists, or instantly draft a custom pitch angle for a busy buyer, you are competing against a calculator using an abacus. Don’t harness the tech to create slop; leverage it so you can better understand your accounts and spend more time face-to-face. Learn about AI by reading a book like Co-Intelligence by Ethan Mollick and The AI-Driven Leader by Geoff Woods. Or take a free online class like Google Prompting Essentials.

Organizational Psychology

• Beverage sales are rarely a straight line between you and a single buyer. To survive, you have to navigate an ecosystem of competing incentives—the bartender’s ego, the GM’s margin panic, and the distributor’s inventory pressures. If you don't understand the psychological friction and internal politics inside an account, you aren't selling; you're just pitching. Learn how groups make decisions, find the real stakeholder, and solve their specific anxiety. If you want to master this, read The New Strategic Selling by Robert Miller and Stephen Heiman to learn how to map out who actually holds the power in an organization. Check out Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss to learn how to negotiate with others.

Data Analytics

• The era of the "relationship rep" who sells purely on a good lunch and a handshake is evolving. Some retailers might care about your golf game, but all of them care about cold box velocity and margin-per-square-inch. If you can’t open a spreadsheet, pull your own depletions, and read a market report to prove your brand's organic pull, you’re just guessing. Data is how you defend your shelf space from being swallowed by a competitor. Start arming yourself with knowledge and know-how now.

Social Media Literacy

• In late-stage capitalism, a fate worse than death is invisibility. For a brand or person, the shortest path to the latter is through social media ineptitude. Think of it as irrelevance by way of incompetence.

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  Contrary to the belief that you’re selling yourself, social media for salespeople is way of reminding others—your customers and your company—you exist. The more you “exist,” the easier your job will become. Mark S. Granovetter’s 1973 hypothesis on weak social ties might go a long way in explaining why likes, followers, and shares resonate and reverberate into sales.

• Writing

  You should know the difference between pallet and palate.2 You should be able to express yourself clearly. You should be able edit your company’s marketing blast so that it’s in your own voice. If you’re not actually talking with customer, you’re likely communicating with them via email or text. The ability to gain trust and respect by sounding authoritative is key.

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  How do you get better at writing? Read good authors. Write every day. Don’t like writing? Too bad. It’s a muscle that must be worked.

  As William Faulkner once quipped, “I only write when inspiration strikes. Fortunately, it strikes at nine every morning.”

  Read everything you write out loud. Change what doesn’t sound right. You can almost always edit at least 10%. Make every word work.

• Project Management

  Every sales rep needs to know how to manage their own time so they can be respectful of their customers’ time. Being organized is of utmost importance because this isn’t a business with cookie-cutter clients. Planning helps you deliver and delivering pays dividends.

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  If you’re an executive or sale manager and you aren’t implementing agile sales it’s time you begin educating yourself. Your company, your salespeople, and your customers deserve it. It is time wine and spirit distribution learned something from the tech industry.

• Bilingualism

  If someone speaks another language, they will taste and talk of things you could never know. Download Duolingo and start learning.

• Graphic Design

  Reps need to be able to make their own simple graphics just like they’re expected to be able to carry 40 pounds. Salespeople need to know how to crop images, add text, and make collages. Canva is free and has just about all of the functionality that a rep could want. Level up your graphic design skills and never have to wait for anyone else to get back to you with that image you need.

In the film Awakenings, Dr. Malcolm Sayer interviews for a job after spending five years on an apparently failed research experiment.

When the board dismisses his hypothesis, stating “It can’t be done,” Sayer replies: “I know that now. I proved it.”1

In the best of circumstances, your brand makes money, lots of money.

Lacking growth or profitability, you must be proving something. And that thing that you are proving should be valuable.

Five things that are not valuable to prove:

1. 👅 Liquid tastes good (subjective noise)

2. 🎆 Influencer hype (vanity metrics)

3. 🚚 A distributor will list you (forced push)

4. 🪩 Flashy event activation (unsustainable)

5. 🗺️ Geographic expansion (any brand can grow their footprint)

Five things that are valuable for a brand to prove:

1. 🏎️ Reliable account velocity (organic pull)

2. 🔁 Repeat purchase behavior (customer retention)

3. 💰 Healthy gross margins at scale (unit economics)

4. 🍹 A clear drinking occasion (consumer intent)

5. ⏱️ A distributor rep can pitch it in 10 seconds (succinct, memorable, and distinctive messaging)

What are you proving?

The most important three words a drink brand, its sales team, or an investor can use are identical:

“Tell me more.”

In negotiation science, open-ended prompts act as behavioral crowbars. 🤝

While direct questions often put people on the defensive, inviting someone to elaborate safely bypasses their guard.1 It forces the speaker to fill the silence, organically exposing their true motivations, hidden anxieties, and strategic gaps.

From Socrates’ method of teaching ☝️ to Columbo’s strategy 🕵️‍♂️ for getting suspects to open up, “tell me more” gets to the heart of things:

• for Brands: It uncovers the raw, emotional “why” behind consumer buying habits during market research, moving past surface-level answers.2

• for Sales Reps: It diagnoses a retail buyer’s hidden operational pain points, margin pressures, and true category goals. 📦

• for Investors: It pressure-tests a founder’s core thinking and operational adaptability, cutting straight through a polished, rehearsed deck. 💵

Want to instantly kill an investor’s interest in your beverage brand?

Demand an NDA in your first or second conversation.

Your early-stage magic can’t be easily copied, but premature legal friction will absolutely kill your momentum.

When Red Bull launched, the recipe wasn’t a state secret; it was a slightly modified Thai energy drink. The magic wasn’t the liquid itself, but Dietrich Mateschitz’s genius marketing and guerrilla distribution strategy. These are things an NDA could never protect.

The usual concerns:

• “But what if they steal my formulation?” Remember, you shouldn’t share exact ratios or chemical specs in an introductory chat anyway.

• “What if a big brand steals my concept?” Investors fund execution, not a rival beverage startup built from a pitch deck.

• Your attorney will tell you to protect everything. But a lawyer’s job is to minimize risk; your job is to build a business.

Save the NDA or MCA for when it actually matters:

• Data Rooms: When opening up deep-dive financial and operational due diligence.

• Proprietary Specs: When sharing exact ingredient formulations or sensitive co-packer contracts.

• Finalizing Deals: When reviewing final contract terms, not during early relationship building.

A reader writes with a frustration shared by almost every supplier:

It’s crazy to realize our distributor reps have to work so hard just to get samples to interested accounts! How can we effectively get product into their hands?" It’s a vital question, because if your liquid isn’t actively in a rep's bag, your brand isn't going to sample itself.

Choosing a sampling strategy is a direct trade-off between scale, cost, and human connection.

Look at how William Grant & Sons and Steven Grasse's creative agency Quaker City Mercantile launched Hendrick’s Gin in 2000. Instead of relying on standard distributor fulfillment, they bypassed the traditional corporate pipeline by sending ambassadors to hand-deliver cucumber-laden "curiosity kits" directly to sales reps, accounts, and tastemakers. They knew a commoditized delivery system yields a commoditized response.

To solve this for your own brand, you have to choose your route:

• The Easy Route: Wholesaler Fulfillment

  This is what most suppliers do. Let the distributor handle logistics from warehouse inventory. While highly scalable, you completely sacrifice your message. Worse, you risk funding "ghost samples"—bottles that get lost in warehouse noise or end up in a rep's personal home bar instead of a buyer's glass.

• The Bespoke Route: Direct-to- Rep

  Gather rep home addresses and ship personalized sample kits and swag directly to them. It’s expensive and labor-intensive, but the high-touch impact ensures your bottle actually stands out and makes it into their bag. Note: this is might not be wise financially for a vodka that wholesales for $21, but for a high-margin, $90 luxury spirit, it might make all kinds of sense.

• The Hybrid Route: Face-to-Face

  Hand-deliver bottles yourself during market visits and general sales meetings. This builds instant rapport with zero shipping friction, though your footprint is strictly capped by your travel calendar. Although, who knows? The market just might benefit from your presence.
  

Too many brands over-index on the ends of the B2B pipeline while neglecting the critical center: the distributor rep. If your distributor reps don’t feel the magic of your brand, they can’t replicate it for their accounts.

How easy it is to forget that even the cheerleaders need cheerleading.

Transitioning your sampling from a standard logistics chore to a memorable, high-touch touchpoint is another way to turn potentially indifferent gatekeepers into high-performing frontline assets. Seeding samples in a way that is personal and distinctive is another tactic for building genuine rapport.

Ben Carlson is a favorite financial writer of mine.1 He seamlessly marries the anecdotal with data to illuminate and simplify arcane investment topics. In his recently published Risk and Reward: How to Handle Market Volatility and Build Long-term Wealth, Carlson combines stories of stand-up comedians prepping for talk shows with data-driven insights on soccer goal-keeping to illustrate the importance of smart inaction.2

In one of the most incisive sections of the book, Carlson outlines 20 things he believes about investing. I was struck by how much his investment philosophy parallels my own when it comes to entrepreneurship. Beverage brand founders would be wise to heed some of his takeaways:

Carlson: “…Simple beats complex. The problem is that simple is much harder to implement because complex will always sound more intelligent and appealing. It’s easier to be fooled by randomness with complexity.”

My view: For drink brands, simple is easier than complex—easier to manage, easier to message. It’s also less expensive than complex. Aim for fewer SKUs and fewer markets, done better.

Carlson: “…Self-control can make you far more money than just about any other trait as an investor. I know plenty of high IQ people who are terrible investors because they don’t have the right temperament.”

My view: Brands that scale require laser-like focus from their founders, leaders, and broader teams. Lack of focus is a pitfall I encounter time and time again. Brand creation and product invention is lighting a spark, while brand-building is growing the fire by continually gathering more and more fuel. It is dangerous for companies to conflate the two. Excitement needs to be sustained on a core product in a key market(s) for years.

Carlson: “…Process is more important than outcomes, but at some point performance matters. A successful investment process requires making good decisions over and over again. But you have to understand the difference between discipline and delusion if your process isn’t working.”

My view: In the early years, prioritize learning over raw volume. Strong velocity in ten accounts beats weak velocity in a hundred. Don’t confuse case counts with brand strength.

Carlson: “…There are many different paths to being a successful investor, but only a handful of ways to fail. There is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to investing the right way. But unsuccessful investors typically exhibit the same poor investment behavior…”

My view: I can’t tell you how your brand will succeed, but I can list the dozen or so ways your company will fail:

• undercapitalization

• lack of focus

• lack of product-market fit

• market/marketing dilution

• consumer confusion

• lack of differentiation and/or memorability

• mis-prioritizing goals

• not understanding the order of operations when it comes to brand-building

• not building a foundation that’s scalable

• poor company culture

• growing too quickly

• taking on the wrong investment at the wrong time

• not establishing commercial value proposition

There are no secrets or surprises here, just an unwillingness to come to terms with how difficult it is to nail these things down.

Carlson: “…Every investor has their own behavioral blindspots. Knowing your lesser self is more important than worrying about what other investors are up to.”

My view: Founders must be curious about themselves. Understanding your “lesser self” allows you to build the team that covers your gaps.

Carlson: “…Optimists are better investors than pessimists… If you don’t think things will be better in the future than they are today, what’s the point of investing in the first place?”

My view: You wouldn’t be building a brand if you didn’t believe in the bright future of this industry. Worry less about the macro headwinds and more about the microcosm that is the backbar you haven’t won yet.

Stop begging for “a quick intro.”

An often overlooked measure of success is the frequency of your unsolicited introductions. If your work is truly undeniable, people won’t just open the door, they’ll drag their best contacts through it without you asking. Excellence attracts advocates.

In 1947, Christian Dior didn’t have to lobby the fashion elite to notice his “New Look.” The designs were so disruptive that Harper’s Bazaar editor Carmel Snow famously grabbed him and declared his work a revolution. She didn’t wait for a pitch; she spent the next year introducing him to every power player in Paris because being the person who “found” Dior was the ultimate social currency.1

• Reputation as Collateral: People only volunteer intros when your excellence makes them look like a genius for discovering you. When a buyer introduces a sales rep to a peer, they aren’t doing you a favor, they are taking a risk. Make it worth it.

• Low-Friction Scaling: Volunteered intros bypass the “BS filter” and the gatekeepers that stop 90% of reps at the door.

• The Magnetism of Merit: No investor wants to use their social currency on a brand that hasn’t found its “why.” When your traction is undeniable, the intro becomes an opportunity for them to look like a visionary.

In 1736, London’s “Gin Craze” forced the spirits trade underground. To survive, vendors created the “Puss and Mew,” a wooden cat mounted on a wall where a passerby would whisper a code and drop a coin into its mouth. Gin wasn’t found on a billboard; it was found by those who knew exactly which alleyway to turn down.1 Today’s digital landscape has brought us full circle: discovery is no longer about who is the loudest, but who is whispered about in the right spaces.

Modern discovery has moved beyond “Google it.”2 For drinks brands, the path to purchase is now a funnel of ambient discovery and deep-niche validation. Here is where you need to show up:

1. The Top of Funnel: “Vibe” Discovery (TikTok & Spotify)

This is the new “front door.” Discovery here is passive and aesthetic.

• The Tactic: Don’t sell the liquid; sell the ritual, the vibe, the feeling.

• Examples: WhistlePig wins on TikTok with “edu-tainment” that feels like a creator’s post, not a brand’s ad. Non-alc brand Ghia uses curated Spotify playlists to own the “pre-dinner mindset” long before the bottle is opened.

2. The Mid-Funnel: The New “Sources of Truth” (AI Search & Reddit)

When curiosity turns into intent, consumers look for “unfiltered” data.

• AI Search: Search is shifting toward “answer engines.” Brands like Fortaleza Tequila and Foursquare Rum dominate Perplexity and Gemini results because they’ve seeded technical data across high-authority blogs and forums.3 Treat your mash bills, aging conditions, and ester counts as “training data.” If you aren’t publishing this data on high-authority sites like Substack or Medium, you are letting the AI hallucinate your brand story, or worse yet, ignore it.

• Reddit: In communities like r/bourbon, r/tequila, and r/rum, marketing fluff is a liability. You don’t “target” these users; you earn them. Host AMAs or share “behind-the-curtain” production secrets. If you provide raw value, the community becomes your most vocal sales force.

3. The Bottom Funnel: Conviction (Niche Apps & Dark Social)

This is where the actual purchase decision is codified by enthusiasts.

• Niche Communities: Platforms like Agave Matchmaker, Whiskybase or Rum Ratings are the final hurdle. A high score here is worth more than a dozen billboards because it offers peer-vetted “proof.”

• The Dark Social Layer: The most influential conversations in high-end spirits happen in “dark” spaces—closed Discord servers, WhatsApp groups, and Telegram channels. This is where “allocation hunting” and “bottle flipping” hype is born. You can’t buy your way into these groups, but you should be monitoring them.

Measuring Success

The old “cost-per-click” (CPC) metric is now a lagging indicator of an obsolete strategy. To measure modern influence, founders and marketing managers need to consider:

• Share of Model: How often does an AI “Answer Engine” recommend your brand when asked for a recommendation in your category?

• Sentiment over Volume: Don’t just track mentions; track the “authority” of the person mentioning you. One positive thread on a niche Discord is worth 1,000 “likes” from a broad audience.

• Data Density: Is your technical data (production specs, terroir, provenance) easily accessible and indexable?

Legend goes: Ernest Hemingway was challenged to write a story in just six words. He penned, “For sale: Baby shoes, never worn.”

Let that sink in.

Hemingway didn’t attempt to list an inventory of narrative components.1 He understood that a single, poignant image carries more weight than a catalog of facts.

In aggregate, the beverage industry, has never fully understood this.

Most product descriptions read like resumes, a collection of neutered facts:

“This wine is from Napa, made from Sauvignon Blanc by a second-generation grower.”

Fully accurate and completely forgettable.

To make a story more compelling, consider including the following three ingredients:

1. Relative Comparison: Use superlatives or scale to provide context. Is it the most or least something? Or the first?

2. Analogy/Simile/Metaphor: Give the brain a memorable mental shortcut.2

3. The “Who:” Connect the “what” to a human “why.” It could be about who the product is for or who made it. This is the “because” of it all.

Apply these techniques critically and note the wholesale transformation of our previously bland product story:

“This Sauvignon Blanc comes from the most biodiverse vineyard in California based on a UC Davis study. It was planted as a labor of love for the grower’s father, who refuses to drink the heavy reds Napa is famous for. She says crafting a delicate white wine in a region obsessed with bold Cabernets is like trying to play a solo flute in the middle of a heavy metal concert—you have to be technically perfect just to be heard.”

Facts inform, but stories stick.3 If you want your product to be more than a line item, stop selling the specs and start telling them better.

Was there enough "drinks industry" news last week for you? 📰

The chatter is deafening, between:

• RNDC offloading major distribution footprints

• Phony Negroni’s exit to The Wine Group

• the collapse of the Pernod/Brown-Forman mega-merger, and

• Sazerac’s strategic play for 818

But if you’re a founder actually building a brand, none of this changes your reality.

These moves are corporate "noise."

They are part and parcel cyclical retrenchment and consolidation that happen every time the market pendulum swings. While the giants reshuffle their maps and legacy players fight for cultural relevance, your mission remains exactly what it was seven days ago:

• Better your unit economics 📦

• Own your backyard 📍

• Understand your depletions 📊

• Increase retention 🔄

• Grow your velocity 🚀

Don’t confuse industry "news" with your brand's progress. The giants are playing a game of musical chairs. That's not your game.

While legacy drink accelerators like AB InBev’s ZX Ventures and Distill Ventures have largely wound down or folded, 2026 has plenty of places where scrappy founders and new-to-world brands can find the support needed.

If you are looking to scale, here are the programs, incubators, and accelerators you should have on your radar:

💵 Incubators & Mentorship Programs 🎓

These programs are generally “non-dilutive,” meaning they don’t take a chunk of your company. They focus on coaching, community, and, in some instances, bridge capital.

• Samuel Adams Brewing the American Dream: The current gold standard for support. They provide coaching, pitch competitions with capital prizes, and counseling for F&B small businesses.

• Pilot Project Brewing: A dedicated “brewery incubator” that allows pre-launch and early-stage brands to grow from concept to taproom without the heavy capital expense of building a dedicated production facility.

• Seed Spot Impact Accelerator: Specifically for social-impact beverage brands, this virtual intensive accelerator and training for diverse entrepreneurs ready to drive meaningful change.

• Tory Burch Foundation Fellows: A community-based program providing education and networking for women-led brands. It’s less about “liquid” and more about the “leader.”

• The Hatchery Chicago: A non-profit incubator providing commercial kitchen space and a clear path to retail for founders who need physical infrastructure without the massive overhead.

• Rutgers Food Innovation Center: A globally recognized hub that supports beverage companies in the “unsexy” but vital areas: R&D, food safety, and manufacturing compliance.

• PepsiCo Greenhouse: This program offers global mentorship for the next generation of functional and “better-for-you” drinks. It focuses on APAC-based companies.

🛒 Retailer-Led Programs 🛍️

These programs are specifically designed for small businesses to “test and learn” with bigger players.

• 7-Eleven “Brands with Heart”: The gateway to the convenience channel. Selected "purpose-led" brands pitch to 7-Ventures for a chance at a regional in-store test to prove their velocity with "on-the-go" shoppers.

• Walmart “Open Call”: A high-stakes "Golden Ticket" opportunity for American-made products. Founders get one-on-one pitch meetings with merchants for a shot at local, regional, or national shelf space.

• Target Takeoff: A premier retail accelerator for brands ready for mass-market. It offers direct access to Target’s merchandising team and network of experts to help you prep for a national shelf set.

• Whole Foods Market Local and Emerging Accelerator Program (LEAP): A 12-week “Retail MBA” for early-stage brands. It offers scaling education, buyer mentorship, and a potential $25,000 equity investment, often resulting in immediate regional shelf placement. Note that this program does not have a dedicated web page (so far as I could tell), so you’ll need to do some serious research to find it.

• Fusion Partnership Lab: Diageo’s collaboration-focused lab. They don’t fund brands so much as they partner with the tech around them—sustainability, packaging, and operational innovations.

📈 Equity & Investment Accelerators 🚀

These programs typically provide capital and operational “hand-holding” in exchange for a percentage of your business.

• SKU: This is “CPG Harvard,” a 12-week high-intensity and mentor-driven program. It requires proven traction (usually $100k+ ARR) and takes an equity stake in exchange for participation.

• Pronghorn: A platform dedicated to diversifying the spirits industry. Backed, in part, by Diageo, it offers capital and mentorship to scale brands owned by underrepresented founders.

• Beyond CPG: A tactical growth program designed to grow emerging brands through expert retail strategy. Requires a 5% equity exchange.

• Big Idea Ventures (Global Food Innovation Fund): A fund and accelerator targeting the next generation of products that use sustainable proteins.

• InvestBev Accelerator: Think of this as a “compact MBA” for beverage founders. It serves early stage brands that are readying themselves for distribution. This program has an associated cost.

Who did I miss? If you’ve been through a program that fundamentally changed your business, drop it in the comments below. 👇

In an industry built on relationships, “AI slop” outreach isn’t going to grow your business. When the cost of generating content is lower than ever, content isn’t an edge; your 753-word email isn’t a business generator anymore.1

Instead, use AI to build context.

Here are 3 ways a sales rep can deploy AI easily and effectively:

• Agentic Monitoring: Use “web-browsing” agents to monitor local retail portals and e-commerce listings across your zip codes. Instead of manual checks, set alerts for when your SKU hits zero or a competitor drops price. 🌐

• Scaled Social Media Audits: Use AI to crawl and summarize the social feeds of your top 50 accounts. The output is a monthly “Vibe Sheet” that synthesizes their current philosophy—like a shift toward low-ABV or sustainability—so you walk in knowing their values, not just their name. 📱

• The Personal Data Analyst: Don’t wait for corporate reports.2 Upload your raw depletion CSVs to a secure LLM to spot “proven patterns” in seconds. Ask it to find the “hidden gems”—accounts with high velocity but narrow distribution—and generate your target list for the week. 📊

The goal? Reclaim 5 hours a week to actually care 10% more. You aren’t competing with AI; you’re competing with the rep who uses AI to serve their accounts. 🤖🤝

Your cap table is not tuition for "finding yourself" or figuring out your brand.

I see a lot of beverage-industry founders try to charge their learning curve to investors—buying into national retail without local velocity or dropping $100k on a rebrand before selling a single case. Investors are looking for growth and exits, not covering the cost of an expensive education.

You’ve graduated when your strategy is driven by depletion data and repeat velocity, not "gut feelings." You aren't scaling a guess; you’re scaling a proven pattern.

Investor capital is leverage for more, not permission for different. Investors are paying to accelerate the execution you’ve already mastered. 📈

Call it the “Great Bifurcation” or the corporate version of the K-shaped economy. Whatever the label, the shift is transformative. 🔄

The big players and major PE firms are still hunting for scale. Mark Anthony Group’s $325M acquisition of The Long Drink Company confirms that “convenience” remains the industry’s North Star. 🌟 While other giants fill white spaces—GALLO (Four Roses), Sazerac Company (Dirty Shirley), and Constellation Brands (Hop Wtr)—Paine Schwartz Partners is betting $25M on functional energy with Lucky Energy‘s Series B. ⚡️

But a tactical new model is emerging: the professionalized roll-up. 🛠️

No Sleep Beverage Inc. just launched its platform by acquiring Whiskey Del Bac, Nine Banded Whiskey, and UME Plum Liqueur. This isn’t just a collection of brands; it is a platform company formed to introduce efficiencies and scale “cultural touchstones” through the current “down” cycle. 🥃✨

As No Sleep CFO David No points out, “selling costs” are the primary barrier for startup success. By sharing infrastructure and professionalizing operations, an agile platform creates the leverage needed for profitability. This model allows “consumer-centric” brands—like the mesquite-smoked Whiskey Del Bac or the sessionable Ume Plum Liqueur—to focus on building emotional relationships while the platform handles the heavy lifting. 🤝🚀

The market is hotter than the headlines suggest, but the criteria have shifted. 🔥 Whether it’s giants buying mindshare or platforms buying potential, the goal is the same: leverage over luck. 🎯

Dave Infante just made his “Fingers Buzzwords of the Week” free.1 It’s an essential resource for thinking founders because it catalogs the exact phrases you should never use.

Corporate clichés like “empathy-first” or “rooted in counterculture, craftsmanship, and community” are more than just vapid; they are a crutch for brands devoid of actual connection. When a brand lacks a clear identity, it reaches for a buzzword.

Martin Amis famously noted that “all writing is a campaign against cliché.”2 Branding is no different. To stake a claim on consumer mindshare, you have to kill the corporate-speak.

Beverage brands must avoid the cliché for three reasons:

• Invisibility: Cliches turn your brand into background noise. In a crowded cooler, a word like “craftsmanship” is now a synonym for “nothing.”

• The Trust Gap: Over-polished jargon smells like a script. Authenticity is found in the specific and the idiosyncratic, not the generic.

• Friction: Because buzzwords are so empty, they demand the consumer do the work of translating your “values.” If they have to think that hard, they’ve already moved on.

Brand and their companies need to stop “operationalizing” and recognize that connecting means communicating like a human, preferably one that avoids clichés.

In 1982, William Goldman began writing Adventures in the Screen Trade at the “nadir of Hollywood despair.”1 At the time massive flops like Heaven’s Gate and Raise the Titanic! had film studios paralyzed.

As one worried executive told Goldman about audiences:

“We don’t know what they want. All we do know is that they don’t want what we’re giving them.”

Goldman’s legendary takeaway?

“Nobody knows anything.”

By the time his book hit shelves, the “immobilized” industry was in the middle of a historic boom. 1982 and 1983 didn’t just recover; they delivered E.T., Return of the Jedi, and Raiders of the Lost Ark. 1984 brought us Beverly Hills Cop and Ghostbusters. The panic was simply the prologue to a slew of blockbusters.2

The beverage industry is currently feeling that same “Heaven’s Gate” anxiety. Volumes are soft, and the old playbooks are missing the audience. But history shows that the hardest times force the most radical—and successful—reimaginings:

• Napa Valley’s Post-Prohibition Revival: A decimated industry spent decades in the wilderness before the 1976 Judgment of Paris proved that “the experts” had no idea what was coming.

• The Whiskey Slump: In the ’70s and ’80s, American Whiskey was “dead” stock. That despair forced the innovation of small-batch and single-barrel bourbon that redefined global spirits.

• New Zealand’s Pivot: Born from a surplus of uninspired grapes and a desperate need for a new identity, NZ Sauvignon Blanc turned a local crisis into a global category leader, sustaining a growth story that lasted more than 30 years.

When executives say, “The audience doesn’t want what we’re giving them,” it’s usually an invitation to stop giving them the same thing.

Volatility is not a death knell; it’s a filter. It clears out the “me-too” products and forces the reflection, reinvention, and innovation that easy money never could.

If you feel immobilized by the current market, remember Goldman. By the time the “experts” figure out what’s wrong, the next blockbuster era has already begun production. 🥃🎬

As Eric Kessels writes in Failed It! “Brilliance begins at rock bottom.”

The goal for a brand is to be the path of least resistance. Consumers don’t buy because a product is “good to think about.” They buy because it’s easy to feel about.

A great brand demands zero cognitive load.

It “feels right” long before it “makes sense.” If a customer has to solve a puzzle to love you, you’ve already lost.

However, for sales reps, the path of least resistance—competing on low price or generic features—is a trap.

Selling the “easy way” minimizes your relationship to a mere transaction. It’s a race to the bottom where you are easily replaced by a portal or a cheaper competitor.

To build enduring value, a rep must provide the meaningful resistance: the insights, the troubleshooting, and the "caring" that a brand’s cognitive ease cannot provide.

Here’s my recommended reading for drink entrepreneurs:

• Mixed Signals: How Incentives Really Work by Uri Gneezy

• The Wines of California by Elaine Chukan Brown

• Using Behavioral Science in Marketing: Drive Customer Action and Loyalty by Prompting Instinctive Responses by Nancy Harhut

• Super Founders: What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar Startups by Ali Tamases

• Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath & Dan Heath

• Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses by Robin Wall Kimmerer1

What are you reading this spring?

Expertise is often just a fancy word for caring 10% more than the person next to you. We mistake “genius” for what is actually a relentless obsession with the details everyone else ignores.1

The Anatomy of Caring

In our trade, we love certifications.2 To this end, consider this: knowledge is reading the textbook, while expertise is being able to point out a mistake in it. Note that what’s interesting about this dynamic is that you don’t actually need to have read the textbook to be able to find a mistake. In fact, if all you know is the textbook, you’ll never spot the errors.

Enter caring. This “shortcut” to expertise is comprised of genuine, unscalable interest. This means being:

• Endlessly curious about the topic/product/industry/question

• Critically skeptical about received wisdom

• Tirelessly empathetic with all stakeholders (employees, suppliers, customers, and consumers)

Examples from History

• The Wright Brothers: While the Smithsonian-funded elite chased raw horsepower, two bike mechanics obsessed over the “unsexy” physics of lateral control. They didn’t have a bigger budget; they just cared more about how a wing actually turns.

• Early Linux: It wasn’t built by a corporate mandate, but by developers who cared enough to troubleshoot kernels at 3:00 AM for free. Expertise was the byproduct of their stubbornness.

• James Dyson: 5,127 failed prototypes. That wasn’t that he possessed some “spark of genius.” It was his refusal to stop caring about airflow friction.

The Beverage Reality

Here’s what this looks like in action for the:

• Sales Rep: Caring enough to fix a broken draft line when the technician won’t show up. This entails first caring enough to know how to fix it, even if it isn’t part of your job description.

• Buyer: Caring enough to dig into a producer’s soil health instead of just checking a “90-point” box.

• Portfolio Manager: Caring about the long-term “fit” and health of the book, rather than just filling a spreadsheet with “me-too” SKUs.

• Start-up Founder: Obsessing over the “why” behind every single door, rather than just the “how many” on a depletion report.

If you want to be the expert, start by being the person who gives a damn, or at least much more than the competition. The rest will come with time.