039 | Founding a Drinks Brand: turning the Feudal system upside down | Part 1/2 with Julian Davies, Founder of Ostara Vermouth (London, UK)

Welcome to the Maffeo Drinks Podcast. I m your host, Chris Maffeo. In

episode 39, I finally caught up with my old friend and colleague Julian Davies. He started as a sales guy for Stella Artois in The UK, then moved to SEB Miller, where he wrote the brand building strategy before taking a senior marketing role at Bombay Safire. He now consults startups and is the founder of Ostara English Vermouth. I hope you enjoy our chat. Hi, Julian.

How are doing?

I'm really good. Thanks, mate. How are you?

I'm good. I'm good. It's it's nice and cold here with minus degrees. It's one of those days that I remember I'm from Rome, and I'm not made for this kind of weather, but it's okay.

It's this is this has gone wrong already, mate. I'm the British guy. I'm supposed to speak about the weather first, and you're supposed to just tolerate that. But I can talk to you about the weather if you want. It's snowing here, I think.

So, yeah, I'm just trying to stay warm myself. Nice. Good to talk

to you, mate. So this is, this is a great episode. We've been waiting to to do a session for, for ages. It's long it's long overdue. And, I mean, people may have heard already, you know, our interaction back in the days of Clubhouse when we had our our room called winning with drinks, resetting the room.

And it was cool for, well, like, six months, I'd I'd say. And then everything reopened, then everybody basically, like, nobody wanted to be on Clubhouse anymore, and then it all went weird, and and we stopped it.

There was there was it was heady times, my friend. You know, feeling like a sort of COVID celebrity on Cloudpath. It was great. I remember you phoning me and telling me that, you know, we were just chatting, weren't we? We've been chatting for hours and hours and hours and just going, hey, this is really smart.

Other people should hear this. It kind of went from there. And it was great to be sort of reconnected with so many old friends on that for a little for a little while. And it was a lot of fun. No, but I've been looking forward to this conversation as well.

So like, you know, and then we made a lot of friends. And you know, many of them are actually, you know, part of this podcast and this conversation. So it's a nice continuation of that. And also, another point to raise is that actually, you know, you are the guilty one to make me interesting into this way of building premium brands. I still remember the first time we met and, you know, in in in working in the office and then you were teaching me how to build global brands.

I've been on the receiving side of of of things from the Global Brands Way and and how to build global brands, and that that got me into really digging into I want to know more and I want to do more and I want to understand more how how these things happen.

It's very kind of you to say, mate. I love doing that Global Brands Way stuff. And my memory of it is working as almost a sort of subculture within a big monstrous brewing company that could open up 90% distribution very quickly in any market that it chose to. And then a small little gang of us trying to convince people about another way of doing things and how to build brands slowly and patiently and kind of go through all that process. And yeah, that was the start of it really for me.

And one of the probably one of the best times of my career was going out and and meeting people like you, because you'd kind of bring this effectively academic exercise in a way to people, cool guys like you meeting this cool Italian guy member and thinking, God, what's he going to think of me with my little textbook? But but but to see that kind of taken and then and you guys operating in bars as you were and seeing that it sort of worked for you guys, made me realize that it was kind of definitely the right approach. And that we knew that was our sort of first our first foray into doing it. And that's, I don't like to think about how many years ago that was now because it makes me feel a bit old. But that was our first now our first dealings with each other.

And that's great to be still talking to you about it now.

Absolutely. And it's a little bit what you said in the beginning, the the interaction, you know, the continuous interaction that we've been having since since we met, you know, always kinda like challenging each other and bringing the academic side of things down to, like, a very pragmatic level and then, you know, keeping each other from derailing, not going too fluffy and not going too pragmatic at the same time because it's easy to go wild into grabbing opportunity. And then it's also easy to go wide into the ivory tower kind of thing. And and one of the things that I took from your sessions back then was that it's easy to get it for people who get it, but then it's very complicated for people who don't get it. And that's what I'm trying to do with this whole thing about bring building from the bottom up because, you know, for some people, it's enough to actually read a post of mine or or listen to one episode of mine or a training of yours.

But then, you know, for some other people, they actually wanna say, yeah. But what do I actually have to tell the bartender? What where do I actually map the city? How do I actually find the right bars? And they need to understand it better.

And then there is a need for actually deep diving into how do we actually bring this to life and we make it easy to understand for everyone, not only for people who get it.

Yeah. I think, thinking back to those days as well, if you remember, one of the big breakthroughs we had was to start talking to people about certain types of behaviors and a mindset and an almost like a philosophical approach as opposed to trying to out logic them, if that makes sense. So if someone logically disagrees with the process and building brands from the bottom up, then it's quite hard to out logic them on that. But what you can do is talk about, as I said, a set of behaviors and a way of doing things and almost like a philosophy. And people are either going to respond to that nicely and want to do it and want to get out into into the trade and see it all or not.

And I'm definitely in the camp of people. The reason I work in the alcohol industry and have worked in the alcohol industry is because I love it, is because I love bars. My first job was washing dishes behind my local pub and then graduating to serving the old boys as they'd come in, and memorizing what pint everybody had to have. And that would that's a tough job. But I but I love that.

And so if you love the hospitality world, that's why we don't work in investment banking or work selling toilet roll and all that kind of stuff. And so there's got to be an emotional difference and an emotional reason why we do that. And part of that is to want to sit at the bar, and enjoy drinks and enjoy these brands and really take it all in. I think was it Paul at one of your other one of your other guests talking about getting insights from the bar rather than from focus groups? And I that's it's I love that episode because then, know, what you've got is so many different types of people who are bringing their expertise, be it insights or sales or whatever it is.

But but we're all sort of the common ground, if you like, is the philosophy of wanting to do this in the right way and wanting to sort of be respectful and deferential to the trade. And if that's your start point, I think that's then it becomes, I think, to your point, a little bit more obvious or a little bit more likely that you'll want to do things in this, as it were right, more more patient way, because you respect the trade, you respect the bartenders that are driving it, you respect the consumers that are coming in, and you understand that to earn to earn their respect, takes time, takes consistency of the right approach, takes a lot of patience, and is not always easy to do, right. And so that we're always struggling with this compromise or this dichotomy, if you want to call it that, whether we're a startup or a or a big brand of kind of cash flow and sales versus, you know, the philosophy of doing the right thing. And I remember you and I, within the organization of SAB Miller, which was a great company, always sort of fighting that fight for the philosophical approach of taking your time and building brands for for long term profitability.

And cultures, I think it's a spectrum, don't they? Company cultures, either get that 100%, or they get it 2030%. And so within that, you're, you're either fighting or, or surfing a wave of that culture, if that makes sense.

Absolutely. Absolutely. Totally agree. And the thing is that it's very interesting what you're saying, because people that interact with me on LinkedIn, or Instagram, or the newsletter or the podcast and so on. I'm getting more and more every week now, notes from people, you know, like that they love my podcast or they love that, you know, and they're changing the way they look at things.

And that comes from people that are starting a brand or people that are working in big companies. And even within those big organizations, you know, I've got people from all sort of like huge companies, because you always find the people that actually want to do things in a different way. And sometimes they've got the mandate to do that, you know, like we had because we were the kind of like agile team within within. I I like to to think myself as a what team, although I'm a little bit less fit than than those guys. But I've never really worked in a huge organization, in a huge local market.

No. I've always been the the export guy or the or the import guy, depending how you look at it. But but that's that's the ultimate way of how to do those those things in terms of brand building and so on. And again, like talking about, you know, how do we make things work is that I've been, for example, in both roles, like as more central, regional, European or global roles, and then also like having my own P and L as a country manager. And then sometimes I used to think about you and about our own discussions, like thinking like, what the hell, you know, like if these guys knew how to really make it work for the bottom line rather than preaching.

And then I became the preacher and then I became the challenger. It is that thin balance between those things. There's no right or wrong. There's no like, you know, it has to take five years, it has to take two years. It's just like you need to grasp the opportunities, you need to be pragmatic, but at the same time, need to have a certain direction that will not jeopardize your brand for the long term, because there's nothing wrong in doing a small promo to get some, you know, pallets out there as long as it doesn't basically like mess up your brand equity in a way that then next month or next year, you're never going to reach that budget because you basically mainstreamized, if that's a term, your brand.

Yeah. Gosh, I mean, there's a lot to unpack even even within what you've just said. But I think one of the ways I think about this is that in the end, even if you're a startup, man band type brand, that the inevitable life cycle of a brand is to hit the mainstream, I. E. To hit a certain scale, a certain market share, a full cross section of society that's buying your brand, and almost then by definition to be fighting against sales on promo, you know, price erosion, and all those kind of good things.

In many ways, that's the definition of success, right? That's if if we start our brand, we're hoping we get to that point. Right? And that that brings its own challenges. And we used to talk about this kind of inevitable life cycle of a brand.

Because if you hit that certain point of scale, and you're selling to that whole cross section of society, by definition, you have to understand all the different pressures that come onto that, that come onto you at that point. Meaning lots of your volume sold to not necessarily your target audience, not necessarily sold in the right occasion, the right segmentation, all the right kind of purest things that we talk about. And as I've mentioned, a lot of your volume probably sold on, on price promotion, especially if you're in The UK, and you're going into, you know, the big supermarkets here. But one of the big sort of discussions or fights that I would always have is that within that setup, it's even more important that you're talking as it were to your kind of original core target consumer, and you're giving them that brand and product messaging that you did at the start. And then we used to draw all these sort of clever graphics to try and show that but, and I always talk in analogies too much as well.

But as a history geek, we had this feudal system here during the Middle Ages, you had the king at the top and your bishops, and then and it would kind of gradually go down. And society is like that and selling a brand to to to consumers is still like that, right? You start with your core people at the top. And by definition, as your brand spreads, you're selling to other types of people, right? The key then is to hold on to the concept of who your kind of your kings and your bishops are and who your target consumer is.

And to, to be talking to them even more engagingly and selling your brand to them and telling your brand narrative to those people, meaning those target bars, the best bartenders, all of those kinds of things. You've got big work to do to convince them that your brand, albeit huge, is still great and still well made and still has all the credentials and credibility that it had at the start. And then on to the point that you were making beforehand, I think what that means internally as a team is that huge empathy is required between functions and between geographies and all that kind of stuff as well. Right? As you referenced, you know, when you sit in a global role, you tend to sort of sit in your lighthouse and be shining wisdom on the the little people in the markets.

But if that's all you're doing, then that's not much use. And so you have to be empathetic to the challenges that people are facing in their market and understand the pressure on the salespeople going from bar to bar. At the same time, I would strongly argue that your kind of your salesperson in market x needs to have some kind of upward empathy back to what the vision of the brand is all about, and what the what the point of the brand is all about. And those two things need to meet sort of somewhere in the middle. At whatever stage of your brand you're at.

You can sort of lose identity of your brand, and you end up with a slightly schizophrenic brand and situation going on, or at least not consistency from market to market and from channel to channel.

I agree. I agree. And that's and, you know, when you were talking, like, it made me think back on on the I don't know I don't know if you remember the days which in, you know, the the the last stage of a premium brand was we used to be called expand, and then it changed into sustain. Yeah. Because like languaging is a thing now.

You know, I read some books and they talk about, you know, language and the importance of languaging. So creating new words to describe new things because otherwise or or sometimes even old things. No? Because you need to make sense of that. And even there, within the organization, you talk about expanding, then you're basically like, kind of like flooding the market and then it being, it means promos and discounts and misbehaviors from a brand perspective.

If you talk sustain is about how do you sustain that growth within those challengers that are coming into the category. And it all goes back to the KPIs because where I've seen and where I see success is where basically all this, you know, from, you know, the kings and bishops. I love that analogy. But within that, you take the kings and bishops within an organization, it's all the feudal system has got the same KPIs and they've got the same targets and you know, it can go back to the vision of the brand because that ultimately what it is. Know, if those people are incentivized into driving distribution or into driving rotation or are they incentivized on volume and incentivize on value.

Know, like there is, there are different ways of actually ensuring from mindset or let's call it mindset, let's call it like culture and so on. But ultimately it's the same thing is like when people talk the same thing within the organization. And I remember, for example, when the old Miller Brands UK, which is now Asahi UK, you know, I remember when I came there, like to learn how they were doing things in London and in The UK. And what I was impressed about like back then was that the whole organization was speaking the same language, you know, whether you spoke to the key account guys in the off trade, people managing wholesalers, marketing manager, brand managers, trade marketing managers, logistics people, they were all thinking the same way. So it wasn't like, oh, no, those are the brand guys or no, you know, but trade marketing doesn't get it.

And, you know, then off trade is just doing promos. You know, it was really like all together merging into a nice way, you know, and this is the ultimate thing. So what would you say are, you know, you are also a brand owner. Got your Vermouth brand. So you Ostara, by the way.

How do you see what you have been learning, teaching, experiencing from big multinational perspective now going and doing your own thing? How do you go about that, and how do you start with a brand in your case?

Gosh, that's a really interesting question. One of the reasons I wanted to do my own brand, Ostara, Headroom, and Moose, available on the website all the time. One of the reasons I wanted to do that was actually for the simplicity of being able to make decisions for myself. And strangely enough listening to what you're talking about about SAB Miller UK, or SAHE, whatever it's called these days. It's it's harder in a big team ecosystem like that to get consistency of narrative of, and everyone pulling in the same direction, if that makes sense.

And for me, the most successful organizations, teams, brands, whatever you want to call them, are the ones where all these people are talking to each other and kind of clearly in this on the same page. And that's, it's it still baffles me the number of times that that's not happening, where, you know, sales are saying that the marketing guys just color in the the pictures and the marketing guys think the sales guys are thick and like, it still happens. Right? And it breaks my heart a little bit to see it's still on on LinkedIn because it's such a silly way to think about it. And so to come back to the my own project, one of the reasons I wanted to do it was just to kind of have a little bit of a binary sense of kind of, if if I can come up with a brand narrative and a and a recipe for a liquid and a concept and a listen to that, I can just get on with doing it.

Right? And, you know, it's a one man band thing. I don't have to answer to anybody. I don't have to discuss it with anybody. I don't have to sit in rooms and go through stage gates of innovation that take twenty four months and all of those kinds of things.

And I sort of went from one extreme, I. E, a big corporate environment, where you would go through all those those processes with innovation, for example. And you suffer from almost what I would say, I'd call it sort of decision paralysis, I suppose, where these companies sometimes they don't do anything because great ideas just get diluted and diluted through various functions of the business, I suppose. And so I wanted to just have a go at doing that for myself. Don't get me wrong, it's also bloody hard.

And so without having kind of the the ecosystem and the support structures and the the cache and the runway and all that kind of stuff, it's difficult. So yeah, for me personally, you know, somewhere in between those two extremes is probably the best way forward. So, you know, the smaller teams that I see now, and this is something that you and I have talked about, you know, smaller teams where clarity on strategic direction, clarity on brand sales, commercial KPIs, you referenced KPIs before, and that everyone understands the ultimate goal, tends to breed teams that are all saying the same thing and doing the same thing, albeit with a different functions, and tends to, you know, there's a strong correlation between those teams, I think, and brands that are performing well within that categories, whatever that category is.

I agree. I agree. And what the challenge on that is, is like from a founder perspective, that it's one of the discussion that I think I was having with Paul Letko in episode can't remember the name of the the number of the episode, but I think it was like

One of the early ones. Right?

Well, yeah. I think it's like 30 where basically, like, I'm talking about, like, how do you build demand for your brands? And how does that evolve through time? Because if you're a founder, you know, in the beginning, you are the one going and hitting the streets with with the bottle in your backpack kind of thing. And then it develops in a way that then you're a guest on a podcast.

So you're still building demand for the brand, but you're not actually doing the old thing you used to do. But you need to, in my opinion, have done that in order to understand what it takes. Because what I what I struggle with is when I when I see people launching a brand and then hiring a team right away. So they are they are the founder, but they actually almost like an investor rather than a founder. And then if you haven't got the door on your face in a bar or if you haven't had that conversation like, thanks, but no thanks kind

of thing.

Then you don't know what it means to to actually do that. So there is a journey to be able to do that. And then we discussed this many times, you know, there is a level of, you know, okay, the runway that goes with it and the bottom up way, it's more like it does not fix time. Mean, it's not that building bottom up means it takes five years or ten years or twenty years. It depends on your effort, on your resources, on the people you've got available, you people you've managed to bring with you on that journey.

And then you may go faster or smaller depending on exogenous conditions in the market as well. But it is the way forward is just that you need to see, you know, like how long how long it will take for you depending on all those things that I listed before.

Yeah. Look, not that I want more people to enter into The UK drink space because that's, you know, competition I could do without. I think I think it's, it's a really interesting exercise for anybody who professes to be either a consultant or a brand director or whatever, to have actually had to have done it for themselves. Because it's different, right? In the years that we've known each other, when I was banging on about this slightly academic exercise that we're talking about of dealing with opinion leading influences and building your brands carefully and all that kind of stuff.

To a degree I had done it. But in a corporate setting, one of my big arguments and one of my big, I suppose, itches that I wanted to scratch was never actually having done it. Do know what I mean? So like, I, you know, I started as a salesman, in fact, selling Stella, going into 12 outlets a day. And you know, that's hard.

So I've had my, my share of doors, shut in my face to your point, but not really for myself, not in that kind of existential way of like, I have got to carry these bottles around, I've got to push post on the Instagram posts, which I pretty much shit myself the first time I did that, like for my own brand, because it's different, right? And it's so bizarre to go from a world where, you know, you're briefing multimillion dollar campaigns to fancy agencies and all agency briefings and all this kind of stuff in the boardroom, versus, okay, I'm sitting here with my phone, and I've got to actually write the caption and check this note, typos in it and check that the photos, okay, and I haven't got my finger in the way of the camera or, you know, any of those stupid things. And that's a great and amazing exercise to go through. Because I think to your point, what you learn is, and it was interesting listening to Paul's reference episode that you referenced before, how do you build demand for something? And this is probably a mistake that I made, but I don't know if it's a mistake or not, actually.

We can talk about it. When I made my first batch of Ostara, there was no demand for it because nobody had heard of it. So I started from zero in a category that didn't exist, English Vermouth, really, that I felt on an academic level had some potential. And I felt I'd made a really good product, which I still think is a very tasty product. But the only demand that would ever possibly exist for it would be if I was able to generate that demand either at the time because it was during lockdown, either on an online basis, so I started selling via a website that I made for myself, or by, you know, literally cycling around and delivering samples and delivering bottles to friendly bartenders that I knew if their bar was open.

So like, you know, that's other circumstantial stuff as you spoke about. And then what you have to acknowledge is that that's bloody hard. That takes a really long time. And if you're cash strapped, bootstrapped, whatever you want to call it, you have to also be patient with yourself. And actually, that's something that I'm probably still working on just on a personal level, is being patient with the project, being patient with the fact that it's not in every single bar in The UK yet.

And it's not gonna be right. So it's, you know, in terms of KPIs, if you will, if you want to call them that, I I oddly find myself not living to my own rules, I suppose, because I haven't I haven't really forced myself into KPIs because because some of them I'm not gonna find that useful right now. Right? My only KPI is try and get it in the hands of the right bartenders where I can, try and get people talking about it. If someone wants to talk to me about it, great.

If I can get more people tasting it, I know that they like it. And just sort of keep doing that really, and hope that gets some kind of traction. And I need the help of someone like you to kind of help me make kind of formalize that and make that better. But I've in a way lived these two extremes, one of leading a big global brand in the gin category and kind of that's it's big, right? And you're spending millions of dollars, and you're allocating allocating budget in loads of different markets, and you're able to order brand and buses around and you get to travel around and go to all these amazing bars and whatnot.

I personally got to a point where I thought, actually, I've got to be closer to reality than this. I've got to actually talk to bartenders and not as the guy who's got some big job title, but who's who's just Julian, who's got a product to sell. And I'd love to go through that exercise. That's kind of a personal motivation, I suppose, for why I wanted to do to do my own thing. But at the same time, on a sort of academic or hypothetical basis, if you want to call it that, I found myself really wanting to stress test what you and I talk about all the time and see for myself whether I felt that it worked and whether it could be a thing.

And also, you know, as as I consult people and as I work with people and as and as you and I talk to other brands, etcetera, etcetera, I want to have lived that I want to have, you know, stood with a bartender and have him taste my product and be super nervous about whether he's going to like it or not. And then be delighted when he does like it and just go through that time and time and time again. Because that makes me more credible, I think when I start to talk to people about things like this.

And that's very, it's very interesting, I mean, to listen to your talk. And it made it made me think now that, you know, because ultimately I don't have my own brand yet. What I'm experiencing that the, let's say the closest thing to having my own brand is actually my own brand, my name, you know, and the podcast, for example. And I see that very much, we discussed this as well. It's part of this chat is basically making public our endless talks over the phone, usually on Friday mornings.

And often like the wise people, call it like, you know, you have to, you should be journaling now. And, you know, like in writing a journal and, you know, like writing things. And that is probably the one of the close things to it, to a KPI kind of thing, because sometimes I, I I have this thing like this tool that I'm using and I and I do the hashtag quotes of the day. Yeah. And and then I every once in a while, go back to it, and then I see, like, I filter by hashtag, and then I see all the things that I wrote every single day.

And then I'm like, okay. This is giving me the direction. And and then I go back to the yearly objective that I set up for myself. And then I say, oh, actually, you know, I I think I'm doing pretty good on this one. I'm doing really bad on this one and and so on.

And going back to the to the podcast, the thing that I was saying is that, you know, it's it takes time because I mean, like, it's it's like yesterday, for podcasts are released released the the yearly summary and I launched in mid March and and it was like, well done. You've published eleven hundred minutes of podcasts. Wow. And it made me think because for me it's a weekly thing and it's like, well, 1,100. And, you know, that is obviously an effort from my side, but it's also an effort from the listener side.

And in a way, my listeners are are my drinkers, you know, you know, like they are drinking the podcast to an extent, you know? So you need to convince people to listen because I cannot call my aunt and tell her, you know, please listen to the podcast, you know, because it's very technical. I'm not talking about things that are inviting for the average person, you know, like you must be from the industry and so on. But and that's very similar to how to be how to build demand for a for a drinks brand, you know, going out there and so on. And it takes time.

And and and then it's a matter of when you manage to actually commit to it and say, okay, with the podcast, I want to show up every single week, no matter, you know, the other day I was thinking like, should I skip Christmas week? And I was like, no. Because there's people that will not celebrate Christmas or will have no family to be with, and they won't

be to the podcast. Don't worry. I'll be listening on Christmas day. I'll be I'll and be

and, you know, ultimately, that's that's the thing because it takes time. You know? I'm out there every single time. Every networking events, any time I go and sit at the bar and I have a person next to me, I mention I have a podcast. You know, if I see that those people are interested in drinks and spirits and beers and, you know, I mentioned that to them and they may follow instantly or they may follow me on Instagram and then they go to the podcast later on.

And this is the old, you know, things that is very similar to being out there and meeting the bars and so on. The the trick with that is that you need money to be able to do that. And to your point, like, when you were saying, like, being on expenses, having two cocktails, it's an expense. It's a marketing expense. I mean, people don't wanna see it like that because, like, you're out there, like, having nice drinks and you enjoy yourself.

No. I do enjoy myself, but it's also I would like to be with my daughter and with my wife some nights sitting on the sofa watching a movie rather than being in a bar. But it's needed in order to build the brand. And this is what I feel many founders don't get right because they think that they can outsource the unsexy stuff of building a brand. And and just give it to all I'll hire a brand ambassador, you know, I'll hire an agency, I'll give it to a wholesaler to sell, You know, like, I don't have to do it because I'm preparing the liquid.

I'm preparing the packaging. I'm preparing the cool stuff that is more like a brainstorming kind of thing. And then I don't need to go outside when the storm is hitting.

There's lots to unpack within that. It's it's it's interesting. I've been getting more and more involved in the in the sort of private equity slash VC world recently, I suppose. What you see often within that is people people getting into a business that say, or let let's call it this business. Maybe not quite with the same motivations as what you've just alluded to.

Right? It's it's got kind of like a money making exercise. And that's, you know, that's fine. It is what it is. But I think that as a personal choice, and what I prefer to see is people wanting to get into this business and this sector, because they have a genuine passion for it, and they want to build something that's great.

And whether it's, you know, take myself as an example, whether they see an opportunity and they want to make a liquid that's great, Or they're particularly passionate about gin or some obscure mezcal from somewhere other, you, I think you've got to love it. And you've got to, you've got to kind of feel that you really want to be doing it. And I think to your point on building the podcast, you, you know, you've got to personally, and you have this, you've got to have that kind of personal tenacity and drive to want to do it. You know, when you're tired and you're feeling a bit sick or whatever, you're still going out there and you're still talking to people and you've got to have that motivation. And that's got to be a big reason, you know, why you want to go out there and do it.

With my speaking for myself, there's no greater feeling than sitting in a bar that stocks your product, your product that has decided to pour that and to put it in the cocktail or whatever. And that's just it's the best feeling to sit there and have achieved that. And I'd argue that I think to your to your point, unless you wanna feel that feeling and you're gonna go and sit in that bar and you're gonna go and enjoy it and enjoy the journey, then it's it's less interesting just to kind of try and make a load of money and try and exit within three or four years and make a million or few, you know, a few million quid. Right? That's great if you manage to do that, but you've got to be in it for the journey, because the likelihood is you won't get the exit, you won't make hundreds of millions of pounds, because you're not the rock or Kylie Minogue or whatever, right?

And so you've got to enjoy that process. Otherwise, what's the point? And as a final thought, think that that thing, that sort of founder led drive or the the drive to build brands in a sort of authentic and patient way, I think that's just a fundamental human truth. So that happens to be we're talking about it, you know, the drinks category, but I'm working with a clothing company at the minute. And the concept is the same, right?

I found a lead clothing company that wants to build love for their products and build a community and take their time to do that, and acknowledges that they are not and don't want to be Uniqlo or GAP or whatever. But it's a philosophical and love based approach to why they want to do that. And I think the more that we can do that, and the more that we can produce an environment which enables people like that to flourish in whatever category, and the more interesting our alcohol category will be, because there's people out there with brilliant ideas that want to, you know, want to be able to make interesting products. And I think I think we live actually in very innovative times for the alcohol sector right now. And indeed, the non alcohol sector as well, because people are making, they're looking for interesting flavors, they're looking to jump on to different drinks occasions, and maybe hijack people's rituals, they're looking for interesting non alcoholic, they're looking at forgotten categories, let's say, and the more that we can encourage and enable individuals or small teams to come out and do that, the better.

But as you said, does in the end come back to having the budget and the ability to do that. So there's always that kind of counter argument to that point.

Absolutely. And mean, it brings me back to what you were saying before now, because the founder journey, like the bootstrapping kind of thing, or the funded kind of, you know, there is always that balance, not the either or or and or whatever. But but it's also going back to what's your objective because I hate that word, you know, like that, you know, like when everybody is like in in a meeting is like, so what's the objective of this meeting? You know, like, I hate that, but but ultimately that's the thing. We call it the goal, the objective, the drive, the passion, the whatever, but it's why are you doing it?

And you raise it really well. I mean, I had a shiver on my back when you said it, you know, it's like you have to be there for the journey because, you know, the end may not be there. Imagine like I do this for my daughter. You know, my daughter, when she's gonna be working, she may be a ballet dancer and she will say like, Maffeo drinks, like, you know, like, I've I've got nothing to do with this company. Or like, it could be like that I want to sell it for a zillion dollars, which will never come because nobody will nobody will ever buy it.

So either I enjoy it now, while I'm building something for myself first, and then for the others. Or I will be disappointed, you know, because there will always be some, you know, like disappointment at the end of the journey. So the thing is that it takes time to build things. I mean, it's it's just like a given and people are misled by industry media, by people telling stories that they don't know about of people exiting after one year, after two years, after three years. Those are just like strike of luck.

You know? The ultimate thing is that it takes time. It may take twenty years as I usually say, and I and I stole that from Paul again. But then, you know, it may take ten. But the thing is that depending what you're looking for, because even being funded, it can be that you basically got yourself a job then.

You know, you're not a founder anymore because then you need to report to the investors. You need to report to the people that gave you money. So then you become the whatever, managing director, CEO, president, whatever you wanna call it. But you are not you

as such anymore. Well, you become everything you probably didn't wanna be

at start of year. And that's the thing that it it's like the and and, again, like, there's no right or wrong. There's no system like that only bootstrappers are cool or only managing directors of a funded brand are cool. Or if you sell out, you are a bad person because I thought you wanted to do it for your own thing and then in the end you sold out. You know, it's not about that.

It's just about understanding what it takes and what it will bring you. And the trick with that is that our industry is a is a cool industry. That's the beauty and the curse of it at the same time, because it drags people into the business that are seeing only the allure of that, you know, rather than actually seeing how hard it is to get there. And it drags in people like from investment banking, lawyers, accountants, you know, like all sort of people that are, you know, it's cool to have a brand. It's cool to have a gene brand.

It's cool to have a Vermont brand. It's cool to have a restaurant, a bar, a pizzeria or whatever. But it it takes time to build those businesses because they are businesses ultimately now. And that is the tricky the the tricky one on convincing those people that easy money are not a thing in this world.

No. I mean, I I think I I completely agree with you. I think this this is a little bit of a UK centric viewpoint maybe, but you you, you know, you mentioned gin. There's so many gin brands in The UK category here, far too many. And usually, there's a kind of an interesting founder story or, you know, there's there's something in that I I won't name them.

I'm I'm gonna try and hard try hard not to make to name them. But it's usually some guy who's made a load of money somewhere, and who's run out of other things to spend money on and thinks it would be quite cool to have his own gin brand so he can kind of take his pals to a couple of bars, and they can all laugh about how he's got his own gin, which is great. And, you know, good for them. I think to flip it a little bit, I always I feel very sad genuinely, for founders who are not that guy. But who, when you ask them sort of what their goal is, they start talking about a, you know, a three year exit or a five year exit or, you know, x x year exit.

Because the likelihood of that happening, the likelihood of someone coming along and going, here's £50,000,000 or whatever, is so infinitesimally small that although you read about it with Stipsmith or whatever, name a brand, right, that's had a huge exit to somewhere or, you know, it's it's it's probably not going to happen to you. Right? Probably not. And so unless you're doing it because you want to do it, and again, to repeat myself, and because you want to live that journey, and then effectively see where that takes you to. And I can I know that you won't like this part of it?

But I'm a fan of setting a vision, which is to say, Look, I want to have this business, you know, sustainable and with cash in the bank and with demand and kind of they'd be tighter than that. But I don't want to see kind of an endpoint to that vision. In other words, I will get to five years and I will sell, I will exit this business because it's not it's probably not going to happen. Or if it does happen, it's probably not going to happen in the terms that you hope it will happen in. And if it does happen, then what?

Like, if your main aim is to just get out so you can then sit on the beach for the subsequent ten years, I promise you, you'll be bored after that anyway. And so it's kind of like, you've got to do it because you enjoy it and you want to do it. And then if if that's the case, then I think talking about these kind of one one man band type situations that we're talking about, you're more likely to follow the approach that you always talk about and build from the bottom up, because you're going to want to enjoy the fun bit, getting in the cool bars and talking to the cool bartenders and going to the cool trade shows than you are probably by definition of wanting to go into Tesco's and sell, you know, 50 pallets to 300 stores or whatever, because that's not super fun. Then you just becomes an accounting exercise and to make sure you're not getting riddled on your price and all that sort of stuff. And so I think you and I probably have a natural sort of direction towards these smaller, interesting founder led spirits or beer companies because they're more likely to play that the game that I've just alluded to, or they become massive very quickly.

That's all for today. Remember that this is a two part episode thirty nine and forty. If you enjoyed it, please rate it, comment, and share it with friends, and come back next week for more insights about building brands from the bottom up.