1. You probably didn’t grow up dreaming of becoming an executive in the spirits business. How did you end up here?
No, I didn’t. It happened because of a group project in business school.
I was doing my MBA at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia and our team was assigned a project on the Ontario wine industry. A group member told me I should meet a friend of hers, that we were similar people and would hit it off. We had breakfast. Turned out he was an executive with GALLO, which was fairly new to Canada at the time. We did hit it off, and he started introducing me to other people in the organization. That was about a year into my two year program. Eight interviews later they offered me a job.
I intentionally interviewed for sales which to some of my peers came as a surprise. They thought I was crazy. However, I had the self-awareness that I was young, incredibly inexperienced, and arguably naïve as I was in a class with far more experienced and seasoned business professionals. After some local training in Halifax, they granted my wish and moved me to Vancouver which today remains my second home.
From there GALLO kept moving me. Sales in Canada, then down to Modesto, Ca as a junior marketing manager for Canada, where I was essentially the test case for whether someone from sales could make it in marketing. Two years later to work inside a distributor in San Francisco, then Seattle managing wholesalers in Washington State, then back to HQ marketing a domestic wine portfolio. Then I got caught interviewing with Starbucks. The CMO asked me why I wanted to leave and I told him the truth, that I was bored. He asked what it would take to keep me and I said give me the assignment nobody wants. He said how about E&J Brandy. I took it on the spot.
That was the turning point. I grew a business in a declining category, learned spirits from the inside, and spent years pushing GALLO to go beyond brandy. Watching where they are today in spirits, knowing I had some small part in getting that started, is one of the things I’m proudest of. Everything I know about this business and most of the relationships I still rely on came out of those formative years.
2. You’ve got research, sales data, and consumer insights coming at you constantly. When do you ignore all of it and trust your gut?
I don’t think of it as ignoring the data. I think of it as knowing what the data can’t tell you.
The first thing I look at is resources. Sometimes that’s a formal SWOT, sometimes it’s just a hypothesis I’ve built from working with the company. But you can have all the research and consumer insight in the world, and if the brand doesn’t have the ability to act on it, it’s useless. That’s where your gut becomes a real input.
The second thing is relationships. Who are the distributors and retailers actually supporting this brand, and who isn’t? Our industry is unusual vs many others. Most of what we want to execute, we can’t go do ourselves. We depend on other people, and those people have significant competing priorities, most of them coming from our competitors. No spreadsheet tells you where you actually sit on a distributor’s list. You learn that from being in the market and from years of knowing these people.
The third is our ability to execute with those distributors and retailers, which loops back to the first point. Resources and execution are the same conversation.
So the honest answer is the gut gets used when the question is can we, not should we. Data is very good at telling you what the consumer wants. It’s much worse at telling you what your organization is capable of delivering in a market where you don’t control the last mile.
3. When you’re responsible for a brand that’s been around longer than you have, what gives you the right to change it, and what don’t you dare touch?
What gives you the right is the market telling you something isn’t working. That comes in several forms. It comes from sales. It comes from the attitude of the buyers we depend on. And it definitely comes from the consumer, which is why you need a read on sentiment, whether that’s digital platforms or formal research.
The key is being ahead of it instead of reacting to it. A lot of brands only start asking questions once the numbers have already gone soft. What I’m arguing for is keeping a consistent pulse across all three tiers so you see it coming.
What you don’t touch is the essence. A former boss of mine talked constantly about brand essence, the soul of the brand. Heritage, authenticity, provenance. That’s off limits. What can and should evolve is how you package it and how you bring it to market. Those are two very different conversations and people confuse them all the time.
Look at what happened to Cracker Barrel when they changed their logo. Different industry, same lesson. The consumer told them exactly how they felt about it. You have to know which things are sacred.
It applies directly to one of my current clients. They have real provenance, and I wouldn’t touch it. But almost everything around it is fair game.
The other piece is buy-in. You enlist and engage people every step of the way. You never drop recommendations out of the sky and expect them to stick. If the people who have to execute the change weren’t part of getting there, it doesn’t matter how right you are.
4. Big companies are very good at eliminating risk. But great brands sometimes come from taking one. What’s a risk you’ve taken that you’re particularly proud of?
Honestly, it’s exactly what I’m doing right now.
I’m in my third year running my own consultancy in beverage alcohol. When I started, I was beyond nervous. Insecure. Wondering if I had imposter syndrome, whether I was smart enough, whether this could ever actually work.
Three years in, I’ve got a steady roster of clients I work with on an ongoing basis, and good relationships with all of them. I don’t just mean financially. I mean they treat me with respect and they value my opinion, even when they don’t take it. That means the world to me. And I still get an adrenaline rush when a new prospect calls, because it means another business to learn. 90% of my business is word of mouth, and 10% is via LinkedIn.
The hardest part wasn’t the work. It was losing the structure. Losing the routine. Losing the processes. In a corporate role you have a lot of it. On your own you have almost none, and neither do your clients. That security goes away and you learn to adjust, accommodate, assimilate. Every one of my clients is different. Different brands, different time zones, different cultures, different ethnic groups, different ways of thinking. That’s been the unexpected gift. The exposure I’ve gotten to different business models and different ways of seeing a problem has been invaluable, and for that am very grateful.
I still can’t quite believe I’ve been able to do this. And I couldn’t have without the people who got me here, mostly former colleagues I can still call for an opinion, feedback, or to have a door opened. They’re integral to whatever success I’ve had. My network has been my biggest asset.
5. What’s something small, independent distilleries understand about consumers that the big spirits companies sometimes forget?
I’m going to get some people mad at me for this one, but it’s what I believe. And I’m not saying everyone is like this.
Independent distillers usually have one simple goal. Make something that tastes good, know everything that’s inside the bottle, and have a story worth telling around it. That’s it.
In big companies, there’s a lot of overthinking. Meeting after meeting. Groupthink, where the loudest voice in the room ends up biasing the decision. There’s insecurity in it too, because nobody wants to be the dissenting opinion. And things can sometimes get researched to death. Sometimes work gets created that doesn’t need to exist, so timelines stretch and scope creeps, which is always dangerous. Part of that is people needing to justify their existence inside a large organization which I believe in many cases are overstaffed.
A small distillery typically has one guiding force and maybe a handful of advisors. They don’t overthink it. Things move quickly, and they have a bigger appetite for risk than a big company will ever have. They know how to work with the limited tools at their disposal and often forced to be resourceful. They are also the epitome of “Just do It”.
I’ve seen all of it firsthand. Most of my career was spent inside very large corporations. Today I still work with large corporations, but I also work with a lot of small independent distilleries. So I’ve got a live viewing gallery on both, side by side, at the same time. That’s not a perspective I had when I was only on one side of it.
6. And turn that around: what’s something the small guys could learn from the big guys?
I will cheat and give two categories.
1.Leadership Style.
Discipline. Small operators have a lot of ideas, sometimes to a fault. Too many ideas. What gets missed is that every one of them costs something. Time to assess it, time to respond to it, time to prototype it. And all of that pulls your eyes off the core business and the core objective.
Planning. That flood of ideas is exactly that, just ideas. They don’t ladder up to anything. Big companies can be maddening about process, but they do force the question of whether a thing fits the (strategy or) plan. That consideration can be overlooked.
Delegation. I often see the person at the top believing they have to make every decision themselves. Delegation is minimal or it’s absent entirely. They don’t always adopt the Steve Jobs quote about hiring smart people.
2.The second area is that they confuse distribution with success.
Getting a distributor signed feels like the finish line. I find myself frequently saying to slow down. Go deep, not wide. The first sale is just the pipeline. The second sale is the business. That’s the one that tells you whether anything is actually moving. The next step is to explain why velocity matters more than any other metric.
And you have to keep a read on sentiment at both the distributor and the retailer level. Those are the people who decide whether your brand gets attention next month or gets forgotten. Big companies track that relentlessly. Smaller ones often don’t realize they should be asking.
7. What’s the hardest decision you’ve ever had to make involving a brand or the people behind it?
For me it’s always been the people, not the brand.
Terminating someone is the hardest thing I’ve had to do, and I’ve done it a few times. You’re dealing with someone’s ego, their self-esteem, their financial well-being, their mental health, their family. All of that sits in a fifteen-minute conversation.
What makes it harder is that in some cases the decision wasn’t mine. It came from higher up in the organization. You can never say that. You carry the corporate flag and you own the message as if it were yours, because that’s the job and I surely knew what I was getting myself into when I pursued this career path.
That’s par for the course when you’re a leader inside a corporation. This part of the job never gets easier.
8. If you could bring back one discontinued bottle, forgotten brand, old campaign, or abandoned idea, what would it be and why?
This one made me laugh. I have to be vague though, because if I name it I’ll get myself in trouble.
There was a brand I worked on for a long time. In this business you move on, someone comes in behind you, and leave their own mark. But I loved that particular brand. It grew while I had it, and I was proud of that.
Years later I still see it. In a store, online, wherever. And I’ll be honest, I cringe every time. The packaging changed, the support behind it changed, and to my eye it just doesn’t look like it used to. It’s awful and my opinion and nothing more. I haven’t even tasted it lately, so I’m only reacting to what I can see on a shelf.
I’d love to know how it’s actually doing. I have no data on it. I’m just a guy watching from the outside, and the people running it know things I don’t. The market has moved a lot since my time on it. Maybe they’re right and I’m just a guy with perhaps too much emotional equity invested in the brand.
But if I could bring one thing back, it would be that. I’m not being nostalgic, but what I see today comes across as change for the sake of change and no rhyme or reason behind it.
9. Long after the quarterly numbers and market share reports have been forgotten, what do you hope you personally contributed to this business?
This one’s easy, though my answer would have been different at other stages of my career. Today I work with a number of brands, and the goal is simple. Leave them better than I found them.
That means building infrastructure. Building strategy. Teaching people skills they didn’t have, like how to actually use their data. Opening doors. And in the end, handing them everything they need to keep going without me in the room giving direction.
That’s the part I find most gratifying. Not being needed anymore.
And if along the way the people on those teams grew while they were working with me, that’s the most gratifying. Knowing you made a difference to the company is good. Knowing you made a difference to the people in it is better.
10. Last call. No expense account, no portfolio obligations, and nobody from corporate communications is listening. What are you drinking?
Expense account or not, I drink what I enjoy. And I’m not afraid to admit it, I’m a sweet seeker.
It depends where I am and who I’m with. In our business, people talk about the importance of occasion, and it’s true. Most of the time I want something easy. An Aperol Spritz, or a St. Germain Hugo Spritz.
If I want the evening to slow down and the conversation to get serious, the big guns come out. A rich, full-bodied Napa Cab, or a Washington State Cab, which I think is underrated. Or a whisky from Taiwan, where Kavalan owns a good share of the premium end and is arguably one of the most underrated producers in the world. In Miami or the Caribbean, it’s an aged rum over a big ice cube. And tequila. Always neat. And late in a good night, an espresso martini, which I refuse to apologize for.
Hang on. That’s basically everything.
But that’s kind of the point. I’ve spent my career being told to pick a lane, and I’ve never been much good at it. Guyanese by birth, Chinese by ancestry, Canadian and American by passport, and I’ve worked every function in this business. My bar order is just my resume in liquid form.
