Written by So when I first started looking into this wine venture I was given a book by my father in law(who although very supportive, needless to say doesn’t want to see 2 of his son in laws ready to kill each other if the business goes bad) called “You Need To Be A Little Crazy” The truth about starting and growing your business by Barry J Moltz.
At one point in the book (page45 actually) Moltz says the following:
“Three years later, we were bidding for a customer project that would add 20 percent to our revenue growth. They wanted to come visit our warehouse to see if we were large and efficient enough to handle thier capacity. I remember that I instructed our warehouse staff to assemble empty boxes and label them as product and put them on our bare shelves. This was to make it seem like we had more product in our warehouse then we actually had. They were impressed and we got the business!”
Although I’m not necessarily opposed to making our wine club seem larger then it actually is at some point, at this point in time with the internet and the amount of public information available I can’t imagine a stunt like this working in the wine business.
By writing this blog(combined with my business partner Matt’s blog) I’m giving everyone a realistic look inside our start up.
Yes, we’re asking customers and wineries to take a small leap of faith with us at the beginning. We do hope that this blog and our other interaction features lets companies, their decision makers and also customers get to know us a little bit. Hopefully after reading about us both groups of people are willing to take a meeting with us, make us an offer or start doing business.
All of this comes to mind because we’re moving forward with everything in regards to the business. Our website should be up at the beginning of next week, we had a couple views of our Facebook profile(even though it isn’t nearly complete) and we’re starting to speak with wineries about potential partnerships.
As always with negotiations it’s an interesting process. Wineries know generally what we’re looking for: wines at some sort of a discount, or at least the availability of otherwise unavailable wine. If we’re all going to be honest about it we realize that a winery making 200 cases isn’t going to be giving us many cases, let alone a significant discount. However a winery that is making 50,000 cases or more and doesn’t sell them all, should be more willing to at least discuss a lower price point.
So who are we anxious to work with?
At the beginning we felt that utilizing our connections in Central and South America to export wine would allow us entry to some of the true high end wine available in California. These wineries would form the basis for our premium wine club as well as an outstanding group to choose from when exporting to restaurants and other distributors south of the border.
I haven’t yet spent a lot of time here discussing some of the wineries that I’d love to have available for our premium wine club as well as well as our first export shipments: A very short list of which I’ll spend some time on each winery later on would have to include: Dumol, Alpha Omega, O’Shaghnessy, Turley, Ridge, Saxum and K Vintners.
