Sample Chapters

Prologue

Chapter 1 –  Sometimes Shit Just Happens

Chapter 2 – Growing Up

Chapter 3 – Learning the Business

Chapter 4 – The Beam Years

Chapter 5 – Transition

Chapter 6 – We’re Going to Do This Ourselves?

Chapter 7 – Putting it all Together

Chapter 8 – This Actually Might Work Out

Chapter 9 – Economic Reality

Chapter 10 – Show Me the Money

Chapter 11 – Creating the Base of a Brand

Chapter 12 – Let’s Add Fuel to the Fire

Chapter 13 – Things Keep happening

Chapter 14 – Protecting Our Turf

Chapter 15 – An Astounding Number

Chapter 16 – Explosion

Chapter 17 – Building the Illusion

Chapter 18 – Success Draws Lots of Attention

Chapter 19 – Protecting Our Future

Chapter 20 – Greater Illusions

Chapter 21 – Keeping the Business Growing

Chapter 22 – Managing for Growth

Chapter 23 – The Battle Continues

Chapter 24 – Wind at Our Backs

Chapter 25 – COVID Explosion

Chapter 26 – The Sale

Chapter 27 – What’s Next

Epilogue

It started out as a typical day. Our annual sales meeting was approaching and I was at the suburban Chicago hotel where the meeting was to be held, going over some final details with the production team before the big show. As the at Jim Beam I wanted to make sure everything was in order for the presentations that would take place later that week. For years I was the key motivator for our sales meetings, adding excitement and motivation for the iconic Jim Beam Bourbon brand portfolio, with millions of cases sold around the world. Over the years I had personified this as “the Bourbonator” or “the Ayatollah of Beam and Cola” in order to get attention and motivate our global sales force.

While we had met the prior year’s sales targets, the bar was raised again, with new higher goals set. After 15 years at the company, I knew what we needed and how to get it done. But before talking strategy and numbers, I had to get the sales force fired up to accept the new challenges. Both congratulate the team and motivate them. After a corporate merger we had a lot of new priorities and distractions, so I had to get everyone focused and on the same page. I wanted everything to be perfect for this meeting. There could be no surprises. This was the one chance every year to renew excitement for our plans and build confidence with the team to hit our ever-higher goals.

I was used to the pressure. I loved the pressure. In sales and marketing, pressure and expectations came with the territory. Ever since starting at Beam in my early thirties, I had always responded. I was the guy who made things happen. When our brands needed a jumpstart, they sent in the “Bourbonator.” By this point in my career I had worked on or troubleshooted marketing, production, or sales on every brand we owned all over the world. And now I once again was asked to be the closer at our annual sales meeting, with hundreds of our salespeople from all over the world.

Late that afternoon, while I was finalizing some details at the meeting venue, I got a call from our chief marketing officer (CMO). She wanted me back at the office … and right away. I rolled my eyes, took a deep breath. While annoying, it was not unexpected. The days leading up to the sales meeting were always a fire drill, everyone a bit frantic. So I stopped what I was doing and headed back to the office in Deerfield, Illinois, which was where Jim Beam’s global headquarters were located at the time, telling the production team that I would be back in about an hour.

I had no idea that I was never coming back.

***

What happened next was like a dream, a bad one. A line from an old mob movie now comes to mind. When they decide to whack you, you never see it coming. Well, I didn’t see this coming. I was an established star, the glue guy, the closer. I had always believed I was bulletproof.

After dropping a few things on my desk, I strolled unconcerned into the CMO’s office. I had expected to find her behind her desk, but there she stood in the middle of the room with the VP of human resources (HR), who was, and still is, a good friend. The sight of these two together, their faces grim, set off alarm bells. I had been in the corporate world for more than 30 years and had been on the other side of a number of “whackings.” All too late, I realized what was going on.

Though clearly uncomfortable with the situation, they still managed to be efficient. The CMO did the actual whacking, telling me in a small and unsteady voice that I was being let go, terminated. As in fired. As in Right Now. With no substantive reasons given, or at least none that I could understand, she quickly slinked out of the office, leaving me with the HR director. He was very decent with me. He allowed me to avoid the walk of shame through the halls, clutching a box overflowing with all my things, a security guard at my arm, and instead let me come back over the weekend to take my time and box everything up. Over half of my corporate life had been spent at Beam. I was going to need a lot of boxes.

After a surreal walk down to the parking garage (This can‘t be happening. This has to be a mistake), I reached my car and sat behind the steering wheel for I’m not sure how long, trying to process. I had been on a great trajectory, receiving glowing annual performance reviews, impressive raises, stock options. I was always able to make a difference in whatever position they put me in. But that had all changed 12 months earlier when a new CEO came in from our parent company. It wasn’t long before I realized he was looking to make his mark and that his perspective was the one that mattered. In short, the only good ideas were his ideas. In my long career at Beam I had been consistently rewarded for offering my alternative opinions and insights, many times going against the grain. This approach, however, was no longer appreciated and the two of us had butted heads—apparently one too many times.

On the way home I made calls: to friends, family, peers, each call harder than the last. I wanted them to hear the news from me, not through the grapevine, where things get distorted or exaggerated. The calls were brief, strained, no one knowing what to say. Despite the circumstances, I felt like a failure. I had let my family, friends, and myself down.

When I got home my wife, Susan, was great in consoling me with a big hug and an “I love you.” As a no-nonsense Irish gal, her first response was “F— them, they don’t deserve you!” She always supported me, and trusted that I would do what’s best for our family.

After a mostly uneaten dinner, we talked and I reassured her—and myself—that despite the situation, we were going to be okay. Financially, we were rock solid, so solid that technically I could have retired even though I was just 49. In fact, I decided that was going to be what I told everyone from now on. I had retired. Sure as hell sounded better than I was fired. That made me feel better, but not all that much, because I knew the truth.

That night, I laid in bed next to my wife, not sure what I was going to do with the rest of my life. While retirement sounded fun, there’s only so much golf you can play and so many ball games to see and cruises to take. As I tossed and turned, I let the pent-up anger finally wash over me. Fifteen years gone in 15 minutes. A career boxed up and carried away. After everything I had accomplished, all the friends I had made, all the sacrifice, the time spent away from my family, the crowded airports, the check-in lines at the Hampton Inns and Marriotts, the late-night dinners with retailers who always wanted one more drink, the middle seats on early flights, the weekends playing paperwork catch-up at the office … after everything, I was, in the end, just a number on a piece of paper. A number someone had decided to erase.

Lying on my back, staring up at the ceiling, I tried to calm myself. But it was hard, really hard. My whole life I had achieved, moved forward, progressed. Now this.

Now what?

Little did I know that in a few short years, my life, my family’s lives, and the lives of dozens if not hundreds of other people, were going to be dramatically different. That what had happened earlier that day had not really been an end, but a big, bright, and beautiful beginning.

Once again, I had no way of knowing that. All I knew was, for the first time since I was a boy, I didn’t have anywhere to go in the morning.

Chapter Outtakes

Learning how to drink as a liquor salesman…

My first few days working “on the street” were a learning experience. I started out in West Allis, Wisconsin, on the south side of Milwaukee, a blue-collar area full of factories, warehouses, and bars. I felt at home there because my great aunt and uncle had lived there for years. While I was driving through the streets my mind flashed back to when I was a kid. I remembered my great uncle giving me a couple of bucks to go down to the local tavern with a bucket to get him a couple of draft beers to drink with dinner, there was always enough money left over to get a candy bar for myself. Can you imagine a 10-year-old kid marching down to the corner bar nowadays to buy a bucket of beer? Times certainly were different.

Now here I was selling whiskey to these very same corner bars. The bars were local hangouts, usually owned by a husband and wife. They were a team; while he worked a factory job, she worked the bar. More often than not, they lived above the place.

A typical bar had about five or six stools and it was frequented day and night by guys coming off their shifts. They would stop in, bitch about work, and toss back a shot and a beer before heading back to the wife and kids. On one of my first days of work, I had to call on 18 of these bars along with a more experienced sales guy who was showing me the ropes. When I walked into the first bar at 9 a.m., I was greeted with stares from everyone; apparently they didn’t like unfamiliar faces. But when my partner, the experienced salesman, told them I was a distillery rep, their faces lit up because they all knew a free drink was coming. And they weren’t going to drink alone. On my very first day I learned that, as a sign of respect, I was expected to have a drink along with them. Which was fine. Until we got to the second bar and third bar and the fourth one, and so on. By my seventh call, I was toasted and started to pass out in the car. Thankfully I was being driven around that day by the distributor salesman. That’s when he taught me about drink dumping. Apparently, it was an essential skill in our business that I was not taught in my training class. The secret, he told me, was misdirection. When the bartender handed me my shot, I asked for a Coke chaser. Then when it was time to throw it back, you took the shot, held it in your mouth and surreptitiously spit it into the glass of Coke you were holding. You never asked for a beer chaser because then you would be expected to drink the whole beer. (They never ask you to finish the Coke.) Another way to dump a drink was to literally dump it in nearby planters, which I thought was a little risky and, besides, not many of these places had planters. Anyway, that drink dumping tip was a lifesaver. I probably could have filled an ocean with the number of drinks I dumped in all my years in the business.

The importance a good mentor to look out for you…

Distributor incentive trips have also always been a big part of growing your business. The trips are usually one of a kind and can be expensed to the company because there’s always a business meeting component. In my early days, I hosted such a trip up to a fishing lodge on a desolate island in the Canadian wilderness, where my mentor Dick had visited before. We took about 30 people from our Illinois and Wisconsin distributors. Before the trip, Dick Schoch said something very odd to me. He told me to “tell them you played the bugle when you get asked!”

“Why would they ask that?”

“You’ll see,” Dick said.

When we got to the island the people who ran the camp had everyone line up and they gave us the details of our trip: when we eat, fish, meet, and so on. They then asked how many people were there for the first time. About half of the 30 raised their hands, including me. Next they asked, “Who of you can play the bugle?” Of course I tentatively raised my hand because (1) Dick told me to and (2) I actually did know how to play the bugle. When the man in charge pointed at me and said, “Okay, you’re on flag and reveille and everyone else is on kitchen patrol (KP)!,” I was beyond ecstatic.

That meant for the whole week my job was to play reveille at 7 a.m., shoot off a cannon, and raise an American flag (even though we were in Canada). At dusk I had to play taps and respectfully lower the flag. That job was a helluva lot better than KP duty for the week, cleaning and set up for all the meals. Thank you, Dick Schoch.

The week went fine; I raised and lowered the flag and blew that bugle. Easy-peasy. The last night at the camp a group of us stayed up until 2 a.m. playing poker. Since I knew I was going to have to be up in a few hours, I decided to be able to get a few more minutes of sleep, I would raise the flag before I turned in, put my bugle next to my bed, and pull the cannon right up to my cabin door so I could perform my duties with the least effort possible. Sounded like a great plan at two in the morning.

So, my alarm goes off at six, I stumble to the door, blast out a few notes from my bugle, then pulled the lanyard to set off the cannon. Somehow though, when I yanked the lanyard, I also pulled the cannon into my cabin and it went off inside my room, blowing off the screen on the door as well destroying my ear drums. I can still envision my roommate about a foot off his mattress as if he was levitating. I learned quite a bit about salesmanship trying to explain to everyone actually how this happened.

You have to pay attention to a mentor to really learn from them…

Another critical thing I learned from Jay was “passionate selling.” Thanks to him, I came to understand the importance of having a rock-solid belief in what you are selling. You have to believe in your heart your brand is better than others. And the best way to do that was by passionately telling a story that only your brand could tell. This is where a comes into play. You have to find that one thing that separates your product from all the others, the one thing that sets it apart. This concept would lead to much of my success during my career as you will see in later chapters.

Discovering the right design for the bottle

We felt confident that we had a special liquid. But we knew we needed more. We needed special packaging, something that reflected the brand’s uniqueness and its exotic character. Pete’s first few designs featured an elegant, tall, white painted bottle with a label that was made out of foil bordered in gold with red, blue, and black accents. The art style was very similar to a Dominican cigar box. It was absolutely beautiful, but looked very old and dated. And since we didn’t have the money to test it with organized research, we once again shared it with friends, family, and industry peers. Their reaction confirmed our initial impressions that although it was beautiful, it was a rather tired-looking package. Not the image we were going for.

During one of our discussions Pete made a passing comment about another sketch he had. He did his best to lower expectations.

“You probably won’t like it,” I remember him saying.

“So try me.”

“Naw, you won’t. You’re going to think it looks like a suntan lotion bottle.”

“Try me,” I said again.

 He showed it to me and yes, it did indeed look a lot like a bottle of suntan lotion, which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Think of a vintage Coppertone bottle, white with broad sloping shoulders and a substantial cap. This old suntan bottle made me think of beaches, sun, the ocean, the Caribbean. There are good vibes attached to suntan lotion. People even like the smell.

I stared at the sketch for a long time. I liked it. In fact, I loved it. “This is it,” I said.

“Really? You sure? I got others.”

“No, this is it.”

How did the Cinnamon Toast Crunch shot become a thing…

Remember my ace in the hole: Susan had been a star salesperson for Gallo and had great selling skills, so the two of us were the first to start the ball rolling. We started calling on Mexican restaurants in the Chicago area, optimistic that everyone was going to love this product as much as we did. Unfortunately, we got a rude wake-up call. Our planned pitch about it being the perfect after-drink after a fine Mexican meal fell on deaf ears. Although everyone who tasted RumChata thought it was wonderful, to a person they said it was not an authentic Mexican drink.

“We do not mix our horchata with rum, it’s not authentic, so we would have a hard time placing it as an item on our menu” was the universal response. A couple of the restaurants took a bottle but no one was really excited about the potential. I was bewildered and depressed. What I thought was a slam-dunk strategy to get the product promoted as an after-dinner drink was failing out of the gate and I didn’t know what to do. Making things worse: I was now sitting on 700 cases of inventory in my warehouse.

I had no option but to try and sell the brand in the general market as a new cream liqueur. And the best way to do that were “ride-alongs”—riding with distributor salespeople to call on accounts. This was back to my roots from my first days with Brown Forman in Wisconsin. I had done hundreds of these over my career, and they could be very effective in getting a brand established, but they took a lot of work as you were selling it bar by bar, store by store. My current situation was a little different however: I no longer had the clout of a big company name behind me. We were a startup, a nobody.

I just put my head down and went to work. One of my first calls was to a casual bar in Milwaukee. When I walked in the bartender was wearing a denim jacket with the sleeves torn off with the slogan “Devils Disciples” on the back. He was 40 to 50 years old with a long graying ponytail. Not exactly a cream liqueur drinker I thought. I decided to sit the call out and let the distributor salesman I was traveling with take his order for whiskey and beer while I stood at the end of the bar and checked my phone.

“What’s he doing here?” I heard the pony-tailed bartender ask.

“He’s riding along with me today presenting a new product,” the salesman said.

The bartender looked at me with a scowl. “So what, I’m not good enough to drink your product?”

I was caught off guard. “I wasn’t sure that you would be interested; it’s a sweet drink,” I stammered.

He huffed, “Why don’t you let me be the judge of that?”

As he sipped the RumChata his eyebrows went up. “It tastes like the milk in a bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch,” he said.

I asked him what he meant.

“You know, after you eat Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal, the milk in the bowl has the same flavor.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Hey, give me two bottles, I’ll see what I can do with it.”

Back in the car, my mind was racing. I had been a lifelong cereal aficionado, regularly eating Frosted Flakes, Captain Crunch, Lucky Charms, Cocoa Krispies, and the like. But I had never had Cinnamon Toast Crunch. It was a relatively new product and had come out after I was past my prime cereal-eating years.

After the day of fruitlessly trying to sell some more bottles, I went to a grocery store and bought a box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch. I then immediately went home, made myself a bowl, and drank the milk left in the bowl. Holy shit, it tasted just like RumChata.

Help for your project can come from sources you never dreamed of…

There were many critical moments like this on our journey with RumChata, moments when I thought things could go south. Times when I had my doubts about the venture and questions about what I was doing. More than once my confidence wavered and thoughts like What am I doing? and What have I done? would keep me awake. But time and time again, something or someone would appear at just the right time to restore my faith and help me weather the storm.

My neighbor Wally Novak was one such person. Wally was a Polish/Russian man in his early 70s, a pure Chicago guy who grew up selling cars. As he told me in many times, “Tom … I went bust more times than most people ever get into business!”

He was a great neighbor, always willing to lend you a hand and share an encouraging thought. He did have one annoying habit, however: he poached contractors and workers from me. Not workers from our plant, mind you, but local from our neighborhood. More than once, after I had hired someone to do some yard work or paint a door, he would saunter over, pull out a few hundred dollars cash from his pocket, and lure the guy over to his house to do some work. The handyman would never hesitate. Once they saw the cash, they would stop doing what they were doing in my yard and follow Wally over to his. It was really frustrating and I had to tell Wally on a few occasions to wait to pay them until after they were done with my job. But that’s how Wally operated and I really enjoyed him as a neighbor.

Even though I had people help me with the heavy landscaping work, I still cut my own grass, and this was something that Wally respected, especially since I was one of the few people in our neighborhood who did that. One hot day in May while I was mowing the lawn, he came over and asked me how things were going. I told them about the issue I had with China and the wire being lost.

“How much do you need?” he asked.

“A hundred grand. But the bank said they would cover it if it doesn’t come through soon.”

Wally didn’t respond. He just nodded and moseyed away.

After about 20 minutes, I went back in my house to cool off and Susan asked me about Wally. “What were you talking about out there?”

“Nothing. Just some business stuff. Why?”

“He just came over and gave me this.” She handed me a check. It was for $100,000.

I took the check and immediately went to Wally’s house and asked him what he was doing.

“You’re one of the hardest working people I know,” he said. “And you’re honest. Use the money and pay me back when you can.”

“I can’t pay you back for a while; you know that, right?”

Wally shrugged. “I take care of you now; maybe one day you’ll take care me.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I just blurted out, “How about I give you some equity in the company?”

He shrugged again. “Sure. Fine. Whatever works for you.”

At that time, we felt the company was worth about $2.5 million so Wally’s money gave him 4% interest in the enterprise. The faith Wally had in me would be paid back exponentially in the future, and much faster than either of us ever imagined.

Once the ball gets rolling it gets ridiculous…

By May 2012, we sold our two-millionth bottle. And in June, more good news: the bank increased our line of credit to $3 million. We needed the cash. To keep pace with the explosive demand, we had to buy automated bottling equipment. Up until then, we had been using temporary workers to help us in that area and up until that point, they had gotten the job done. But the right equipment could produce 50 times more than the workers could produce. So we contracted with a custom equipment manufacturer and built a state-of-the-art bottling line that cost $1.5 million. With this line, we would be able to produce over a million cases per year. In addition, we had to lease another warehouse that had over 100,000 square feet of space. When we took possession, I remember walking into the vast empty warehouse two football fields long.

“Do we really need all this space?” I asked my dad.

“In 30 days, this place will be full of glass and finished goods. You’ll see.”

He was right. In a few weeks, that warehouse was full of more than 100,000 cases of RumChata.

I wasn’t the only one admiring our success. In mid-2011, a few months after our Walmart trip, an old friend of my father and mine, a large independent distiller, asked if he could fly in to see our bottling plant. He was keenly aware of our success and had a pretty good understanding of the volume we were doing, because we had asked him to give us a cost estimate for bottling to help with our volumes as we outgrew our first facility. After touring our bottling operation up in Pewaukee, he and his right-hand person came into our office, sat down at our conference room table, and pushed an envelope across it in our direction.

“What’s this?” my father asked.

“Open it.”

My father opened the envelope and pulled out a fully executed check. When I looked over my dad’s shoulder, I read it as $2.5 million. My heart jumped. But when my father handed it over to me and I was able to fully examine it, my heart jumped a lot higher. It was for $25 million.

“We want to buy your company, and we wanted you to know we were serious!” our friend said.

My father and I nodded in silence, stunned.

We had been very quiet about our recent financial success. We didn’t want the bigger players in our business to notice and subsequently take aim at us with competing products. While our reputation was certainly growing, no one knew how good our bottom line had become and we wanted to keep it that way as long as we could.

We politely told them we would consider their offer and after they left, my father and I had discussed valuations for the brand. We felt the company was easily worth $50–$75 million. And with the increasing orders, along with the newly awarded Walmart business, we knew it would only go higher.

“Twenty-five million, huh? How about that?” my dad said, picking up the check again and staring at it.

“It’s hard to turn down that kind of money,” I said.

“But we are.”

“Yep, I guess we are.”

 I never saw him smile wider.

Where did the name for the book come from…

Every year we attended the major industry distributor trade show: the Wine and Spirits Wholesaler Association (convention. At this gathering all of our distributors from across the country would come in for meetings to review the industry and trade regulations and to meet with their top suppliers. As a small company, this was an excellent chance to catch up with the people who were so critical to our success, the people who actually sold our product. If you were a large producer and had the budget, you would get a hospitality suite in the convention hotel and invite the distributors up and show them any new products or discuss any pending issues.

This was a major opportunity for us to talk face-to-face with all of our distributor partners. As the brand continued to explode, many of the distributors stopped by as a sign of respect but also to congratulate and revel in our shared success. The meetings were very cordial and there were very few issues that needed to be resolved.

Our biggest distributor in the country also happened to be the largest distributor in the United States, Southern Wine and Spirits. At that time they were an independently owned $18 billion company. Their chairman and founder was perhaps the most well- known person in the liquor business, Harvey Chaplin. Harvey was an exceptional salesperson who had started Southern on shoestring budget and had attained legendary status in our industry. He was also a real character with a great sense of humor.

I had known Harvey for several years and had an “in” with him because he and my father had a special relationship that went all the way back to when Harvey was starting his business. At the time, my dad was able to source specially distilled spirits for him that he used to fill holes in his brand portfolio. It helped get him through some of the lean times.

Harvey knew of the explosive growth of RumChata because it was becoming tremendously profitable across his whole company. I estimate that at that time, RumChata was probably delivering $12 to $15 million in gross profit across his enterprise. And knowing how well Harvey knew his business I am sure he knew this, too. He rarely made the trips to convention hospitality suites anymore. He made a point to see their major suppliers, but smaller ones like us usually would not be on his agenda.

He surprised us by stopping by, however. As he walked in, a respectful hush fell over the room. This was a visit from the Pope. After chatting with my dad for a few minutes, he asked me, “I’ve got to taste this RumChata because my people are raving over it.”

We poured Harvey a sample–he took a sip.

“What do you think?” I nervously asked.

“You know what this tastes like?”

He then smiled broadly. “Tastes like money!”

The Pope’s blessing—and pure Harvey Chaplin.

Look what we have accomplished…

In August 2019 we celebrated our 10th anniversary of RumChata. I couldn’t believe how fast the time had gone by. The decade had seemed like a few months. Everything had happened so quickly. We took a moment to celebrate and come to grips with the enterprise we had created. Since 2009, we had sold over 44 million bottles of RumChata in 26 different countries. When you do the math, that meant we had generated over $1.4 billion in retail sales—an incredible accomplishment! I remember where I was sitting when I compiled these numbers. Fittingly, I was in our kitchen. It was all so surreal.

To celebrate the anniversary, we created Gold RumChata bottles and sent them to our distributors along with a personal message acknowledging the milestone. Even though I remained frustrated with their indifference to doing “the basics,” I knew I couldn’t have achieved what we did without them.