How to Take a Brand from Idea to Forbes
When most people are hanging up their cleats in life (around their 60s), my parents decided to buy a small plot of land in southwest Michigan, turn it into a vineyard, produce their own award-winning wines, distribute those wines as a direct-to-consumer subscription service, offer a speakeasy-style wine bar for members to visit or host events in, and a finally, use this platform to travel with their members to notable ‘wine countries’ around the world.
My dad, an entrepreneur for >30 years, and my mom, a retired corporate salesperson, had everything they needed to build an epic wine business — an understanding and appreciation for entrepreneurship, backgrounds in agriculture, a thriving vineyard, a degree in wine-making from the top wine-making university in the U.S. (UC Davis’s Robert Mondavi Institute for Wine and Food Science), and multiple award-winning wines from when my dad started studying wine-making through the University.
What they didn’t have, was a partner to help them take their gorgeous marble vision, and help them sculpt The David. That’s where I came in. Once the vineyard was up and running, and their wine production was beginning to scale, and their speakeasy-inspired wine bar was under construction, I realized through a few less-than-clear-you-might-say-contradictory-vision-for-Mahan-Family-Wines-conversations that they needed someone to help them refine their strategy, put together a detailed launch plan, and even support in the execution of it.
Knowing that retiring my own business, ManifestHer, was imminent, and having learned a lot along the way (read about that here), I knew I was in a position to help them be successful. Fast forward three years, and what started as just an idea and a partnership in 2020 is now a thriving business that has been featured in Chicago’s Daily Herald, on Chicago’s WGN TV, and most recently, in Forbes!
Yes, you read that right. Forbes! My 60+ year old parents and their DTC wine startup featured in Forbes… I couldn’t be more proud!
This article will be a case study on how we went from idea to launch to scaling revenues to Forbes, in under three years.
Step 1 - An Open Discussion and Brainstorm
I sat my parents down to our first meeting as a team and started with a simple, open discussion and brainstorm. I asked them to come prepared to discuss the following questions about the business:
Who do you serve? What problem do you solve for them?
Who is your ideal customer (buyer of service)?
Who do you serve (consumer of service)?
What problem do you solve for this person?
What is the exchange of value?
How much does it cost?
What do they get in return?
How long do they stay a customer?
Talk me through the members journey with your brand?
Where do they hear about you?
Where do they live?
How do they get engaged with you?
What are the reasons why they would want to buy your service?
What are the reasons why they wouldn’t buy your service?
How much money would they have to be making in order to afford this service?
What part of the HH budget does this come out of?
Who’s in the decision-making process?
Once they’ve made their purchase, what happens?
How do you engage them for the first time?
How do you keep them engaged?
How do you connect with them?
How do your members connect with each other?
It's end of year 2021, what is the state of this business? 2022?
What are your financial goals for the business? For example: Profit first? Nothing matters? Cashflow would be nice, but not willing to work too hard for it?
I know this seems like a lot, but the point of the exercise isn’t to have it all “right from the get go” but rather to understand what assumptions we’re making about our dream customers, where the co-founders (in this case, my parents) have conflicting ideas about the business strategy, the product offerings, and the customer’s experience/buying journey.
Because time was of the essence, we did Step 1 and Step 2 together.
Step 2 - The Brand Discussion and Brainstorm
While I am sure some founders have a clear vision of the brand, that drives who is attracted to the brand, we let the vision of the offerings, and how we wanted the customer to feel when interacting with our brand drive the vision for the brand identity - everything from the overall aesthetic of the brand, to the logos (primary, secondary, submark, and favicon), colors, slogans, imagery, typography, wine label, and even how the brand came to life in their Speakeasy, and on the Vineyard.
Once we’d established our ideal customer: affluent couples, primarily empty-nesters with disposable income, in the Chicagoland area, aspiring to re-find their zest for life and finally finding the time to savor everyday pleasures they’d been missing while raising their children. We knew the brand, imagery and essence needed to reflect the joy of people coming together over wine, both aspirational and yet, attainable. We wanted to show generations coming together, enjoying each other’s company. We wanted our brand colors to be earthy. We wanted our label to feel organic - as if it was handwritten and homemade by someone in your own family.
Once the “vibes” were discussed, I got to work on putting together a mood board for our first photoshoot, branding, logos and our now ‘famous’ wine label. By famous, I mean to say, people love the label and frequently comment on how unique and special it is.
Step 3 - Business Plan and Financial Model
Business Plan — the rough vision my parents had for the business when they came to me was such: they wanted to entertain people in their speakeasy-inspired space in Illinois, travel with those people to wine country - both domestic and abroad, and get those people to buy their wine, the wine produced on their vineyard in Michigan. Sounds simple, right? Well, there were some constraints we needed to consider. First constraint is that the only two employees of the business were my mom and dad, and they didn’t want to hire nor did they want to completely impeded their lifestyle. Second constraint was that because of this, the speakeasy was not going to be run like a bar or restaurant, my parents only wanted to entertain during certain times of year (read: not during harvest season, boating season or snowbird season) and only on certain days (read: they wanted to keep their weekends mainly free to enjoy life!), and it could only fit 16 people at a time by law. Third constraint was that due to state licensing, we could not open the vineyard to the public, nor transact commercially onsite at the vineyard. Therefore, the speakeasy would not be open to the public, nor would the vineyard. Another challenge/constraint was that the speakeasy and the vineyard were about 2.5 hours apart from one another traveling by car — while some customers may visit both places, the main commercial customer was going to be in Illinois, and not Michigan. The final challenge/constraint was that when you are building a wine business, in order to sell wine online, you need to have a pouring license for every state you want to pour alcohol in, and a shipping license for every single state you want to ship alcohol to, so by nature of operating in two different states from the jump, we already had to deal with some regulation before being able to transact any amount of business, period.
Considering the constraints, I proposed the following in terms of the Business Plan:
Mahan Family Wines would be primarily a direct-to-consumer wine service. The majority of our revenue would come from the sale of single orders (bottles, sampler packs, and cases) and subscription orders (monthly or quarterly cases of 6 or 12 bottles). We knew exactly how many cases of wine our vineyard would produce each year, and therefore the goal of the subscription business was to sell about 70-80% of our inventory.
Secondarily, we would host RSVP-Only evenings at the speakeasy-style wine bar on select Thursday, Friday and Saturday evenings throughout the year. Guests would have to purchase their table/s in advance and they would get the address to the space upon booking, the booking included wine tasting for two, dinner for two, and two bottles of wine to bring home. The idea here was all guests had to do was book the experience and then show up to enjoy — like they were family. The goal of the speakeasy was three-fold, revenue via bookings, onsite up-sells (to additional bottles of wine to take home or even a wine subscription), and a marketing funnel for our direct-to-consumer wine service and our travel business.
In addition to using the space for this purpose, we also positioned the space as a location for “done-for-you dinner parties” where anyone could book out the entire space for an evening and entertain friends, family, clients, or colleagues in a unique space with great wine and food, and no hassle!
And as a third priority, we would offer travel experiences to notable ‘wine countries’ for those interested in traveling with wine-lovers, starting with southwest Michigan, where our Vineyard (and about 30 others) were conveniently located about 2.5 hours driving distance from the Chicagoland area (where about 100% of our customers were at the time). While we couldn’t transact any commerce on the Vineyard, we could show guests the spectacular space, introduce them to our grapes and share a bottle of wine on premise as we walked among the grapes, in the same way you share a glass of wine with family around the holidays. The goal of this part of the business was two-fold, to encourage retention of our existing customers in a unique way (it’s one thing to drink wine, it’s another entirely to meet the grapes that are harvested, pressed into the juice, and ultimately become your wine), and to create the opportunity for travel, with friends, to wine country, under the guise of “business” for my parents in their retirement.
Financial Model — Using these three pillars of the business, I roughly mapped out our costs for each of the revenue streams, discussed the profit goals with my parents and ultimately made a recommendation to them with respect to the price points for our offerings. Then, using those price points and assumptions about our total case capacity, and through which parts of the business we would sell those cases, we built out some goals: ### of cases sold via the DTC website, ### of cases sold on-premises at the speakeasy, etc. As an example, if we knew we needed to sell ### of cases via our DTC website, we could establish goals for how many sampler packs we sold, how many quarterly or monthly case subscriptions we had active at any given time, so on and so forth. I built out a model that would deplete our entire inventory and those numbers became our goals for the first year in business.
Step 4 - Digital Activation Strategy, Execution, and Internal Operations/Collaboration Protocols Established
We started by building a website to sell our 8 different varietals
and shipping to states where we already had license to do so.
With the Brand concept laid out, the Business Plan in hand, and the Financial Model built out to illustrate our goals, it was go-time! We were going to start by building a website to sell our 8 different varietals to the states where we had license to ship; in addition, we’d take orders from all states, and upon receiving those orders, apply for our license to ship in that state, so we knew there was demand before spending time and money working with an endless array of lawyers and states. My favorite time!!! Next step was to develop our external presence and our internal systems and standard operating procedures, ensuring that we delivered an exceptional customer experience with our brand from the get go.
For our External presence — I needed to develop assets for our web and social presence, where our future customers would be discovering our brand for the first time. First impressions matter! First, I bought the domain and acquired the social media handles. Then, I booked a photoshoot with an area photographer whom I’d worked with a ton in my previous business, ManifestHer. Next, I built out an initial website architecture for my parents to approve which included the 3 product offerings, with that approved, I developed website, email and social media copy and imagery from the photoshoot that articulated our vision in a consistent voice, and finally with that approved, I went and developed the website and got social media booted up for our launch. The tools I used included: Squarespace for our domain, website hosting, and email marketing; Stripe for payments via the website and Square for payments on premises; Canva for logo design and other key asset design, and finally Planoly for automation of our social media (primarily Instagram).
Internally — I needed to ensure my parents were going to be in a position to communicate with their customers and take over all of my work at some point, so I built out a Trello Board that had breadcrumbs to every digital system we were using, with documentation on how to use the system, nuances to how we were using the system, even which credit card the system was hooked up to for our monthly payment. In addition to this, there were columns for ongoing projects that we moved from “to do", to “doing”, to “done”, so we could collaborate on bigger items that were outside of my purview, but needed to be complete in advance of our planned launches (e.g. legal and tax paperwork for shipping alcohol to the state of California). Outside of Trello, I set up the Google suite of tools, so my parents had access to Gmail and Google Drive, which I organized for them into thoughtful folders such that they could easily navigate everything from our internal planning and financial documents, to “how to use Planoly” documents, to the creative assets we’d generated for the site and social. In the end, I had to onboard my mom asynchronously to a number of these tools, so I used Loom to capture quick screen recordings of me working in the tools that she needed to learn, so that she was able to do things like make updates to our email marketing templates and website on her own.
Step 5 - DTC Wine Subscription Offering Launch Strategy and Execution
With the brand coming together, the website built, and social media starting to roll out, it was time to go into launch mode! Our first launch was our DTC Wine Subscription Offering via our website. Working with my parents, I knew it was going to be crucial for us to establish the following in order to have a successful launch:
Launch day and launch goals — What day will the launch campaign begin? What are our goals for launch day revenues, what are our goals for revenues. (# of cases sold, # of subscription memberships, etc.) for the first month in business?
Marketing plan — We had a multi-pronged social media strategy and a small email list of friends and family who we knew we could market our initial launch to. In addition to that, we had relationships with local restauranteurs who would be willing to let us sample our wines on site, and finally, we had a friend who could connect us to a writer in the Daily Herald to help us get some initial interest in our service.
Operations plan — We knew the website was ready to go, but we wanted to make sure there were no glaring issues with the member’s journey from discovery to purchase. We ran a few test transactions through the website, and developed a standard operating procedure for how to treat and manually move orders from our website to our “shipping & handling” department (aka my mom) to ensure that we were processing orders as quickly as possible, so our customers could try our fabulous wines!
Lastly, we needed to make sure that across these initiatives and the finer details underlying them, we were all on the same page. I developed a RACI (responsible, accountable, consulted, informed) document that mapped out who was on duty for what and “by when” that person’s responsibility must be met. This was developed in a Google Document, which allowed for commenting back and forth among our team, such that we could asynchronously work through the details as a team, during the hours we were able to spend working on the business.
On launch day, the Daily Herald article went out, our social media was going strong, we asked friends and family to share about the launch on their social channels, our email marketing was in inboxes, and the most magical thing happened — orders started rolling in. I called my mom, both of us over the moon! WE WERE OPEN FOR BUSINESS, BABY!
Step 6 - Speakeasy Offering Launch Strategy and Execution
Our next launch was a little bit more complex, as we were now transitioning from an entirely digital experience, to basically opening up a restaurant (and none of us are restauranteurs) in the speakeasy. This required us to do things like:
Purchase food and beverage serving items that fit the space, find a food vendor, find a pianist, think about the guest parking and arrival experience, think about the guests departure experience, think about the guest experience inside of the speakeasy, including the on-site upsell experience — How do guests get seated? When do they get seated? How do we handle seating big groups versuses couples? What happens when groups arrive at different times throughout the evening? How do guests get their wine tasting? when do they get their food? What about the wine that they get to bring home with them? Again, the guest experience was a pre-paid reservation that came with a tasting, food and wine experience onsite, coupled with wine to bring home, so there was a lot of nuance to planning the experience. Upon realizing this, we knew we needed to do a few “trial” nights with friends and family before opening up RSVPs to the public. Fortunately for us, this also granted us the opportunity to do an additional photoshoot so we had professional photography content in the speakeasy that we could now use to start marketing this offering.
With our professional photography in hand, our guest experience ironed out via the multiple “trial nights,” and a RACI/timeline document with all the crucial items checked off, we were ready to go! At this point, we did a rinse and repeat on our marketing plan for the launch of the DTC site and all of a sudden, the launch was in flight. And the most magical thing happened, revenues from RSVPs for speakeasy seatings started rolling in. I called my mom, WE’RE IN BUSINESS, BABY!
After a few “real nights” engaging with guests, we did a retrospective as a team. How were things going? What was going well? What was not going well? What did my parents really enjoy about the experience hosting people in the speakeasy? What did they hate? What was the feedback they were hearing from guests about their experience?
We took a scalpel to the existing offering, made some key changes to the offering that was then reflected in our digital presence and marketing materials, and off to the races we went with this offering!
To me, this is a critical step in the development of any complex offering — start by methodically thinking through the offering, give yourself a few trial runs, and revise based on what you learn. Then, give yourself a few MVP (minimum viable product) runs, and again, revise based on what you learn. Finally, firm up the product, deliver, revise, deliver, revise, deliver, revise and continue doing so until you get consistently great feedback from your customer, and you start to find repeatable patterns and scalable success. When this locks into place, you now have your core offering. It will most likely be substantively different than what you thought it would be at the get go, but it will also be substantially better, as it will have evolved to be MORE of what the CUSTOMER WANTS and WILL PAY FOR, and LESS of what YOU THOUGHT THE CUSTOMER WOULD WANT, but DIDN’T ACTUALLY VALUE. You’ll be surprised every time. This is a good thing.
Step 7 - Travel Offering Launch Strategy and Execution
The last offering we were developing and launching was our travel offering, perhaps the most complex yet, as it involved getting close to 100 of our customers to visit a new state, stay in hotels, visit our vineyard for what we were calling our “Harvest Party,” where there would be food, drink, live music and more, and then getting them back home safe at the end of the night. Launching this part of the business was almost like planning a wedding. We looked at the complexity of the event we were planning and knew we needed time to get it right.
Like engaging our guests in the speakeasy for the first time, we decided to make our first Harvest Party a friends and family endeavor, whereby we were essentially doing a trial of the travel and event format to see if it worked, what the guest experience was, where the kinks were, and again, leveraged the “trial run” to get professional photography and videography content that we could leverage to market travel experiences to our vineyard, and around the world in the future.
Using all of the same strategies outlined in Step 5 and Step 6, we formalized our plan, executed our trial launch, got content, revised the plan based on what we learned, and then did our real launch.
And the most magical thing happened — we maxxed out our capacity entirely! And we heard wonderful feedback from our guests, guests who now, have attended and enjoyed mutiple travel experiences with us.
Step 8 - Revisit (and revise) your plan, assumptions and KPIs
What we thought our customer acquisition funnel was going to look like…
Little did we know!
With all three of our offerings launched and generating revenue, my work here was wrapping up. I firmed up our website copy, planned out our upcoming launches (our core offerings positioned against a time of year (e.g. ‘DTC Wine Membership for Christmas gifting’ and ‘Speakeasy RSVPs for Beaujolais Nouveau week’), generated both ‘nurture’ and ‘selling’ marketing materials, automated their sequences for about 2 full quarters via our email marketing, and social media marketing channels, and provided recommended next actions to my parents: hire/engage an SEO consultant to help improve your online visibility, hire/engage a Facebook ads person to help you scale your reach on social media, hire/engage someone to help host events in the speakeasy to help them scale revenues there, knowing it was our best channel for acquiring new DTC subscription members.
In addition to revisiting our plans and teeing up my parents for future success, we looked at our initial financial projections and other KPIs we’d established at the onset. How were we doing to plan? Using our actuals, we made revisions, made new assumptions, and established new, more realistic goals for the future of the business based on what we’d learned through our launches and ongoing business operations. At the end of the day, our initial projections were not right. but they weren’t that far off! We had good instincts on what the business could do in terms of volume of sales by channel, and we simply needed to make some adjustments to the model to better reflect things we’d learned along the way (things like the speakeasy being our best marketing channel for new DTC memberships).
Step 9 - Keep refining until all your revenue is “fuck yeah” revenue
With the business handed over to my parents, I encouraged them to do one thing as they moved forward: On a quarterly basis, they needed to sit down as a couple and look at the business together. They should continue refining the business offerings and operations such that they felt like all of the revenue they were bringing in on this business was what I call “fuck yeah revenue”. “Fuck yeah revenue” is when you make money and when those dollars hit your account you energetically feel like “oh, fuck yeah!!!”
Energetically, when you are making money, but seeing that money makes you feel like “Fuckkkkkkk, I don’t want to do this…” trust that something is off either in terms of the offering itself, or the resourcing you have around delivering that offering to your customer. When that alignment is off, you feel depleted by the business, frustrated with progress, and ultimately you start self-sabotaging those offerings consciously, or unconsciously, so you don’t have to deliver them as often. This kills your revenue and kills your scale.
On the other hand, when you are making money, and seeing that money maakes you feel like “oh, fuck yeaaaahhhhhh!!!” something is going right, this is the revenue you double down on, you pour fuel on the fire, it scales and takes your business to new heights.
What my parents started to find as they did these energy check-ins, was that they loved the scale and the operation of the DTC shipping business. On the other hand, the speakeasy was wearing them out, even though they thoroughly enjoyed all the wonderful people they met through their RSVP nights. So what did they do? They scaled back on speakeasy events, opting for other opportunities to sample their wines in real life that were lower lift instead. The result, more “fuck yeah revenue,” scaling faster, and less stress. Now, that’s what you want!
Step 10 - Scale
With more “fuck yeah revenue,” less stress, and more clarity on what the offering was that could scale their business to new heights, my parents were ready for the kind of attention and revenue that comes from a feature in a publication like Forbes. They leveraged a strategic contact, pitched themselves, and Forbes picked up the story. When the story ran, guess what happened? Revenue flooded in. But not just any revenue, “fuck yeah revenue” and that’s what I love to hear!
In Summary
I learned SO much from my failed business, ManifestHer. I am SO grateful I was able to apply so much of what I learned building ManifestHer to helping my parents build Mahan Family Wines. I hope you learned a lot by reading this article. If you are looking for help or another set of eyes on your business, consider reaching out. From time to time I consult with entrepreneurs to help them think about their business differently and help them generate more “fuck yeah revenue” with less effort, less stress, more ease and more happiness!
