Hey Reader,
Hope you had a safe and relaxing Labor Day. Although in this industry, "relaxing holiday weekend" usually means you were slinging pints while everyone else grilled in the backyard. I see you.
Now. In addition to the new look here at the Bottleneck, I have a spicy take to kick off your fall: your brand isn't special.
Put down the pitchfork. I promise this ends somewhere useful.
(TLDR folks: new podcast episodes are up, Episode 23: Choose a Modern Sales Rep Model - The 2013 Playbook Is Dead, and Episode 24: Your Distributor Wishes You Knew This, with Melissa Johnston of Tryon Distributing, and Episode 25: Turn Your Data Into A Decision Listen here)
So here's where this is coming from. I've spent years consulting in just about every corner of the beverage and service industries. Beer, cider, spirits, wine, NA, hemp bevs. Plus CPG brands, vendors, service providers, guilds. Yes, I have the education to back it up. But nothing teaches you faster than real world experience inside dozens of different indie businesses.
And after all those years and all those categories? One pattern I can't unsee:
Every beverage/food/service category has the same problems, the same challenges, and the same lessons. We just refuse to learn from each other.
"But Julie, my market is different."
I hear this weekly. And yeah, I know there are real nuances to running a craft brewery in the middle of the desert in Utah vs. a full vegan kitchen/tasting room in North Carolina. Different rules, different customers, different headaches. I get that.
But the baseline issues? Shockingly, uncomfortably similar.
You could be a farmhouse cidery in the Finger Lakes. A gluten free protein cookie brand in Albuquerque. A baked potato focused fast casual restaurant in Broomfield, Colorado. (That last one is real, by the way. Loco Potato. Just opened down the street from me, the owner is killing it on TikTok, and the line is out the door every single day. Not kidding. Go check out his scrappy marketing!)
Doesn't matter what you're making or what you're offering. Everyone needs more sales, more revenue, more profit. And everyone struggles with the same stuff: selling skills, hospitality, profit margins, labor costs, marketing, etc.
Which is actually great news. It means the answer to your current headache probably already exists. Somebody in a category you've been ignoring already made your mistake, paid for it, figured out the fix, and learned a valuable lesson the hard way.
Your business runs on two kinds of skills
Everything you need to know to run your brand fits in two basic buckets:
- The easy-to-teach stuff. Geographic footprint. Packaging formats. Service standards. Product styles. Regulatory weirdness. This is the technical layer. Learnable. Google-able. A decent consultant or a trade association webinar can get you most of the way there.
- The hard-to-teach stuff. How to actually sell. How to build a real relationship with a buyer/vendor/wholesaler/customer. How to price without apologizing. How to market to actual humans. How to read your numbers and make a call. This takes years of practice and real world experience. And here's the kicker: it transfers across every category, every state, every revenue model.
The problem? Most brands treat the first bucket like their whole identity. "You don't understand, we're in a control state." "Our county has weird rules." "We're in a super rural location, that advice doesn't apply to us."
Meanwhile the second bucket, the one that actually decides whether you survive, is the one that gets ignored.
The technical stuff is table stakes. The judgment stuff is what keeps you in business and your bank account in the black.
What the other categories already figured out
This is why your echo chamber costs you real money. When you only talk to people who make what you make, sell what you sell, promote what you promote, you only learn what they already know. Some examples:
- Wine figured out membership and allocation models decades ago. Every taproom loyalty club is a wine club wearing a hoodie and a trucker cap.
- Spirits brands have been teaching bartenders and retail staff to sell on their behalf forever through engagement. That's a brand ambassador playbook you can borrow tomorrow.
- NA and hemp brands got locked out of a ton of traditional retail and advertising, so they were forced to get scary good at DTC, email, alternative marketing channels and community building.
- CPG brands live and die on margin math and velocity, so they check those numbers like a vital sign. Not once a year at tax time.
- Restaurants have been squeezing profit out of menus forever. Menu engineering, portion costing, placing the high-margin item right where your eye lands first. Your taproom board is a menu. Treat it like one.
- Hotels figured out decades ago that the money isn't in the room, it's in everything wrapped around it. Late checkout, the upsell at the front desk, the loyalty program that keeps you coming back. That's true hospitality thinking, most customer service businesses just haven't borrowed it yet.
None of these categories is smarter than yours. They just had different constraints that forced them to learn different things. And you get to borrow all of it for free.
Want proof this cross-category view is worth something? Talk to a distributor. They watch hundreds of brands succeed and faceplant across every category, every day. That's exactly why I sat down with Melissa Johnston of Tryon Distributing for Episode 24: Your Distributor Wishes You Knew This. Someone with that vantage point is worth your listening time.
And about this economy
Yes, consumers are sitting on their wallets right now. Here's the thing though: the economy is cyclical. Patterns repeat. This exact squeeze has happened before, in beverage and in every other consumer category, and brands found their way through it. Not by waiting it out. By tightening the fundamentals and stealing smart moves from wherever they could find them.
The brands that treated "we're different" as a strategy? Most of them aren't around to argue with me today. And the brands still running sales plays from the glory days are next in line, which is the whole point of Episode 23: the 2013 playbook is dead, and your sales rep model needs to catch up to the market we're actually in.
Your homework this week
Pick one brand outside your category. A cidery if you make beer. A CPG product if you distill spirits. A baked potato restaurant if you're feeling funky. Sign up for their email list. Follow their socials. Look at their club offer, their pricing, how they talk to their people. Find one thing they do well that nobody in your category is doing, and ask what it would look like in your business. Reply to this email and tell me what you learned...seriously.
That's it. It's that simple and it's all for the taking on the interwebs.
Bottom line: what makes your business work isn't niche category knowledge. It's business judgment. And you build judgment a whole lot faster when you learn from more than just your own category.
That cross-category pattern recognition is basically what I do for a living. And speaking of getting out of ruts: my website just got a full glow up, with some brand new ways to work together in there. Go explore and poke around. Or skip the browsing and book a call and let's get to work.
Get out of your echo chamber this week,
Julie
P.S. Fall conference season is officially here and so am I. Come find me and talk shop:
P.P.S. Speaking of borrowing my brain: if your numbers live in six different portals and not one of them tells you what to actually do next, that's exactly what I built Proof for. One dashboard pulling your whole business together, plus the strategy behind the numbers and the action moves that matter. And in a scheduling coincidence I swear I didn't plan, Episode 25 of the podcast dropped this morning and it's all about Proof: what it is, who it's for, and how it works. [Give it a listen], then head to the Proof page and fill out the interest form. I'll take it from there.
P.P.P.S. And a sneak peek at what I've got brewing, pun absolutely intended: two AI-led training apps backed by Julie's brain and designed specifically for your brand. GuestWork trains your taproom and tasting room staff on hospitality that actually drives revenue. RouteWork trains distribution sales reps without the ride-along or if you have zero distribution selling knowledge. Both built on everything I've learned doing these jobs myself, and both customized to your brand: your ops, your prices, your rules, your goals. They're not out yet, but the waitlists are open. Joining costs nothing and commits you to nothing, you just hear about it first when doors open.
If you enjoy tough love for your business and you actually read these emails, then you'll love the podcast. Bite sized episodes that pack a big punch. You can catch up on all episodes here or click those cute buttons below. You can also search for This Is Not Your Hobby wherever you get your podcasts. Have a Bottleneck for me to tackle on an upcoming episode? Submit your anonymous gripes and beverage business issues here.
Love this email? Share the love. Forward to a friend!
