How Brett Berish Built Billion-Dollar Spirit Brands by Ignoring Industry Rules | Sovereign Brands

Building businesses is like the comedian. When a comedian goes on stage and tells a joke, they get the audience's reaction and then they tweak it for the next time. And then they tweak it again and again and again and it could be 20, 30 times before they're tweaking that same joke and it nails it by the end. And to me, that's business. You've got to constantly learn from your audience and what's working and what doesn't work, what the consumer's reacting, how the trade's reacting and it's constantly evolving and that's what we're doing. This is right about now with Ryan Allford, a Radcast Network production. We are the number one business show on the planet with over 1 million downloads a month. Taking the BS out of business for over six years in over 400 episodes. You ready to start snapping necks and caching checks? Well, it starts right about now. What's up guys? Welcome to Rad About Now. I'm Ryan Allford, your host. And you know, we used to have a little moniker to say if it's radical, we cover it. Well, you know what? I don't know too many brands and too many people doing more radical things than my good friend Brett Barris. He is the president and CEO of Salver and Brands. And if you're watching the YouTube, what you should be, you would see the lineup of beauties here on the desk. What's up, brother? How are you, Ryan? Thanks for having me on. Yeah, man, my pleasure. And just real quick, on the radical side, you made me think of my brother who I work with. He says what you'll get you fired at any other company will get you hired by mine. So that's how I think. It's funny, I own a digital agency called Radical. And our show used to call the Radcast. Now we have the Radcast Network with multiple shows that we didn't want confusion. Literally, when I have meetings with my team and I need to get a knowledge from here, I go in there and I go, our name is fucking radical. It's right. You have the license to live up to this name every day. And our clients hired an agency named Radical. So you know what that means? It means they can't call me and go, what the hell were you thinking? And I'll go, you hired an agency named Radical. It works. You said the quiet part out loud. This is what you expect to expect it. I love what you're doing, man. I love anyone that's got bravado and doing things a little different and understands marketing. And you got all that in spades, pun intended. For me, with my brands, it's all based on making mistakes and kind of learning. If I'm veering off in my own direction, it's because a long time ago I realized I have to stop being like everybody else in my industry because I can't be them. I can't be Diagio, I can't be McCarty, I can't be Jack Daniels. And every time I try to do things the way they do, I fail miserably. I started leaning in on, what do I like? Who am I? What do I want to be? And that's when it started working. Why spirits? What got you into spirits? I like most people, I ended up following what my dad did for a living. My dad spent 45 years in the liquor business. In some ways, he loved it, loved it, loved it and lived it. At the same time, he hated it for me. I realize this is apparent myself. You want your kids to do something that you perceive as being easier. You perceive as being just something more simple, something that's got more benefit. He really wanted me to do finance, something in money, which I started out doing. But I veered back into this and I have never looked back. I think it's turned out all right for you. I tell this to people, I think there's one type of person who knows exactly what they want to do in life. And God bless, they're the luckiest people in the world. And there was somebody like me who had lots of ideas and I was the worst one, never picked anything. Because I was always scared that the one idea I'm going to do is not the right idea. I'd run out of ideas. Therefore, I'm just in kind of nowhere land. It's sucked for 10, 12 years until I picked something and I picked this industry and stuck with it. It's been a fast-aying industry because you've got the tiered system in the US with alcohol. And I know enough to be dangerous. You can enlighten us further than my brain can probably do it. But the inability forever to not be able to do D to C and having to go through the tiered system to distributors and all that stuff. I'd love just a business of liquor. Give us a little bit of the evolution from where things started of where it is today. Money, it hasn't changed since prohibition. Surely it's gotten a little better. We can write ads about it. I'll give you one example because it'll be come home to you in South Carolina. The industry hasn't changed. It's been a three-tier system and a three-tier system for those of you who don't know what that means is, I'm a supplier, I own the brands and I sell to distributor and the distributor sells to bars and restaurants. I is a supplier, the owner can't sell direct and then every state's a new distributor. And then you have some states that are franchise states like the state of Georgia, whereas if you give the brand to a distributor, you can never get it back. Or a state like Pennsylvania, where the government is the distributor. In fact, they're probably the single biggest retailer in the United States and it's still owned by the state. So it's fucked up, but it works. But I'll give you one change that's happened in the past 20 years of South Carolina. And if you're old enough to remember in South Carolina on premise bars and restaurants, we're only able to serve the customer many bottles, airplane bottles by law. Millions and billions of billions of mini bottles in bars because it was the only way to control serve and you get a perfect serve. You couldn't get any more or any less because it was straight out of the mini bottle. I was in college when mini bottles were still a thing in South Carolina. That made a pretty strong drink. A mini bottle is actually a lot, but it was so funny because people would come into town and like, what is that behind the bar? They thought it was a novelty. And I'm like, no, that's how you ordered drinks here. We sell globally in 80 countries. I share that story. Be good, comprehend the fact that bars and restaurants sold the little airplane bottles. The industry has not changed except that's been a change. Like these beauties on my table here, everything that you're making and branding, you can't sell direct. No, I cannot sell direct to a bar restaurant to retailer. I have to go through a distributor. In the state of South Carolina, we have a distributor. Empires are a distributor in that state, great distributor, and they take on the delivery, the sales. And we have college, somebody in the market who supports them and goes out and visit accounts and sells my brands, Bel Air, Bumbu, McQueen, Deakin, our brands. It's convoluted, it's strange, it's crazy, but it works and the key to anybody's business and whatever industry you're in is you gotta figure out how to make it work for you. And that's what we've done. How do you make it work for you? That's to be kind of your statement how you've made it work for you. Along with self-made taste better, which we'll get to shortly. I love taglines. I've been to business. It's such a hoitty, toyty, champagne market. Some of these stuff is just so, I don't know, they take themselves too seriously. There's this fine line of taking your brand seriously and having a stake in the ground versus some of maybe the irreverent, non-traditional ways that you've gone at it. What gave you the confidence to go there? It's the way I've looked at everything as I look back. It's learning from my mistakes. I realize I've got lots of sayings I live by. One of them, which is a strange one, is sometimes not having a plan is a great plan. And what that's taught me is, if you stick to your plan for a year or two, you're gonna be wrong and you're wrong. You're wrong for the next year or two and the key is to be really flexible. That's what I've been leaning into. That's one example of the way we build our business. It's leaning into what works and being very nimble. And that's how I built the business. And it's empowering people. Everyone we've hired, we have a few hundred people in the company who are hiring based on hiring people who are our self-starters, who are leaders, who if they're waiting for me to tell them what to do, they're too late. That's not the person for us. It's lots of things like that all coming together that's made my success. That's huge. And I'm gonna circle that for our audience. We have a lot of flooding entrepreneurs, people wanting to start their thing or maybe already in their thing. If you have the wrong plan and you don't pivot, then you can get stuck somewhere spinning your wheels for a lot longer than you should have. You don't an art flexible to what's happening around you. That is huge. It's an interesting, I have a story that I use. Building businesses is like the comedian. When a comedian goes on stage and tells a joke, they get the audience's reaction and then they tweak it for the next time. And then they tweak it again and again and again. And it could be 20, 30 times before they're tweaking that same joke and it nails it by the end. And to me, that's business. You gotta constantly learn from your audience and what's working and what doesn't work. What the consumers reacting, how the trades reacting and it's constantly evolving and that's what we're doing. What's the thread for sovereign brands and kind of how you bring any bottle brand to life? It always, always, always and it sounds canned, but it's the taste. That's gonna dictate everything because if it doesn't taste good, Ryan, they're never gonna come back again. What my brother and I decided a long time ago is we don't have tasting groups and sommeliers and all that goes with that. If you were in our office on the day the tasting, I'd have you taste with us and tell me what you think. And my goal is in the category we're in, it's gotta taste better than the competition. If the tasted bamboo, which is the rum with the X on the front there, it tastes better than any other rum in the category. And that's why the brand today is the number one premium rum in the world. Six years ago we launched it. It's the one thing, Ryan, all my brands haven't common is no one believed in them. No one, no one believed in them. No one thought they would work. They're in sleepy old categories, which I love. But it's the taste because if it tastes great, people are gonna talk and you're gonna build something from there, so it's always that. You guys lean in to the influencers, the spokesperson's, the celebrity app, if Post Malone says, bamboo tastes great, does it matter if it does taste great or not? The interplay of that brand recognition and leverage that you get from those celebrity endorsements versus the product itself. If you wanna use the example stick to the artist, if the artist has a shitty song, it's a shitty song. It doesn't matter who the artist is. There's a reason why if you try to pick an artist of 10 great songs and that's it, and that's hard to do in itself. But if you can be the single greatest artist, if the song's not good, it won't play. And to me, it gets back to the taste. If the taste isn't good, no matter how big this celebrity is, it's not gonna work. But all the other stuff, don't get me wrong. Package is an example in your marketing guy, it means everything, especially at my level. I can't spend the way of Bacardi does and build a brand. I think my package is in the design or the name or the story girl with it matters too. The consumer hopefully will see us in the shelf or they'll recognize us and pull it and then taste it. And then they'll come back again. But if they don't like the look, they're never gonna try it. So they work hand in hand. Yep, similar to wine bottles. Consumer packaging is critical. To me at least, I have to believe in what I'm putting out there. I have to look in the eye and say, Ryan, you're gonna taste the best frickin whiskey in the whole world and there's nothing else like it. And I can look at the eye and tell you why and tell you stories behind it. And you're gonna taste it, you're gonna love it. You're gonna love the stories to go with it. Who's your favorite baby on the table here in general? I have six kids in my house. And if you ask me, who's my favorite? Every day of the week, I got a favorite. And that's just real, I love them all, but someone kind of stands up today and it's like, oh, she or he is so cute or, oh, this is the best. Right now it's the Deacon. It's my whiskey. I'm wearing my shirt that says the Deacon. If you like bourbon, if you like whiskey, if you like Irish, if you like anything, this thing is smoky, it's sweet, it's peat, it holds up in any cocktails, you can still taste it, which you can't do with any other whiskey and it just gets me excited. And I'm probably also saying that right because it's the newest one. It's the newest one, so the newest one always gets more love. I worked with Apple for quite a bit. And the way Apple does one thing is the way they do everything and this to details that matter, especially in packaging and design. The feel of this bottle, the textures, the design, the first thing I pulled out of the box, I'll just say that right now is the copper kind of look, grab my attention. And I'm telling you, a brand experience happens. The moment you touch it for Apple, like how easy it is to open the box. That's the first thing. But for you, it's like, I felt this. I'm like, okay, must have. And I love the attention to detail in just the overall bottle and everything. That softness of Apple packaging, it's nothing expensive, but it feels it. It feels a little more expensive, but it's true. And you look at that Deacon bottle, you know, there's a white X in the background behind that character, that's the Scottish flag. It's all over the bottle, which are actually X's, that's to do with Scotland. It says aquavetes on the main label and then debossed in the back and that has to do with aquavetes Latin for the spirit of life. The face has meaning. It has to do with the plague and plague doctors. The goggles have a meaning. The name in Scotland means if you're the best of what you do, if you're the best podcaster, if you're the best economist, if you're the best barber, you're the Deacon. Everything has meaning to me and I need it to live and breathe in the brand. I need to believe in it. It's showing through and I think our audience definitely just heard it. And look, let me tell you this, if you're listening, there's details matter in web design. It's like CX, like consumer experience. That shit matters and people pick up on it. That's the beauty. I always look at it. If you ask me, who's my target audience? I don't believe in demographics. I don't believe in channels. I don't believe in on-premise, which is bars restaurants, off-premise, which is retail. I don't believe in cities or states. I believe in selling to everybody, everybody. Because the consumer who likes it is the consumer. You don't know what you have until you let it go and do you put it out there. So I want to sell to everybody. And that, to me, is how you build a brand. They say riches in the niches and I thought that my whole career a little bit. You certainly have to have some amount of focus, but you want mass appeal. And word of mouth is like the most powerful thing in marketing still. I learn from everything around me. And if I use music, which I'm a big fan of as an example, if you ask any artist what their number one hit was and did they think that song was going to be successful, they'll all say no. They didn't like it. They didn't think they should put it out. They didn't think it was going to be a hit and lo and behold it is. And that tells me you got to try shit. And for me, if I use bamboo as an example, our biggest single market in the world outside the US is Canada and known for my companies ever been there. We crush it in places like Latvia, Romania, Poland, where rum isn't the thing, but they love bamboo. If I didn't let it breathe, we would never have known. It would be like this. Brett, you're a personal brand. You're carrying the brand of the company yourself. I could sense you've always had this personality and this sort of gravitas that goes with you and the brand and what you're doing. But when did that light bulb maybe go on that you are part of the brand and part of this story? It happened for me maybe a year before COVID, not that long ago. And the reason is my brother and I, if you ever asked us, we've always said it's not about us. We don't want to make it about us. It's never about us. It's about the brand. We don't matter who cares about who I am. It wasn't until I started doing an interview series called Self Made, where I wanted to hear people's stories. People started coming to me and thinking, I've always been successful. And my response is, no, that's not true. I went through shit. I lost my house, side of the IRS, we went bank account. I lost everything in this business. And I started realizing I want people to know that side because that's the side that motivates me and I want to hear that side from other people. And then I started realizing, boy, I think I can help. I think I can help my brand at the same time. I realized I can help people. I wish there was somebody like me when I was 19, 18, 17, 16, where they're telling shitty stories about failure and look at me now, because I think that's very important. That's the most important story to tell if you're successful. Brett, I can't appreciate you enough for coming on the show. Let's talk where everybody obviously got the distributors stuff, but where can people keep up with you, the brands, learn more about everything you're up to, and where to get these delicious drinks. On Instagram, Brett bearer CEO, the brands, Deakin Whiskey, bamboo original, official Bel Air, McQueen, Pilot Fog, the own France. Hit us if you have questions. If you want to be a brand ambassador, be part of our team. Just hit us, that's how it starts. And if you're looking to do anything in business, the key is don't rely on anyone. That's the key. Self made, tastes better. That's right, don't rely on anyone. Brett, thank you so much for coming on. I really appreciate your wisdom, your time, and your gifts. Thank you so much for having me, Ryan. Take care, everybody. Hey, guys, you know, to find us, Ryan is right.com. You'll find all the highlight clips from today. Links to all of Brett's brands. And of course, links to all of mine. Thank you for making this number one. This bill is real. And number one, because we are number one, because you made us that way. We'll see you next time. I'm right about now. This has been right about now with Ryan Alford, a Radcast Network production. Visit RyanisRite.com for full audio and video versions of the show. Order one choir about sponsorship opportunities. Thanks for listening.