PIVOTING FROM NON-PROFIT INTO OWNER-OPERATING A COMMUNITY-FOCUSED GRIFFO DISTILLERY AND SELLING FOR MILLIONS
Jenny Griffo worked in education and the non-profit sector building libraries in Southeast Asia and East Africa for Room to Read before pivoting in 2015 to co-founding and operating award-winning, community-focused Griffo Distillery in Petaluma, California. With no prior experience in sales or business, Jenny learned on-the-fly, grew multiple revenue streams, and navigated her and her husband's company to a multi-million dollar exit in 2023.
Anne McGinty
Can you tell us a little bit about what you were doing before you decided to start Griffo Distillery?
Jenny Griffo
Yeah, so before Griffo Distillery, I feel like I had a whole different life. And it's interesting, you know, when you look back at your life, how you don't quite know how things are all gonna unfold while you're in the middle of it. But I led a life of really just following my passion and feeling like my purpose in the world was within the realms of education, international development, and worked for Room to Read kind of all over the world building libraries through my teams.
Anne McGinty
How did that transfer over to wanting to start a business? Because to me, they seem pretty unrelated.
Jenny Griffo
It's funny how when you're in the middle of things, you don't quite ever imagine, oh, I'm working internationally in rural Laos building a library. How would that ever lead to opening a distillery? It makes sense, right?
And I really do believe in following passions and following your purpose and how life unfolds in a way that works out when you do that. I didn't know it at the time, but all the skills I was learning around how to build community, how to leverage community for good and for creating things together, all was going to come in handy when I opened the distillery. So I think there's a two part to it. One is that I was learning real skills. I was really challenged managing $35 million worth of programs and grants throughout like maybe 10 countries, running big programs.
Project management from start to finish, solving really difficult issues that come up in developing countries. And when we opened the distillery, I wasn't at first clear on what my value was, right? I wasn't sure how I could be of use to the distillery. I'm not a distiller, I'm not a scientist. And so it took a little while for me to kind of find my legs. And once I realized that business and work is all kind of the same, you know.
Building a library in rural Laos and trying to get community buy-in isn't really any different than being in our town and building our distillery and really needing the community to have our back and care about what we're doing. I think our community loving who we are and feeling connected and a part of who we are is one of the main reasons why we've been successful.
Anne McGinty
Where did that spark come from? What was the moment?
Jenny Griffo
Well, it was more like a series of moments. The first moment was we were sitting at our friend's annual Fourth of July weekend party at their vineyard on the Sonoma Coast. And it was like one of those most incredible days where we were like, this is how people think it always is to live in California, but it isn't really. And we were sipping champagne and eating oysters and listening to beautiful music. And Mike was like, now I know he was joking. At the time I didn't know he was joking. And he said, we should open a winery.
And I was just gassed because you need so much money and there's so many wineries and it's so difficult. And I was like, no, that's an awful idea. We should open a distillery. You already distill nanoparticles in the lab as a physicist, so that makes a lot more sense. And I was telling the story on a tour maybe a decade later and Mike was like, Jenny, you know I was joking about the winery, right? And I was like, nope. So you mean our whole business is founded on me not getting a joke.
That was the first seed, right? That was the like, I just threw spaghetti on the wall and it stuck, right? And then there was a series of years where we kept talking about it and exploring the idea and researching and figuring it all out. I honestly didn't think I was going to be a part of it until a few years into running the distillery. I really saw that it needed me, that I had the other half of what Mike had.
Anne McGinty
And what did it need?
Jenny Griffo
What I mean is that, you know, when I looked at what Mike was doing, he had built an incredible facility, an incredible distillery, the first wireless distillery that we know of in North America in a craft distillery. He's brilliant. And he was the scientist building the best distillery. But if no one knows about your distillery, and if you have no partnerships, no community buy-in, no outreach, you know, none of the stuff that goes out, you're only half of a business, right?
And I knew that I had all that experience in how to work with communities, how to bring communities in, how to build buy-in from my previous experience that I had no idea would apply to a distillery. Right. And so I came in because I was like, I know this place needs more than just Mike. It needs someone to be his yang to his yin. Right. And as I came in, I started trying things and it started working. Building community was what the place needed. And it was really exciting to figure out that we could do this place together.
Anne McGinty
What exactly did you do when you joined Griffo and took over? What did you implement? Like, how did you change things?
Jenny Griffo
I started building partnerships with local brands, local stores, local restaurants, going in, doing tastings, sharing our products, bringing them into our facility, building out our facility to have more of an ability to host people and share on the spot what we're doing and really building relationships. Letting
Different politicians throw their launch events, having nonprofits throw their fundraisers. Most schools in our community throw their annual gala, silent auction style event at our distillery. And what an incredible demographic for a distillery, right? You have a hundred plus parents all at perfect, premium spirit drinking age, you know, going to your facility, feeling that you're supporting their school, getting buy-in. So win-win. It's totally a win-win.
It strikes me that I could have had different skill sets and joined Griffo and added in a different way. It's just that's the skills that I had to contribute. And so that's how I was able to grow us.
Anne McGinty
So you came into the distillery at that point, it didn't really have any community outreach, any events. So what you started to contact these schools or nonprofits or did they find you?
Jenny Griffo
I found them. I just started building partnerships. So calling schools.
My kids were at school, so we started with those schools. Our friends' schools, started talking to them saying, hey, does your school need a place to hold their fundraiser? We can be cheaper than where you currently are. Give us a chance to quote it. And just reaching out. You actively went out to seek partnerships. Yeah, I mean, as part of my personality to move through the world building relationships, it's part of who I am. And so it was a natural thing to do.
Anne McGinty
So what were the initial challenges that you faced when you pivoted?
from nonprofit to running the operations of a distillery?
Jenny Griffo
I mean, there were a lot of really hard moments because it wasn't like I started working with Griffo and knew immediately where my value was. I first started trying to hire sales teams to manage our distribution. And if people aren't familiar with alcohol distribution, we're forced into the three tier system. So we can't sell directly to markets. We have to use a distributor that takes a 35% margin off our shelf price. And so they make more than we do on our bottle delivering the bottle to the market.
Anne McGinty
Is that a California law or is that a nationwide law?
Jenny Griffo
It's a California law and every state has some version of this, right? You have states where you have to move through state liquor stores. You have some that you can deliver directly. I was just talking to someone in New Jersey who owns a distillery and they can deliver direct and that's a huge difference, right?
I think where things really flip for us at Griffo, because there were many years of reinvesting in whiskey barrels, reinvesting in brandy barrels. It's so expensive to build future revenue streams and sit on them for two to four years. But COVID was a huge game changer for us. And I suspect that we are on the top 2% or 1% of distillery sales of sanitizer in the whole country. There's two parts of that, why we were so successful. One part was Mike's ability to pivot literally over a weekend building sanitizer, filling machines, producing gel sanitizer unlike any other distillery.
We had liquid and gel and made these massive automatic filling machines that we could produce pallets and pallets in one day. Combine his incredible intelligence and machine building skills with my relationship building skills. So at the same time, I knew that a dad of my kid's friend, he was a kind of a broker for the military. And so I reached out to him and said, Hey, do you know if the military needs any sanitizer right now? And he's like, oh, yes, they do, Jenny, let's do this.
And so we figured out a commission for him and we sold seven figures of sanitizer in three months.
Anne McGinty
Oh my gosh.
Jenny Griffo
Yeah.
Anne McGinty
What a game changer. That is huge. And so you had this sudden influx of cash. How did you reinvest that cash into your business and expand your operations?
Jenny Griffo
It was a really exciting time for us because for the first time, we really had the resources. For the first time, we had the resources we actually needed to build this place out.
We were able to invest in a lot of machinery that increases our efficiencies and allows us to produce at a more competitive rate and start producing for larger clients. And that has been a major way for us to really compete within the custom distillation marketplace, which has been about 40% of our revenue stream. So that's been huge. Oh, that's so interesting. So 40% of your revenue stream is from custom distillation. Where does the other 60% come from? Roughly it's 20% our brand, private events and 20% tasting bar sales.
Anne McGinty
And how did you know about the custom distillation niche? Was this always a part of your business model?
Jenny Griffo
I really credit Mike with figuring out the custom distillation model before really any other distillery that I know of that was our size, at the Kraft kind of micro distillery size. It was before I was really working full time at Griffo. He had this epiphany where he's like, every day I'm not running this still and I'm paying for this facility.
I'm losing money. So how do I get this still running? And he's like, I'm in wine country. And he's like, I had just spoken to a winery. I was at an event and I was talking to them and they were interested in making brandy. And a light bulb went off for me. He's like, I'm in wine country. Maybe I can make brandy for wineries while my brand is growing and just get that still on and make another revenue stream. And so he and I actually worked on the collateral for custom distillation and prepared these bags where you'd get a bottle of gin.
You'd get a... packet of information on how to turn your excess wine into brandy and add a new revenue stream to your winery business. Because wineries can sell brandy direct as part of their winery license. And so he started driving around every day to wineries and say, can I talk to your winemaker? Can I talk to your winemaker? And if they weren't there, he'd leave the bag on the desk with a contact card. And our gin is incredible, right? It's a gold medal winning gin and one of the best on the market.
And so these winemakers that are so tired of wine, they got a bottle of gin and they were so excited about it. They poured it at home and they're like, this is incredible. Wait, I can make something with these people. And we started getting winery clients, but it wasn't a huge number, but it really showed us that there was a big opportunity here. That is so savvy. Would you say that Brandy then is all of your custom distillation? Brandy is not all of our custom distillation. That's where I've really been able to come in and build partnerships.
And it's really great because I happen to be really excited about helping brands make their spirits. And so we have a lot of brandy. We have our annual clients that we make cropa for, brandy for. We're aging for many of the wineries that you know and are familiar with from the shelves. And they use that brandy to fortify their wines to increase ABV or they use it to just bottle. These wineries sell our brandy that we make for them for upwards of $700 a bottle.
Anne McGinty
So it's really valuable for them. And it makes use of a product that would have otherwise, what, gone to waste or been sold at a cheaper price?
Jenny Griffo
Absolutely. I mean, right now we have wineries reach out to us with 30, 60,000 gallons of excess wine. And the wine world is unfortunately in a lot of trouble right now with sales down really considerably this year. So I have more and more brandy and contract clients reaching out to me from wineries trying to figure out how to make their business model work in this market.
Anne McGinty
Wow.
Jenny Griffo
Yeah.
Anne McGinty
Was there a point in your distillery journey that validated your decision to make this pivot or a moment when you felt, I'm so glad that we did this?
Jenny Griffo
There were many nights like that. There were also many nights where we were going like, why did we do this? This is so hard and this is so scary and maybe we'll lose everything. But there were also like many really, really exciting days like having...
an incredible world-renowned musician on the stage in our barrel room filled with 130 people dancing and celebrating with our barrels all around. And the singer on stage sipping a whiskey and being like, this is the best whiskey I've ever had in my life. And the synergy of community and making the living. For me, those are the moments that I'm most excited about. There's obviously we've landed really big contracts. We just launched Woody Harrelson's gin called Holistic Spirits Origin.
But for me, it's those community moments. It's those moments where you look around and you see that you've created a space where people get to come together and celebrate community and feel really positive together. I've had people like weep to me and say like, I haven't felt this way since before COVID where I'm so comfortable in a space and so happy to be with community. And that sticks with your values of wanting to create community impact. It really does.
Anne McGinty
So when you say 20% of your revenue comes from events, these are not just event rentals. It sounds like you are curating events.
Jenny Griffo
Absolutely. Like a small event we have tomorrow is for local pet shelter. And so they're going to have dogs in front of the distillery. And we're going to have a preschool there, kids raising money for their preschool and doing an art for kids event and a food truck. And so it's a lot of fun. And it's amazing what it does for our brand.
We have so many brand ambassadors out there because they're dog fans and they love that a dog rescue group is getting supported by Griffo. So they're forever Griffo Gen fans, right? That's to me my favorite way to build a business, right? Is through that heart connection and to the side and to it all where that's just part of how to play the game in distilleries. The other huge part about how to play the game is the distributor model. And it has nothing to do with community and it has nothing to do with personal relationships. It has to do with big business shenanigans.
Anne McGinty
How do you handle that in comparison to other distilleries that aren't doing it as well as you? What are you doing differently?
Jenny Griffo
I mean, we're not succeeding in the distributor model. We're doing just fine because of our local buy-in, right? So we're in the local Costco's, which is great. And all of our local fans love to go there and get it for a really great price. But to be honest, like we've never figured out the distributor model with our acquisition. We've brought in a new CEO who has extensive sales experience.
Basically his only focus really is scaling our distribution nationally, because it's really not within our skill sets to know how to do that. It's a perfect partnership.
Anne McGinty
So going back to before you were acquired and brought in the investment, how did you get the necessary knowledge and skills for running operations when you didn't know how to do them coming from your background in nonprofit? How did you learn?
Jenny Griffo
It was really hard to learn something so different, but Mike and I both love research. I love taking people out to coffee and saying, please let me know, how do you solve these problems? Like, what are you doing? And so it was a lot of trial and error. You know, to be honest, there were many years where every six months, either Mike or I would feel like giving up. And if I was pregnant, usually it was me feeling that way. Because having three little kids while building this place was a pretty crazy idea.
I'm so proud of how hard we hustled, how much we learned, how much we stretched, how much we had to learn to work together, overcoming our failures, right? And persisting and pivoting and tapping into skills that we didn't know we had and extending and partnering, all these things, you know? I'm so glad I had to do it all, but it was so hard. I don't think I would have chosen it if I had known. I think that human, there'd be a lot less humans if women really knew how hard childbirth was, is perhaps a
similar model.
Anne McGinty
Well, so then it's probably better that you didn't know. You wouldn't be where you are today. So you mentioned the setbacks. Can you share one of the hardest setbacks that you have experienced in your journey and how you navigated through it?
Jenny Griffo
So we spent a lot of time building a relationship with this one vodka brand, and they spoke very highly of their partnership with us. We spent a lot of time.
days and days, weeks and weeks working on proposals and how to run their products so we could get it as efficiently run as possible so we could get the price point they wanted it at. And they were the kind of people where they were like seasoned professionals and they sat down with us in our boardroom and shook our hands and said, you're going to be our distillery. And they produced maybe 50,000 cases of their vodka in 2021.
Anne McGinty
And how big is a case?
Jenny Griffo
Nine liters. So that's 12 typical bottles of spirits in one classic spirit case. And they had all this big talk, but they couldn't sign a contract because their board was still, there was all these reasons why they couldn't put it in writing. And we trusted them and they started pulling back and pulling back and pulling back in 2022. And this was right as we were trying to go to market to sell. And so I just had to go into high gear with my custom distilling sales. And I started just...
hustling and calling anyone I could think of, pushing on all of the brands I could think of, going to any conference I could think of. And what I'm really proud is, is that in 2022, despite the contraction of working with this brand, going down to maybe 10, 15% of what it had been the year before, right? And it had been a very large portion of our custom distilling revenue. I was actually able to grow our custom distilling business in 2022 by 30%. That's amazing. Yeah.
And that was really leveraging all those partnerships I'd had, right? So one of the things that we did during COVID was we started canning cocktails. The RTD market, everyone knows about how crazy it was for a while there. We did it at the time because there's just cash here for us. Just make it, you know, build this business. But canning is really difficult and we really didn't like doing it for a lot of reasons. What it ended up doing was it ended up creating all these relationships with these formulators and there's a whole network of formulators across the country that actually will make the products for brands that they then send on to the producer to be produced.
So I had built all this trust and I had brought all this business to these formulators during the RTD craze. So during 2022, I told them, hey guys, if you make us your preferred distillery, I'll give you a 5% commission on every referral from you guys to us. And that worked. It worked, right? But it was a lot of hustle. We have momentum now that is really unprecedented in our whole business.
Anne McGinty
That is incredible.
I feel like you guys have done it in a way that even though you're saying you had those moments where you really doubted your path and what you were doing, it always worked and it continued to grow. Did you ever hit a year where it retracted?
Jenny Griffo
No. I wish we'd gone into distilling earlier in our lives, but looking back, I don't think it could have unfolded any differently. And I'm actually so thankful that we had these different careers that built our skill sets in such diverse and dynamic ways.
And I think it's a real testament to the second career switch that I think you can do a lot in your second career because you're leveraging more diversity in your skill sets, right? It reminds me of that study about child athletes, how you're most likely to become a professional athlete if you wait as long as possible to select your sport. If you have a diversified sporting childhood, you're going to be the best professional athlete.
Anne McGinty
Wow. I didn't know that.
Jenny Griffo
Yeah, it says wait to specialize. And I'm not sure exactly the reason. Maybe it has to do with how your body develops and moving it in different kinds of ways. But I relate that to career and how Mike and I both did a variety of things. We had different kinds of work within our fields and that really came into play at the distillery. Like I saw us leaning on different skill sets that we'd built in our 20s and 30s.
Anne McGinty
So if you don't mind me asking, how old were you when you started the distillery?
Jenny Griffo
I was 33.
Anne McGinty
Okay, and another question if you don't mind me asking, approximately how much capital did it require for you to get started?
Jenny Griffo
We opened it with $500,000. How did you secure the financing for that to open? So we went out to New York actually to work and save money. I know you don't go to New York to save money, but we did. And...
Mike worked for Barclays as a quant and we were able to save maybe 200 over the course of three years. And then we were able to secure an SBA loan and we had two small investments, a $20,000 investment and a $50,000 investment. And that got us just to the $500,000. But what it required us to do was to be scrappy. And so, you know, Mike...
drew all of the drawings for all of the engineering, for the steam system, for the trench drain. We literally rented a digger. There's probably a better non-kid oriented word than digger. I have a five-year-old though. And we like dug our own trench drain, right? And if you look around our distillery, it was really about every six months we'd reinvest whatever money we could get out of it, we put back into the distillery. And so for instance, the windows that we built,
that separate the tasting bar from the production floor that allow you to have this big expansive view into what's happening on the production floor. Those were bought for $10 at the Petal Marie Use facility that's next to the garbage dump. And they are sliding glass doors that we took off the hinges, turned sideways and put side by side in the wall. And they look like we bought them for that purpose, but they were $10.
Anne McGinty
Wow, that is scrappy. Really scrappy. Love it.
But it sounds like it was kind of hard starting with 500,000.
Jenny Griffo
I would suggest not starting with so little, because you can do the capital improvements that allow you to create more revenue from the beginning. So we built out a whole barrel room and event space, right? We built out our tasting bar. All of those build-outs meant we didn't have capital to take home, right? And if we'd had an event space from day one, we could have been doing private events even before we were producing gin or whiskey. My biggest advice for small businesses is to stay so flexible in the beginning.
and to try different revenue streams and see where it's working. And just pivot, pivot until you figure it out.
Anne McGinty
What advice would you give people on getting those partnerships?
Jenny Griffo
Number one thing, right? Lead with love and kindness within your business values. And the community really resonates with that. The kindness part is so important because people push you within your business. And when you respond with kindness, also healthy boundaries, right? So to be a healthy human in the world is kind of a, right? Just be kind, right? And assume that every person has some type of value to add to your business that you haven't found yet.
And remember people's names, take notes on people's kids or parents or if a parent is sick or whatever it is, take notes. And when you see them again, say, how's your mom? Ah, how's Judy? How are the kids new school? And those relationships really matter. Similarly, working with kind and good people really matters. And that's the benefit of being in business for as long as we have is that we've been able to kind of let go of the partnerships that...
weren't supportive, didn't share the same values as us. And we've found people that are great to work with. Finding good partnerships, being kind, leading with an inclusive business, and asking people, how can I support what you're doing? Having those conversations, they build over time, building your business as partnerships. There's some distilleries in our local area that are led by very alpha men. They treat each other like brothers that are mad at each other all the time, just trying to like one up each other. And I don't really...
care either way. I like both of them and I think they're both pains in the butts and I just keep my mouth shut, right? And they both have lost business because of that, right? So I have friendships with each of them and each of them bring me business that they know is better suited to my distillery that could have gone to the other one. But because I have relations with both of them and I've bit my tongue when they've been annoying or rude or whatever, I'm just like, whatever, it doesn't matter. The relationship matters more.
where it's a huge part of our success. Is building relationships. This is a repeated theme that I know among entrepreneurs and that I also have from my own experience as one. It really is about building relationships and authentic connection and making it less about yourself and more about the other person. Yes, asking more questions about the other person, learning about how they're doing, what they're doing, how they're struggling, how you can work together.
how you can leverage your businesses together and not treating things like rivals. I treated both of them like, hey, we're a rising tide, all ships, let's do this together guys. And they treated each other like, I got to elbow you out of the way and hurt both of them I think.
Anne McGinty
What has been your favorite partnership to date and how did it come about?
Jenny Griffo
I think my favorite partnership has been this recent one with Woody Harrelson and I haven't met Woody yet. But.
The reason that they found us is twofold. Woody tried our gin in LA and loved it and said, I want these people to make my gin. And the person he had put in charge of his gin project, Dave O'Brien is an industry professional who had built a relationship with me over the last few years. And he reached out to me and said, hey, Jenny, would you be interested in this? And of course he'd given Woody feedback of like, oh, I know the Griffos, they're great people. This would be a good home for you. Because of the resources he has access to,
His team is some of the highest professionals in the industry. And it has been really fun to work with them because most of the people I'm working with are building a brand from scratch with limited resources. And so it's a lot of me walking them through the process. And I tend to be sharing my knowledge more than they're sharing their knowledge because I'm helping them do something new. However, this was a lot of industry professionals who have a lot of experience.
and know what they're doing and I learned just as much as they learned from me. And that's been my favorite. I love that synergy of minds that can feed off of each other and grow together and create something even better with all the knowledge in the room.
Anne McGinty
That does sound like a lot of fun.
Jenny Griffo
It's really fun when one plus one equals three.
Anne McGinty
Definitely. You get more. So looking back, because now you're a bit older, not that old, but what advice would you give your younger self about being an entrepreneur?
Jenny Griffo
If it's not working, pivot. Figure out why it's not working. Don't think that more of the same will get you somewhere different. And keep your eyes open to opportunities because they may not be what you came into it thinking it would be. The business that ends up being successful may not look anything like the business you thought you were gonna start. But are you humble enough to let go of that initial vision?
to see where it can truly unfold if you're like in the flow, right, in the flow of life, where you're letting what's coming to you integrate into you and be a part of what you create, right? That's the flow. And I think entrepreneurs need to be in the flow and not rigid about what they think they're creating. You can hold true to your values, right? Yes, values, but rigidity about vision, your vision may have been shit, right? It may have been uninformed. It may have been an uneducated vision. So,
Are you going to stay rigid to it or are you going to be flexible and be in the flow?
Anne McGinty
Yeah. If it's not working, change it.
Jenny Griffo
Yeah. And why isn't it working? Right? I think that sometimes we just thought we needed to be more patient, more time. And in reality, we needed to be more flexible and smarter. You needed to look for some different opportunities. Yeah. I think we would have figured things out quicker. Next business I start.
I will really take that seriously.
Anne McGinty
What advice do you have for others who are considering a similar pivot from a stable job to an entrepreneurial venture?
Jenny Griffo
Hold on to your hat. If you can reduce your overhead expenses during your business build, so what do you need to do? Do you need to sublet two rooms in your house and have roommates for the first couple of years? What do you need to do to decrease the stress on the...
the business producing financially so that you can really focus on its ultimate best path. I think having that financial flexibility and breathing room while you're building it is really important. But I think businesses often start pulling money out of it before it's ready to, when you could be reinvesting.
Anne McGinty
I couldn't agree more. I've always thought that low overhead businesses were just so much easier to get off the ground and quicker to turn a profit.
Jenny Griffo
Yep, yep. And almost more fun because you're not just weighted with the ulcers of can I make payroll tomorrow? Yeah. Which is an uncomfortable feeling. But now you've made it to where you did. So it's been 10 years. Yeah. Our product had been on the market for eight years. We opened the distillery 10 years ago, but it took almost two years to fully get the product out there. But we built a distilling facility, right? We didn't build a brand. We built a distilling facility, right?
So massive electronics, steam engineering. We installed a massive boiler, right? We dug a trench drain. We installed a 350 gallon copper still, a fermentation tank, smashing kettles from China. I mean, it's a big process to run a distillery. And you also occupied a space that was larger than what you initially needed for a footprint because you planned. Having that low overhead of our rent, our rent is half of our neighbors.
a quarter of another distillery I know that's a similar size, a quarter. We looked really hard. We were flexible about the vision, about where it would take place, and got a great lease. And then it comes back to those relationships. We have been really good tenants. We pay on time. If one month we were going to miss it, we'd say, this is going to be just one month. Ahead of time, we said, we're going to be late with rent. We'll get it to you by the 15th. We weren't a problem. He didn't have to say, hey, why don't I have rent yet? We communicated actively.
But that was how we approached him, right? We're a team, we respect you, we're good tenants. And now we take up, we went from a quarter of his building to half of his building, and in a year we'll go to three quarters, and then in three years we'll go to the full building. And we have a 10 year lease with an incredible rent, and he loves us, and it's like, I'll help your business grow, do you want me to invest in it? Like, I believe in you guys, I want you guys to succeed. And that's that relationships, right? The relationships are just, when I come back to them, oh my God, I'm so repetitive, but it just.
It's in every aspect of our business.
Anne McGinty
So now it's 2023 and you've sold your business. At what point did you decide that you even wanted to entertain the idea of selling?
Jenny Griffo
I think we're that classic story of creators and makers and builders who keep making something and have that pressure to grow year over year and get to a point where you've built something that is really beyond your capacity to run.
We aren't the CEO type. We're not the ones in the board meeting negotiating deals. We're the people that want to be in the distillery making things. It got to this point where we thought to ourselves, we can't sustain this. Either we need to hire a CEO or some C-suite person that can take a lot of this off our plates, because we were working so much. We were making great money, but we were working so much. And we had these three little kids at home who we really wanted to spend more time with. So we thought to ourselves, okay,
There's different ways to do this. I don't really want to hire someone. The risk of them not being the right fit and us spending so much money on them was really scary. And it probably would have been a reasonable path to follow, but it didn't sit with where we were at with our own risk threshold. Simultaneously, this other issue was happening where one of my good friends in town was diagnosed with stage four metastatic breast cancer. And she had two young boys. And at the time, it seemed like a death sentence to all of her friends and to herself. Thankfully, she's been able to...
get incredible treatment and she has, I think, a healthy prognosis for the next few years. By the time it felt like she had two to three years. But what Mike and I watched was her community rallying around her. We saw her mother move, end with them for a year and take care of her boys. Her husband had a job that allowed him to take paid medical leave to take care of her. And I don't have a mom that could come stay with me and take care of my kids. Mike doesn't have a job that he can take medical leave from because the distillery would implode.
nor can I not be 50% of what's making the distillery happen anymore if I was sick or if Mike was sick. And it was like this rock in our stomach. I'm like, I can't handle this risk anymore. I don't want everything to fall apart. I want to feel like I can be there for my husband if he's sick or him for me. Or even if my mom got sick and I needed to go be with her or help her. There's no flexibility in our life for any of that. We are both needed every day at the distillery.
So all these things are kind of simultaneously happening of the business getting so big. Can we really run it anymore with our skillsets? Are we the best people to run it anymore too? Have we grown beyond our skillsets? And that's totally humble saying that. Like, I don't mind. I know my skillsets. I feel very confident in myself. We thought, let's just start talking to brokers or actually I thought, let's start talking to brokers. And let's be honest about how this happened. I was like, I don't like this risk anymore. And I convinced Mike.
Let me just start talking to brokers. Let's see what they think we can get out of the distillery. Let's talk to our financial planners and let's see what they think we need in order to make a good life and let's see if they match up. If they match up, Mike, why would we keep working? We also happen to have these amazing best friends who had sold their business and we're living a beautiful life. And we were like, that looks pretty good.
Anne McGinty
I don't know who you’re talking about ;)
Jenny Griffo
And so I started talking to brokers and I was getting valuations back right around where our financial planners needed us to be. So, there was this question of like, well, why are we doing this then? And once Mike, so I think Mike approached things a bit more with financial stress, right? He wanted to make sure we were okay financially. And he was really worried about that. And so, once he saw that he might be able to surf more than once a month, he was really all on board. And we started having meetings with brokers. We selected our brokerage team.
Then we're just like on this wild train, right? Headed toward a sale. And it honestly took us about a year and a half because our growth was so high in 2022 that we actually pulled back from negotiations to be able to use our 2022 numbers rather than our 2021 numbers in our sale. Growth was so high in 2022.
Anne McGinty
Is that from the custom distillation?
Jenny Griffo
Every revenue stream grew by 20 to 30% last year. And we're growing by 30 to 40% this year.
So we're having a little bit of seller's remorse. I'm like, oh my God, if we had done one more year, we could have gotten so much more.
Anne McGinty
What caused revenue to grow in every stream in 2022?
Jenny Griffo
10 years of hustle.
Anne McGinty
How does it feel now to have sold your business?
Jenny Griffo
It feels great. One person compared it to selling the home you raised your family in, where there's definite losses with it. But I'm very clear about it being the right decision. And that feels really good. And to have financial stability, really for the first time in our lives, is an incredible feeling. And I honestly, you know, we never set out making this business thinking we'd sell it, but looking back, despite how hard it's been, it's been so fun that I can't help but wanna do it again.
Anne McGinty
Really? Are you sure?
Jenny Griffo
Not another distillery, no. We're not actually legally allowed to do another distillery, non-compete. No, but I-
If I can figure out another business that engages the community in the way that I was able to and connects the community and it's a part of our value system, absolutely, I'd love to do it. But I would build it with no overhead or low overhead, right? And I would build it with the intention of selling it and with the intention of it being low work hours, not going to build something that's hard to manage.
Anne McGinty
Yeah. Your perspective has shifted. It's cherry picking the best parts of business ownership mixed with the best parts of living.
Jenny Griffo
Yeah. If I do it again, absolutely.
Because it is fun to build and grow something and create something out of nothing. And I've gotten huge joy from, and Mike has too, from really bringing something to our community that builds it. It's really a cool experience. Created something that feels really positive to people. And that's like a really beautiful way to move through your community. It feels really special.
Anne McGinty
It's such a fantastic journey. From the beginning of building out a company, bare bones, warehouse, and it's amazing what you two have accomplished together.
Jenny Griffo
Thank you, Anne. It's been a wild ride and you've watched the whole ride.
Anne McGinty
Key Takeaways:
Building relationships can create a win-win opportunity. By supporting organizations you care about, you can increase brand awareness, profits, and get buy-in from your community.
Stay flexible and try different revenue streams. When something isn't working, pivot. The Griffo's started their business expecting to make bottle sales as their main revenue. But it turns out that they make 40% of their revenue in custom distillation, 20% from their brand of bottles, 20% from events in their barrel room, and 20% from their tasting room.
Don't wait for business to come to you. Go after it.
Remember people's names and take notes. Take the time to build relationships and ask your clients and potential partners questions and learn about them.
Consider an exit strategy before you even start because it may impact how you approach your business's growth.
Think twice about the overhead of your business and think of ways that you can start with as low of overhead as possible.
