Bill Anderson is the founder of Los Angles based First Beverage Group, which advises and invests in innovative and transformative beverage brands.
He says it’s an era where consumers are turning away from corporate companies and their products; and instead looking for smaller, original offers that they can share and discuss.
‘A time of non-corporate brands’
“It’s a phenomenal time in the US and around the world to be in this industry, it’s really the era of small brands, the era of local and artisanal and craft and regional,” he told attendees at Drinkpreneur Live in London last week.
“It’s a time of non-corporate brands, which is the big challenge to the big suppliers,” – but also an opportunity for entrepreneurs, he added.
Anderson uses the success of the craft beer industry as an example: a category that has grown up from small, entrepreneurial brewers. These are now reaping the rewards of their endeavours – and putting pressure on the multinational corporations.
“This is a time where no matter what the big companies try and do, consumers – at least in the US – are looking for something that they can discover and tweet about and tell their friends about,” he said.
“You’re never going to tweet about a Budweiser you found in Costco. But you are going to tweet about the honey blueberry ale you found at a great restaurant in Nashville.”
“Being ready to take on the corporate establishment, and take in on through social media, is a key part.”
So what makes a beverage entrepreneur?
Beverage entrepreneur checklist
- Vision
- 'Lover of liquid'
- Brand builder
- Large skill set
- Comfortable with different people
- Risk-taker
A beverage entrepreneur is risk-taker, said Anderson, adding that 90% of the business plans he sees comes from people with no beverage experience. But that is what makes brands special – they’ve come from people with ‘enormous guts,’ not from people who have decades of experience with multinational companies.
An entrepreneur needs to have a strong drive.
“We find a lot of these entrepreneurs really do have a vision,” he said. “I think the great brands are based on the founder’s intuition on what the brand should look, feel and smell like.”
And they need to have a passion about that vision – to be a ‘lover of liquid.’
“They really believe it has an impact in some way, whether because of the functional benefits, the social aspects of it. They really care about what’s in the bottle. It used to be you could go to a co-packer and try and do the next vitamin water. That’s not going to work anymore. There really has to be an authentic story behind it.”
Along with the story is the necessity to be able to build a brand for the product, he added.
A beverage entrepreneur needs to have a large range of skills – or at least have people on their team who can contribute. A brand needs to cover all bases: from branding to distribution, production, and legal aspects.
And among these skills is the ability to work with different groups of people. “It’s not just working with the personality of your team, or your board of advisers. It’s also working across the full range of personalities from retailers to distributors to consumers. In the US, those are all very different groups of personalities.”
And the personality of the entrepreneur themselves is important to investors and buyers, added Anderson.
“What we look for: the people. it sounds tripe, but we’re going to bet more on the jockey than the horse,” he said.