That is a tall order. The average craft distillery sell less than 1000 cases per year. Let’s say their 6 packs that would be 6000 bottles. If you wanted to pay someone poverty level compensation let’s say $28k per year their Commission would be around $4.70 per bottle or $28 per case. You will also have to pay them mileage if they use their own car to go around. The last figure I saw was .58 cents per mile driven. Let’s say they drive 6500 miles in that year to sell your 6000 bottles then that overhead cost would be $3770. Your are now at $5.30 per bottle or $31.77 per case. I’m not going to touch on expense account reimbursement at all.
My 9 years of doing this is the owner needs to peddle their hooch until they get to 2500 cases per year and then it makes monetary sense to creat a sales persons position. We compensate our two sales positions $40-$46k (salaried) per year and provided each of them with a wrapped Wiggly car. You will go broke paying the IRS minimum mileage reimbursement and not have a billboard driving around. Been there, done that. And if you don’t pay the IRS reimbursement and it’s found out your screwed. And they only find out from past sales people.....
Now you could have a person that just loves what you do and wants to be part of it. That’s awesome. We have done this in the past and works marginally. We paid $6.50 for every bottle placed. Tracking is hard but doable. Don’t forget the competition is using professional sales people and the mistake craft distilleries make (we did) is they don’t. We lucked out, now our two sales people are huge fans and left their previous sales position to come on board. We do bonus them out when agreed to numbers are hit for the quarter. And that can add up to an additional $3000 for the quarter. It’s only been hit 1 time in the past 8 quarters since we started this but, you know there is this COVID thing going around and they feel secure having a job. We’re just now seeing improvements on the sales side.
Best, Dave