Jump to content

Hello from South Australia


Recommended Posts

Hi fellow distillers,

I am in the early stages of building a distillery in the Adelaide Hills. We have all out tax off approvals and licensing complete, stills built, and have started out first batch of single malt whisky. A few hiccups along the way, but we are learning and moving on. Still working full time and working the distillery on weekends at nights until we have a product to sell.

Great to find a bunch of friendly commercial distillers all willing to help each other out! I sure have a lot of questions for you all. Hopefully can same us some experimentation time and costly mistakes. Really interested to hear from any other Aussie distillers so we can share contacts for suppliers.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Biggest issue that we have run into trying to operate a distillery and have other jobs is not production, it's sales.

Beverage managers, bartenders, owners, buyers - all these folks can or will only meet at 2pm during the week.

Too busy in the mornings - prep for the day.  Too busy at noon, lunch rush.  At 4? No way dinner rush is starting.  Friday?   No good, too busy.  Weekends?  Not possible.

Easy to produce at 6pm and on the weekends, not so easy to sell.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Thanks for the guidance Silk City.  Certainly a problem we need to solve once we have a saleable product. Since our main game is whisky that will be a while. We need to keep working to fund the whisky. Unfortunately banks in Australia are every reluctant to loan money to small distilleries, and to be honest we would rather self fund.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

20 hours ago, djpearse said:

Really interested to hear from any other Aussie distillers so we can share contacts for suppliers.

The Australian Distillers Association group on Facebook seems to be where most of the professional Aussie distillers hang out.  There is also the Aussiedistiller forum at http://aussiedistiller.com.au which is very active but seems to be mainly home distillers. And of course there are some very active and knowledgeable Australian distillers right here in the ADI forum.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Thanks Meerkat. Yes, I have been a member of Aussiedistiller Forums for a while and mostly home hobyists, but quite lots very skilled and knowledgeable people.

The ADA Facebook group is only available to paid ADA members and just cant justify the expense until we start getting some income. Would be interested to hear from any ADA members on whether we are likely to get value from our membership fee. I am sure we will become members in the next year or two.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

12 hours ago, djpearse said:

Thanks for the guidance Silk City.  Certainly a problem we need to solve once we have a saleable product.

That's a horribly bad idea. The best situation you can be in is that you've sold every drop of product you produce as it is ready. If you wait to build a sales pipeline until after you have product to sell you've going to be building up that pipeline for several months. A lot of manufacturing businesses (not just distilleries) fail because they don't understand you don't get paid until you get a check from the customer. And that check can be 30-90 days after you ship your product, which might take 10-15 days after you get the order, which might be 5-10 days after you "sell" your product. So best case scenario you might get paid two months after you "sell" something, or up to four months for a normal transaction. Worst case you ship product that you never get paid for, which will be 5-15% of the time. 

Sales may suck but you have to have work on it all the time. It should be the first thing your business works on. Understanding where you're going to sell, to whom, distribution of the product, how long it takes to get paid, how are you going to collect accounts past due, the industry bad debt % and a million other aspects of business is something you need to understand as you build your business plan. 

As has been said on here many times, you're in a sales/marketing business that happens to sell booze. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
×
×
  • Create New...