How do you go from a $100M family business to a $300M fund?

95% of family businesses fail in the third generation and I happen to see it ahead of my family. So I engineered the exit of our family business. >> How does one procure 10% of the bourbon inventory and kind of why was that a bet that you made? >> When people are sad they drink. When they're happy they drink. It is a forever social lubricant for the earth. >> How did you scale that business so fast? What kind of gave it its positioning and its growth? >> I'm guessing it left about $10 million on the table. I didn't structure the deal correctly. I didn't know who I got in bed with as a private equity firm. >> What would you have changed about that transaction? We talked about your perspective in doing deals and now you're on the other side deploying capital and making investment decisions. What prepared you to be on the other side of the table? Everyone, welcome back to Million Dollar Exits. Uh the show where you get to learn from experts and business founders and investors that have built and sold and scaled $100 million businesses. Today I'm excited to have Brian Rosen on the show. Uh Brian, you built and scaled your family business from 30 million to 100 million in revenue, sold it to private equity, and you then also did it again. You built and sold another business for another 20 million and now you run InvestBeed, which manages over 300 million in AUM and are kind of the de facto expert in investing in alcohol beverage companies. Brian, welcome to the show. >> Jason, thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here. You know, Brian, it's not often that we get to have people come in and taken a family business, scaled it to a much higher level, sold it, and then kind of done some other things. What I like to understand is like you sold this business, your family business in your 30s. What felt harder in that moment? Was it letting go of the family business identity, or was it knowing that you could do something bigger? Well, I didn't know I could do anything bigger. That's the challenge. It's everything's a leap of faith. kind of jumping off a cliff um every time you leave the home turf, which is the family business. Uh you know, it's it's important to understand I had a a very stable existence, right? I was we we had a golden goose. We had retail liquor stores in and around the Midwest. We were the kings of Chicago and that never waited for a table at any restaurant. Were often awarded and celebrated um within our industry. But as I'm third generation and as you know what I think 5% of family businesses fail in the or are when 95% of family businesses fail in the third generation and so um I happened to see that the end was coming and I happened to see it ahead of my family. So I engineered the exit of our family business um based on external factors that that our family could really rush off kind of mentally but not actually. And so sold the business and it was a leap of faith. Um I didn't know what I was going to do next. I didn't know where I would land but I thought that the unknown had a greater probability of success than what I knew. >> And kind of catch us up on the timing of this. This was you know kind of before financial crisis. Correct. >> This was I began the I I I wrote a pitch book. I used my connections through YPO to find uh people that would buy an expensive chain of liquor stores. This was in 2002 this process began. So the GFC was 0708 and um the deal was consummated in '04. But uh it was uh it was before the GFC and thankfully so because uh the GFC uh really took a hit on retail, on interest rates, on people having capital to spend on deals. Um so I consider ourselves timing experts in that regard. >> What happened after that sale? So you sold the private equity. Was it a 100% sale? Did you guys roll over? >> I sold 80% of the business. I kept 20%. So, I rolled 20% into the deal. I stayed for about a year and a half, two years as CEO and then I uh left. I left and uh my equity the remaining equity never materialized into anything >> because it didn't sell recently or shortly after the Benny's a few years later. >> Well, they the the private equity without a a rose been behind the wheel. It wasn't the same kind of business and Chicago wins and they understood this and they you know stopped frequenting frequenting the business. it became a loser. So, what was sold to Benny's was the shell of a company, meaning um the remaining stores, they didn't close. It was really just a fire sale at that point. And I was long gone. It was hard to see. I mean, this is the business that had been around since 1933, which is when prohibition ended, but my identity was never as a retail liquor guy. That was not my identity. So, my family's identity, but it wasn't mine personally. And so, it was hard to watch. The whole thing was is my first ever exit. I didn't know how to do it. I didn't know who to adi to advise me. I didn't know what was a good decision and a bad decision. I had no idea and I had no ability none uh to look to look around the corner which I have sub subsequently acquired. >> Well, yeah. So, I think that would be an interesting chat is like knowing what you now know, you know, 15 18 years later, all the experience, all the transactions you've done, what would you have changed about that transaction knowing what you know now? To any of your listeners who are lucky enough to be able to sell a business, um, equity is key. Equity is the only game in town. Equity creates wealth. In both of my businesses that I've sold subsequently, that was the driver of wealth. It wasn't a paycheck. It wasn't that. It was your equity. And I probably sold too much equity. Um, in my first transaction, I left money on the table. I'm guessing I left about $10 million on the table. I didn't structure the deal correctly to uh I didn't add earnouts, which is valuable. I didn't I didn't know who I got in bed with as a private equity firm. Um I was so happy to get a deal done, I didn't care who the counterparty was. And um those were all mistakes I made. I mean, I was in my early 30s, had no deal experience, and I had a and I hired a law firm that wasn't uh necessarily great on my behalf and didn't give me the gotchas. They just gave me the deal. Those are all mistakes I would I would correct now. And it's not easy because you think you know you think people want to buy your business. You think you're the smartest guy in the room. But what I've learned subsequently is that I never want to be in a room where I'm the smartest guy ever. I want to be in a different room. That is often the feeling that uh the post exit founder conversation is if you didn't bring in the experts that have kind of been there done that in these transactions actually advise you because there's definitely like representation for the company to get a deal done but there's also like >> the Brian Rosen you know the founder you know uh representation and often founders don't spend on that. They just like well they're the company lawyer they're representing me. It's like no those are two different things and those could maybe not be aligned always. You're 100% right. And one thing I would add to that is that a lot of founders when they sell their businesses cut back on the legal because it's so expensive. You can spend a half million dollars, a million dollars on legal fees. And you're thinking to yourself as you wind your way towards a transaction, you're thinking that's my money I'm spending. I'm spending real money in legal fees. It feels like I'm giving away my my big win. And uh that's the best money you're ever going to spend to be honest. >> And you only get to do it once. Like once it's done, it's like that's it >> theoretically. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And you can't go backward. There's the honeymoon phase and there's the marriage, purchasing the business, due diligence, your private equity partner or your capital partner. You guys are in love. There is a honeymoon. You're going out to dinner and you're going to Nicks games and you're doing all these great things. Um, go Knicks. Um, and you and you think everything is is hunky dory. And when the deal closes, that relationship very quickly goes from uh friends trying to get a deal done together to employer employee. And it's very much worth noting that. >> And you stayed on for about a year and a half. What was that experience like? Were you like really trying to grow the business? Were you just trying to stay alive? Were you just kind of like, nah, I'm done. Got my money. >> No, I don't I don't think about money like that. Money doesn't play an incredibly important part. uh in my day-to-day I mean you want to have enough money for retirement and all those things but you go to work every day because you want to go to work not because you're earning X in my this is my opinion the post transaction honeymoon was very quick uh to die and it was all of a sudden as an entrepreneur turned CEO and working for someone else for the first time in my life I had to have quarterly reporting I had to have monthly closes financial P&L closes I had to report to a board. Um, I was held accountable for things I had no control over, like in Chicago, if we do 40% of our revenue in the last 3 months of the year, uh, which is very common in retail, and then it snows three of those days and I can't get my trucks delivered, then my revenue goes down X. In the old days when it was a family business, it goes down X. you have this theory that no matter what the customer is still going to be there uh you know uh in in in kind of professional capital experience that they want to know why why it snowed and and what you did about it and why you couldn't get why you couldn't get why you couldn't get your deliveries out etc. um why was payroll so high? Uh because you needed more labor to get the numbers that you need to satisfy the board. All of these things um were foreign to me and I to learn very quickly. The deal closed in May and by June by August I knew I was I knew I was toast. I knew I was toast as a person and just stayed on for another year um and began looking kind of subversely for work. And that ultimately led you to go to PWC, which I always think is a pretty fascinating transition. But uh where I want to kind of take the conversation is Bev Strat and how that you know you take the lessons learned of selling a family business and going through that that experience on kind of the marriage then divorce then you know maybe a breakup you know period and then uh you know on to the next. Uh tell us kind of what was Devstrat and how you manufactured that business to to an outcome as well. Sure. I think just real quick just a little PWC slipper because it's relevant is that I was at PWC because they did not have an advisory services division for adult beverage. Um and EY and um Asenture was really giving them the business meaning um they were had all these companies Dagio constellation pronicard andheiser bush molen course they had all those companies as consulting clients and PWC didn't have anything. So they brought me on board to build the practice. I built the practice and I brought to my leaders at PWC in about two years in um this idea of Bevstrat and this idea of um invest capital Capital and my MD took me aside and he said we don't create businesses here Brian we just bill for hours and that was a Friday when I brought the idea to him and that was a Friday when he told me we don't do that here and then on Monday I resigned and I packed up my my stuff in New work, left my apartment and drove to Chicago and started Bevstrat the next Monday. And that's kind of the, you know, the origin of of Bevstrat is that I brought this idea to PWC first. It wasn't in their comfort level and I created Bevstat the following Monday. And that became a, you know, a $20 million plus exit for me. Um, I owned 100% of the business and I did it in four years. It was a beverage related business that um focused on advisory services and sales and marketing exactly what I had brought to Price. Um I just did it myself and it became a home run number two for me. >> And so how did you scale that business so fast? Was it essentially consulting and advisory as like the primary uh function of the business or what kind of gave it its its positioning and its growth? I played on this notion that that alcohol beverage in the US is um a very challenging business and 95% of brands fail. And one of the reasons brands fail is because it's a limited distribution network and it's controlled by three companies basically. But there's tens of thousands of brands. The three companies combined carry 6,000 items. So you've got three companies distributing 6,000 items. you've got 40,000 items that are available for sale. That means there's 34,000 brands that could hire us to help them. And so I used that I kind of reverse engineered that. And so I pitched the 30 34,000 brands and I said I can be sales, marketing, advisory, back office support for you. And uh that's how I positioned it. And I'm an expert because of my days at Sam's and my time at Price Waterhouse. I never had a money I never had a month where I lost money ever. It was it was positive from day one. That business was a great business. Very hard as all businesses, but this one was uh hard and profitable. >> I'm profitable. At least you got to made it worth it. Talk about manufacturing the sale. Like were you being chased? Did you realize it was now time to sell like the previous business? How did you kind of architect that? >> No, I wasn't looking to sell. I was approached at a at a conference by a distributor, the people that I that I ra that I kind of rallied against in all my in all my marketing. Um, I was approached by a distributor that wanted to buy Bevstrat as a point of differentiation, a distributor that had its own consulting practice, a distributor that had its own sales teams, a distributor that um worked on behalf of the brands instead of against them. And they bought us as a way to differentiate themselves in a market. And note to listener, a strategic buyer will always pay more than a financial buyer. And that is 100% true. >> No, there's they have upside. They have the ability to kind of manufacture at scale. And >> yeah, they cut up they cut operations and they increase revenue and it's incremental incremental revenue with incremental associated um outbacks 100%. >> Nice. And so you got 20 million in your pocket. You're north of 20 million. You then go into a leadership role at the acquire. Um what kind of happens there? What starts going through your mind? Are you happy at that you know is it the same kind of marriage problem you had before or is it >> no if I say if I say it's a marriage problem that I had before that becomes my problem. It becomes me as the problem as opposed to the system. What happened was co we were a sales company that needed to be in liquor stores and bars and the they acquired my business in 2019 and co came March of 2020. dumb luck on timing, but uh my business if it's relying on physical people going into physical stores and liquor stores and bars and restaurants are closed during co I don't have a business. So after two years of trying to figure that out on the acquirer of me this company was then acquired by another company. So I took a second bite there and then I left and and kind of and really devoted full energy to InvestB Capital >> and walk us through InvestB Capital because that's been that was going on kind of back at your Bevstrap days uh at a high level. So kind of walk us explain to the audience what InvestBev is, why you started it, kind of where it is today. >> Sure. I I always had this um this desire to be on the other side of the counter in retail. we look at one side of the counter as the merchant and the other side as the customer and I always wanted to be the customer. Um, and I knew that through my time at PWC and uh through my MBA experience and and just basic life experience that there's a lot of money to be made in alcohol and a lot of money to be made in the dislocation. It's a fragmented space. There's distributor consolidation, retailer consolidation. Um yet capital is drawn to alcohol because it's totally non-correlated. A good investor wants non-correlated or alternatives in their in their portfolio. So I formed this company. My first fund was really kind of dimminionative at $5 million in 2015. Um that turned into $19 million a few years later, 18 months later. That was fund one. Fund then I'm like, well, I'm on to something here. Oh my god, I may actually know what I'm doing. And then fund two came and three and four and five closes. Fund five closes on June 30 of this year um 2026. And um then from there we sprung out an insurance platform. We sprung out a private credit or structured finance platform, real estate and advisory services. So five units and all of them have created like a a platform within beverage finance that is um and that's how we operate today. I want to understand. So we talked about your perspective in doing deals on the kind of founder builder side, operator side, and now you're on the other side deploying capital and making investment decisions. What do you see as different from those two two different perspectives and kind of what prepared you to be on the other side of the table? I bet founders and I bet category. A good founder can create his own success. A good brand cannot. There are plenty of good brands that are in the graveyard. Um, and this is something that I've just learned through my career. But you bet on a founder with an average idea. That's better than betting on a bad founder with a good idea. And the one thing I would also say, and I tell this to my founders all the time, and I tell tell my team all the time, is you're either a f you're either a founder or a CEO. And you're rarely the same person. Founders are in the weeds, in the mud, creating business. CEOs are operating businesses to profitability and oftentimes the founders are not the f don't have the financial acumen to run a great company. They they have the acumen to build the company. So as an investor I I bet founder. I bet founder all the time and I've made mistakes. Um I've also found uh winners in that strategy. Um but you got to bet founder because um a founder can pivot. Someone says, "I'm only doing vodka and that's what I'm doing and I'm really good at vodka." I'm out. I I as a firm investment of capital, we are out of that transaction because that's a founder right there in that sentence who is arrogant, who thinks they have all the answers, who doesn't understand there's a broader world out there and also fails to realize that you can make vodka in one week in your bathtub. And so there's no skill to it. Um it's just marketing. And so we bet founder first. Um and we're a founder first firm. In fact, so much so that Inc. magazine gave us the founder friendly award in 2025 for being the most founder friendly uh private equity firm in the country. So, um we don't I don't I not only say it on podcasts, I preach it and the team believes it. >> Tell us a little bit about the deals that you do. Are you backing like the actual producers? You're backing the branch, you know, obviously you're backing founders. Um but what's some examples of the deals you typically would do or have done? We write checks between really one and $5 million. Um we take minority control but majority rights. Um we're viewed as strategic capital. So I ask for board seats. I ask for um decision uh P&L decisions on labor which is the number one expense, the number one anchor on any brand. We do deals where we can create, we can from a portfolio perspective where I can look at the portfolio and I can say we may win here, we may lose here, but overall we're going to be okay. Um, you have a couple flyers in there, but you have a couple staples in there. So, how we look at deals is what's the category doing today? What's the category doing tomorrow? What is the founder doing today? What's the founder doing tomorrow? Do they understand their business? Are they capitalized because cash is king? uh are we entering into a a series A round, a seed round, and then what is the exit opportunity and who is the exit uh partner? We do all of that before we enter before we that's part of our diligence. I'm not going to get in any trade without having an exit partner in mind. >> Real quick, if you're a founder doing over 5 million in revenue and want to know what the best hund00 million plus founders are doing to fuel their growth, then make sure to subscribe to our $100 million exits newsletter. Get the playbooks that are proven on how to fund, grow, and sell your business. I'll even give you a curated list of investors that want to invest in your business. It's totally free. All you have to do is click that link down below. Subscribe. Do it now. I promise it's worth it. You won't regret it. You got nothing to lose. Go ahead, subscribe now. Back to the show. >> And you've been doing it for about 11 years or so, 10, you know, decade. What have been some of the outcomes that your firm has delivered or like some of the deals that you're most proud of? quite a few um we've sold many companies out of the out of the funds. We had some good success in beverage e-commerce. That is like the last bastage of of of beverage brands to be able to sell on the internet which uh is not easy to do because you have a weight and a shipping uh constraint. Um we've had some success there. We've had some success u and we're going to have quite a bit of success this year in cannabis beverage. uh cannabis is having a moment here in the states where hemp derived or delta 9 or THC at small po small small doses are really lifting the alcohol beverage category in totality. So we have two of those brands in our portfolio. We're excited about that. And we have um hundreds of millions of dollars of raw distillate of bourbon barrels um that are laying down in and around Kentucky. And we're excited about that because once the tariffs, we expect the tariffs to go away. And once they go away um Canada and Europe and southern hemisphere will open up to our inventory, which we have roughly 10% of the bourbon inventory in the country. How does one procure 10% of the bourbon inventory and kind of why was that a bet that you made? >> So you procure it by having a hundred years in this business and knowing who to call. Jim Beam and and Barstown Distilling and Green River Distilling and Molson Kors and others who have these barrels um of bourbon which eventually become the brands that and why do you do it is because there's two factors at play here. If you buy a barrel of bourbon, um it becomes uh it comes out of inventory, so it becomes more scarce the minute you buy it. Uh you can't make the same barrel twice. Different age, different mash bill. So once you buy it, it's yours. And then that same barrel goes on to be 4,000 brands that don't have a distillery need juice to make the product. There's 121 distilleries in the country. There's 4,000 brands, brown spirit brands. So that means 3,000 and change need to buy their inventory somewhere. So they buy it from someone like us. The other thing that's unique about this asset class, Jason, is that it appreciates over time. Every every year it gets older and every year it gets older, it gets more valuable. You do not need to be Creskin the great which I'm dating myself now but you don't need to be a Creskin the great this great mentalist to know that a Macallen 12y old is cheaper than a Macallen 15y old and the only difference in that is 3 years same exact juice so if I buy something at $800 at year zero through our regression analysis we know that same barrel will be worth $4,000 in 10 years it'll be worth $3,000 in six years So you buy it at zero, you sell it at X. Once you own it, you take it out of inventory and it becomes more valuable. So that was the thesis behind adding this barrel component to our overall portfolio construction. >> I find that fascinating. I see those deals kind of pop up every now and then in the um uh post exit the founder community and it's, you know, looks fascinating. This is like, you know, definitely a long-term kind of hold or as you got to say like an alt investment that's non-correlated, >> a passive hold. It's a passive hold. I mean, you don't I don't have to do anything. I pay storage. I pay insurance. And then I spend years looking for the exit partner. >> Educate me on the industry a little bit. Like, can I just buy if I'm a brand, do I just buy any barrel or like do I have to have like very specific requirements that kind of match my >> Yeah. So, there's something called the mash bill, which is essentially a flavor profile. But what's important to note in bourbon, this is why the trade is interesting, is that from 0 to 3 years, it's not really called bourbon. It's just raw distillate. When it gets to be three years old in Kentucky, it's called bourbon. And then a brand, any brand, can buy it from us or others and turn it into their brand. They can char the barrel. They can put it high humidity in a rick house, low humidity in a rick, whatever they want to do to make it unique. But a brand settles on their flavor profile. And then they want to go ahead and get the juice. They can either they can buy it at year zero and hold it for three years with no return to capital. None. So they've put money out. They've got an asset that's appreciating but unusable. So they're negative cash position, the brand, and they've got they put money out for something they can't use or they can pay a premium. They can buy it from from us, but they can be in business in a week. That's the deal. When you have this time component, it works to the favor of the capital. That was our thesis. And the distiller is the ones producing that juice effectively need cash now. Hey, we just spent all this money producing >> 100%. You're right to get that. We're a solve for both pieces. We're a sol for the distrib for the distiller who's a cash flowing business. It's not in the storage business. They're not in the storage business. They're not in the buy and hold business. They want to make it, sell it, make it, sell it, and keep that flywheel going. The brand, on the other hand, is not in they don't have capital to put aside for three years with no ROI, right? So we we hold it for this period of time and then we sell it to the end user and they've got a brand, we've got a sale, the distilleryy's got a sale and the flywheel keeps moving. >> And so in the market that we're in right now, the deals that you have, what's something you've seen some founders doing andor decisions that you're making that have you come and intervene and or step in? The one overarching comment I would say here is that founders are a unique bunch and I'm a founder but at least I I fancy myself a humble founder and I fancy myself some would may say otherwise but I I fancy myself a humble founder and I fancy myself someone who is open to feedback. A lot of founders, a good majority of founders operate under I'm going to make a brand that I want, meaning the founder that I love, that my wife and I needed or created or my buddies and I wanted to create. And the reality is when you do that, your audience is just you. So to tell a founder, you got to make a general product. You can't make something so specific to your own desires that you're going to limit your audience opportunity. And so that is a huge mistake founders make. I'm paraphrasing of course, but founders are like, "Well, my wife and I were climbing Machu Picchu and we found this pisco and and it was great and we think the whole world should love it without not discounting the fact that no one the peaceful was a subset of a subset of a subset of tequila and the audience is in the tens of thousands instead of the millions. So that kind of lack of awareness could cause someone to really lose their shirt in this business." And we look for founders that have a real good sense of um I may have the idea but I don't have the answers. And that's a founder I want to partner with. >> What drives success in this industry? Looking at your portfolio, you have several different brands that you backed. Like what's ultimately the driving factor for a brand to be successful? >> Marketing, hard work. All the shit's basically the same to be honest. you know, um the vodka, the bourbon, the tequila. There's not a consumer in America or anywhere that says, "Oh, the agave you you used in your tequila is one month older than the agave I like." Like, it just doesn't exist like that. These companies are marketing companies. There's no inherently difference between Kasa Migos and Kasa Draon and Cas Aul and the other 5,000 celebrity tequilas that are out there. The difference is George Clooney and Randy Gerber. And so, but the juice itself is just a basic juice. In fact, like bourbon in tequila, there's three or four distilleries that make tequila. So, it's very likely that your Kasa Amigos that you bought for $100 a bottle is made in the same factory as as Kevin Hart's tequila or Michael Jordan's tequila or the Rock's tequila. It's all the same juice with different marketing. The success factor between win and lose in alcohol beverage is how well do you market? How well do you know your audience? And do you speak to them in a way that they're going to buy your purchase once, twice, and forever more? And that is the that's the key. So I'll ask you, Jason, you're in England. Uh you're in London. Kasa amigos, everyone knows. Ryan Reynolds Jin, aviation gin, everyone knows. I would ask you c, can you name 10 other celebrity tequilas? I'm guessing no. >> Tesla. >> Yeah. Yeah. Tesla. Well, Tesla, we own the mark on Tesla through our company Speak Easy that we saw. But yes, Tesla. But Tesla's a dog, too, because it's subject to Elon Musk's personal behavior. And so the the reason we don't like celebrity tequila is because you're hinging your whole business on the moral and ethical and behavior of your celebrity. Sarak vodka, Puff Daddy was a great vodka until he went a little bit left of center. Puff puffy if you will, you know. So >> simplified way of putting it. >> Yeah. Well, you know, who knows the audience, right? But you want your brand to stand on its merit and its hard work. If you tie it to a celebrity and that celebrity is of ill intent, right, your brand is tanked. We don't like celebrity stuff. It doesn't it's it's not what it once was. And now with social media and AI and influencers, you can get your audience without having Kevin Hart tied to it or, you know, or or any of these other celebrities that that do the things they do. >> But how how does one get the word out now? like you know paying for you know traditional advertising in this market is expensive. It's not necessarily easy and you got to get the shelf space. You got to be at the bars. How does one really actually step out and differentiate? You got to do the work. You you got to create pull for your brand before you create push. You've got to create an audience. I mean Alex Earl is a great Alex Earl, Alex Cooper, both of the Alex's are great examples of this. Alex Earl teased her cosmetic line long before it was ever created. She created the pull before the push. And that's what social influence can can allow you to do. She made the consumer ask for the product before it was ready to go to market. So the time it was going to market, there was a fervor around it. There was an excitement around it. And that's what social media can allow you to do. um you don't need Whiz Khalifa anymore to to to to push your brand. You you just don't need it. And and so that's how you get to market. You create your audience before you create your brand. >> So still very much a part of maybe like in traditional influencers, maybe not celebrity influencers, but influencers and traditional media buying. >> It just puts gasoline on the process. I mean, you could get there other ways. We've got a brewery in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, that creates beer for um uh John Melany, the comedian. It's a non-alcoholic beer because he's a recovering alcoholic. He certainly expedites the sale of it the same way Bureau does for Tom Holland, another non-alcoholic beer. Um and London native. Uh but the reality is if you find an audience that is attracted to your cause or your category, um you'll be able to do that. You can just be online attack attract attacking and attracting your audience. It's much easier now than it's ever been historically. I'll give you a historical reference. I'll give you one that non-ceelebrity Jaggermeister was a Sydney Frank product and the way he got awareness was he put scantily clad women in liquor stores and bars all throughout the late 80s early 90s. There's no person in the world, not one that likes Jagger Meister. It is a shot that you do when you lose a bet, right? That's what Jaggermeister is. It is one of those last call shots. It is. Oh my god, I'm really going to do this shot. And how do you turn something that is not flavorful by nature into a brand that's worth many billions of dollars? Well, all he did was he brought out Jaggermeister girls in college campuses around the country and then he brought them to liquor stores around the country. Same thing with St. Paulie girls in their leader hosen type outfits. These are not celebrities. Jagermeister is is is a horrible pasting brand that's got a great following because of how it got started. So, there's other ways to get to market without um being Alex Earl or or having influence. You can just be creative and you can be smart. Garage Beer is another one. There's a lot of brands out there that just capitalize on what on what the market is asking for and then go attack it directly. And what would be your advice to it's probably the advice you give to your porcos like what's the advice you give to founders that are looking to enter this industry? >> Capital. You need to have capital. It's a very very very expensive industry. And if you're under capitalized, you're going to go out of business very quickly because it's it's marketing first, brand second, and marketing costs a lot of money. So if you're under capitalized, you're not going to make it. Period. Unstop. And you have to be able to be capitalized through seed round through series A. You can people that are investing in seed rounds uh on Albv are very likely to lose their shirt. And switching gears for the investors that are listening here like why is alcohol a category that they should pay attention to? Typically it's the kind of the sin category that you know the vice category that they're not allowed to invest in. Um, how do you kind of stand out and kind of defend the category? >> Just a a point of clarification, there's not a lot of the the notion of sin categories are that's a notion from the ' 70s, '60s, early 80s because all those categories do quite well now. Cannabis, uh, alcohol, um, gambling, those are all great stocks to buy. Um there was a time when uh America in general was a little more wholesome and you stayed away from those things. The only people that we are familiar with that are forbidden from kind of alcohol is when we go to UAE or we go to Dubai and have family office meetings there and there's something called Sharia law which doesn't allow them to consume. Although the irony of irony is they all own casinos and own hotels with restaurants with liquor licenses. So, we're still working through that kind of weird dynamic, but alcohol is a a very good investment because it's not tied to any of the normal indices. Um, when you look today in the US when the markets open shortly here, uh, and there'll be a bump up because, uh, the administration declared an end to the Iranian war, the market's going to go up. If the market goes down, for whatever reason, in both of those scenarios, alcohol is not impacted. Alcohol stocks are not impacted. Uh value of alcohol is not impacted. It's totally non-correlated. When the unemployment rate when the unemployment rates come out the last Friday of the month, we're not correlated. When people are sad, they drink. When they're happy, they drink. When someone dies, they drink. When someone's born, they drink. It is a forever social lubricant for the earth. And so, we like that from a use case perspective um of assets to invest in. I've got plenty of investments um in my personal portfolio that are predicated on all the things we just talked about. The only the only investment I have that's totally uh an alternative is my investments in my own company. >> Some quick questions I want to ask you for for the audience is what's the biggest mistake that a founder makes when raising capital for a beverage company? I think that being really aggressive with your own equity. I think there is something to this notion of um less equity of a bigger pie is worth more money and founders that hold on to equity like it's their birth baby. Investors don't want to see that. We want to see investors are we want to see that uh the people that are asking for capital understand that the greater good is worth more than the equity today. >> All right. So, next question. You sold the family business early in your career. What did that teach you about the timing of an exit? >> I don't think you can time an exit at all. The only thing you can time is you as a founder, you know if your business is going to fail or succeed long term. So from a timing perspective, if you say, "Hey, I'm going to sell this thing before it fails." That's one way of looking at it. Or as a timing perspective, I'm going to say I'm going to sell this thing before the market fails. me from our perspective when I sold Sam's um I saw a little bit the walls closing in. So I wanted to sell the business. I did not see the GFC having the impact that it did. >> Why do so many beverage brands underestimate how difficult distribution is? >> Lack of knowledge and founders optimism. The reality is when you make a new brand, Jason, you don't make a new drinker. You just make a new brand. So you get the same number of drinkers, but you're adding brands to the to the kind of the human consciousness. And so, uh, founders underestimate that. Every time you get on a shelf, something's got to come off the shelf to make room. And what is it going to be? There's only, just by way of example, there's only 44 linear feet on a shelf that holds 20 brands. If you're not one of the 20 brands, you're not on the shelf. So, who are you going to take off? Who are you going to replace? Why should the retailer buy you over another brand? Why should the distributor buy you over another brand? Those are all things to think about before you you buy your first cork. And if you don't do that, then you really are not seeing around the corner and not understanding the business you're getting into. >> Kind of a fun question here. What's it like having 300 billion assets under management? >> It's a responsibility. That's not a fun question. That's a that's a question that I talk about with my therapist. It's a responsibility. We've got, you know, 400 LPs um across equity alone. And so I've got 400 bosses, if you will, and people I'm responsible for in their capital. I take that responsibility very seriously. Um and so I don't look at it as fun or not fun. I look at it as I'm in the business to get to to hopefully help LPS create wealth. And that's a responsibility. And so if you don't want that kind of sleepless night type of responsibility, then this is the wrong business for you to think about. >> What's it like having 400 LPS? Like how do you get >> Well, you you got to you got you got to spend a lot of time in airplanes. It's hard. Look, it's you know, as we've gotten bigger and more institutional, the checks have gotten bigger. So a lot of this is from early days where funds two and three mostly where we had guys writing quarter million dollar checks and you need a lot of checks to get to $75 million fund. That's where the LPs come in. As we've gotten bigger and more institutionalized and and and professionalized a firm based in Chicago, we've had less LPs writing bigger checks. Now the checks are 5 million, 10 million, 15 million. um they're not $50,000 friends of friends of cousins kind of thing. That's how we started, but you can't get to 300 million um $25,000 at a time. >> No, I would agree. That's I was kind of curious. How do you how do you have earned? Well, Brian, it's been awesome having you on the show, sharing your insights. What would be the best way for people to learn more about you and Invest? >> Sure. Um I am on LinkedIn at uh uh Brian Rosen. Um I would say 20,000 followers. I'm very proud of that. My daughter asks me, "How do you do that?" And I would say, "I have no idea because I'm the oldest guy on LinkedIn." Um, but people seem to resonate with my tell it like it is attitude. Um, LinkedIn you can find me um, invest.com from a web perspective and my email is brianinvestb.com. So those are three easy ways to get a hold of me. >> Awesome. Thank you, Brian. Thanks for coming on. Look forward to getting this out to our audience. >> Thanks, Jason. Appreciate it. If you were inspired by today's episode, then go ahead, watch this next episode. Promise it's worth it. And if you really enjoyed this last episode and you want to connect with the guest I had on today, make sure to leave a comment down below telling me why you would like an intro to this guest and I'll make it