The “Real American Beer” Playbook for Breaking Into a Saturated Industry FAST

0:00I met Hulk through another business venture and we were on the road one time and someone came up and said, have you ever thought about doing your own beer? And Hulk's like, brother, I used to be, say your prayers, eat your vitamins. But now that I'm not in the WWE anymore, I got this big idea, brother, real American beer. It's to unify the country with having one beer. Have a beer with your neighbor, NASCAR, country baseball, football, good memories, drinking beer. That's what Hulk wanted to do. And he called me up for several months to do it. And I finally came out and doing it. This is Right About Now with Ryan Alford, a Radcast Network production.

0:32We are the number one business show on the planet with over 1 million downloads a month. Taking the BS out of business for over six years and over 400 episodes. You ready to start snapping next and cashing checks? Well, it starts right about now. Terry, Chad, welcome to Right About Now. What's up, guys? What's up, Ryan? Good to have you guys, man. I get to do this show. We're almost 800 episodes in. It's pretty popular. When I see business and beer, I'm in, baby. That's all I needed to hear. I am a real American beer drinker. It fit perfect with this brand. Love what you guys are doing. It's got to be a little fun.

1:11Yeah, it's been a crazy ride. We partnered with Hulk on this and obviously he's passed, but we were on the road for a year and it was pretty amazing to share that year Hulk and just hit the streets everywhere. I was a living, breathing child that ate his vitamins because of Hulk Hogan. I get to leave behind the Real American legacy in beer, though. That's cool. It's great for you guys to pick it up, focus on the positive sides. How the hell did you get into beer with Hulk Hogan? I met Hulk through another business venture. And we were on the road one time and someone came up and said, have you ever thought about doing your own beer?

1:43And Hulk's like, brother, I used to be, say your prayers, eat your vitamins. But now that I'm not in the WWE anymore, I got this big idea, brother. real American beer. It's unify the country. Having one beer, have a beer with your neighbor, NASCAR, country, baseball, football, good memories, drinking beer. That's what Hulk wanted to do. And he called me up for several months to do it. And I finally came out and do it. I met Terry through another business partner. And Terry was the head of M &A at InBev. At the time, she was at NACO. And I called her up and told her this crazy idea and she jumped on it.

2:12So that's kind of how we got started. This bud's not for you. Is that what you told him, Terry? Chad and Hulk were pretty convincing. When you see somebody's work ethic matched with sort of a long career of hard work to show for it, it was a very easy and obvious decision for me to come and join them. Chad, hardest working, best marketer I know I've met. And then Hulk worked and couldn't be stopped. There was nothing about him that ever wanted to not be on the road meeting people and pushing the brand. We had such a fortunate year and a half with Hulk. He really certainly did open the doors to allow us to now take on, as you say, Ryan, his legacy forward and really bring real American beer to as many people as possible.

2:47How's it been? And kind of where are you guys taking things now as far as the brand and the business? And it's an interesting time. I love this brand because I feel like we started to get towards this place where I feel like we were making, it's not about politics. We all should love America. We were all blessed to live here. And whenever that became a bad thing or in any way a negative connotation, I'm a big believer like in sentiment. People have fucking lost their minds sometimes. Do you know you live in the best country on the planet. It's not perfect. No one says perfect, but man, let's embrace patriotism and make it cool again to love the American way and American products.

3:24Is that all right? Yeah. Terry and I and Hulk were on the road. It was kind of during the hot topic of what you just mentioned because it was Trump was running for president. Hulk and myself were at the RNC. We spoke there and all Hulk really did care about truthfully. And this is not like people that didn't know him. They make their assumptions. We were with them every single day. He would go on the road and we would just get to spend time with Americans. Didn't matter who they were, Republican, Democrat, didn't matter. Hulk was nice to everybody. Really, we had the best time because we'd be at a bar.

3:51Everyone's happy. Hulk was there on stage chugging a beer with all the great Americans. And that was probably one of the greatest times we've had because it was rinse and repeat. That's all Hulk. What you just said is exactly what he would say. It's not about politics. Beer is a place where you can have a beer with your neighbor, have fun, watch sports or barbecue. you. He'd also say mom's apple pie and just enjoy yourself. That's the brand that he wanted to set out to create. Yeah. And what we found, and I say that we were on the luckiest tour ever because we got to go to places most people and certainly the media don't write about.

4:21And we've got to see people's kindness, their generosity, their openness, their excitement, the pride that exists in all these small towns around the country. It really was a tour that everyone should go on because you'd realize that in fact, in these small hometown places, people are happy. It's very different from what you read in the media. That's something that will stick with me for the rest of my life. Yeah, good point there. The only thing that presses me is turning the news on. It's all about doom and gloom and clicks. And look, a lot of there's shit going on, but come on. It ain't all.

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6:22The American way is work hard, play hard, and downtime and entertainment and all these things, a lot of things that Terry, Hulk Hogan stood for. and what a consummate professional. Hulk Hogan always knew the way. Say whatever you want about him. The dude knew the job. He knew who he was and the persona that he carried and what he stood for. I like to ask guys like that. We need to stand up for what you are and what you do. None of us are perfect because look, you need to fucking look in the mirror if you think you got it all figured out. No, we have all imperfections. But the American way is to forgive and forget and to also, hey, know how to relax a little bit.

6:57And that's why I love what you're doing with this brand. Enough of me getting on my soapbox. You guys got the right guest or the right host for you guys, the brand. This is right up my alley. Talk to me about the business side of this. What is it going up against big beer? It's challenging. We've chosen one of the most competitive and cutthroat industries. And I think most industries would say that. The difference here is there's only so much shelf space. And with all the laws and regulations in place, you have to go through the system. You've got to start getting the system to work with you and for you, not against you.

7:25Now, I could sit for hours and talk to you about the beer system and the three tiers. That's for another day. Unless your distributor wants to work with you and wants to push you, you're not going anywhere. What we've been able to build in a matter of a year and a half is relationships. Thinking about it from a business podcast perspective, relationships are at the center of every single business. There's very few that I would say it's not critical for. In the beer industry, even more so. You could look at it from a big, broad perspective, but ultimately, it's the shop owner who wants to make a few more bucks each week.

7:56It's the truck driver who wants to make sure that they make their rounds. It's the person growing the hops and the wheat somewhere in North America that wants to be able to feed their family. And so the whole pipeline, the whole way along, you're dealing with individuals who care about their world and you've got to make your beer worth their while, capture their attention. The more Ryans we have in this world who are interested in what we're building, the more successful we'll be because it's going to take a lot more than just even our team to make this work. It's a whole ecosystem of people pushing in the right direction.

8:25Do we want to go to how outdated the three-tier system is? Do we want to go there? Do we want to still steer? We can go there if you want. Our distribution partners are key to our success. The three-tier system has long protected the distribution, the distributors in that chain. The issue you have is the further you get away from the consumer, the less you can impact sales. What we're trying to do is work well within that and just make sure that our distributors get more of their mind share than other brands. And obviously when you've got the big Goliaths, that's a big Goliath amount of mind share that the distributors put towards them.

8:58How can you continue to create marketing moments and experiences that bring them into the real American world and make them feel like they're part of something? Because for the most part, the big brands aren't doing that anymore. So the opportunity is really in the relationship. Yeah, it's a relationship. It's also marketing. We're constantly having to give them something to be excited about. Terry's CEO is an incredible fighter. You got to be a fighter in this industry. Our whole team are fighters. We're ground and pound. And back to the whole thing is whatever Hulk would do, didn't matter who it was.

9:26If you run his team, he expects you to work as hard as he is and he'll work as hard as you were. And so that's kind of the culture we built. From the marketing perspective, we have to bat up there with AB and these guys that we don't have the money like they do. We've raised some money. We have to be very selective on what we do. So we've learned a lot through this two years of how we spend our money and what we did. One thing that we did was really cool is that we created a professional freestyle wrestling league because we knew that we wouldn't be able to compete against bud light with ufc deal and football to rent out a stadium be official bear of an nfl team is half million dollars minimum i wrestled my whole life let's call it unscripted wrestling free folk style wrestling and we were on the road and i was thinking my son's wrestling and all the dads are drinking beer the tournament stuff i'm like this is an area we can own.

10:12We come up with thinking about an idea. I told it to Terry and Hull. I was like, my partner's in the freestyle wrestling league. Freestyle wrestling, that's now the most popular emerging sports league in the world. It bats up there with the rest of the combat sports. And now our beer is the official beer of wrestling, unscripted wrestling. We come up with ways to be creative. Brantley Gilbert, we met him through Hull, wasn't drinking beer. He said he's allergic to alcohol now, 14 years later, because he was an alcoholic back in the day. And now we create a non-alcoholic beer with Brantley because Brantley has a story that resonates with the non-alcoholic market.

10:44It's just coming up with unique ways to put ourselves there. It's very natural and sincere to our consumers. Zero. Real American beer, zero, isn't it? Yep. I think I saw Brantley holding one. I'm a country music loving, truck driving. Oh yeah. I'm South Carolina, baby. I know Brantley Gilbert. Right. Hi, you're our drinker. We're going out to you. Yeah, we're out. You got to come to rock the country. Yeah. I know. Yeah. When is that? And so they're in seven small cities around the country. Our next one is in Belleville, Texas on May the 1st and 2nd. Brantley is going to be performing there. What we're building is like an ecosystem where maybe it doesn't make sense to everybody right now.

11:23But what you'll start to see is that when you come into the real American ecosystem, it all works together. We've got Brantley walked out Colby Covington at a real American freestyle. Colby and Brantley are both on the real American beer team. Brantley is performing at Rock the Country. We are the beer of Rock the Country. You start to see country music and MMA are different. They're not. The people who are watching MMA are listening to country music and they're drinking beer. What we do is we're creating an ecosystem that really surrounds someone's lifestyle. It's the person who's going watching the dirt racing.

11:53They're also going to watch RAF on Saturday night and watch that great show in Philly. So it's like, you know, we're sort of surrounding ourselves with the lifestyle of our drinkers. I love that. I'm sitting in the middle of my trading card store that I own. I'm going. It all sort of ties together, too. There's a culture there. We launched a trading card business for a raft. We've done pretty well. And there's guys that come from Tennessee and all these different states to buy collectibles. And Jeremy Padawer is one of the biggest collectibles guy in the space. He's also an investor of Real American Freestyle.

12:21So when he bounties the cards, all the collectors, they come out and they want to be a part of it. It's been a really good part of our business. Let's talk about some distribution or something there. I can put some RAF cards up there. Yes. Trading cards. This is a match made in heaven. Let's talk about the business a little bit more. With the distribution system, is it bottom up or top down or both? Because I'm sitting here going, do you elevate the brand from the bottom down like customers? So you get them talking and asking. So you bubble it up there, pun intended. Or is it top, you're working the top?

12:57Talk to me about all that. It's definitely both. those kind of lightning bolt brands that you hear about once every few years, they've managed to both the exact same time. Gruns is an example of one that he sold. And I would say they're one that kind of found a need, found the consumers, found a route to market and did it together. Now with beer, on the alcoholic side, it's a little bit more fragmented. I think you need to win the hearts and minds of the distributor first. Then that allows you to win the hearts and minds of the retailer. And then the job is to get the consumers to ball. If you start the other way around, consumers can't find it.

13:29And so there's always that thought of when do you spend your marketing dollars and when do you accelerate? Because if you've got all this great stuff happening, but the product's not on the shelf, forget about it. Then no one's ever drinking your beer because it's not there. And the need to get distribution and get it wide across everywhere where you're targeting, only spend money where the beer is actually on the shelf because of the three tier system. That's the rule. That's where it really becomes interesting. That's why in a year and a half since we've launched, we were able to open up 20 ,000 retail doors.

13:55We were able to set up 180 distributor relationships across 32 states. We were able to get into Walmarts and to Albertsons, we're at HEB, you name it. We've had a spot in it, Total Wine across the country. To be able to do all of that rapidly and then also get the consumer at the same time, you win some, you lose some. Some markets weren't into our old packaging, just to be clear. It wasn't the thing for it. Now what we're doing with the rebrand is we're really making sure that we've got that surround sound that we know is needed to The RAF is our core consumer. We're focused on wrestling. We're focused on colleges.

14:28And then we're also focused on country lifestyle. And those three areas, we've got very sort of specific pillars for marketing that we're building under that. But we're building that because we know also where our distribution is. We're getting strong distribution in Texas. We're getting strong distribution in Florida. We're getting strong distribution in Georgia. You sort of start to see how when you look at where we're going to be on the shelf, our consumer is there and we can speak to them in a certain way. The magic is when the two collide. It needs to happen from the top and the bottom at the same time.

14:55We're not a beer that's going to kill it in the city of Massachusetts, Boston, right? It's not a beer that's going to kill it in downtown Chicago. We kill it in Illinois and all the other areas in Illinois, just like Terry's Market. We murder it in upstate New York. We do really well in Wisconsin, in Michigan. We kill it in Ohio. We know that we're not going to be here. It's going to be going into a nightclub in New York City, and that's going to be our beer of choice. So like Terry said, we're very focused. I know where we went, and we know where we went. Yeah, that country culture. I'm telling you, I'm a South Carolina.

15:22It's about to open North Carolina. That's going to be in the coming month or so. So we'll be down in South Carolina in no time. We'll have to stop in if y 'all come on the world tour or whatever through the South. I think direct-to-consumer, is that ever going to happen for beer? A lot of the beer-only non-alcoholic beers have done well and been able to get distribution because of direct-to-consumer. So with the launch of our Zero, we've just started our D2C. So we've had to build that whole arm and muscle. We haven't quite yet got Hulk's muscles in that arm, but what we've had to do there is we can start selling that directly outside of the three tier because it's a non-alcoholic beverage.

15:55In most states, it's possible. Now, with that, what we're already seeing is an ability to understand more about the consumer because we get the direct data. We've learned that we're getting about 25 % rebuys in the last three weeks just off a smaller base, but still that's a fantastic indicator of flavor and taste resonating with the consumers that are buying. You start to see and understand more how direct data with the consumer can change the way you can react. That's the hardest thing with beer is you just don't get that because you don't have that relationship with the consumer from a transactions basis.

16:26Will it ever go DTC? I think, again, as long as you work through it, maybe it's DTC and it ends up being that, you know, the back end goes through the retailer. That's how DTC has worked so far. I don't think there's any time soon that that's going to change. I think it's about finding the way to work within it. And is that just a safety because you're sipping an alcoholic beverage and people are worried that 15-year-olds are going to be drinking it too easily? In fact, if you go to Walmart.com, here's a great thing about Walmart. And we love them as our partners. They really do a great job. What Walmart is able to do now, I think it's the stat, something like in 97 % of the country, you can order and get your product delivered to your door within three hours.

17:03And that includes alcohol. That's a little promo for Walmart, but it's a pretty fantastic stat that, in fact, in most parts of the country, you can actually order and get alcohol delivered to your door within three hours. Oh, South Carolina would have that, I don't think. Yeah. Blue all states, I don't know, or backwards. On some things, we're forwards, on some things, we're backwards. It's just South Carolina way. The whole of the alcohol regulation side of things is done state by state. My background is I'm a lawyer. And so that's helped us really to understand and cut through some of the noise when you set up a new company.

17:35It does. It makes a difference to understand it so you can work within it. Terry, to go through, we went through over 180 wholesalers, distributors. And they used to look at me and Terry and be like, you guys can't get this done in a certain amount of time. And Terry's like, well, I'm a lawyer. I'll be okay. And so we get a contract signed with him that may take a normal company, four to six weeks. We get it done in three to five days. And a partnership we had to do that because we would take Hulk to market. Hulk went with me and Terry to Walmart and all these different spots. But once Hulk was agreeing to go to market, we had to move quick.

18:04And so there was one time where we actually got a contract done in about a day. And then we were in market days later. So pretty crazy. Three or four days later with Hulk. With a large retail partner. That's nimble. You don't see that at the big spots. I'm trying to think, anybody sleep? Not during those times. It was crazy. You get like 600 to 800 people waiting in line to meet Hulk. and he was in a lot of pain, barely can move, to be honest with you. And he stood up there for four hours to make sure everybody got to meet him. And that's what you were talking about earlier, which always resonates with me.

18:36It's important for me to always share that part of his legacy because most celebrities at his level would not do that. And he would do it rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat, three to four times a day while everyone else is getting to relax. I thought that said a lot about his character. The end of the last year of his living, he got to see the love that people had for Hulkamania. And that kind of gave him his energy when he's in that pain during those store visits. So lift him up and he'd go, man, brother, I'm tired. But they still, the Hulkamania, that 1984 Hulk feel, I feel that lightning bolt still.

19:04And he would say that to me and Terry all the time. So I thought that was a good message that for the brand, that's why a lot of distributors and people want us to win too. He would drive a lightning bolt to them. He would sell seven trucks of beer in a week because he would show up and that no one was able to ever do that.

19:24He always knew the job and he always did it. I didn't know him personally, but I know Darren Prince. He's like one of his many agents. Entertainment and shows and everything. Darren and I are close and he speaks very highly of Hulk Hogan. And I followed him growing up. I mean, I watched wrestling. I don't know if you met Christopher Volo, but he worked with Darren for a long time. And Chris Vos, our partner, he's the one who would be with Hulk and us on the tour all the time and was a partner of the beer and RAF. But on the road, he managed Holt for 17 years with Darren. That's awesome. What are we going with the brand?

19:55I know you guys have talked about some of the changes. We've talked about the Rath integration and all that stuff, which makes tons of sense. Where are we pointed towards right now? We're going towards the Real American Beer. It's a brand, as the original vision that we set out to do. Terry said it's a very pointed approach. We just launched Non-Alcoholic. We're going to be coming out with more SKUs. We're just getting started. We're almost a two-year-old brand. We just launched a whole new VBI, as Terry is presenting. We were two weeks ago here in Tampa. There's a bunch of football players from the box there and they love the beer.

20:23People, it's just getting the beer in hands and becoming as big as a big CPG company, average company that we can be. But it's staying in our lane, knowing who we are and just really hyper-focused on growing the business. We're always looking for ways to activate our community. We've already, for a very new brand, got a bunch of loyal followers. It's like, how can we use them to continue to be advocates and referrals for the brand? So we're coming up with a couple of really cool things that I'm excited to share soon. But this can't be done by our team. I said this earlier, but it really will take a force and a force of people who will want to see something new and aligned to what they love work.