Investor Spotlight: Alcohol & Vice Investing with Jason Sherman of Top Shelf Ventures

21:48Because your job is to help those retailers to sell the product.

21:51Hannah Dittman:Yeah, that's the universal rule in CBG and retail. I feel like getting into retail before you're ready to support it from a marketing standpoint can often be the kiss of death because, you know, from an operating standpoint, you feel like, you know, the first mountain you need to climb is to get into retail. But there's a mountain right. It's like a double topped mountain right after that one where you need to be able to support it and do well there. So, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Before we pivot on to kind of your diligence process and getting into a little bit more of the nitty gritty.

22:20Hannah Dittman:I'd love to kind of talk a little bit more about your firm. And, you know, you've mentioned kind of what you guys are looking at, your mandate, but what makes your firm strong fit for the brands you're partnering with? You know, how should people be evaluating investors in return, especially in the alcohol space? And how should they think about choosing the right partner to be working with? We are sort of the preeminent, if not almost the only independent, not controlled by a distributor We are a supplier, a big retail chain. We are totally independent. Our LPs are independent LPs from the industry.

22:53We are here as startups direct partner where incentives are 100 % aligned, which is we will make all the introductions. You know, we have connections throughout the entire industry, almost any single person at any major distributor, retailer, or supplier you want to speak to. We have those connections. We have all the salespeople you'd ever want to talk to. We have all the finance backend. These are things we can help fix holes for. And we've seen it all. You know, I think in the end of the day, these are difficult businesses to run. And you might have an incredible brand with incredible velocity.

23:25But if you just even a little bit mess up your accounts receivable, that might be the end of your business. And it's just little things like that that can really take brands down fast. And we really are here to help them figure out what they're missing and what they're not missing. I think when you look at a lot of the other, I'll call them investors in the alcohol space at early stages, they're either one from big suppliers, which we've kind of just covered earlier. It's very scary to take early money from suppliers. We highly recommend only offering acquisitions to big suppliers for various reasons.

24:00Or they're, I'll call them service providers with sort of investment arm. You know, they'll be your outsourced sales arm. They'll do your marketing for you. If you do digital marketing or you want billboards or you'll do the marketing, you pay them for that and they'll invest money in return. Those are really the two flavors of other alcohol investors out there. You know, we are the only that are only focused in this vice category. There aren't any others like this and only focused this early. You know, there are quite a few like we work very well with a couple of the other players that invest five,$10 million checks, later stage growth stage projects, because obviously they follow on well with the brands that we work with.

24:37But at the earliest stage, you really are the only player that does this at an institutional level. And that gives you a lot of credibility. When we invest in a brand, the whole industry takes notice of a brand they probably didn't even know about before. And the reason for that is you were so small and you didn't exist outside the thousand that exist out there every year. You probably didn't pop up on anyone's radar until we got involved. And that's because we've basically become the scanning arm for the alcohol industry for the best of the best that comes about. and then we can go into how we do that but yeah like that comes through just really taking a

25:11Hannah Dittman:close look at as many as we can yeah no that's so exciting and i feel like what an impressive niche that you've kind of been able to hone and craft for yourself on the investment side not always the easiest to do either you know it's a crowded space with a hard way to differentiate yourself so that's awesome when you're putting the kind of first smaller truck maybe like i think you said 500k or so what is that capital going towards is that for rollouts or is that some like marketing muscle maybe and then when you're thinking about follow-on checks what kind of is the biggest use of funds in that cycle of your investment yeah i mean the best use of funds would be inventory you know so if you are growing so quickly you have so much demand for your product in your existing territories that you're getting orders let's say from all the total wines in florida they ordered once and then they came back and ordered two weeks later but you don't have enough product to give them nor do you have enough cash to produce that product quickly enough That's the best use of funds if you can get there.

26:06The second best use of funds is you have a marketing engine that you know if you pour onto a little more gasoline, it'll work. You know, the quintessential example there is sampling. If you've done five samplings in New Jersey, and every time you did a sampling, you sold$1 ,000 a product, you know that if you do 100 samplings in New Jersey, you might sell as many in revenue. You can pour money out of that if you had it. And that is something not a lot of people have. So that's the second thing that we would love to help support. You might have the inventory already, but now you can just fuel efficient, profitable fire onto one marketing lever.

26:46That would be the second thing. And the last thing you kind of referenced, it would be expansion. That would probably be a later stage, like those$2 to$3 million lead rounds that we would do for you. That would be if we know you have a playbook in a state that works or a couple of states has proven to work and you already have distributors lined up that are ready to run that playbook with you and you just need the capital that has to be a pretty de-risk situation in a perfect world it really is your remaining states your existing states with the right inventory needs and the right fuel you want to pour on existing marketing levers otherwise expansion is always dangerous because like as we were referencing earlier it might hurt your ability to be acquired the bigger you get territory-wise, you really want to focus on growing where you are.

27:30Hannah Dittman:Should brands start, you know, when they're thinking about their regional strategies, should they start with the states that they're located in, even if that may be like second city or not really a prime target? Or do you think that brands should really start focusing on certain metropolitan areas or states first that you think stronger ability to generate traction? Yeah, brands should focus on where they think they'll sell the best. brands in the alcohol space, they aren't all the same in every place, you know, and I think when you're thinking about your consumer and who's going to want to order it, you may have a brand that only does well in New York City and Miami, Los Angeles.

28:08So you should expand to those three states, right? That's where you should be. Or you could be like a carbless or a mom water that do terribly in major cities, but do exceptionally well in the rural Midwest, you know, and that's a big, broad spectrum of different things. But the focus should be launched where you think you're going to win. And that should be one state and one territory. And by when I mean have the highest velocity, have the easiest time opening accounts and having those accounts come back again and again and again, because you're going to use that first state. If you mess that up, again, we'll might be the end of your brand completely, because that state is going to be the example you use to show future states, future distributors, future retailers, you're going to show them, hey, look at this first city I launched.

28:51Here's the rate of stock doing five cases a week per account that I'm in. If I just expand into your estate, I'm gonna replicate this exact same success. But if you go into that state and it fails, either could be out of your control, but like if your distributor isn't good, if the retailers don't present it right because you didn't probably help them well enough or it was a wrong territory fit to where your brand was supposed to be, it might collect us and no one buys it and then no one else will ever take your brand. So you're gonna have to start again. And the number one thing you need to do is I wouldn't always focus on where you are personally, because I don't know if that really matters anymore.

29:23But it really needs to be where your brand is going to win out of the gate.

29:27Hannah Dittman:You know, it sounds like quite a lot of this is in-person driven, given that we're talking about like a regional approach versus kind of, you know, it sounds like you either need to hustle and get into mom and pops, get into local retail shops, get into local bars, maybe be at events, sampling, whatever it is. It sounds like relative to other CPG categories, it makes a lot more sense to focus on boots on the ground starting point versus like, you know, if you're an e-commerce business where you're kind of you don't even really geo targeting. You're just kind of like trying to find your core consumer for whatever it might be on TikTok or whatever.

30:02Hannah Dittman:Is that how you're thinking about it? Or, you know, what was kind of like a best in class early life journey of a brand kind of from a tangible tactical things they're doing prior to coming to look for investment or meeting with someone like you? Yeah, I mean, best in class, maybe depends on your type of category, but let's just say your, let's say Tsukasa Mezcal. Their Mezcal brand we invested into about two years ago, they started off their journey. They made a$40 a bottle Mezcal brand that was extremely palatable. It was a little smokier than other Mezcals, something that where people could be introduced to Mezcal for the first time if they've never had it and still consume it and enjoy it.

30:42But most importantly, it mixed extremely well in cocktails. And it was at a price point that was less than almost all other Mezcals that the bartenders and bar owners were purchasing for those cocktails, but still extremely good and mixed well. So they ended up being on the Mezcal on the cocktail list when we met them about 10 of the most high velocity cocktail bars in New York City when we met them, which is an incredible spot to be. But nobody knows your brand like that. You know, very rarely do people actually know what mezcal there's in their cocktail or in the cocktail. It happens, but not that often.

31:17But the velocity was so high, that means somebody really likes it. So it's the bartenders, the bar owners. So that's what we fell in love with. They really spent a lot of time. I mean, the founder is a big industry veteran. He's been around a long time. He used his connections to build the brand around what his connections wanted, which allowed that velocity to happen in those first 10 accounts. I mean, today they're the fourth largest selling mezcal brand in all their states. They basically control almost every on-premise cocktail menu in both Florida, Georgia, New York, New Jersey. That's where they are.

31:47That's where the only drink you're really going to get mezcal from. And that's all from that baseline. You know, that I'll call it hustle, but hustle connections and building your brand around it. That's probably a quintessential example. And the other one, it's probably a little bit more like Grazi. You know, if you are a wine brand, if you're a spirit and beer brand, I would highly recommend not bothering with e-commerce. If you're really trying to scale to be a billion-dollar brand, if you're trying to be a smaller brand, there's things you can do. But if you're a wine brand, you can build a base of people.

32:14Wine, you're allowed to ship around the country willy-nilly. This is an old regulatory exception, which is why when you go to like Napa, every single winery is going to pitch you a wine club. Some of those wineries, 90 % of their profit comes from those wine clubs, not from anything else.

32:29Hannah Dittman:Oh, I can tell by how hard they sell it. Exactly, right? So you get some of that. So wine brands can do this. And I think if you're a wine brand and you're trying to get started, maybe an RTD wine, if you're a can wine or something, that's a different world. But if you're trying to be a traditional wine brand or a box wine brand, building up a community online, that can work. But again, the margins are tight, you know, and it's very expensive to buy space in wine. If you try and just, you know, buy the wine Google search, you're going to be spending hundreds of dollars for that placement. And so it's very, very hard to get your LTVs to a place where that makes any sense.

33:02And so we always say, like, if you can start on the ground and do it right, that's the easiest way. If you can do the e-commerce and you have that following. We've seen that work as well, but both are probably good examples. You know, get that strong retention or velocity going as soon as you can.

33:16Hannah Dittman:Yeah, I feel like, you know, like anything, there's a million ways to skin a cat. It sounds like you just really have to have a deep understanding of your product, your consumer, and your focus and your power lane as a founder of what you're going to try to pursue to make it happen, whether that's going to be social events, the bar scene, whatever it might be that you feel like is going to be the strongest lever for you to pull. When we're thinking about margins for this category, and maybe this varies by either subcategory like spirit type or RTDs versus a bigger bottle or something like that.

33:49Hannah Dittman:But what do you think ideal gross margin and profitability is by the time that you're getting involved in your first investment? Yeah, I mean, the goal should be 50 % gross margins on all alcohol products. Very few early stage brands even get close to that. The vast majority of brands we look at are co-packed by major distilling co-packers or wineries or RTD co-packers. And so their margins typically fall in the 30s, low 30s even. But you need to be able to show that at even reasonable scale, I mean, big scale, by the time you hit a couple million dollars in revenue, that could get closer to 50, if not hit 50.

34:26Because on acquisition, that's the number everyone's probably looking for. If you're in the RTD world, so the beer and the seltzer-based RTDs, you could get lower than that. But the other products are certainly higher than 50. But again, 50 is probably the number for the gross margins. On profitability, if you can show that your brand can be profitable, like a million or two, that is incredible. We just invested in a yogurt-based soju brand called Yoju. Do you know the brand?

34:51Hannah Dittman:No, but I love soju. Oh, you do? You should try it. It's really, really good. They did an incredible job in Hawaii, California, and the Mid-Atlantic. reasonably small brand, you know, 1.6 million last year, targeting about just over three this year, if they can get, but doing it all profitably almost from day one. And that is very, very hard to pull off very, very hard. And they did that through just pure efficient growth. But that being said, we see tons of brands, you know, I just spoke to a brand that's going to 1.4 million this year, and they burned through$25 million doing it. And it happens.

35:22We're not going to invest in a brand like that, you know, just to make that clear. But you definitely want to be as close are profitable around the one to two million revenue mark as you can. That is different than where it was probably four years ago, where you could spend whatever you wanted for growth. It was a weird time. That is not the case anymore. There's too many good brands running profitably right now that if you're the kind of brand that is going to make five million to burn through seven or eight, just not going to work anymore. It's just not the world we're looking at.

35:49Hannah Dittman:Yeah, I feel like operational excellence has been just increasingly across the board in CPG, just the higher and higher watermarks. So it sounds like sub 1 million, you probably won't be hitting 50 % gross margins, but that should be your North Star. And you might not be profitable, but you should have a path to profitability. Around 1 to 2 million, you should be starting to get closer or hitting the 50 % gross margin, and you should be maybe break even or starting to get to profitable. If you can pull that off, you would be an outlier for sure. Not a huge outlier, but you'd be in the top 5 percentile for sure.

36:23And that is where you want to be. You definitely don't want to be a middling kind of player on any metric. And if you're doing the three, 4 million revenue in approaching profitability, that's still very good. But if you can get to round two, that's excellent.

36:35Hannah Dittman:Awesome. That's really helpful. I'd love to kind of do a little exercise where if I was your cousin or a childhood best friend or something, and I was starting a brand or maybe I have one and I'm looking to start talking to investors, what would be the rundown that you would kind of give me of everything to expect in the first getting a meeting, the first meeting, what I need to have prepared, how I should position, kind of all the different check the boxes that you would be wanting to make sure I hit to be performing well in fundraising process? Yeah, for fundraising and alcohol, it really runs two different lanes, right if you are very well connected you already have sort of that lineup of people we've seen a lot of these decks almost just sort of brands they're just you know nice pictures and colors and the brand looks nice that is the one subset of fundraising i think you know i certainly wouldn't recommend that if you were my cousin but if you were my cousin and trying to raise from top shelf or really trying to scale in our industry i would highly recommend doing as much as you can not to do that.

37:40So almost take the opposite approach. The best fundraisers in our space are extremely financial and metric driven. There's nothing else to it. That's because there are so many brands and so many look great on paper. So many are so well presented. The product could taste incredible. Some of these brands, they like to collect all these gold medals and platinum medals and almost all of them have them at this point where it's almost doesn't matter if you have them in a funny way might matter to consumers. But this goes to my next point, which is when you're fundraising, do everything you can to show why your brand is better than everybody else on the shelves.

38:19Because you have to remember, people like us, we probably speak to 100 brands a month. And for you to stand out in that universe of brands is hard, just by being pretty for by far. But if you can tell me, like we were saying before, 90 % of the customers that bought in April came back and bought again in May, that would blow me away. So like find something like that, that you can really hone in on find those couple stats that show you have an outlier product, either from velocity or retention, or maybe you're running so efficiently, right? Like you're in 1000 accounts, and they're all selling through every six days, you know, they're coming back and running six days, because it just sells through, you can come up with stats, I would really focus on velocity stats, revenue stats, and cash management stats to show that you have an incredible brand relative to everybody else.

39:12And that's hard for founders who don't know what everyone else is doing. But in the end of the day, you have to have that pulse. You have to think through, go to your stores and literally would sit there and watch what people are buying, ask them why they're buying it, see why they're not buying your product, why are they buying your competitor, and start to get a read for, is this really working the way I think it is? Because as soon as you have that, you can start explaining that to investors. You know, people are coming and buying my product instead of these other products because of this and this and this.

39:38And you really have to explain that in a way that everyone understands. The metrics are good, and then you need to have, like, the reasons it's doing that well. And usually it's not, everyone always says, oh, the quality is really high or, like, it stands out on shelves. That might be true, but actually you should ask and go find out because we're going to once we get into diligence. And if that isn't the case, we're going to think you don't have a great grasp on why your product is selling, which is the scariest thing for an investor because you're probably going to spend money growing that piece of your marketing arm when you really probably should have focused on something else.

40:08And then we always say like some of the ugliest brands in the world have blown up and I don't want to point to some examples, but you know, things like a Surfside or Carbless, like they don't look any different than the, you know, a hundred other brands that were doing the exact same product. They probably taste worse. If you look at like a White Claw or Truly, like no one ever said that's the highest quality product in the history of time, but they did so well. And don't focus too much on stuff outside of, is my product selling and why is it selling so well?

40:36Hannah Dittman:Yeah, no, I think that's great advice. And I feel like a lot of times the reason fundraising can be so painful is just the ambiguity. As a brand owner, you're so used to marketing to the consumer world and you're trying to tell them why they should buy something, which is very different than why someone should invest in something. And I think having, yeah, your North Star be, it sounds like, wicked sharp business fundamentals. Pick a couple of your data points that are going to really support a strong business fundamental story and use that to drive the narrative of what you're talking to about investors seems like a solid approach.

41:13It's a really, really good way to think about it, what you referenced here. It's when you're selling an alcoholic beverage, you're selling an experience, right? Like you're selling, I'm going to consume this liquid and have a great time, or I'm going to enjoy it with my friends, whatever it is that you're consuming a product. When you're selling your business, you're selling the ability for someone to make money on your business. That has nothing to do with whether or not I'm going to enjoy consuming it and having a good experience. In fact, the opposite. I don't care what the experience is. You know, my partner, like, we'll do it.

41:42You know, he'll taste them. Yeah, I will too at the end. But we often say we won't even try it. You know, we won't try the product usually until we're way into diligence. And that's because we don't care. At the end of the day, we're trying to make some money from the growth of your business. We're here to support you. You should be here to make some money from the growth of your business. You should be here to look for an exit. Talk to investors. Sell to your investors. Market to your investors how you're going to get through an exit with them. And that's a very different mindset than, hey, consumer, you're really going to enjoy this product.

42:11It's going to change your life because you're going to drink it instead of you're going to invest and make a lot of money together.

42:17Hannah Dittman:Yeah, a thousand percent. It's like opposing views. It's like the consumer you want to be like product, product. Here's so amazing. And as long as you're not doing anything illegal or crazy, how you're running your business is oftentimes not a deal maker, maybe a deal breaker if it's extreme or like very political or something like that. And same thing for investors. It's like to varying degrees. But how you're running your business and the back office is paramount. And then if the product is horrible, horrible, horrible, it might be a deal breaker. But at the end of the day, I think most savvy investors know that they're an end of one.

42:47Hannah Dittman:And what they think about your product might not be what the world thinks about your product or your core customer. So their personal taste or their personal experience using your product might not be representative if they're going to focus on the data and say, you know, if you're meeting your customer, you're meeting your customer and they seem pretty happy. And that's all I really care about is that your customer likes you. So yeah, I think for founders that might be hard, hard bill to swallow, like what I spent all this time on my product, but it's not that investors don't care about your product.

43:14Hannah Dittman:It's that they care that the right person is caring about your product and it might just not be them. Right. In fact, you don't, you don't really want your investors to be your target market. Probably that would be a very small market of people to sell to. Yeah. Rich, older people in big cities. Yeah, exactly. I think good alcohol investors, I mean, not that there are that many of us out there. We're a very small group of people, but we know that too. We know the vast majority of sales of alcohol don't happen to people like us. It's very, very rare. Most of us don't even consume that much. We know there are big pockets of this country that consume all kinds of different products for all kinds of different reasons.

43:53And often that's where the most innovation can come. If you walk into an Erewhon, you could probably see a thousand different alcohol brands being pitched to all the LA socialites. But if you go through North Dakota, you probably don't see very many. But if you can go out and dominate North Dakota, we know there's a lot of money being made there. They consume a lot of alcohol there. So we often say, go find a new home and go show us why people are consuming it.

44:17Hannah Dittman:That's so helpful. Okay, so I've got my mindset right and I'm getting into a first meeting with you. What's that going to look like? How's that going to go? and kind of, again, stripping away some of the ambiguity, like, do I come with a deck? Do I put it up? You know, am I the one talking? Are you interviewing me? Are you asking me questions? Like, from a brass tacks perspective, what's the founder experience supposed to be like? I like this. I guess if you're coming to a meeting and you have the meeting with me, that means you've probably already gotten through like one gates. We've already, you know, gotten to the point where we think you're a fit of some sort based on what you've sent to us.

44:51usually before you've had the meeting, you've sent a deck and you've filled out a very short application, just so we know sort of where you fall size wise and what your valuation expectations are, how much you're raising. So if you sit in the meeting, I mean, I would, you know, pitch, but I would really focus at that point in the meeting. There's a few things. If you haven't covered velocity, please go into it deeply initially right out of the gate. Like here are the accounts we're in. Here's how we're selling through. Here's why they're selling through so well, like we talked about earlier. Second thing, go into yourself.

45:22The next thing for us, as early stage alcohol investors, it's true for all startups, is there's so much risk outside the product itself. And now we have to believe that you're the person that's going to take this thing from where it is to the promised land. So go pitch yourself. Or if you're a team, go pitch the team. Because that's pointing that if you're having a call with me, I now need to believe that A, you're trustworthy, that you have a big vision for what you're going to do. You're extremely sharp and you're able to execute you're able to learn and take feedback and follow a playbook and follow up with connections and in our industry it is run by old family-owned businesses you know like these are fourth generation companies to get in the door with the distributor most of them or get in the door with these major liquor store chains you need to hustle hard like i mean sleep on the couch in their front yard like you need to be there all night and just wait until they come out their door it's crazy stuff that you have to get done and so we need to see that in you like we don't see that in the first call sometimes that even if you have a great brand that might be the reason not so i'd say if you haven't covered velocity earlier which now brands are starting to catch on we like so they do that a lot but you haven't done that yet do that first and then go right into why you guys are awesome and why you're so energetic about it and you know

46:39Hannah Dittman:should i have slides for you and i've already sent you a deck do i assume you've already looked through the deck and i'm not a big fan of like walking through slides on calls i find that to be not the point of a call you know like maybe i haven't fully i might have flipped through it maybe i haven't seen everything but if i like the call i will then go through the deck carefully if there are things in the deck you want to highlight to say them that's because i often find when people go into the deck they kind of lose there isn't really a conversation happening at that point so a lot of time is spent on things that i don't care about and a lot of time maybe stuff you don't even care about just because you feel like there's like a sequence of these decks you know that you have to go through so i would say if you want to bring a couple slides maybe it's just like one or two that are like the highlights of which you want to talk around i wouldn't go more than that like do not go page flipping through a 20 page deck on a 30 minute call i think that i think most startups and this isn't just our industry i think they forget how much this is ultimately if we like the company how much it is a relationship game so you should spend the first 30 minutes like you're dating you wouldn't bring up a slide deck about yourself on a first date like you should almost make this like you want to yeah right i don't know right maybe people do i guess that's kind of like hinge these days i would say you probably want to spend more time like getting out your personality and the team's personality than you want to spend going through like all your skew counts and what states you're distributed in a few highlight account like i don't care that much like at this point we've gotten there if we have questions we'll ask you directly on that front.

48:06It's very easy. If you don't have answers, I would say come prepared with all your metrics written down somewhere so you have it ready. But otherwise, you know, really focus on building relationship with your investors.

48:17Hannah Dittman:That's awesome. So it sounds like I'm going to come, I'm going to get you jazzed about my momentum and velocity. I'm going to get, I'm going to help you see what I've got going and that our engine is running pretty hot. I'm going to make sure that, you know, I'm a hustler, give you some anecdotes and stories to color it and make sure you see that we're really passionate and excited about the brand and the direction. And then I'm going to eventually have to get to the ask, right, of why we're even having the meeting in the first place. And I'm probably going to close out with something like that.

48:45Hannah Dittman:So how should I approach that portion? You know, what does the structure of the ideal ask look like? Or could you model it like I'm looking for X dollars or this is the valuation I have in mind? You know, when you get into the so what of the conversation, what are you hoping a founder might say? Or do you even expect them to touch it in the first conversation? Definitely have an ask. It should be, if you're talking to us on our first call, like, ideally, you know, we don't write like$10 million checks. So if you're trying to raise a ton of money, like probably, we probably should have said that up front.

49:16So like, at least if you know, it's us, if it's going to be a huge round, just to make sure we're all like level setting here. You know, we're not wasting the first 30 minutes talking about a business that you're worth $100 million in your head. Great. I'm all for it. But we're not the investor for you. So at least like tell us up front and maybe we can save some time or maybe we can say tell us a little more and we'll let you know. But I would say up front on the ask if it's going to be big, big, big. Otherwise, if it's you don't just say evaluation, you don't want to let me on the lead, you know, evaluation, but say like, look, I think I need 500 ,000 million to achieve this goal.

49:50And I think a lot of people, they often just say a number when they're fundraising because they feel like, oh i'm doing 500 grand revenue this year i can raise a million i could use a million somehow be better than that like you've got to be like if i have this much capital this is how big i'm gonna be if i don't this is how big i'm gonna be like you should have both in your mind not nobody wants to hear like oh i'm gonna use this money and this is what i'm gonna achieve i think it needs to be you really gotta know what you're gonna spend on to be really good at this game so ideally you come in with the ass being like you know i'm trying to raise two million if i only get a million, I'm going to get this much.

50:24I already have 800 grand committed. We could use a lead like you guys to set a valuation or run around. And something like that would be huge. If you can have that much confidence in your ability to execute, it goes a long way for an investor like us.

50:36Hannah Dittman:And when you're saying kind of the ROI on that investment, are you talking in terms of revenue or how should people be framing that kind of number explanation in their mind? Revenue is probably the easiest one just to say quickly, but that revenue should also be tied to the number of states you're in, the velocity, and how many accounts you expect to be in at that time. So if it's any different, then you've got to have them all together. Otherwise, like we talked about, you can be in all 50 states, even global, doing$3 million of revenue, and that is not interesting to anyone. So before we wrap up, I want to take a second to make sure our audience can have an actionable next step to apply all this amazing knowledge to.

51:11Hannah Dittman:For founders that want to get in touch with you and get to that first meeting, where can they find you, or what is the best way for them to get into contact with you? This way, reach out to us, either Jason at TopShelf.Ventures or brands at TopShelf.Ventures or hello at TopShelf.Ventures, you'll find it all. We're a very small team. It's really my partner and I and we have two people that help us kind of initial screening. So you'll get to us, we'll see it. We're only looking at alcohol brands, so we certainly won't miss it. If you think you have something amazing, please send some info, send a deck and we'll reach back out.

51:44Hannah Dittman:Awesome. Well, thank you so much for your time today. It was so lovely chatting with you and learning more about your personal journey and top shelf ventures as well. Thanks, Hannah. I appreciate it.

51:55Hannah Dittman:Thanks so much for tuning in, everyone. If you like this episode, show us some love with a five-star review at ratethispodcast.com slash startupcpg. I'm Hannah Dittman, podcast host and correspondent here at Startup CPG. I hope you'll join me again as we dig into more juicy topics like ops, finance, and all the real talk founders actually need. come say hi on LinkedIn or ping me on Slack I'm always eager to hear your questions or brainstorm future episode ideas if you're a potential sponsor and want to get in on the fun and appear on the podcast shoot us an email at partnerships at startupcpg.com and last but not least if you haven't already don't miss out on our free Slack community for emerging brands and CPG lovers alike join us at startupcpg.com we'd love to have you see you next time

52:42Thank you.