I recently went one on one with Christopher Wirth, Founder and CEO of Volley.

Adam: Thanks again for taking the time to share your advice. First things first, though, I am sure readers would love to learn more about you. How did you get here? What experiences, failures, setbacks or challenges have been most instrumental to your growth?

Christopher: My journey started out at George Washington University. At that time, I was working part-time at a hotel in Washington, D.C. and befriended the head mixologist. He explained to me the complexity of a mixed cocktail and the importance of high-quality ingredients to make the perfect cocktail. At the same time I was in charge of an organization's social events and great-tasting drinks were important. That’s when I came up with the idea of making a premium mixer brand that would allow you to easily make high-quality cocktails without being a master mixologist. Massi, the mixologist, came up with the recipes and I did the rest! I began bottling juices out of my home kitchen, peeling and pitting each mango (making sure not to waste too much fruit, of course!) and juicing each ginger. I ran around NYC on foot, dropping off/picking up bottles from the small number of customers we had, since we needed to save every dime and glass bottles are expensive. 

As the company grew, I became certified in HACCP, moved to an industrial kitchen in Queens, NY and quit my day job. I would recruit friends and find people looking for odd jobs to help chop the fruit and pasteurize the product. There are many stories of late nights working only to realize a few days later that the pasteurization process was done incorrectly and all the products went bad. It was soul-crushing but you have to get up and back at it the next day. I slowly grew this business from a side-project to a profitable business with very little funding. Learning how to produce a consumer good safely, how to scale and most importantly how to do this all on a very tight budget was the best education I could have asked for. That along with some of Tim Ferris’ books and a great one called Scaling Up -- highly recommend. 

Adam: How did you come up with your business idea and know it was worth pursuing? What advice do you have for others on how to come up with and test ideas?

Christopher: In summer of 2018, my wife was reading a book called The Dorito Effect, which goes into the food industry and essentially what makes the flavor, color and texture of a Dorito so consistent. What was specifically shocking was that ‘natural flavors’ are made in a lab and a single flavor can have over 100 ingredients, including sugar, and none of this has to be disclosed! A popular flavor is vanilla (due to the cost of a real vanilla bean) which contains castoreum, which comes from the castor sack of a beaver. This was the same time that all these hard seltzers were coming out, marketing themselves as the healthier option for consumers. What they don't disclose is that they’re made from fermented cane sugar and natural flavors. This didn’t sit well with us, and when my wife and I looked for the tequila option there wasn’t one, so we started our own! Since then we’ve been very fortunate to have Volley be in a very hot space -- both premium tequila and RTD -- two of the fastest-growing categories in beverage.

My advice for others is to not worry about being the first. Often you hear someone say, “aren’t there enough of those out there already?” The key is doing it differently and being better in your own way. Is it pricing, quality, taste? Understand who your product is for and don’t try to be for everyone. If you make something for everyone, it really is for nobody in particular and makes it hard to cut through the noise. Be nimble, test your idea on a small scale and don’t be afraid to iterate. Nobody gets it right on the first try. To do that you need to listen to your consumer and align with what they are truly looking for and care about.

Adam: What are the best tips on launching new products?

Christopher: Know the market you are getting into, know your competitors and lean on people with experience. I don’t believe it is enough to be another “me too” brand. Your product needs to have a very zoned-in target audience and differentiator. Know what those are and do not be afraid to not be for everyone. It’s better to have a smaller, very loyal customer base than a larger, very fickle customer base.

Adam: What are the key steps you have taken to grow your business? What advice do you have for others on how to take their businesses to the next level?

Christopher: Learn as much as possible from experts out there. There are so many resources out there from business books, podcasts, online courses and other entrepreneurs. Scaling Up is a great book along with Traction and The Art of the Start. I’m also a big fan of the show “The Profit” with Marcus Lemonis. There are processes that are universal that you need to implement to properly gauge and manage your business’ KPIs. The key steps we took were first getting our product in a place that we were proud of and aligned with our brand mission. We built a reliable supply chain with partners we could count on. From there we launched in markets that we understood and had relationships in so that we’d have the easiest path to market before expanding further into areas we were less familiar with. You have to balance growth with getting it right. If you expand too quickly without getting it right you lose your ability to make nimble changes when things need improvement. We would rather build deeper distribution in a limited geography than expand too far and spread ourselves too thin.

Adam: What are your best tips on the topics of sales, marketing, and branding?

Christopher: If you’re building a consumer brand, brand is super important. It can be the differentiator in itself. How does your product make consumers feel? You can control that through your attributes as well as your communication and design. We believe that getting the brand right is worth the investment (which can be quite high upfront!). 

For sales you need to build a process for your customer acquisition funnel. How many people do you need to engage with to get a sale? What do you need to do to get a re-order? This is all measurable and eventually forecastable. Once you have a baseline you can make small changes that can impact those KPIs incrementally but setting up the measuring frameworks upfront is important.

Adam: In your experience, what are the defining qualities of an effective leader? How can leaders and aspiring leaders take their leadership skills to the next level?

Christopher: They need to be inspirational, build morale and get people to keep moving forward, despite how tough things can be. Read books, be self-aware (i.e. take personality tests) and listen to others. Getting as much feedback as you can, while also knowing how to weed, though that feedback to make it effective is very important. Great leaders think about their business as “we” and “us” and inspire the team to overcome hurdles together versus pointing fingers.

Adam: What is your best advice on building, leading and managing teams?

Christopher: Hire people that are smarter than you at the given job function, with different skill sets and who care about the job. You need to be very clear of what your expectations are from that role and that person and they should be made as early as possible. Provide feedback on a weekly, monthly and quarterly basis. Keep a pulse on how things are going. You will know if someone is not the right fit pretty quickly. As a founder, you have to realize that no one will love and care for the business as much as you do. 

Adam: What are your three best tips applicable to entrepreneurs, executives and civic leaders? 

Christopher: Don’t worry about getting everything perfect on the first try. It’s more important that you start and then constantly iterate and improve. Fail fast!

Invest in people. Having the right people around you makes all the difference. You want to surround yourself with people that complement your skillset and are smarter than you in their areas of expertise.

Know your numbers. Without a clear grasp on your KPIs it is very difficult to know where your pain points are and where things are going well, it all meshes together without KPI clarity. I’m a big believer in setting up KPIs and you may realize that you have too many or too few or some aren’t that important anymore. There are only a few that truly drive your business so figuring out what those are is critical.

Adam: What is the single best piece of advice you have ever received?

Christopher: It’s never too late to get it right. You may feel like you’ve put so much time, energy and resources into pursuing a specific strategy but it doesn’t seem to be working. Are you willing to start from scratch on a different path with your new learnings? You often need to do the wrong thing a few times before you realize what the right way to do it is but it's an invaluable learning lesson and not something to see as having wasted all of that time.

Adam: Is there anything else you would like to share? 

Christopher: Think about how you can do things differently from everyone else. Even in a small way, you have to differentiate yourself. If you are competing in a category and doing the same thing as your competitors or advertising in the same way, it’s difficult to get to a sustainable marketing strategy. Find your differentiator and lean heavily into it, purposefully try not to be for everyone!


Adam Mendler is the CEO of The Veloz Group, where he co-founded and oversees ventures across a wide variety of industries. Adam is also the creator and host of the business and leadership podcast Thirty Minute Mentors, where he goes one on one with America's most successful people - Fortune 500 CEOs, founders of household name companies, Hall of Fame and Olympic gold medal winning athletes, political and military leaders - for intimate half-hour conversations each week. Adam has written extensively on leadership, management, entrepreneurship, marketing and sales, having authored over 70 articles published in major media outlets including Forbes, Inc. and HuffPost, and has conducted more than 500 one on one interviews with America’s top leaders through his collective media projects. A top leadership speaker, Adam draws upon his insights building and leading businesses and interviewing hundreds of America's top leaders as a top keynote speaker to businesses, universities and non-profit organizations.

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