The hire you are worried about

Two versions come up most.

The first is a brewery or distillery that grew on brand and taproom and now needs someone who can run a business. The founder is still the best salesperson in the building and cannot be in fifty states at once.

The second is a business that has been through the craft shakeout, has capacity it is not using, and needs a leader who can fix the economics without killing what made the brand work.

Why breweries and spirits is different

The three-tier system is the whole thing. You do not sell to the customer, you sell to a distributor who sells to a retailer, and your brand is one of hundreds in their book. A leader who has never managed a distributor network is starting from zero here, whatever their food and beverage record looks like.

Compliance is state by state. Label approval, licensing, direct-to-consumer rules that differ across every line on the map. That is not an administrative detail, it is a constraint on how fast you can grow and where.

Spirits has a problem brewing does not. You lay down liquid now and sell it in four years, or twelve. Capital sits in a warehouse while someone forecasts a market that does not exist yet. Getting that wrong is not recoverable in a quarter.

And brand is the asset in a way it is not in most manufacturing. The person you hire can improve the P&L and damage the thing that made the P&L possible.

What I screen for

Distributor evidence first. Have they actually sat in a distributor's annual planning meeting and fought for shelf and truck space, or have they only seen the reports afterwards.

For operational roles I want to know what they did when a batch went wrong and the liquid could not simply be reworked.

For anyone senior in spirits, I want to hear how they think about inventory that will not be sold for years, because that judgement separates people who have run a spirits business from people who have visited one.

Where I draw the line

I will not present someone whose entire record is beer into a spirits mandate, or the reverse, and call it drinks experience. The economics are not the same and neither is the sales motion.

Roles I run

Director to C-suite. General management, operations, supply chain, commercial and distributor management, finance, technical and quality.

How the search runs

I do every step myself, from the briefing to the first ninety days after the offer, because there is nobody else here. More about how I work.

Tell me what you are trying to hire

I will tell you straight whether I am the right person for it. Book a 30 minute call, or email scott@williams-recruitment.com.