Robert Laird : How One Startup Took Over a $19B Tequila Industry | DSH #1568

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Holy, that is the best tequila I've ever had.

Like, that's our plata.

So that's age three weeks.

We do our reposados aged nine months in a Cabernet.

And then our Aneo, which is my favorite.

So this is aged two years, which is twice as long as most Aneos.

You got to try this tequila.

It's the best I've ever had.

And I go, all right, I'll be the judge of that.

All right, guys, we got Robert here, a good friend of mine, Dio Sazul.

Cheers.

Cheers, brother.

One of the best tequilas I've ever had.

Thank you so much for having us.

Yeah, I was just telling him, you could drink this shit straight.

How many tequilas you can say that for?

No, you certainly can't.

Now, that was the whole point and really on why we wanted to bring this to market was because it sort of found its way into my life in a really serendipitous way.

And I decided, you know what?

As a

fan of tequila, what I've been told is the best, right?

I told you earlier before the show, good and better.

This absolutely outperforms it in every sense of the word.

I mean, to really understand like, this is what tequila is supposed to taste like has been really fun to discover.

Absolutely.

And everyone thinks, everyone that owns a liquor company thinks they have the best tasting.

So of course.

When we first met, I was skeptical.

Of course.

And then at PowerSlap, you were giving out samples.

I was like, damn, that was fire.

I know.

And I took another one right after.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's amazing to actually get to a point where we're like, okay, I can actually enjoy this.

And it's one of those, one of probably the most euphoric buzzes I've ever, you know, I've ever had as you decide to indulge.

And no hangover because we don't use any diffusers.

We use open air.

It's really artisan approached.

And more importantly, we grow the agave

ourselves with our family and our partner down there.

So we maintain the age of that agave when we actually harvest it.

I actually love that because I used to love this.

I don't want to call out anyone in particular, but I used to drink this.

tequila brand and there was a bunch of PR about them lately about how they add stuff to it.

Yeah, yeah, it's actually a class action lawsuit with that particular group, I think, right now.

Which ironically, you know, in Mexico, there's a very small, and this is, of course, something I've discovered, and we'll talk about here in a minute,

becoming kind of an industry expert, right?

You have to, if you're going to start any business, I don't care what side of the market you decide to go into, whether it's media, marketing, AI, you know, pharmaceutical diagnostics, whatever it is, you better figure out how to become an expert in that space.

And so, of course, I dove into the space and the heritage and what goes on to actually produce it in Mexico over the last 18 months since I discovered this.

And it's wild that they'll shift distilleries quite often after they're acquired by larger companies, and then they just basically change the whole formula.

And that's basically what happened.

That's a bummer.

Yeah, it is a bummer.

Because they try to make more margin.

100%.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, because tequila is supposedly one of the healthier alcohols, right?

It is.

The agave plant itself is almost like a superfood, right?

I mean,

whether if you have diabetes or if you're autoimmune, I mean, mean, it's the one spirit you can enjoy.

We actually digest agave, right?

Like a vegetable, unlike

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Some of our other spirit friends, like a vodka or a whiskey, I'm a whiskey guy.

I'm Scottish, ironically, with a tequila company.

So usually it's, you know, even if you're doing a really impressive Macallan 18 or 20, whatever, it still leaves you, you know, a little hungover the next day because of the way we digest it internally.

Yeah.

Yeah, I used to be big on wine, but as I've gotten older, I get a headache now.

Yeah, real bad.

Yeah.

And the tannins, the sugars, let's throw the sugars that'll do that to you yeah and so because agave isn't a sugar right uh there's no hangover and trust me i've put it to a test i probably should you probably drank a damn near a whole bottle uh i'll try more than that and obviously you know we're doing this day in and day out you know and really trying to build the brand in an authentic way by leveraging phenomenal you know hospitality partnerships and key account markets you guys have crushed it with that can you name some of your partners

in We're seven months in.

Yep.

I strategically launched this in San Diego.

So

that market has been phenomenal.

I live in Northern California, so not far, Sacramento, east of Sacramento, El Dorado Hills.

Father of two.

So I'm a little, you know, taking care of not just fatherhood, but also growing a business is not easy.

But this product deserved to be in a hospitality market that was going to appreciate it.

And so I chose San Diego specifically because of relationships relationships with really impressive hospitality partners like Click Hospitality, RMD that owns Hard Rock,

groups like Sidebar.

And then, of course, we ended up moving in with Insomniac groups.

So Nova and Oxford and the club, the club scene in San Diego, and my good friends down there really embraced us early on.

So very lucky.

Now you got some major ones in the works.

You got PowerSlap.

PowerSlap came on, yeah.

Our first, you know, I'll mention our very, our, our most pivotal partnership that obviously opened the doors, right, to

create some legitimacy behind the brand, right?

Not easy getting into the space, very competitive, a lot of money.

I mean, Tequila does 100 almost 19 billion a year in revenue.

Wow.

So your conglomerates are making a lot of money, spending a lot of money,

was to get in with the MLS team of San Diego, which was an emerging.

um franchise so they were coming into um the limelight and creating creating their brand themselves the same time as we were.

And I was fortunate enough to run into

Tom Penn, who's their CEO.

And Tom Penn actually founded, I shouldn't say founded, but ran and put together LAFC

in 2012 and then ended up partying release with them and got kind of touched on the shoulder to launch San Diego FC, which is currently ranked first position right now.

I know.

I believe they're crushing.

I mean, they're in first position, just knocked down

the former champions, you know, LA Galaxy, just took down Vancouver.

I mean, they are on fire.

Soccer is growing pretty fast.

It is.

And of course, the pairing between the heritage, you know, Hispanic culture, San Diego, soccer, Chuki Lozano, who they had just signed,

you know, that we've had at the distillery and nurtured a relationship with him.

That was a big win for us to secure SDFC, the new MLS team, and more importantly, Snapdragon Stadium, which is in San Diego.

So this old Qualcomm.

So we took over that whole stadium.

We got all the bars taken over.

And the official tequila of SDFC opened a lot of other doors for us.

Let's go.

Nitro Circus as well, right?

100%.

That was the next one.

So as I discovered this amazing product and decided to take on a multi-billion dollar industry, I decided, hey, we're going to need to have a hell of a team to do it, right?

Can't lift it on your own.

So I was

able to put together really a pedigree, I would call it, you know, and and I attest that to, you know, years.

This is 20 years in the making, Sean, you know, really.

Kind of a slum dog millionaire type story, right?

I go back to my years running Mercedes-Benz dealers for 12 years, a lot of similarities to what we do in this industry between fixed ops and sales and incentives and managing inventory.

It's very, you know, a lot of similarities.

And I did that 12 years in my 20s, one of the youngest, you know, managers in Mercedes,

really crossed the country.

I was 22 years old.

Wow.

You leveled up quick there.

Leveled up quick.

Yep.

Instead of doing college, I got into the school of hard knocks.

And like a lot of my mentors I'd call or a lot of guys we've looked up to here, right?

You know, your Grant Cardone's, your Red Lee's, your Andy Elliotts, these are all car guys.

That's true.

They're all car guys.

I didn't even think about that, but you're right.

Yeah, I mean, the one thing

you can't beat us every single month.

Even though there's like a negative connotation with youth.

They're typically, yes, they've typically followed us, but you know what down at the bottom bottom or end of the day, we, you know, we've got to get up every month and perform, you know, and we got to take care of clients because we got to ensure we get them to come back.

You know, Mercedes taught us incredible,

you know, best practices in hospitality, right?

How do you, you know, take care of a client who's spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a car that we all know depreciates tomorrow, like the day they leave, and then get them to buy multiple per year, which which is the name of the game.

So as I've taken a lot of those

techniques, best practices, and of course, resilience, that's how I launched this team where we brought in some really heavy hitters.

So former president of Walmart's a great shareholder of ours.

I mean, that's part of an incredible job we did

in actually my sales distribution line of work, which over the last four years, and then brought on former COO of fevertree and and john soto so he actually put the the deal together for us with dana on throw one entertainment shout out to him yeah no show what's it like uh negotiating with dana getting to learn from him seeing him like day by day yeah yeah it's funny when we got when we first got introduced to the opportunity it was kind of like all right throw one entertainment all right travis pastrano god he's like an idol growing up um yeah we're interested for sure and at the same time my coo was nurturing a deal because i hadn't brought him on full-time yet because we were you know building this plane as we're flying it right?

Self-funding basically from day one over the last 18 months

after discovering it on a job site of a project I funded, which is what I do now, real estate development.

And that's literally how we found Dios Azol.

Crazy.

Isn't that wild?

So imagine me on a job site and my general contractor,

you know, tells me, hey, you got to try this tequila.

It's the best I've ever had.

And I go, all right, I'll be the judge of that.

I've heard that a million times before.

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I tasted the reposada of the back of a truck in the middle of June and like, you know, know, 90 degrees.

And I go, holy shit, that is the best fucking tequila I've ever had.

Like, whose is this?

He goes, it's Pedro.

I go, who's Pedro?

He goes, Pedro's doing our drywall.

I go, Pedro's doing the drywall and he made this.

You got to be kidding me.

I got to meet him, bring him down here.

So Pedro comes down and Pedro.

has been in the States for several decades, actually creating a life, you know, in the construction industry, running a drywall company in Central California.

The project I was doing was a multifamily project, like 48 units, nothing nothing huge, but you know, so he's got a humble, but hard, you know, but nice existence with what he does.

And he basically, you know, grew up in a Montetan, which is right outside of Tequila, one of the heart of where the agave's grown and where we produce right now.

Of course, it's an actual city, Tequila.

Tequila is an actual city, yeah.

Wow.

So Jose Cuervo is there.

Sauz is there.

Forta Leza is produced right there.

I never knew that.

You need to go, my friend.

Sounds beautiful.

It's gorgeous.

Very, very

cinematic.

You know, cobblestone, gorgeous church center of the town.

We just got done shooting our first episode with Travis Pastrana and Nitro Circus.

So it's on tour with Dios Azul.

So, yeah, so Dana White had them come down while they did Nitro Circus in Guadalajara, which we sponsored.

It was our kind of our big event just four, six, eight weeks ago.

So I had Travis at the distillery.

I mean, imagine that.

I mean, I grew up watching him.

You're a little younger than me, but I mean, he was, I mean, the guy.

He was a Tony Hawk.

He's a, well, Tony was the same thing, but as far as Moto MX went, I mean, he's, you know, 17 time winner of X games.

It's like ridiculous.

Gold medals, I should say.

So

that town where Pedro grew up is actually where the distillery is, and it's his family's distillery.

So after spending two decades here in the States, creating a great life for him and his family and his two kids, twins that went to SF State.

And, you know, I think he was looking to sort of leverage what he, his family had done for four generations and create the best tequila and sell it to his friends and family is basically what he was trying to do.

Nice.

Now, Pedro doesn't speak very much English, and he certainly doesn't know sales distribution or marketing and probably wasn't going to be able to raise the capital.

So as I'm staring there, pulling back the layers of the onion on this and really contemplating, am I crazy enough to fucking take on a multi-billion dollar industry, which I know all too well?

I mean, I was in the space for three years during the COVID run

as the senior vice president of Medea Vodka, which is Shaquille O'Neal's vodka, right?

So he was a big shareholder and became a good friend.

He was a great guy.

And, you know,

that team pivoted to PPE.

So we did a bunch of other stuff in sales distribution.

But nevertheless, I understood what, you know, enough to be dangerous, how hard this would be to launch.

And I said, we're going to do it.

Pedro, we're going to tell the whole world your story.

And here's how we're going to do it.

We're going to put together a pedigree team.

We're going to raise the capital and we're going to go to work.

So luckily during my course of sales distribution, I did a lot of work in Mexico with the government over COVID era, sold them PPE and masks through my group in a large quantity for a lot of money.

And that was with a partner of mine who's out of Mexico City.

And so after meeting Pedro and tasting this, I called him and said, hey, I need you to just do a little due diligence for me.

Tell me a little bit, what's going on down there?

I'm not down there enough.

I don't know.

And you're from there five generations.

He's been manufacturing,

does very well, has a great life.

I helped him move into Beverly Hills as his lender.

So that's how we met.

And he called me the next day and he goes, this family is amazing.

The Partidas are incredible.

This is their operation.

Letitia is Pedro's aunt.

It's his aunt's operation, and his cousins now produce most of the tequila.

They actually actually produced this so albert partita actually produces deal sazul he's our master distillery he's 38 years old this guy has a master's degree in farming studied abroad in france on how to produce cognac and wine which is the reason why ours comes off so incredibly smooth it's the aril the the barrel aging component right so we're aging in napple wine barrels and kentucky bourbon barrels i mean that's how we age our tequila yeah

rather than just a regular barrel 100 Or still.

You know, if it's coming out of a still, you're not going to get the flavors from that oak.

Wow.

Good timing, too, because the growth of tequila is insane right now.

It's taking over more and more market share.

Right.

And what I've loved,

what I've loved discovering and

educating myself on is that the U.S.

consumer, I'm going to pour some more.

Yeah, go ahead.

Is

finally has a palate, right?

And

they're done getting bamboozled by celebrities who say they've got the best tequila when in actuality, they're they're ranked in the bottom third of distilleries people didn't know what good tequila was no they don't yeah pretty easy to look up but i mean even your top performers um in volume and value right now and some of our favorite favorite actors yeah i love them all okay but like literally it's like almost comical like nobody told them to even look at it like you guys are literally in the bottom third of quality wow

of distillery i wonder if they even know honestly they may not not.

There's a good chance they don't.

I doubt Mark's been to one

or Kevin.

Yeah.

I mean, they just see the numbers.

Hey, and I love you guys.

Yeah.

It's always love, but always love.

They probably just see the numbers and they're like, yeah, I'll invest in that.

Exactly.

Yeah.

So those down.

So for me, as I sat there and, you know, leaving the car industry, going into real estate development over the last 10 years, that's what I, or I kind of broke into the entrepreneurial role, right?

After making people a lot of money,

decided to go ahead and venture on my own and do that.

So I own a hormone company that does TRT nationwide.

I've done this.

And then during COVID, I was with a remarkable team out of the Bay Area called Medea, which turned to Medea Medical.

And we did all the COVID testing for like, you know, the Super Bowl, you know, the Lakers, Staple Center, and basically was one of the unsolicited awardees of the very large White House contract.

So I helped put that whole deal together for $200 million.

Yeah.

I know.

Yeah.

So while that knucklehead Biden was deciding to give away COVID tests for free and didn't realize that none existed, we actually solved the problem for the White House and we were gifted

by getting a pretty good contract.

And because of that, I ended up with an interesting network for sales distribution.

We worked with Kroger and Walmart as well.

That's how I met George Riddell, who's one of our shareholders and become a dear friend.

He was, you know, he's been the president of health and wellness for Walmart for nine years.

Prior to that, he was the president of Walgreens.

Right.

So he's on our

advisory board and a shareholder so he's you know we're leveraging his resources on sales distribution and things of that nature yeah distribution is the whole game in alcohol right it is the game and right now it couldn't be more in shambles i mean we just had rndc fold in california that's a nine billion dollar company they lost tito's and then jack daniels and then cutwater all in a 90 120 day span how'd they lose them uh by From what I can tell, mismanaging, perhaps.

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Expectations or,

you know,

quality.

How you take care of your customers, everything.

Yeah.

And what we're noticing in this space above all else, the reason why we are excelling excelling in such a short amount of time is because we're bringing just rudimentary hospitality back to hospitality.

Okay.

Like, how do we take care of our clients?

And more importantly, how do we help our clients or our customers take care of their customers?

Right.

So the patrons that are going to restaurants want to experience high-end hospitality, right?

High-end cuisine.

I mean, we're partnered with Sam Nazarian, SBE Hospitality, Tau Group.

We just placed in all of their clubs here and in Las Vegas and

going going in the California market,

you know, just did SPEs, Zooks, you know, Hyde, you know, Katsua just opened up their new facility, our new restaurant in Century City, LA.

Gorgeous.

Grand opening two days ago I was at.

And they deserve to have as

a partner in spirits as they have in food.

And that's where we're trying to fill the void.

It seems to be really, really resonating, let's call it that, with our food and beverage managers.

I love it.

So three flavors flavors or four we actually have four varieties okay so we have our plata love that that's aged uh three weeks in a chardonnay barrel so it's not your normal blanco it's really amazing finish full body that's our plata so that's aged three weeks chardonnay barrel from napa so really really fun full body we do our reposados aged nine months in a cabernet

napa barrel

And then our Aneo, which is, to be honest, my favorite.

This is the one I'm having, right?

It is.

This is aged two years, which is twice as long as most Anaos.

And we use a combination of that Cabernet barrel and then a Kentucky bourbon barrel.

I think smooth.

It's incredibly smooth.

Yeah.

And this is all, you get that taste, the sweetness, the great finish, because we're using seven-year agave.

Wow.

Seven years.

Not three-year, four-year, which is what most of our, the bigwigs do.

Which is too early, right?

Way too early.

It's bitter.

It's like when you've, if you're going to do banana bread, right?

You want to have a nice, you know,

bruised up.

The browner, the better.

We're gonna do that.

This one's exceptional.

It's our extra nail, aged five years, which is incredible.

Most of the nails, extras are about three.

And this is a little more bit a higher blend of the bourbon.

So if you're an old-fashioned fan and you don't want to have a hangover the next day after having four, that's what you should have it made.

This is the one I had at a power slot, I think.

It is, yeah, that thing's exclusive.

Yeah, and our price point's amazing too.

I wanted to bring this to the to the market to where people could enjoy it.

So we're priced right at most of our competitors, you know, 50 to 60 bucks.

Wow, which is insane because the quality is way better.

So it's hard to compete.

I'll tell you what, you go side by side against even your top two contenders on the high-end ultra premium.

We should do a blind taste test with like five brands.

I'd love to see the results of that.

Get like five people.

Yep.

Let's set that up for sure, dude.

Yeah.

Well, what's next for you guys?

Where can people find you?

And can they order this online anywhere, too?

Yeah.

So online at dealsuzzle.com.

Yep.

All 50 states.

Obviously, distribution right now.

We are in California, Nevada, Arizona comes online next month along with Texas, and then we're in Nashville.

So Nashville goes live on the 1st of July and then Florida's been alive for online for about four months.

So we're total wines over there and working with some of the top distributors right now.

Southern Wine Young Glazers just took us on for Nevada, which was a big, big win.

That happened just a few weeks ago.

So they're off and running, which was

you know, seven months in, given the landscape of distribution,

huge win.

Pretty unheard of.

Yeah.

Like for someone new in the space to pull that off with very self-funding, like you said.

100%.

Well, Dana White gets about a case of a nail a week, and he's a big fan.

He's been a big, big help.

His whole team's been a big help.

Nice.

But we're coming in.

We'll be the official tequila.

The Padres come in August 1st.

We're already in Petco, Snapdragon Stadium, and then we'll be having the Warriors here as well.

Let's go.

I know they love them, bro.

I know you love them.

Thanks for hopping on.

Appreciate it.

PowerSlap.

Let's do a PowerSlot.

All right, guys.

Check them out.

See you next time.

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