#473 Matt Jones: The Four Pillars behind a multi-million dollar gin business

I'd spent the last six years advising big brands like Samsung and Google and Volkswagen brand, an advertising centre for a brand experience agency, so much more focused on how those brands showed up in the world and interacted with their customers, whether it was through events, experiences, retail. And it was a really interesting time to do that because that was the same time that social media, digital media, mobile phones were changing how people interacted with the world.

So I would use this again. This is twenty six to twenty twelve. Was when I was in the world of agency. Before that, I was a failed political strategist, so I became a half decent brand strategist and I

moved back from New York to Australia. I had a baby, looking for things to do, doing a bit of consulting, and I go for lunch actually just up the road in Surry Hills, and I meet this guy called Stu greg and Stewart at the time was running a public relations firm called Liquid Ideas, and he'd sort of been in the wine industry and one of his senses was that Australian wine was world class but didn't always tell its stories very well, didn't really walk as tall on

the world stage. And you could argue the same about Australian whiskey at the time, incredible world class whiskey from Australia, not always getting the credit it deserves. So Stear was trying to solve that problem. He had another mate, Cameron McKenzie, and a Cameron's a world class athlete. Olympian always reminds us you run fast. Once you get to the Olympics, you're an Olympian for life. So he ran fast enough. In ninety six he made Atlanta for an a meter

runner around for Australia in the relay. He intertumed meat in the wine industry. Become great mates. Cameron stays in production operations, marketing, sales, the whole nine yards. Stew as I said, goes into public relations. But they'd been daydreaming about making gin and I think they thought, you know, maybe we need a third wheel in there, someone else

who can inject something a bit different. And he was me fresh off the boat from New York, interested in the theories of how to build brand in this new social media socially wired aids necessary Gin well for me, not the so Jin for those two. They'd had a couple of cracks at wine. They were interested in wine, but I think those had been hobby businesses. This time, they're like, if we're going to do Gin, we're going

to do it seriously. For me, the opportunity to take what I've been learning and applying in the world of agency and go, maybe I should take my medicine, put my mother, put my advice where my math has been, and do it. And Gin appealed to me because Gin has this beautiful combination of you can differentiate through product, like you can make a genuinely different product. It's not vodka, it's not mineral water. And yet if you don't get

the brand piece right, you're not going to succeed. You're not going to cut through, you're not going to pull off the shelf. So it was a lovely piece of in a world of abundance, there is room for another Gin as long as you have an angle, as long as you find a way to make it better or different. But even then you're going to have to tell the story and build the brand really well. And that's what we tried to do.

is the most delicious place on Earth. We are so lucky not just to live here, but to eat and drink in this food culture, in this natural environment, this climate that gives us botanicals think about gin is it's got to be distilled juniper. If it's not juniper, it's just kind of weird vodka. But with juniper it's gin. But after that you can add whatever you want. So we add things like Australian lemon, myrtle, tazzy pepperberry. We use whole fresh oranges that we steam for the rare dry.

We use sharaz grapes that we soak in gin for the charas. We really make the most of Australia's flavor culture. So you know, you talked about hutzpa at the start, and I said, yeah, but balance with humility. Well, the hudspa was we can make more delicious gin. The humility was even then, The world, even in twenty twelve, was not crying out for another gin. Like you went to that Big Wall Bay in Dan Murphy's there was plenty of gin. I don't think anyone was losing sleep going

where's the Australia clear color gins? Pretty much? I mean there's a little bit of Cameron loved there was a particular barrelized gin that he discovered on a fact finding mission he enstewed in the States, an old tom from Ransom up in the Pacific Northwest. There were examples, but not many, but certainly the opportunity to explore gin and to go, well, what are all the things that gin can be? And that came as well from the humility

to go that, what doesn't need another gin? But maybe we can wedge our way in if we make a product of exceptional quality. And we will do that by focusing on one thing and one thing alone, and that's

gin making. And as a result, and this is what you've identified, we then went really broad with gin because when you only get to do one thing every day, you've really got to hone your craft and become bloody good at it and get experimental, and you earn the right to explore, and I think that's what we've done. We've never got distracted. We've respected. Let the whiskey makers make whiskey, Let the vodka people make vodka, and we're just going to make gin and try and be really bloody good at it.

a bunch of different decisions very quickly after that first decision. Okay, we're going to give it a go. We're going to put some money in the bank and make gin. What kind of gin? Are we going to make? London dry gin? The classic British style, very juniper heavy gin that we've all been drinking like Gordon's beefeed a tank ray. Are we going to make modern Australian gin. It's a big tick there, like, well, the world doesn't need a British

gin made by three Aussie blakes, it needs modern Australian gin. Okay, Gin's based on juniper. We said we're going to make modern Australian gin. So does that mean we have to use all Australian botanicals? So what's juniper? Juniper isn't actually not a bury it to conifer. It grows wild on trees, and there's very little juniper in Australia. And what juniper there is that grows wild that's hard to cultivate, isn't

particularly good quality. So then that's an easy decision. It grows on what conifers, little yeah, little ones, little like baby ones, and it mainly grows down in the Balkans, Macedonia, Kosovo, and they'll literally go around harvesting juniper, is just beating bushes with sticks, and the little juniper berries, these little conifers are like falling off and they're beautiful. The astle berry it looks like a berry. Technically it's a conifer.

We're already outside of my natural scientific comfort zone with this conversation. But it looks like a little berry, it's actually technically a conifer. Starts this real beautiful royal blue and as ages it gets a bit darker and under distillation it just releases this lovely, almost kind of painy. Note it's a great classic London dry gin which is very juniper heavy, smells like a pine forest. Not great

London dry smells more like pino clean. And so we needed to ask the question if we're going to make world class gin at meaningful scale, Well, it can't be based on a juniper supply locally in Australia. That's a pretty small spy of pretty mediocre stuff. So immediately like got to get our juniper from Macedonia, from Cosova, so that's where juniper comes from. So then the question came,

or what can Australia give to it. So we had this philosophy from the app set that we're going to distill the best botanicals from anywhere in the world, but we're also going to do what you know, Neil Perry and his modern Australian restaurants does find the produce from Australia that balances with Asian spice, Mediterranean citrus and just gives us this wonderful modern Australian flavor canvas to play with. Shaniel just left. He was here on podcasts. Yes, so like.

snakes down in the Yarra Valley. But you know, we've built these relationships and as you know, business is so much about relationships. And one of the great networks of relationships that Cameron in particular is built is with growers with producers, whether it's the guys who grow are citrus for the oranges, the guys who grow a lemon myrtle.

In this case, Juniper supplied Tommy who's over in the UK and making sure we've got enough supply and we're forecasting demand and that along with you know, you asked how Jim was made. With the other side of it is the Gin machine, like we distill in big beautiful stills. And one of the first decisions we made were sending Cam and stew On that fact funding mission to the States, and they came back and went, we have to have

a Carl still. And I thought they meant a still named Carl, because they showed all these photos of these great stills from these American distill who's all just had Carl written on the front. Turns out, Christian of Germany just outside of Stuttguard. They like the Mercedes Benz, the Rolls Royce of gin making machines, and it was a stainless thing. It looks stainless. Actually every part of the still that touches the gin is copper, and copper is

this beautiful purifying metal. Because what Carl Steels do really well is they intensify flavor while purifying spirit. Because what you and I want to drink is something that is full of flavor but really clean, goes down smooth, feel smooth the next day, but it's full of flavor as well. And Carl Steels do that better than what else. Carl Carl, Christian Carl was the name and founder. They've got this factory the size of a couple of footy fields. They

handbuild them. They make about one a week. We had to wait twelve months from putting the order in to actually receiving and we called her Wilma after Cam's late mum. Wilma arrived And that twelve month pause is really the subject matter of the first section of my book. Because we had this very rare opportunity in business to actually slow down and think and go. We thought it was

a good idea. We've put down the deposit on a still, we've started to think about what kind of gym we want to make and why we want to make it. But now let's really actually sketch out the beats of what is this business we're going to build, because then when Wilma arrived and Cameron could start doing experimental batches, start fine tuning and finalizing that gin, and then it was on and it didn't stop being on for a decade.

to something. He's going to make it to the Olympics, and in this case, he taught himself to become now I think the most awarded gin maker in the world. He is only the twentieth worldwide to be inducted in the World Gin Hall of Fame. He's in the Australia Distilling Hall of Fame as his stew He's won more more metals, more bleeding for gin than he ever got near in athletics. He has become an extraordinary gym maker. But that's him, and he's now built a whole distilling

team of master distillers through the assistant distillers. But he remains that the visionary who built that making business.

That goes in in what's called the pot, along with whichever botanicals we wanted to still with everything called a botanical anything you put in their steams in the vapors. That's where we put whole fresh oranges sliced in half. It takes about eight hours for that process to unfold. Cam likes to leave that gin to settle and tank

for a couple of weeks before we bottle it. But really that production, that innovation timeline, as you say, is super compressed, so you can make experimental batches and pretty much be iterating daily to fine tune and get to that perfect recipe. And then it's about consistent. So it doesn't go to a barrel though, like whiskey does not dry gin. Yep, we do barrel age gins, and barrel aging adds something. It adds layers of flavorite puls, different

botanical flavors add it adds sweetness. But dry gin, perfect sort of gin and tonic gin is not barrel age. It's just distilled.

and be new. But once you've made those capital investments, you're right, the cash flow was reasonably steady, so we sort of tried to figure out what it would take to stay in the game for the first three years because even with that cash flow one of the challenges of Australian spirits is we send so much back to

the taxman. So you think you're in clover because you know people are paying seventy five eighty bucks with bottle of gin, but thirty thirty five of those dollars again straight to camera, so you're not making anywhere near the margin you'd like. So we recognized to build a super premium brand, a luxury brand, a brand that could could sort of ultimately take Australian gin too the world. It was going to take time. We couldn't get into the

promotional marketing game too quickly. We couldn't be discounting. We had to hold on to price level and premiumness. So even though the ash would start flowing, we still had to have the capital and the banks that in the game.

our own salaries onto the business straight away. But we recognized we need a camera at camera was going to build the distillery, make the liquid. We need to take him out of his full time job and start paying the day a week. We got really lucky and made of ours who earned a winery in the air of value that you can have a bit of the bit of the bit of the winery out the back of not really using it. You put a cage up credit bonded area. Wilma can move in there. You can have

that rent free for a while. Will be grateful to him. Rob Dolan in the Air Valley makes great Pinana grateful to him for life. But even with that, we recognized we needed money, and we decided let's not be greedy. We'd rather each own a smaller percentage of a business that had legs. So we went and found twenty friends and family investors. We called them investors because we thought it was very clever to put a G in front

of any word. Starting within that happened until we start talking about genovation and we're like, okay, we're calling this it's too much.

them for that? Because at this stage it is just an idea two percent eachk, so forty percent you give gave.

will say something else. We almost exactly this time eleven years ago and twenty thirteen, two things were going on, actually four things were going on, fine tuning the GYM. We still hadn't finally finalized the GM that we launched in December tween thirteen in terms of the taste, in terms of the final recipe, exactly right. We were fine

tuning what i'd call the traditional launch avots. We were going to take over bars in Brisbane, Adelaide, Sydney, Albourne and launched for pillars to the trade drinks, drinks, media, bartenders, everything you'd expect. But the other two things. One was what you're asking about now, the pitch to investors, the pitch to ginvestors. But the other, and this was critical, was our crowd funding campaign. So we decided to launch both in the traditional way to the drink's trade and

the non traditional way. We were the first GIN brand in the world to launch through crowdfunding, not which ones you use, which possible, which is the Australian platform. I think it was the third biggest in the world at the time after Kickstart in Indiegogo. Now that campaign we aim to raise ten thousand bucks. Over the course of a month. We put one batch of gin up four hundred and twenty bottles, sold it out in four days. It put thirty thousand dollars in the tank, which was

not nothing but was not game changing. But what it

did is it pumped conviction into the business. The day before we launched that crowdfunding campaign, we had nine of the twenty g investor slots field seven days later I was getting panicky emails because we were on nineteen out of twenty and people were scrambling to get that twentieth slot because they could see that something had just happened without having a drop of gin for people to taste, without having a bottle to show people simply by telling

the story well of what four pillars was our purpose, our ambition, what Australia could bring to gin and selling that out on crowdfunding to three hundred and seven people who didn't just give it a like and a share on Facebook, but put their money in the put their hand in the pocket and handed over cash. That built the conviction amongst the remaining ginvestors to go this could be a good idea. So thousand Bockstege people pledged. No

people bought a bottle of gin. Right, So on crad funding, it was a seventy five dollar pledge that brought you one bottle of Batch number one and it made you imperpetuity a member of we called our Batch number one Club. We said, anything new we make for the rest of your life, you get first dips. No equity is no equity, just pure crawdfunding. So crowd equity is something that was launched I think probably two or three years after we did that. This was pure preset. Let's call it what

it is. It was pre sales. But the act of that successful pre selling campaign created the remaining conviction for the crab funding campaign, and its hard for the for the equity investor campaign. And I think it's sort of hardwired into our business, this belief in the power of storytelling, of intimacy, of winning consumers sort of one consumer at a time, and trusting the impact that could have on your way to business.

and that kind of made no sense. And we said, okay, well, let's now demonstrate that we understand some of the barriers. And we've talked about them already. Some of the barriers like XCIS and tax were the things that had stopped Australian gin becoming a meaningful movement. We said, well, those should not be obstacles. If we can figure out how to clear them out of the way, we can just

have a hell of a lot of fun. We can make gin that no one else in the world can make because of the climate, the flavor, culture, the produce, the botanicals we can access. And really we just romanced people with that vision, and I think also convinced them that Australians were people to make good gin fun, that sometimes you see brands that are so committed to craft and process and that folks on excellence that the fund trains away like, well, it's still gin. It should still be.

It should just still be generous and warm and enjoyable and have a laugh. But so we can. So we talked a lot about like taking our craft seriously but not taking ourselves too seriously. And I think even though we hadn't quite sort of crystallized that as a strategy at that stage, instinctively, particularly just stew I think those

instincts were just really strong from the outset. So frankly, people were just carried along with the story and thought this will be delicious, but also this will be fun and also very Astralian back them and very Australian, very very modern Australian. I think we you know, you know, we talked about Neil Perry. I think, you know, people

like Neil Perry became almost you know, marketing. You sometimes talking about like your news consumer, like who are you picturing when you're picturing, who's going to buy your product? Who's going to be your number one consumer? I think for us we almost had like news makers like if Neil Perry made a gin, this is the gin he'd make. If X y Z was a gin, it would be this. So there was that sense of we're not we're not old Australia. We're not sort of just down at the beach.

We win a leather chair like and with a jack and no tire shirt in the Australian Club. Correct, we're the lame Ways of Melbourne. We're Surrey Hills, we're Darlinghurst, we're Collingwood and we're wine country and we're mashing all of that together and turning out extraordinary gin. So what's interesting, man? This is that the By the way, I need to know where's the name? Four pillows come from? What is that? So name came from stew The name came from the need to have a name. I talk about a bit

in the book. I think naming is often the most painful part of building because people try and use the name to solve all the problems of the brand. They think, well, all the things you know, brand is about feeling, right, I mean you know this. A brand ultimately is just a word we use to describe how people feel about a business. What really matters is the business, but also what matters is how people feel about it. And so when we talk about branding, talking about that emotional, storytelling,

signaling side of a business. So people then go, well, I hope that the name I choose can send all the signals I want to send, and no name can do that. And most businesses that we all know and sometimes love, the Bavarian motorworks, who was mister Mercedes? And who was mister Ben's? What is a face book? And yet you know Tesla was a dead scientist. Like all these names, they don't mean something until they are made

to mean something. So you get to the point of making four pillars and you're like, Okay, we're going to make great Australian gin. We're briefing in label design. We're briefing in a custom bodle, and the designer goes, what's it called? You're like not sure, and stud says, will put four pillars on it for now, and asked him afterwards, I'm like, what's four pillars me made? Is? Ah? Camer

and I used to play this drinking game. Would be at events like boring wine events, and we'd start just to divide the room up into the four pillars of humanity, and there was one humanity that was like unnameable on this podcast or any podcast. So for him, it was just like a fun name that referred to an in joke that he and Cameron had. I liked it because it wasn't too long, Like you look at it on the bottle, you don't need too much with like it's

nice and tall, it's easy to design around. But then if you turn the bottle to the side. Every gym we made, I said, what are the four pillars of this gin? So it became a philosophy, a philosophy about doing four things well and every gin everything we released, we just said, what are the four pillars of this? So it's the stills, the botanicals, the water, the love. Bloody Schiraz is about the fruit. It's about the process of bleeding color from the grapes. So it became a

discipline and a philosophy. And if you walked into the Four Pillars Distillery in Heelsville tomorrow, every single person on that tasting bench who tastes through the gins or offers you a drink, they'll tell you different stories. But I guarantee if you went back five times, every time, you'd walk out and have the same feeling about Four Pillars.

And that's what we ultimately wanted it to be, not one of those brands with a very rigid story where everyone tells the same story, but instead it stands for something and four Pillars is just the name that reminds you of all the things it stands for. So that's where it came from, and that's where it came to it.

this business. Now it's got a great name. It's got you guys are all sort of have the three of you have great.

everything looks schmick like. I mean, I guess this is not how I originally looked. It was probably pretty close to it. What you're right, and your label you put in your label.

I mean it may sound obvious, but I think everyone who goes into business they need to understand how is this business going to grow? To your question, who's going to buy it? Where are they going to buy it, why are they going to buy it? And what is the role of all the traditional marketing piece, the product, the place where it's going to be sold, the way it's going to be promoted, the way it's packaged, all

of those things and the price. And the price is so critical we decided that we needed to take both a traditional and a non traditional approach at the same time and make them work hard for each other. So on the traditional side, we're like, well, you can't be a world class gym business if you're not a gin

that's on world class back bars. If world class bartenders aren't making world class martinis and the groanies with your gym, Well, how can you really say to your consumer we're the best gin in the world, But every time you go to a bar you don't see it there. So big focus on relationships with influential top bars and restaurants at the same time. How do you do that? You wear out the leather on your shoes and you meet people

and you invite them to come to you. So we spent a One of our biggest marketing budgets in the first three years was travel. Travel for us, particularly stewing cam they were the front men out in the trade, but also travel for incoming bartenders. We bought a bus, really on bought a gym bus just so we could get now drunk bartenders back to Melbourne or back to the airport, because if we could get them to come

and make with us. You use the advantages you're given. Right, most world class gin distilleries are in the northern Hemisphere. Ours was an hour from Melbourne airporty five minutes from Albourne CBD. Let's use the advantage your proximity, get them to come and make with us. Be generous. Stu would talk endlessly about the importance of generosity, like walk into a bar, ask them about their bar, ask them about

their business. Don't just give them a nip of gin, hand them the bottle, Invite them to come and spend the weekend with you. Invite me to come and make gym with you, be friends, build relationships. So really we wanted to be, you know, part of that Australian gin movement, which includes the drinks movement. Same for retail. We can I just stop around there just on the drinks. In terms of do it lets you we're talking like I.

of the business you are in and drinks distribution. Distribution is a logistics game, it's a cash flow game, it's a personnel game.

Some of them will be working at a bar that currently has a deal that's completely wrapped up by Diagio, and you're not going to move to the ashually being one of the distributors correct or. Some of the world's great drinks businesses Diazuo, Beam, Suntory, pan of Acard, they've all got great they're all good businesses, they've all got great deals with bars.

return won't always be immediate. So in some cases you wanted them to list the gin and not just on the back bar, but in their house gin and tonic in a listed cocktail. Most consumers aren't going to walk into a bar look for a gin they've never heard of before in order that they're going to point at the menu and go, oh, martini, I'll get that martini. And I see you make yours with four pillars olive

leaf gin fantastic, sounds delicious. So you have to have this combination of some people are giving you a more immediate return. Again, segmentation of bars. There's influential bars small they're not going to do big volumes, but they're going to have a big impact in terms of profile, then you've got the marra vels of this world groups who are going to give you scale but a premium. And then you've got the sort of wider pubs who are not going to give you premium profile, but might unlock

some volume if you can hit a price point. So not all bars are credit equal, not all relationships are credit equal. And we had to have the subtlety to navigate that landscape. And we had to make sure that after Mark Borris had been into a bar, had that great martini, went Wow, that's the best martini I've had this year. What's the gin? And this out? It is

olive leaf gin that four pillars make. Who the four pillars are down in the Ara Valley and this is made with olive oil and I've seen them make it because I was down there a month ago. So now you've got personal testimonial bit of connection. You walk into Dan Murphy's, you need to see it on shelf, you need to see it ranged with its friends, and hopefully that's that point of discovery. So we really had to

call that the entrade and the trade. But all of that is the distributed side to what It's a lot. It's a huge and it was only half of what we did because just join me on the other half of the business. Right, So we make this decision very early on, we're only going to make gin. We make rare dry gin. We launch it in December twenty thirteen. In March of twenty fourteen, it wins its first big medal.

It gets double gold San Francisco World Spirits Competition. That means every judge and the comp had given it a gold medal. Now at that point, sensible business people like had you been on our board, you'd have said, guys, it's time to double down. Time to like blow the doors off red dry gin. Nationwide distribution, get it everywhere, get behind it. Everyone in Australia has to taste it. And that I think would have been a completely legitimate

bit of advice. But we also looked at it and went, we've written into our purpose we want to be Gin makers, we want to explore gin. We want to make the most of what Australia can bring to Gin. That doesn't mean one Gin. That means playing with Gin broadly. And it's that that led us to making the world's first dedicated gym for a NEGRONI beautiful bit of week cocktail. We want a gin that smashed it in a the groany,

the Martini gin. I talked about the Christmas gin that's on your table here, the gin soaked with Charaz grapes. And to make the most of that, we needed a direct consumer business. We needed a way to build a database a fanatical gin collector's gin lovers people. Seth god In is the marketing guru that I love. He would talk about, you know literally, you know, you need people to be almost contagious with their love of your brand

to sort of sneeze it to everyone. You can't say that now we've had COVID, but you know what I mean. And so we were trying to build that and as well of going how do we build out of that crowd funding campaign that first three hundred quickly that was a database of two thousand quickly, that was a database of fifty thousand people who we could email direct and say we've just made a gin with Zoe Foster Blake at Go to Skincare and it was gone in four hours.

We've just made another batch of Blachera's gin that lasted two days. And so the energy that we created through that direct consumer business this way that we were constantly putting our gin making Gin love in credentials on display. I remember the first meeting we have Dan Murphy's. I said, please, don't don't be scared, don't be worried, don't be offended.

We will try relentlessly to sell Gin direct. And I guarantee Dan Murphy's every bottle of gym we sell direct, that person who buys direct from us will send ten people into their local Dan Murphies to go and buy four pillars. That this system will work. And that really is the system. We're back so effectively we were growing

two businesses at the same time. This fast turnaround, highly experimental direct consumer business and this longer lead time logistical business of getting into every bottle shop, every bar, first in Australia and now in thirty countries worldwide, in thirty countries world one. Now, well done, Gragilation. That does amazing.

these inventions and generate pr and coverage. And then the team I built, and it's endless capacity to then take each gin and go right. We're going to tell the story of that. We're going to tell the stories of drinks. We're going to shoot beautiful content we're going to inspire people to buy it direct, we're going to back it in the trade. And so the system worked, and it

made the most of the advantages we had. As that system grew, you started to realize that the gears would sometimes grind a little bit that we were I would walk out of a meeting and oh my god, We've got this amazing opportunity to make this new gin and do this and this, and I'd look at the marketing team and they're all just gone white because we're on a deadline to help figure out what's the summer campaign that's going into Dan Murphy is in ten months time.

So the speeds and the rhythms are different. And then you go to export a lot of those home ground advantageers, those advantages of proximity and intimacy no longer have those. The distributor that you hire in the UK just doesn't care as much as you do. Like you've you've got your one little gym business. They've got forty different brands in their portfolio. They don't really they care about you

at best one fortieth as much as you do. So you start to realize, okay, well, some of what got us here in Australia help us over there, but also we have to figure out some different ways of winning. So that's I think when it becomes sometimes overwhelming, is you realize you've built a system that wasn't necessarily built to scale to the level you're at. Doesn't mean it was wrong. In fact, it's only because of what you

did that got you this far. But to quote Marshall Goldsmith, the leadership coach, what got you here won't necessarily get you there. So that wrestling match between what do we hold on to where do we stay the course, but also where do we now adapt and tweak and maybe question some of those assumptions. I think that's the that's the constant battle, and sometimes it is a bit overwhelming.

raise more money. Do you get to a point where the three of you thinking to yourself, am I giving away too much equity? Is it worth it for me to have you been able to maintain more than fifty percent equity yourself through So.

and banking covenants and all those other important things. If you're running a business, and I think you get to the point from a cashflow point of view where your mortgages are on the line, it's still connected to your family's financial wellbeing, and you're like, these bets are getting bigger, and we have to take bigger bets because at some stage our appetite to take the risk required could become a constraint on the growth of business. It's not that

we want to be inappropriately risky. We want to be appropriately risky, but the business now needs a bigger risk appetite than we have as individuals. So you start to look at how do you pull those two things apart. You also go these investors who joined us in twenty thirteen, they deserve a good day at some stage, they deserve some return maybe, and you go, we probably need some more capital. So in the case of Heelsville, we had

bought in twenty fifteen and old timber shehed. We'd fitted out quite cheaply, but it looked beautiful and it was home to Wilma. Our first still, Jude, named after Stew's mama. Second still my mum doesn't drink. She got the experimental stell Eileen. So those three stills live there happily. Barrels we age gins in a lovely space to taste and make drinks. But we were outgrowing. We had queues out the door every weekend. We were getting about ninety thousand

people a year through that space. We needed a bigger space, We needed a bigger boat. So we raised some capital and we found a wonderful partner in Line, Australia's Great Boroh ultimately owned by Kieran, but a very Australian business. Here the business of two two e's and four x and stone of wood and little creatures. So they came in. They put some capital in to help us buy the

building next door. They said, look, we'll guarantee a bit more funding to help you with your cash flow and the growth of your business, but we will leave you guys in full operational control. And we ran the business for four and a half years. So I chaired the board. Laren had two people on the board plus me and Stewing Cam very very happy, amicable, and would have been even more happy have we not had COVID come in,

and then COVID followed by a supply chain crisis. So for those four and a half years, I think we were feeling very smart and very lucky that we had a big brother sort of standing over our shoulder, letting us run the race, really backing our theories, but also kind of knowing that you had a bit more muscle behind you if you needed it, and luckily we didn't, that you always knew it was there, And I think

psychologically that period would have been very different. I don't know if we'd have made different decisions, but psychologically there was a level of safety that you had because of that backing, and then on the first of July twenty twenty three, they exercised the right to take out the remaining fifty percent of the business. So now I continue to consult, I continue to work on the business, but I no longer own.

mean in the business, so generally speaking, when they have it. Look, when a founder has a liquid event like that, a lot of founders just leave, they go there, you go off. What did someone like in multinational Line say they say, Okay, Matt, you've got to be restrained.

lock in period. And once that that sort of final, you know, once they executed their right to take the remaining capital, we could have all walked away. My view was, and all three of us were very amicable and very keen to see it succeed. And I think we all just looked and went what contribution can we make? And as the as the brand guy, I'm like, I think there's a role for me to continue to play because

the job is only half done. We've got this into thirty markets worldwide, but we are the leader in Australia. You know, in twenty twenty one we caught up and overtook Hendrix by volume. Hendricks had had sixty six zero percent of super premium gym in Australia when we started, and we ever took them in twenty one. But in markets overseas we are still a drop in the gen notion. So A there was a job to do there, but B lined to great business. But it's a it's a

beer an RTV business, it's an on tap business. It's a pub driven business. You might call it a fast moving consumer good business. Spirits is luxury. Mine didn't have a spirit's business. Kieran, their parent company, had a couple of interesting spirits assets Fuji whiskey, Fantastic Japanese whiskey, four Roses Bourbon out of Kentucky, So we said, well, why don't we help you now build a wider spirits business. So we've called it four Corners Global Spirits. It's a

bit to b not a bitter C company. It's not consumer facing, it's trade facing. It includes not just four pillars,

but Vanguard. We encourage Line to acquire the distributor that we'd worked with, So I've just sort of been working behind the scenes helping them both continue to grow four Pillars, but also start to think about what could a genuine Australian global spirits business be that took Australian spirits to the world as well as building, you know, bringing some great spirits into Australia, And is what is the reason you wrote your book. I wrote the book because I

got really lucky. I met two people who knew a lot about the craft of making gin, and I knew nothing about it, and I still know very little, as you saw in our discussion about Judipervari's and I think I was able to support their craft and their expertise and their passion with structured thinking about the business and the brand. Someone said to us, They're like, I figured out four pillars. Cameron makes the gin, Stu you make

the noise, and Matt you sort of makes sense. And in a way, the book was trying to extract the making sense piece, because Stu does a lot more than making noise. He has got a brilliant entrepreneurial mind. Cameron does a lot more than making gin. He's got a great creative mind. But I think what I've brought is a slowness and a structure and a strategy to building

the business and building the brand. And I thought, wouldn't it be good if I could give that to people as a structure to help them think about growing whatever it is they're trying to grow. Well.

they valued Australia as a market. Because this, we can underestimate how much opportunity there is even before you leave this continent. There's so much opportunity to grow great businesses here.