For Fawn Weaver the story of Uncle Nearest needed to be told. Learn how Fawn, with no distilling background, turned this story into one of the fastest growing Whiskey distilleries in America.
Dave Young:
Welcome to The Empire Builders Podcast, teaching business owners the not-so-secret techniques that took famous businesses from Mom and Pop to major brands. Stephen Semple is a marketing consultant, story collector and storyteller. I’m Stephen’s sidekick and business partner, Dave Young. Before we get into today’s episode, a word from our sponsor, which is, well, it’s us, but we’re highlighting ads we’ve written and produced for our clients. So here’s one of those.
[WyattWorks Ad]
Dave Young:
Steven, we’ve been recording these podcasts for a while now. And I think it’s about time we just stopped and had a nice drink. Any objections?
Stephen Semple:
Got a bottle right here.
Dave Young:
Got a bottle… ooh, Uncle Nearest.
Stephen Semple:
Uncle Nearest.
Dave Young:
Uncle Nearest. There’s got to be a story there.
Stephen Semple:
There’s an awesome story with Uncle Nearest Tennessee whiskey.
Dave Young:
All right, let’s hear it.
Stephen Semple:
But before we get into it, I think we need to let people know both you and I actually have got a little bit of background when it comes to whiskeys.
Dave Young:
A little bit, a little bit. We’ve both been through the whiskey som the whiskey marketing school in Austin, Texas, has a program to train people to be whiskey sommeliers.
Stephen Semple:
Yeah. Yeah. And at the end of this, this is going to be a two-parter because at the end of this, we’re going to invite two other whiskey somms to join us. One, a partner of ours, Gary Bernier and my girlfriend, Morning Mays, who are also both soms and the four of us are going to do a tasting together and let everyone know what we think of this whiskey and I haven’t even cracked the label on it.
Dave Young:
Oh, that sounds like fun.
Stephen Semple:
First to the story, this whiskey was founded by a lady by the name of Fawn Weaver in 2017. And they’ve won a ton of awards for this whiskey. At the time of this podcast, they’ve also had tremendous growth. They’ve had 11 quarters of triple digit growth. So they have been just killing it. In March of 2021, about four years after their launch, they had sold 1.5 million bottles of Uncle Nearest Whiskey.
Dave Young:
Wait, when were they launched?
Stephen Semple:
They were launched in 2017.
Dave Young:
Okay.
Stephen Semple:
So basically four years later, one and a half million bottles had been sold.
Dave Young:
Amazing.
Stephen Semple:
Here’s the funny thing. Fawn has no background in distilling, none. She likes whiskey. Her favorite are high proof bourbons, drinks them neat, but no background in the whiskey business whatsoever. Now the closest she had come, she had had a successful business in PR and was a real innovator in product placement on social media. She had also worked for some high end hotels and restaurants, but before entering the whiskey business, she was best known for some books that she wrote on marriage.
Dave Young:
Wow. Okay.
Stephen Semple:
Yeah. Her affair with this, pardon that pon just talking about marriage, but her affair with this whiskey starts back when she’s reading an article in the New York Times. She’s on vacation in Asia and she’s reading the New York Times and she sees this picture of Jack Daniels in an article about this black man, Nearest Green. And the article is not kind to Jack Daniels, talks about how Nearest Green is a black man and a former slave and is really not kind to Jack Daniels, but she looks at the picture and she says, “Something’s not quite correct in the picture,” because it’s the picture of Jack Daniels leadership team and right there in the center of the picture, right beside Jack is Nearest Green.
Stephen Semple:
And she goes, “But that’s a place of importance.”
Dave Young:
Yeah.
Stephen Semple:
“What’s going on here?” So she thinks to herself, there’s a story here. There’s a book here. So she travels to Lynchburg, Tennessee to research the story of Nearest Green. And it turns out Nearest Green is also known as Uncle Nearest taught Jack Daniels how to make Tennessee whiskey.
Dave Young:
Oh, okay.
Stephen Semple:
So he taught Jack this whole idea. So a Tennessee whiskey starts as a Kentucky bourbon that is then charcoal filtered and it becomes a Tennessee whiskey. Back to Nearest Green, so the story of Uncle Nearest starts 150 years ago in Lynchburg with a young apprentice, Jack Daniels. And Fawn starts doing her research with reading a biography on Jack Daniels. And very early in this biography, Nearest Green is introduced in this book. This is no secret to the people in Lynchburg, none, that Uncle Nearest was involved. There was this white preacher, Dan Call, who’s running a distillery. On one edge of his property is the church, on the furthest edge of the property is the distillery as far as far as he can get the two of them.
Stephen Semple:
And the congregation and his wife really don’t like the fact he’s running this distillery, but he’s running this distillery. And working for Dan Call is Nearest Green. Nearest Green is his master distiller. And Jack also works for the preacher, but not in the distillery. And eventually Jack Daniels convinces Reverend Call to let him in on the distillery business. And it’s at that point that Jack has introduced to Nearest by Reverend Call as the best distiller I know of.
Dave Young:
Wow.
Stephen Semple:
So again, not a secret here. But reading about this just made Fawn even more interested in this business. So she started to research the story. She wanted to learn more. What was the involvement of this black man in the early days of the whiskey business in America? And she got really intrigued. Because if you walk into a bar anywhere, look at the bottles at the back of the bar. They’re all stories of white dudes, all of them. So she goes to Lynchburg, she’s doing research. She thinks there’s a book here, that’s where she starts off. So she’s in the library looking for research on the family. And she asks the librarian about the family and the librarian calls her director. And in walks one of Jack Daniels eldest descendants, who then introduces her to Nearest Green’s descendants. Turns out they all hang out together.
Dave Young:
Oh, that’s so cool. All right.
Stephen Semple:
Yeah, they all still live in the town. They all hang out together. Then she finds out that the farm where the original distillery is for sale.
Dave Young:
Oh, okay.
Stephen Semple:
So she now meets Sherry, who’s a realtor and another descendant of Jack Daniels. And before she retired and went into real estate as a side gig had been the head of distillery operations at Jack Daniels.
Dave Young:
Oh man.
Stephen Semple:
They’re all intertwined, all hanging out together. So Fawn and her husband go look at the property and there’s barrels and log books and all sorts of things still there and they buy it on the spot. It’s just her and her husband, black Los Angeles couple now moving to Lynchburg, Tennessee. That’s quite a departure, right?
Dave Young:
That’s amazing. Yeah.
Stephen Semple:
Yeah. But originally what she thought is they buy the spot. They do the research there, was a historic place, they were just going to restore it. They decided that what they wanted to do was preserve Nearest Green’s legacy. So 2016, they relocate from Tennessee to LA so she can do her research and she interviews close to 100 of Nearest Green’s descendants. And at one point she’s meeting with them in this church. They’re having this big church meeting and she asked them, “What should I do to honor their ancestor? What should I do to honor Nearest?” And their reply was, “Make a whiskey in his name.” So Fawn decides if Sherry, remember the real estate agent who worked at Jack Daniels, if Sherry will come out of retirement, she’ll raise the money. So she approaches Sherry and Sherry says, “Yeah, I’ll come distill whiskey for you.” So now she’s got to go out and raise money.
Stephen Semple:
So Fawn’s got to go out and raise money, but she really wanted to preserve the legacy. And her first idea, she said, “Here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to create a commemorative bottle of whiskey. Make a bottle, sell it out there, be done.” That was her first thought. But as she researched the whiskey business, she realized get a whiskey carrier, you got to get a distributor. To get a distributor, you have to have a marketing plan to get the product on the shelf. You have to have all of this stuff. It’s complicated and it’s a crowded field and it was way too much work for a single commemorative bottle. There was just no way.
Stephen Semple:
So that killed the idea of a commemorative bottle. So guess what? She’s now going to have to enter the whiskey business because she’s committed to this idea. She decides, you know what, I’m not doing a bottle. I’m entering the whiskey business. And the more she researches it, the more she realizes this is a terrible business. There are tons of independence, few make it. It’s a bad idea, but I’m going to do it anyway.
Dave Young:
That’s the thing about whiskey, it makes things seem like a good idea.
Stephen Semple:
Yeah. Right, right. But she’s got this other challenge because she’s got this great story about Uncle Nearest.
Dave Young:
Sure.
Stephen Semple:
But there’s a trademark called Jack Daniels. So how am I going to tell this story about Uncle Nearest without infringing on the Jack Daniels trademark?
Dave Young:
Stay tuned, we’re going to wrap up this story and tell you how to apply this lesson to your business, right after this.
[Empire Builders Ad]
Dave Young:
Let’s pick up our story where we left off and trust me, you haven’t missed a thing.
Stephen Semple:
So she comes up with a way to tell the story. She’s bought the farm. She’s done the research. She’s trademarked Uncle Nearest. And she goes and sits down with the folks at Jack Daniels and tells them what it is that she’s going to do. Jack Daniels organization could have been very litigious, but it turns out they were not. Now, they made it clear to her, they’re going to protect the Jack Daniel’s name, but they were not really worrying about what she was doing. And she needed to figure out how to tell the story without ever talking about Jack Daniels. In fact, the name Jack Daniels doesn’t appear on the website. The only time they used the name Jack Daniels is from a historic reference. They did not need to associate with Jack Daniels and in fact, they didn’t want to diminish Jack Daniels. Because diminishing Jack Daniels in their eyes, diminished Nearest Green.
Dave Young:
Sure. Yeah.
Stephen Semple:
They wanted to grow both legacies because they felt there was a shared legacy. And the only reason we know about Nearest is because of Jack.
Dave Young:
Unfortunately, yes.
Stephen Semple:
Yes, but it’s really cool. Go to the website and take a look around. There’s even a video that they have and it’s really amazing. The name Jack Daniels appears once in the video and almost way at the end, they’ve done this brilliant way of telling this story without really mentioning Jack Daniels. So it’s 2017, she has a business plan and she has a story. So our first hire is I got to hire some sales people to tell this story because they needed to convince customers to carry the brand. And they needed to convince customers to come into the store. But they also felt it was important to show the world it was a good whiskey. So they entered a number of whiskey competitions. At the time of this podcast, they had been in 16 and won 13. They needed to prove that this was a product that could run with the big dogs.
Stephen Semple:
So that’s 2017, they get started 2018. They get things rolling. Then what happens? The pandemic hits. Now, the pandemic was good for the booze business, but it was not good for independents because independents relied very heavily on sales people opening the doors, getting shelving space, getting it in the bars, getting into restaurants and the shelf space was just taken over by the big players.
Dave Young:
Yeah. Yeah.
Stephen Semple:
And she’s pretty early on. She’s got 13 open sales positions. She hasn’t even filled all of her sales positions. So what do you do? Pandemic, can’t do sales calls, you’re trying to get this thing going. What do you do? She decides I’m pushing ahead. I’m filling those 13 positions because what she also figured out is there’s going to be people who are disheartened. There’s going to be people who’ve been laid off. And this may be actually a really great time to hire amazing people, to hire the best.
Stephen Semple:
So she decides there’s an opportunity going to hire the best. Secondly, she says to everyone, “Create a plan for your territory because this will eventually go away. This war will eventually be won,” sounds a little bit like Wrigleys. “This war will eventually be won and we want to have a plan for taking over the territory, let everyone get creative.” And one of the ideas that was created was to go cocktails. The whole idea of here’s all the stuff you need to take home and mix your own cocktail.
Stephen Semple:
But they weren’t legal most places, but she looked at it and said, you know what, bars and restaurants are struggling. I could see this being made legal. So it’s another thing that can be sold on the takeout, food and a to go cocktail. So they decided, you know what, we’re going to design it. We’re going to make it. We’re going to create the pouches, the jars, everything. Because these have got great margins and we’re going to be ready. The moment it’s legalized, we’re going to be first to go up. And it worked like gangbusters. Things were working so well that in September of this past year they ran out of stock. They ran out of whiskey.
Dave Young:
That’s actually a pretty devastating problem to have.
Stephen Semple:
Right. So what do you do when you run out of product? They spent another million dollars in advertising.
Dave Young:
To say you got to wait, whiskey takes a little while.
Stephen Semple:
Well, they didn’t do that. But what they did do was advertise because they wanted to do scarcity marketing. They wanted people coming into the store and saying, “Hey, do you have any of that Uncle Nearest whiskey?” And the person in the store going, “No, we’re out of stock.” Eventually they’ll go, “All these people are asking for this whiskey and they can’t get it anywhere. I better order more. I better look into this.” And now when the consumer comes in and it’s out of stock, what are they thinking?
Dave Young:
Must be pretty good.
Stephen Semple:
Must be pretty good. Scarcity marketing. They upped their advertising campaign, when they went out of stock. 2020 comes along and they have this huge increase in sales. And they’re now starting to build a $50 million distillery. They’re building this huge distillery. They hired the former president of Disney stores to come and do merchandising for them. And they’re now becoming a destination. And it was from leveraging this story and this idea, but also doing some really interesting things during the pandemic.
Dave Young:
The pandemic’s going to be a fascinating place to find case studies for years, for decades. Isn’t it?
Stephen Semple:
It really is. And this is where the lesson is on this business. Because look, we’ve seen lots of businesses that discover this really amazing story and turn that story into an amazing business. But what really threw the fire on this thing that was already burning is what she did when the pandemic happened. So many businesses, shuttered, so many businesses sent people home. She doubled down. She said, you know what, this is when I can find really great people. The people that often I can’t hire, I can hire today. I’m going to hire them. I’m going to use this time to get creative and build my marketing plan. Think of new ways of selling my product. I think about heating and air conditioning companies or other seasonal businesses that during the slow time go, well, what can we do to get more people today? Why not take that time to get creative?
Stephen Semple:
Why not take that time to build new systems? Why not take that time to create new ideas? That’s what she did. And then when they’re out of stock, what does she do? Upped her advertising, scarcity marketing. When my product is scarce, what does everybody want? They want it more. If you called up a lawyer, you got a complicated will or something you want to do and you get a hold of a guy who’s supposed to be really good. And he goes, yeah, I can see you in an hour versus the guy goes, you know what? I’m fully booked for a month. Which one do you think’s the lawyer you want? So many businesses get busy and they say, I don’t need to advertise any longer. She upped it.
Dave Young:
Yeah.
Stephen Semple:
And basically is now becoming this massively unstoppable force. Keep in mind, they started in a four year period of time. They went from nothing to selling one and a half million bottles in a highly competitive, unbelievably crowded, tough business.
Dave Young:
Yeah.
Stephen Semple:
Yeah, and I’m sure after hearing this, one of the things people are going to be really curious about is how good is the whiskey? So stay tuned. We are going to do an episode of a tasting of Uncle Nearest Whiskey with three really wonderful sommeliers and David.
Dave Young:
Touche. One of the things that we say at whiskey marketing school, when we talk about whether this whiskey is good or not, we say this about every whiskey. The definition of the best whiskey is whiskey that you like to drink in whatever way you like to drink it.
Stephen Semple:
Absolutely.
Dave Young:
Right. Because it is so individual, everybody has their own taste. Everybody has their own favorites. Some people like the rarest, rarest stuff and it’s hard to find. So you end up chasing whiskey. Some people just say, you know what? I like the taste of this particular one and it’s easy to get. And I always have some and that’s good enough for me.
Stephen Semple:
I will always find the one that my pallet likes the most at the lowest price tag.
Dave Young:
Uh-huh, uh-huh. I’m with you. Often what happens though is it’s a story like this that makes that whiskey, the whiskey that’s in your glass right now, in this case it would be Uncle Nearest. It’s the story that makes it special. And you raise a glass to a shared story and to the success of someone like Fawn who has stepped into a world that she didn’t even know.
Stephen Semple:
And chased the story. And then in the midst of chasing that story just did some really bold, bold… But when we look at the history of these other empires proven things to just continue to drive that business forward and have the success that she’s had.
Dave Young:
Yeah and story trumps nearly everything. First, she wouldn’t have stepped into this world if she was just looking for a business to start. She came across a story that demanded she get into this business.
Stephen Semple:
Remember this started as writing a book. I’m going to write a book.
Dave Young:
Yeah.
Stephen Semple:
Then she met all these people and was like, “Okay, I’m going to do a commemorative bottle. Oh no, I’m going to now distill whiskey.”
Dave Young:
I guess I’m getting into the whiskey business.
Stephen Semple:
I guess I’m getting into the whiskey business. She was compelled to do this.
Dave Young:
Yeah.
Stephen Semple:
So I’m looking forward to tasting this whiskey.
Dave Young:
Same here. Thank you for sharing this story of Uncle Nearest.
Stephen Semple:
Thanks David.
Dave Young:
Thanks for listening to the podcast. Please share us. Subscribe on your favorite podcast app and leave us a big fat juicy five star rating and review at Apple Podcast. And if you’d like to schedule your own 90 minute empire building session, you can do it at empirebuildingprogram.com.
