716: Ryan Spent 13 Years Without a Single Breakout Moment - Then Doubled His Whiskey Brand In 6 Months

SPEAKER_1 (0:01)

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Welcome to Little Empires, brought to you by the team at Foundr. At Foundr, our mission is to support the next generation of Ecom founders. So while you may know us for interviewing some of the world's most successful entrepreneurs, this series is a little different. Little Empires shines a spotlight on the builders inside our own Foundr community, the entrepreneurs who are in the trenches, taking action, learning and building their businesses in real time. These aren't overnight success stories. These are real journeys, real lessons and real founders creating their own little empires one step at a time. This podcast is proudly produced by the Foundr team to give our students a platform to share their experiences, wins, challenges and honest realities of building a business from the ground up. Now, let's dive into today's episode.

Leah (1:54)

We're here with Ryan Thompson from 10th Mountain Whiskey. Welcome to the Founder Little Empires podcast, Ryan. It's great to have you here.

Ryan Thompson (2:01)

Hi Leah. Thank you. I'm excited to be here with you guys and your audience.

Leah (2:04)

Yeah. Awesome. Now dialing in from Vail, Colorado, I am really keen to hear all about 10th Mountain Whiskey.

So let's get into a bit about your background beforehand because you've been across quite a variety of things in your career. Restaurants, financial services, a motel. Let's talk about what led you to be here today.

Ryan Thompson (2:25)

Yeah. You're exactly right, Leah. I've had a restaurant for 25 years at this point. So I started when I was 25 years old and you guys can do the math on that one. I bought and sold a couple other quick serve restaurants as well. I started a financial service planning company in the mortgage industry supporting title companies. And I had that for about nine years or so. And then about 13 years ago, I started watching what the craft distillery movement was doing and thought someone in our area in the ski resort of Vail, Colorado was going to start a craft distillery. And I thought might as well be me, give my history with hospitality and bars and restaurants. And so I started doing some research on that. At that point, I was home brewing quite a bit just for fun, just for friends and family. And distillation is the next step after making beer. And so I went out to a school called Moonshine University in Louisville, Kentucky, got hands-on distilling knowledge there, learned everything from A to Z about how to operate a distillery. And came back, wrote a business plan, bag barred and stole as much money as I could ever put together. And here we are 13 years later. That's all there is to it.

Leah (3:28)

Wow. Okay. 13 years.

You've very much summarized it very nicely and succinctly there. So what led you to actually start it, right? Like you were doing some brewing by yourself, but starting an e-commerce brand is a whole other ballgame.

Ryan Thompson (3:43)

Yeah. What interests me overall? Certainly, there's so many aspects of the business that are challenging, which keeps it interesting on a day-to-day basis even 13 years later.

One day I could be working on accounting, the other day legal, the other day marketing, the other day coming up with different cocktails and different manufacturing recipes. We manufacture all of our spirits as well. We make seven different spirits total. But what really caught my eye and what really interests me in pursuing this, especially on the e-comm side, was the growth potential. Having a restaurant, 120-seat restaurant, we're at limited capacity about how many people we can serve a day.