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Welcome.
“Welcome to the best five-minute wine and podcasts”
with Forrest Kelly. Hello, I'm Sherman Moore. And I am co-founder and chief operating officer of shared spirits and liquid-to-lips marketing. And recently started a firm called Over 50 Pros
to serve professionals over 50 making transitions in their work life. All righty, let's start with your background a little bit. Let's get to find out from you just talking in the green room a moment ago.
You told me you moved from Nashville to South Carolina. So let's get a little history back before that. Sure.
I was in Nashville basically as a career move when I was far younger.
I'd been in the mortgage business for numerous years. I moved in Nashville in 1990, still in that industry, stayed in an industry for a good while longer.
“And then right before the financial crisis, 2002, 2001,”
made a move to marketing and technology. And have been in that space ever since, started shared spirits in Nashville in the mid-2010s. It was a concept of way ahead of its time. And we storyboarded for years as my partners
and I worked other jobs. Through COVID, we're suspended from that work for the most part. We do a lot of restaurants in that business. And they were shut down during COVID.
So we use that opportunity to make a quick pivot. And I started a promo agency in the wine space and spirit space where we literally take those people across the country, those brand ambassadors and staff and retail settings that many of your listeners
are used to hearing about and do samplings and work like that. And over the next few years, that business grew substantially. And through the course of that work, we ended up relaunching the shared spirits app. And we're at about 50 locations in Nashville
and we're running across the country now. And the demo agency grew to a nationwide organization. And we're having great fun with it. It's a lot of work. We did about 1,700 events last year.
And this year should be everybody's good. So contrary to what people are being told for us around the wine industry, it certainly has its issues. But there are still a lot of people drinking wine. Oh, of course.
Of course. So now back when you were you were store boarding that, what inspired that was something that you noticed was a hole in the market or something that you thought
“I could do better or were you reinventing something new?”
I tell you, it's the master of pivots for us or shared spirits app. Literally is one where we have to have restaurant involvement. We onboard their alcohol bed program and it becomes easy to buy, share and redeem spirits wine
and beer from the restaurant, all VM mobile. Basically, it's like a Benmo for cocktails. And in COVID, that business was shut down for a few months. We couldn't get into restaurants because they were closed.
So what did open up because they were deemed essential
to retail spirits and wine stores? So we had connections in the industry. My partner was with a distributor for several years. And I pivoted from running the technology to growing up promo agencies because we
could still do business with suppliers and brand owners by sampling their stuff and retail stores. So much like anything that happens in business, it was a real pivot for us by things outside of our control. And much like we all have to do on occasion
when life throws us a curve ball, we can swing at it. And occasionally we connect. And we connect it on the promo work and through trial and error. And a lot of help from people in the industry who helped us out,
we ended up growing a nationwide company out of that. In our next episode, when you go to our restaurants, out as a winery, get their wine on that menu.
That's where wine is generally trialed first.
It's generally discovered first at restaurants. [MUSIC PLAYING] Thank you for listening. Tell your friends and pets. Please like and follow.
Please like and follow. Please like and follow.
