Author: Quirk

We want this place to feel different. We want working here to be different than working at other jobs. We want all of us to create a new kind of worked environment based on trust, open communication and mutual respect. We want you to feel good working here. That doesn’t mean we want your job to be easy, or to feel like I’m your best friend so do whatever you want. We want you to think of everyone else in this room as your teammates on the best professional team whose goal is to win.

We could make more profit here. We could do nothing but contract bottling, because that is profitable and we are good at it. But we made a decision that profit is not our only goal. You only have one chance at life, and at the end of it I want to look we want to look back and say, we really did something special there. And what we did there spread out into our community, and changed the way other employers think about their companies.

Profit then is simply a means to an end – not the end itself. If we make profit, we can use that capital to invest in other things and other people. We can grow our team. Both in quantity of people and in training opportunities, exciting field trips, and other benefits. No sane man wants money just for money’s sake. Money is just the way we’ve decided as a culture to keep score of the value of an activity or thing.

We hope the following outline for our vision for Cardinal Spirits in 2021 will help you understand the direction we’re trying to steer this ship.

Distribution

• Overview
  • Sales: Our sales organization will be top-tier — a leader among our cohorts in the industry. We’ll have exceptional relationships with our accounts and distributors. Our program planning and execution will be unmatched among craft spirits suppliers, and comparable to the best alcohol suppliers in the industry. Our sales team will be sincerely engaged and committed to their goals and our larger vision.
  • Markets: Our distribution footprint will be larger and deeper, encompassing the majority of the Midwest and the Northeast, plus key states elsewhere, including Florida and California. In Indiana, our presence and products will flow . Consumers will know our brands well, and when someone asks them to name a craft distillery in Indiana, Cardinal Spirits is the first one they enthusiastically think of.
  • Products: Our canned cocktails will equal in revenue to our spirits, totaling over $2M in annual sales and over 60,000 cases. When it comes to spirits, we’ll move an impressive 20,000 cases per year, with half of those sales coming from Indiana.

Production

• Overview
  • We will shift the bulk of our distilling, bottling, and operations to a larger primary production facility somewhere nearby with top-of-the-line furnishings/equipment.
  • Our original building at 922 S. Morton St. will continue to be a craft spirits destination with a cocktail bar and restaurant, where our guests can get an intimate look at how we produce some of our specialty and seasonal products.
  • Our barrel rickhouse will have room for 2,000 barrels.

Cardinal Copacking

• Overview
  • We will operate a blending and packaging facility called Cardinal Copacking, where we give entrepreneurs the ability to easily produce their own spirit brands. We’ll excel at servicing the needs of suppliers, retailers and distributors — using a combination of industry best practices and our proprietary methods.
  • Cardinal Copacking will become an excellent profit center for Cardinal Spirits, creating $7.5M/year in revenue and $4.5M in gross profit.
  • Cardinal Copacking will be known for exceptional customer service, turn times, and quality.

Birdhouse

• Overview
  • The Birdhouse, our craft cocktail bar and restaurant, will become a Midwest destination — a place you’ll unquestionably go out of your way for, or perhaps plan an entire trip around.
  • Guests will be wowed with a 7-star experience: one that is memorable for years.
  • The distillery experience is amplified inside the restaurant with barrels or a window into production, driving home the fact that we’re distillery

Marketing

• Overview
  • Our core brands will be separately and confidently messaged (Birdhouse, Spirit/RTD Brands, and Copacking) but share a common thread.
  • We’ll lead the craft spirits industry with inviting content on social media platforms, creative campaigns and posts.
  • We will partner with influencers and enthusiasts to create meaningful, creative campaigns that will both enrich our brand and drive sales.
  • The media will count on our leadership team as trusted sources, and our company will earn national press at least quarterly.

Community

• Overview
  • We will partner with organizations that do meaningful work.
  • We will re-shape industries and regulations that are broken.
  • We will build communities large and small, in the real world and online.
  • We will focus on entrepreneurship for our team and in the community.

Team

• Overview
  • Talent: We will attract the best people from the Midwest and beyond to be a part of our organization.
  • Culture: Our team will recognize that working here feels different than working at other jobs. We will be committed to creating a supportive, humane, and welcoming place to work, where communication is open, honest, and transparent. People will feel good working here. We’ll teach and apply the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, and expect employees to live by Habit One: Be Proactive.
  • Leadership: Leadership track candidates will receive ongoing training, coaching, and mentorship. We will give candidates a clear understanding of where to start: with our curated library of books and training courses that we facilitate, along with an ongoing book club.
  • Education: All team members will understand a financial statement, and they will know how they relate to the business as a whole. We’ll prioritize and incentivize self-improvement and continuing education by providing stipends for courses, books, conferences, and seminars.

Finances

• Revenue Growth
  • $4.5M in 2019
  • $7.5M in 2020
  • $11M in 2021
• Healthy bottom line
  • Net $400k in 2019
  • Net $1.2M in 2020
  • Net $2.5M in 2021

Operations

• Overview
  • Systems: We will be a Demand Driven Adaptive Enterprise (DDAE).
  • Culture: We will demonstrate a culture of support of one another, which includes putting your coworker ahead of yourself.
  • Space: Management/leadership will work in a well-designed work environment in close proximity to our production facilities, with space for collaboration, private work, conversations, and phone calls.

Adam notes:

Our customers often came after dinner-hours for a post-meal nightcap. We starting snagging the dinner crowd and brunch crowds when we paired up with food trucks that could provide more gut-filling meals than our snack menu.

This came with a cache of challenges though — one, we couldn’t control the service experience customers had with the food trucks. The disposable oil-soaked plates and plastic-wrapped cutlery didn’t match our aesthetic, the food didn’t match the spirit of our cocktails, our production, or our branding. And while the food trucks brought customers during mealtimes, we didn’t catch any profit from the food sales and our average sales per table fell. People often saw us less like a unique dining experience in town and more like a concession shelter with an outdoor patio. We knew we had to open a kitchen and do things our way.

We tore down the wall that divided the kitchen from an office room. It was still a tiny space–more than three cooks in the kitchen is too many cooks in the kitchen. But we made up for this with top-of-the-line, dream appliances. Just like our first bartenders, we hired a strong chef and gave him creative reign. Same rule: our spirits are made from scratch, our cocktails are made from scratch, and so should our food. We had seen a hole in Bloomington’s cocktail scene and a chance to fill it with something unique, and we knew we could do this food.

Every dish is made to share, they cascade out over service, never disrupting conversation with an overwhelming amount of plates hitting the table at once. Rather than a giant entree stacked with a giant side, every dish is a delicious study of an ingredient — they are elegant, fresh, and unexpected.

Our kitchen elevates our customers’ experience at Cardinal without distracting from our bread & butter (alcohol, that is.) When our servers aren’t dropping off a bowl of house-made, hand-pulled seasoned mozzarella cheese, or a seasonal cocktail, they’re coming round with tastes of our spirits.

To say that we weren’t a little surprised that our tasting room was busy during our opening month would not be entirely accurate. It was dreary February and we only offered Vodka cocktails and a few pickled snacks. What we did know was that we were doing something new and unique in Bloomington, and enough people were also hungry for this. We were the first and only distillery in Bloomington. Around this time there were only two bars in town with a focus on cocktails. One beloved establishment, The Rail, closed suddenly a few months before we opened. The other is a cocktail-mixer bar with plastic cups that won’t break when dropped on the blacklight-lit dance floor. Although we were a distillery first and foremost, we had a beautiful bar and delicious vodka–we knew we could offer what was missing in Bloomington.

We hired strong bartenders and gave them creative reign behind the bar. We gave them one rule: everything was to made from scratch, just like the vodka itself. Our bartenders made original cocktails and played off classic builds to stretch what most people believed vodka should be used for. They infused our vodka with toasted oak chips to make a cocktail akin to a manhattan (The Prelude), they modeled a very complex elixir after Campari so we could serve a knock-out, sans gin Negroni. Everything was elegant, fresh, and unexpected. Almost before we knew it, we weren’t just a tasting room, we were a proper cocktail bar–just without all the other spirits.

It wasn’t just vodka for long though. Our production geared up and filled our rails with new spirits; coffee liqueur, two types of gin, flora liqueur, white rum. What had once been a constraint for a bartenders became a new kind of challenge–they were constantly generating cocktails to highlight our new signature spirits. The bartop filled with house-made syrups, purees, and tinctures. They had to scale back and create new constraints for themselves to keep drink times and prep shifts under control.

Stella Snyder, one of our distinguished bartender alumni who went on to head the cocktail program at Finches Brassiere, said she has never made so many cocktails in a single shift than at Cardinal. It’s a work out.