Patience Makes Perfect – The Secret Blend to Business Success

In life and business, we’re all impatient to a degree.  We want to see our hard work pay off right away. Who wants to wait?

But if you had to wait, what’s reasonable? A few hours? A few months? A few years?

How much patience do you have?

I got to thinking about waiting for success after my recent conversation with Lauren Ackerman, co-founder of Ackerman Family Vineyards in Napa Valley, CA. We hosted Lauren During a C-Suite Network Digital Discussion: Unleashing Creativity, Innovation & Patience as Catalysts for Growth in September.

While Ackerman Wines is one of the highest quality boutique wines in Napa Valley, it wasn’t always that way. Lauren told me that when she bought the vineyard in 1994, they didn’t bring their first commercial vintage to market until 2007.

“We started making wine in 1995, but just by experimenting with it,” Lauren remembers. “We wanted to see what the property would produce. So, we just made a couple of barrels of Cabernet Sauvignon every year, about 50 cases or so, and did that for nine years. Checking on the quality, making sure it was what we liked. We made some changes based on the input we received from people we gave the wine to. We didn’t even sell it back in those days. We literally gave it away and said, ‘What do you think?'”

Making wine was a giant leap for Lauren. She had been working in the San Francisco Bay area in technology and as a business consultant. While she didn’t know winemaking, she understood business and learned the rest as she went along.

“I was able to look at the wine industry with a different set of eyes and ask some of those questions, ‘Why can’t you?’ ‘What about this?'” Lauren recalled. “You could definitely make some changes in how you approach things and others you had to go by what was actually realistic for farming and harvesting grapes. I think for me, it was about patience.”

After experimenting and giving the wine away, Ackerman Wines set out to go to market. Their first offering was a 2003 vintage that went public in 2007.

“I remember the concept of going to my very first wine tasting, which was in Orange County (CA). It’s sort of like putting your first artwork or your first child on display and wondering if people are going to enjoy it, or like it, or respond positively to it,” Lauren said. “When they do, it’s this amazing satisfaction like, ‘Okay, we can do this. This is on the right path.'”

Building a brand is tough, and the wine business is no exception. According to Lauren, there are 20,000 brands in the wine industry. Just like the process of making wine, getting your name out there can take time. She says she relies on her consultant roots — looking at where she wants the brand to be in 5 years and ten years or, as she likes to call it, the short game and long game.

“There are things that change along the way, but you always have to keep your eye on what the long game is and make adjustments in your short game to get there,” Lauren said.

Wine can be a fickle business because everyone has a different pallet. While Ackerman Wines try to appeal to everyone, Lauren knows she’s not running a popularity contest.

“Certainly, our style of wine, coming from this cooler part of Napa, which is less fruit-forward and if you know your wine terms, a little more mineralogy, deeper berries. That’s a different style and taste all together than what people might see from St. Helena, Calistoga, or other parts of the Napa Valley,” Lauren said. “I don’t take personal offense. There’s a lot of other styles out there that you can try. We all wear different styles of clothing or fashion. Wine is also that kind of commodity.”

Wine is also something that takes time or, as I alluded to earlier, patience. The process is very intricate and doesn’t happen overnight.

“It’s always an interesting process. It’s like creating a new artwork,” Lauren said. “It’s creating a painting, and you’ve got the various tools to create that painting. The winemaker does too with yeast or with barrels or harvest and fermentation time. I tell people if you think of an artist with 100 colors on their palate, we have those colors in the ability to create something different whenever we want to and create the best that we possibly can.”

Like all businesses, COVID-19 has forced the Ackerman Family Vineyards to places it’s never been before. The wine business is seeing a lot of adversity, and Ackerman isn’t immune.

“It’s definitely been a challenge,” Lauren said. “Shutting down restaurants affects us too because restaurants tend to buy our wines, and they are not selling either. Dealing with that and being innovative, and how do you address it? We do virtual wine tastings, and we do virtual events to introduce our brand to various people around the country.”

Besides the pandemic, all California wineries have another unknown to deal with — wildfire. While the fires have left most of Napa Valley intact, the smoke in the air could ruin this year’s crops.

“I’m not alone in this. Many wineries are wondering and waiting because the harvest is looming whether or not we will be able to harvest our grapes and make wine, whether or not there’s going to be a smoke taint issue,” Lauren said.

“What we don’t know yet in Napa is to what extent all of the 700 or so wineries…are going to be truly affected by (the smoke) and how many of us will have to make the very difficult decision to drop fruit and not make wine at all,” Lauren said. “Laboratories that we depend on to give us a sense of where we are, are backed up. We’re waiting, and harvest is impending. It’s an interesting time to make both a financial decision and making the decision to make a wine that may or may not in three to four years’ time, when you put in on the market have an Issue with that smoke taint flavor nobody really likes.”

With so much up in the air for the 2020 vintage, Lauren knows Ackerman wine isn’t alone in this process. Even with all the competition, she considers her fellow Napa Valley winemakers’ family.

“I think that’s something people haven’t really understood about Napa,” Lauren said. We’re all competitors at one level, but we all work very well together to make sure coming out of Napa Valley, we can produce the best Napa Valley can produce.”

Well said. Whether you want to call it your community or tribe, we are all stronger together.

I really enjoyed my time with Lauren, and I really enjoy Ackerman Family Vineyard’s wine.

If you’d like to hear more of my conversation with Lauren and the Q&A session she did with our C-Suite Network community, click here.