Andrew didn’t try to take on the biggest player in his market – he instead, in his words, “decided to play a different game.”
Instead of taking on Jack Daniels, Andrew started a whiskey company that partnered with his customers.
Learn from Andrew how to be co-creators with your customers, how to win in a niche market, and how to ride the up-and-down emotions as a new business builder.
Who are you and what business did you start?
I’m Andrew Minarick, and I started Flyover Whiskey.
Flyover Whiskey is a custom small-batch whiskey company. Corn farmers would send me their grain and I would turn it into a custom batch of whiskey, and ship it back to them in their own labeled bottles. Each batch of whiskey is unique to each farm.
What was your background? How did you come up with the idea?
I grew up in North Bend, Nebraska, a small farming town. Growing up, I got a sense of what entrepreneurship and being a business owner was like from my Dad, who owned and operated his own well-drilling business.
Because of that building a business felt attainable, and even normal. While I was in college, I developed even more clarity about wanting to build my own business through the Engler Program, a college entrepreneurship program at the University of Nebraska.
I started getting interested in distilling my own whisky as a college student. I was majoring in engineering and took quite a few chemistry classes. Distilling whiskey is essentially the process of making ethanol, and I thought, ‘it would be cool to make my own whiskey.’
I started experimenting in my basement as a hobby. This wasn’t exactly meeting legal regulations at this point, but I wasn’t trying to sell anything.
One of my buddies was getting married, he liked whiskey, and I wanted to make him a unique gift. He was from a farm, so I got some grain from his family and made a custom whiskey batch for him.
And I got an inkling that this could be a cool business idea.
What were your first steps to starting the business and coming up with your product?
From my background in chemistry, I wasn’t too worried about figuring out the distilling process. I did some research online and found some good literature to learn about aging and all that. The real challenge to starting was the regulations.
Obviously, making and selling alcohol is a highly regulated industry. It took me a long time to research and understand the process.
I read a ton to figure it out. What kept me going through all the reading was treating it like I was searching for answers to my questions.
After I got that first bottle made, I thought it was cool – so I wanted to figure out, how do I make this good?
Then it was, how can I do this in a way that could scale?
Then it was, what does it take to get legally approved? How can this be commercialized?
I kept it simple, trying to answer one question at a time, and that would eventually lead me to the next question that I needed to figure out.
It’s a very steep and long regulatory and permitting process to make and sell liquor. It’s not fun to read all the regulations from the liquor commission, but I did find it interesting when I was using it to answer a question. Could this work? What would disqualify this from working? and if it works, what are the upsides? So as I was going, it was a process of getting questions answered.
But eventually, I got to the point where I had a location to distill, and got all the regulations approved, and I was ready to start.
We made our first batch for my own family farm in July 2020.
How did you go about validating the business idea? How did you know there was a need?
As I was thinking about getting the business started, one of my observations was the farm-to-fork movement. It was at a time with direct-to-consumer beef was starting to become popular.
Local cattle guys were able to get some of their beef processed locally, fill their freezers with steak, and provide it to family and friends. They could enjoy what they had raised.
Corn farmers couldn’t really do this. The corn they harvested goes to ethanol or corn flakes on a shelf, and it doesn’t get tracked. They can’t fill up the gas tank and say ‘This is the corn I raised.’
So there wasn’t the ability to directly consume or use what corn they were producing. I thought there might be an interest in bringing that farm-to-fork to grain farmers.
That’s where the idea of custom small-batch whiskey came from. A farmer could send me his corn, and I could send him back a whiskey made from his farm.
Around a campfire
I started informally sharing the idea with some of my friends. They were all from farms or had family members who farmed. We would be around a campfire drinking beers or something like that, and I would pass the idea to people, and hear their thoughts. And this was pretty natural.
For new businesses, it’s probably not that easy to do customer validation, but I was so close to the customer having grown up in a farming community. It was kind of second nature for me – I could trust my instincts on the market need.
That’s not always the case for certain businesses, but for Flyover Whiskey, I was designing something for myself and I just had a great ethos of my customer – better than most of the other businesses I’ve worked on.
It wasn’t super scientific by any means. But I got good feedback and I just kept taking a lot of little small bets as I moved forward.
When I was first working on it, I envisioned it as a small side hustle. If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. I was going to try to keep it really low cost without this huge capital investment. It was incremental.
Our first batches were for family and friends with whom I had originally pitched the ideas.
There’s always a special place in my heart for those people who were willing to be our first customers.
From there, we just incrementally kept growing.
What does your business do uniquely in the market? How did you grow?
There are quite a few distilleries out there that you can consider craft, but ours is the only one that is truly custom.
We aren’t selling a brand on the market called ‘Flyover Whiskey.’
Instead, our product is the farmer’s product.
It wasn’t our brand, it was the farms. We are just the manufacturing partner to make it happen.
I think that was the really unique part – our customers are co-creators. In a sense, they are more responsible for the final product than we are. They send us all the raw ingredients, we just process it for them.
And that’s a big part of how we grew. People weren’t saying, look at this ‘Flyover Whiskey.’ They were saying look, hey look this is ‘Emmanual Farms Whiskey, the name is right on the bottle.’
We would even customize each label to include the date the corn was planted and harvested, along with the name of the hybrid and yield amount.
As a result, the customer took ownership of it and was proud to show it off.
Naturally, this led to word of mouth, and their farmer friends wanting their own custom whiskey as well.
So as far as growth, most of it was organic – our customers telling other people where they got their custom farm whiskey made. Our customers became our biggest promoters and biggest marketers. We spent very little money on advertising.
We did have one big inflection point when the Grand Island Newspaper wrote a story about one of my friends who had ordered from us, and how he got his corn made into whiskey. After that came out, we got a bunch of orders from a wider audience than just people I knew. And from there it spread our net really wide.
Flyover is somewhat of a unique business, and I get that not every company has the same kind of customer-led virality or promotion. Because of our business model, the product sold itself, and it made marketing easier.
What were some of the biggest lessons you’ve learned along the pathway of building? What would you tell new business builders?
When the business was growing, things were getting really busy from the product and customer side.
Appreciation for the customer
I was trying to keep up with the volume – and this is going to sound bad – but I found myself almost being annoyed by the sheer number of customer requests. I just remember feeling overwhelmed.
I realized later, that being busy with customers is a good problem to have. After some reflection, I found that needed to refocus on what I was actually selling.
Every batch of whiskey I made was just another batch of many I was going to make. But for that customer, it was potentially the only whiskey they were going to see. And it was the corn they grew themselves – it was really important and personal to them.
It was a great shift in perspective for me, to focus and maintain that attention to detail, and appreciation for what I was making.
That story may make me sound spoiled or something, but it was an important lesson for me to bring it back to the customer, even when the business is growing and trying to scale.
Find a way to win
I would also say that for new business builders, it is important to figure out how you can win.
If there are competitors that’s fine, or if the market is not that big, you can still have a successful business. But you need to focus on how you can win.
I see a lot of businesses that try to come into a market and do the same thing as someone else and expect to do well. Or people think they can’t play small and win.
That would be like us trying to go against Jack Daniels or something like that. We can’t win whiskey market share if we expect to do the same thing they are doing. We would lose 10 times out of 10.
We had to learn to plan our own game.
I think that’s part of vetting out a business idea. You have an idea – great. Now what does the market look like, and how can you win?
Floundering
And finally, when starting, there’s a lot of feeling like you are foundering.
I found myself often going, ‘I don’t know what the hell I’m doing.’
‘This might not work.’
‘This is not conventional.’
‘My other friends are doing real jobs.’
And I think especially in the Midwest, we often think that we need to just do the traditional route.
This idea of just embracing that feeling of floundering is important and good.
There’s a strong barrier to entry to starting a business because it’s tough to stomach this feeling of not knowing what you ar doing. But if you can understand that this is just a feature of starting, not a bug, not something wrong, and gut through the process, you can make it.
It’s like a sine wave of ups and downs. Some days you are like, this is going to work, I’m the smartest person in the world. And the next you are like, I’m a fucking idiot and this is never going to work.
Try to understand that – and to reduce the volatility of your emotions.
Not getting too high and not getting too low can help.
That’s one thing that is nice looking back now, is that whenever I feel like something isn’t going to work, I can say – no I’ve felt this before, it’s going to turn around.
Did you ever have any, Oh Crap, Moments? Where you thought the business wasn’t going to make it?
Once we got off the ground, it was I was lucky to not have too many of those just because our customer demand was pretty strong. So I felt pretty lucky, but on the on-ramp to getting it going, getting out of the gates was not easy.
It was just a lot of regulatory and legal pieces that had to come together. Stuff like zoning was really challenging. There were a few calls about the property we’re gonna use for a distillery that was not potentially going to be zoned correctly with the city or county.
And so there’s just a lot of uncertainty there, And there’s a few times where I was like, oh, this is gonna get nixed because of legal stuff.
A friendly review
I learned to try to reframe the problem by asking what I could do to affect it.
One of the things that was a big vulnerability for us was shipping liquor directly to consumers.
We went through FedEx and they were doing a pilot program for direct-to-consumer shipments of hard alcohol. It was relatively new.
And so there’s always the concern that if that got shut down we’re gonna be in trouble. This was out of my control, so I tried to influence it as much as I could.
So what I did, was go to the branch that I was working with and I wrote a very strong positive review to their management team.
That made the branch look really good. And from then on, they were huge advocates of what we’re doing. They never gave me any difficulties in shipping.
So little things like that. It’s like, okay, if XYZ went wrong, this could be really bad. This is out of my control.
But how can I align it with what we’re doing? How can I make sure that they’re on our team as much as possible? How can I reduce this as a risk?
When you reflect on building your enterprise, how has it changed your life? Positive or negative?
The beauty of entrepreneurship is the drive for freedom and autonomy. That is a commodity that I really value. But that doesn’t come without a cost.
Working on a venture requires a tremendous amount of time and effort, and it’s tough to shut off and be present.
With self-employment, the buck stops with you. No one else is going to do the work.
So when something goes wrong you’re constantly thinking about it. You’re worried about it. And I think that there are some detrimental aspects of that.
I remember thinking like, oh man, how nice would it be to just have a 9 to 5 where I can check in and check out? There are definitely trade-offs there.
Not over-indexing on the highs and lows is important. Never think you’re too smart or you’re too good.
Some of it is a little bit of luck and it’s a lot of hard work. I try to stay in the middle – not beat myself up too much, or give myself too much credit.
Selling the Company
A few years ago I sold Flyover Whiskey.
The business was growing at the time, and I was headed out of state for graduate school. It felt like a good time to transition the business, and I sold it to a good friend who was a farmer.
Definitely a bitter-sweet feeling, but I knew Joe, a friend who purchased the business, was going to grow it into what it could be, and I had a high level of trust that he would keep producing a quality, farmer-focused product. I was really happy to see him carry on the brand.
So having seen the process of founding a business to an exit, it gives me kinda of a highlight reel of what it’s like to go through all the stages of a business.
I’m now the co-founder of an agriculture technology business, BovEye, and it helps me when I encounter a challenge. I can say, hey, I’ve felt this before, and it helps me keep going.
What are some of your favorite books, classes, or resources that have helped you?
History of Whiskey in Early-America
Lean Manufacturing Methodologies
Where can we learn more about your business?
Andrew speaking at SCC about Flyover
Breakdown
In this section, Humble Starts provides a summary of the main lessons from Andrew’s story. Hopefully, you can apply them on your own journey towards enterprise building.
Learnings from Andrew:
1. Get close to the customer.
Before Andrew got started, and long before he started selling any whiskey, he was sharing his idea with customers. His potential customers were his friends and neighbors – the farmers that he had grown up around.
Because Andrew was so close to the customer, he had a jumpstart to his company. He shared his ideas and listened to the feedback. Not only did this provide easy access to early adopters, but it informed him on how to build something the customers wanted right away.
Sometime entrepreneurs are tempted to build in a vacuum – they only start talking to customers after thier product is finished. That’s a risky way to do it.
Early on, get close to the customer. They help you make sure you are building something the market wants, and quickly become your first sales.
2. There’s more than one way to start.
Andrew was interested in whiskey, and that could have led him to just start his own brand. But if he did this, he knew that it would pit him against all the other brands. And those other brands are giant companies that have been around a long time.
Instead, he looked at the whiskey market and found a unique opportunity. He asked the question, “How can I win?” And that allowed him to see the market differently.
Getting creative with your business model can allow you to play a game that the ‘traditional’ competition can’t play. There’s more than one way to start – find your unique value by playing a different game.
3. There’s going to be ups and downs, ride them.
Andrew didn’t sugarcoat that starting this business hasn’t been all roses – it’s been up and down.
But the longer he’s been in the game, he’s realized, that’s how things go. Starting a new business is going to be difficult. If you can learn to keep your emotions and attitude level – not getting too high or too low – you’ll make it though.
Learn to ride the waves, they are coming.
