214 - Revolutionizing the Tequila-Making Business with Quintaliza Tequila's Mike Winters

Welcome to Listening with Leaders. I'm Doug Noll, lawyer turned peacemaker. I teach executive leaders how to listen to emotions rather than words so that they can become the leaders everyone wants to follow. And I teach those same leaders how to be authentically present, available, and connected to their families despite being insanely busy. I have learned that we are 98% emotional and only 2% rational. Learning how to listen to emotions is, in my experience, the foundational skill of life. Stick around to the end of the show, and I'll reveal how you can be on our next guest in 15 to 20 minutes. So let's get started. Mike Winters, welcome to Listening with Leaders. You are the CEO and founder of QuintaLisa Tequila, which can be found of course at QuintalizaTequila.com. And we're really interested in hearing your story today. Welcome to the show.

Thank you so much. I challenge you to say that 5 times fast. Quintaliza Tequila. Quintaliza Tequila. Yeah.

I speak a little Spanish.

That's it.

So backstory, how did you get, how, tell us what led you into the tequila making business?

It's actually funny, because you're an entrepreneur at heart. I started my first company when I was 19. And destroyed it by the time I was 20. So it was actually a company that my uncle helped me out. He, he grew as a detailing company and he, you know, raised a family of 4 and, uh, didn't take me long to not do, to destroy it. But a lot of lessons learned at a young age and I think that helped. And from there it's just spiraled from, my background is actually in medical. I'm a, a medical engineer, so I service CT and MRI equipment. Our ser— we have a service company that's a national provider of service of MRIs and CTs. From there, I've scaled. In 2008, I bought my first restaurant. I've owned 3 restaurants, 1 restaurant that I expanded into 3 different locations. Dove into— I'm still a partner in a coffee shop in Miami. Um, I was looking to buy some property and it's funny because they kept falling through. And at the time, my friend had just launched his tequila brand and a, a little company called Sip Tequila, which is now a pretty big company. And he was looking for someone to help him do distribution and importing.. And I really wanted to get involved, but I was too far. It was the investment rounds were too far gone at that point for me. Naturally, like with the red tape and my knowledge, I should say with the red tape of Florida, I decided to dive into helping to see if I could become an importer and distributor. Lo and behold, 6 weeks later I had all my licenses required and started doing importing of tequila. First round actually going at it. I actually didn't like tequila when I started doing this. This was about 5 years ago. I didn't really care for tequila. It wasn't— it was— I think the story that I have is similar to a lot of people where they had one too many crazy nights in Cancún or in college and just too many shots and you can't stand the smell of it. My history with tequila was very similar, where Patrón and different tequilas that just— I couldn't even smell it. But his tequila that he had brought out was something different. It tasted more like a whiskey and a bourbon and sweet, and it was okay, this is cool, this is different. And I think that just my nature, my curious nature, I think I just took a rabbit hole dive into tequila, understanding what they all are, what the differences are, additives, non-additives, organic, non-organic, understanding all the aging and expressions. There's just a lot. There's a, there's so much to, to learn about tequila. And I think that would, it helped me to be a better importer and to start bringing in and also be a little bit better of a distribution company here in Florida to help them. But it also creates that spark of curiosity of learning different types of tequilas that didn't have additives in them. And I started really growing fond of ones that didn't. And I'm finding though, as a— I started finding as a very basic palate that I have, you know, that a lot of these tequilas started tasting very similar to me. So that's what led me into the world of trying to discover something different.

So tell us about Quinta Lisa Tequila, brand new company, been out now for not even a year yet.

Correct. Yeah, launched in July of 2023. And what it is, it's a, it's a 5-month reposado that's aged 2 months in American whiskey barrels and it's aged 3 months in coffee barrels. So that there is something that's actually never been done. We actually hold the patent on this process. So for 2 years before launch, I spent a lot of time in R&D, began diving into the world of tequila. I had this passion of wanting to create to mend the two worlds of coffee and tequila together. I love coffee, started finding a new love for tequila, and I wanted to see if I could bring those two worlds together, but I wanted to make sure we could stay additive-free and we can stay organic. That was something as I started learning a lot more about those types of tequilas, it's something that was extremely important to me. So I started playing around with small barrels, really just trying to see how can I get these notes into the tequila and not be considered additives, which took a deep dive into understanding what exactly is an additive tequila. Like, what are additives? What is considered an additive? And it's exactly what you think it is. Essentially, anything you put into the juice is considered an additive, right? It doesn't matter what it is. It can be anything aside from water. It's considered an additive, right? And coffee, obviously coffee flavoring would consider, be considered an additive. So how we actually approach this is I was able to after trying to blend tequila with coffee beans and pour it through coffee filters and soak it in coffee beans and all this crazy stuff, it all just tasted like shit. So how I ended up really getting it down was we aged barrels, new barrels, in cold brew. And what that did is—

cold brew coffee?

Cold— yeah, cold brew coffee. And the reality is that we're not reinventing the wheel here, because if you think about all the barrels and how they get tequila gets its notes at this point, Jack Daniel's barrels or red wine barrels or Cabernet barrels, the tequila takes on from the previous tenant, right? So those aren't considered additives because those barrels were used as something for a previous process. You're just using a unique barreling process. So it's considered finished in like cherry oak or finished in rosé barrels. So this is technically finished in coffee barrels. The barrels didn't exist, so we obviously needed to create those. And we started, like I said, with these small barrels with cold brew and honed in the roast over a long period of time to find the right roast because it's very specific. We couldn't be acidic. We didn't want to be bitter. The two things you don't want tequila to be. And we had to choose the right coffee bean. It's a long process to kind of just to figure out the coffee side. And I was very particular. This is a Mexican product. I wanted to make sure everything was made in Mexico. So all of our coffee is from the Chiapas region of Mexico. Tequila obviously is from Mexico. So we wanted to stay as traditional as humanly possible, make sure everything came from Mexico, but we wanted to put an innovative spin on it, creating something unique and completely different. And that was my main goal, is just to just separate myself a little bit from the herd, right? There's so many tequilas out there. And like I was mentioning with my palate, I was tasting products from a very popular distillery and additive-free, and there was 2 or 3 products from that distillery. And with my, you know, again, untrained palate, I would have a hard time picking out which one was which. They were very similar. All great, don't get me wrong, but very similar. And one would argue, oh, this one's better than the other. And I'm allergic to the word better or like different. I don't want to be ever said, oh, this is better. No, no, no. It's— I'm not comparing myself to anyone. I want to be completely different. And that's what Quinta-Lisa is. It's different in a, in a blind taste test. It's definitive what Quinta-Lisa is.

Wow. So you, uh, obviously this is produced in Mexico, so you have a company, a distillery there that produces to your specifications using barrels that you guys basically create with, right? And then, and it's pro— I presume it's all bottled there and then it shipped out of Mexico.

Yeah. Yeah. So we use Hacienda de Oro as our distillery.

Okay.

And Ileana Partida is our master distiller. Amazing. She's a fourth generation master distiller. And she came to us, honestly, we went through a few different distilleries and just when we first met her, I was, this is the way we're gonna go. Right. She's just amazing. Yeah. And, and her knowledge, but I think that her, her ability to want to be innovative as well matched our mindset and was really important for us.

Think of the coffee finished tequila.

That was funny. So the first time we introduced this to her, she didn't think it was gonna taste good. And I had to convince her just to at least try it. And I think where, I think what it was is that, and I think Quintaliza does this in general, is it creates the curiosity. We hear a lot of, I'm curious, or you have my attention. And I think that's the number one thing we try to do. So I had her attention and when she tried it, she really enjoyed it. And this was just, again, a prototype that I had made in my house. And I think she had a good idea is that if I can make it taste as good as I did in my house using a different product, then using her agave and doing it the right way, I think that it could be completely spectacular. Different. And it was the first time I tried it when it came out, out of the tanks before we barreled Lot 1. I was just like blown away, like how good it was. Like, we had all my friends there and they're like, dude, oh my God, we crushed this. And it was like, I cannot believe it's so good. And it just— I— what's I think the funniest part is I believe that it would be, but I also thought that, man, there's a good chance that tastes like crap. So it's so It happens.

So how's the company done in the 9, 9 to 10 months you've been open? You said it's taken off.

Yeah. So my approach for just say distribution or scaling, what have you, is really a brand-first approach. So we've, we focused a lot on our branding, social media, our website. We've just a lot of branding and taking a deeper dive into understand who the consumer really is and why they drink tequila in the first place. Never mind Quinta Lisa. Just understand who drinks it and why and where and when and all those good things. And I think for us, we started learning a lot about our buyer personas as far as who's following our brand. We're starting to see a lot of people that don't typically follow tequila brands that are following our brand on social media. So we went really aggressive into that aspect, high-quality content. We hired a great PR team, but our videographer, our photographer, creative director. These are all in-house. We've got quite a large team that's been a part of this since day one. Uh, love them all. They'd walk off a cliff, I feel like, sometimes for me, because they have. And we— a lot of them weren't making any money for the first couple months, but they believed in this project, and it's definitely come to light. So I'd say, yeah, in the first 9 months, we went from nobody knowing us to quite a bit of followers and a lot of engagement. Rolling Stone, Robb Report, Bartender Magazine twice. We've been in Forbes. We're in a lot of national press. I won the 2024 WSWA Brand Battle in Las Vegas, which was a huge compliment to us and to the team. And I think that we really appreciated that, that time to go out and hang out and meet a lot of industry professionals. That really did take a springboard approach into so many different things. Distribution companies reaching out and not just some, but all of them. Yeah, Southern and RNDC and Breakthrough and Allied and like literally all the major ones have reached out and import companies from the EU and Canada have all wanted to try product and really trying really excited about it because again, it gives, it gives the distribution company something that they have been looking for, which is a different set, right? It's something completely different. There's literally nothing on anyone's shelf that compares to it.

Wow.

So when you walk into a bar or a restaurant or a mixology or an off-prem location, there's nothing that touches it. You can, there's no competitive set. You can look at price point, maybe you can look at class of reposado, but you're not going to be able to find one that was coffee-aged, organic. It's not a liqueur, right? But if you— a lot of people say, oh, it's like Cafe XO or like Mr. Black's. No, it's not at all because these are liqueurs and this is a tequila. And I think that's been our biggest hurdle is just the educational aspect.

So what is it that gets you out of bed in the morning, gets you excited to go to work?

Yeah, it's, it's my mind. I like— my ADHD is my superpower. Like, it's my title on LinkedIn. Like, I, I literally Yeah, it's a blessing and a curse. But no, I think I'm just a naturally driven person. I really just— I love— I, I don't know, I think it's made my upbringing between my father and my mom and all the people around me have always just never shied away from getting, getting shit done. And not just to get it done, but to do it with a purpose. I think that's the biggest aspect. And I've never found any more joy than just building my own, just personal, personally, right? I just enjoy doing it personally. It's not for a financial gain. I think everyone has a different skill set, or a mindset I should say, is what their level of success is. Mine's not a financial success. It's driven by just, you know, my personal goals and being able to give myself enough time to be with my kids, or, you know, be able to take the vacation without asking for permission. So that's, you know, do it differently.

What do you think, as you think back on this project and all the previous businesses you've created and owned, What is it? What's the unique skill set that you think you bring to the table that makes all this so successful?

Resilience. I'm resilient. Like, I'm like a cockroach, bro. You can't kill me. Yeah, it's one of those things when it comes to like my— when I say kill me, I mean like my drive to succeed. And I don't mean it in— it's not in a negligent way, right? I'm very dialed in. I'm very focused as to what the goal is. But I also will be the first one to realize that this is going the way it should and we need to pivot or we need to abandon. I do a lot of due diligence on all of my projects. Prior to even committing to it. And I think anyone that knows me knows, like, when I commit, I'm all in, and it's intense, Mike. I get pretty intense as far as where I'm at and how I want to go. And so I think I bring that to the table a lot. I think I also do a pretty good job at bringing teams together. From the restaurants, having a couple restaurants, we've been a pretty large team of employees with managers and stuff, and I feel like it was always run pretty well. I made a lot of mistakes and I learned from those, obviously. And going into this tequila team, it's very similar where we're learning, but I'm very quick to fire myself from as many, you know, jobs as possible and bring on the people that know better than I do. So I'm never too proud to sit there and say, oh, I know it, but I don't. The reality is I don't know all of it.

That's a recurring theme that I hear over and over again from successful leaders is that hiring the right people and letting them do their thing is the most important thing you can do as a founder and a CEO.

100%. Yeah, you've got to entrust in the team and you You got to realize, and your job is to, as a CEO, you definitely is to fire yourself as many, as fast as possible from all the jobs. You wear all the hats when you first sign on, right? When you first start the business, you have every hat that takes to make something a huge company. And slowly but surely you start taking those hats off and giving it to somebody else. But trust those people to do their job, but also be, you know, cautious and know that if there's a time to make a change, you got to make the change because it's going to end up hurting the entire team. So you find that Zed, the faster you can find that Zed, the better you can.

Yeah. In all of your experience, how important has listening been to you?

Insane. It's insane. Yeah. Yeah. It's something that listening is one of those things that's hilarious because when you're a little kid, it's listen, pay attention, like, listen, pay attention. You're ordered to listen. You're ordered to listen.

That's right.

And it's very challenging as a kid because your mind's going a million miles a minute and I think struggling with ADHD, which is fact that growing up my whole life, that was always been a challenging aspect because my mind's been running it. And as I've gotten older, you have to learn different tactics in order to listen and shut yourself off and just shut yourself up. But one of the tactics I've learned is on Zoom calls, I have my finger usually constantly on the mute button because I tend to sometimes I'll have an idea and I want to say it. And I'll mute myself so I can get it out of my head and then I'll remember it. But I didn't interrupt the person talking. I just had to listen a little bit. But it's extremely crucial because if you don't pay attention to those that are there to help you, you're going to miss the information that they're giving you. And it just always comes back to bite you in the ass because you're wondering, what do I do now?

Have you run into— I'm sure you've run into people who are not great listeners. How do you handle them?

It's funny because I have, I have a good mentor who I think is at times a good listener, but other times loves to just talk over you. And yeah, and I find that actually sometimes if they're talking, I have to be the— take the ringleader. I have to be the— I have to be the leader in that conversation. Not necessarily being the leader in the conversation doesn't necessarily mean you're the one talking. It can be that you're listening and you listen more and talk less. And sometimes people just really need to get it off their chest and they really need to talk it all out. And I think that the best way to do that is to listen to them, be— take the control in the listening aspect and let them finish and then ask them a specific question about what they just said. And I think it changes the scope of the conversation a little bit.

Ryan, how do you deal with— how do you deal with the messes that inevitably arise in your businesses?

The things that happen, often fights and arguments.

People don't get along. People get pissed off at each other.

I don't have that in this team, to be honest with you. We— I've actually had a lot of compliments from the people that come on saying this is the most supportive team they've ever been a part of.

Wow.

We've had— I had plenty of that in restaurant. Plenty of that. And I actually— quite a few, to be honest with you, hilariously enough, a lot in the medical space. A lot of pointing fingers because you're talking a lot of money, you're talking systems that go down, and engineers want put the blame on a different engineer. There's, uh, like networks issues, for instance. They'll want to put the blame on the network guy because they don't want to have to go in and do the call or be the one that's the reason why. The facts will be facts. You just have to let the facts roll out and let it play out. And then, and you'll, it comes to light pretty quick. And the restaurant, I was going to say, how do you learn?

It's, I, I can see the, I think I see the evolution in the restaurant business. You're dealing with conflict all the time. Because you've got a lot of different people. It's people that work in restaurants, kind of, some people love it, but a lot of people, it's just a job and a lot of different personalities, not paid particularly well. So you can just see that there's gonna be a lot of conflict. You learn lessons there. It sounds to me like in creating Quinta Lisa and the culture that you took me, it sounds to me like you took the lessons you learned in the restaurant business and applied them to the culture of Quinta Lisa?

Yeah, I think you look in the restaurant space and that's a great example because like you said, it's very tense, but you have to understand the reason, I think, why the conflicts happen. And it's usually not the reason what they're yelling about, right? There's in a restaurant, you've got consumers. Customers are the worst people. They're extremely rude. They talk down to people. They're demanding. And as a employee or a bartender or a waitress or server, you have to take it, right? That's, it's your job. You can't talk back, but it doesn't mean that you take it and forget it. You take it and you store it and then you go in the back and then someone spilled a drink on your foot by accident and you lose your shit. Right. And you start yelling at that person. It's really not that, that you're mad at. That was the trigger. And I think that identifying what the triggers are and understanding, hey, look, we're all under tension here. We're all stressed. We're all running around. We're at a packed house. We've got a line out the door. We've got waiters doing this and servers doing that. And. You want to point the finger at everybody else because you think you're working a lot harder than everybody else is and you're the only one working here. But the reality is that you're underpaid, you're overworked, it's hot, and it's frustrating, and nobody wants to be there, period. Not even the owners have to want to be there 90% of the time. It's just a field that they fall into. With this base, on the other hand, this shit's fun. We're having a lot of fun. Not to mention that— not to say that it doesn't get testy, and I should say stressful, at times when we're busy, but again, we're serving tequila. We're having a good time. We're laughing. There's no rush here. We're having fun. And there's sometimes miscommunications on scheduling. I would say probably that would be our only hurdle at times where it was a communication error on when we're supposed to have this meeting or this video shoot or that call and things got mixed up and we missed something. That happens. We figure out, okay, what's the problem here? Is it our platform? We just switched over actually to monday.com to start doing a little bit more organization on the formats as far as we start getting busier, but those are so small, right? And I think it's the making sure that the people that are on your team understand that. And again, it's a different pace set. It's a different mentality. It's a different, completely different environment. So it is truly apples to oranges, but it does at the same time have given me, I think, training to see those red flags before they start to happen.

Are you running a virtual operation or hybrid?

Uh, hybrid. We have a team here in Florida, but our PR is out of Texas, New York, and UK. So there are, she serves back and forth from New York and UK. And then you have Merritt's in Montana. Uh, our copywriter is in Texas as well. And the rest is, oh, and our VP of sales is in San Francisco, but everybody else is here in Florida. So we have our creative meetings. Luckily, our creative team, our videographer, photographer, and creative director are all in Florida. So they're, they have their noodle sessions every Thursday, most likely usually in person. Either at a bar or a coffee shop or here at my house to come up with some ideas of what the next videos and stuff are. But everybody else is virtual. Every Monday we've got a call at 3:30 standing.

Did you finance this yourself or were you able to get outside people to come in and help?

I bootstrapped it pretty far, but we do it— we did go with a convertible round that we are currently in right now, but we've attracted some pretty heavy hitters for our Series A round. So we haven't quite gotten there yet. We're Probably looking for funding in maybe October, but right now we're okay. We're, we've got ourselves pretty far. We've, we're able to, with our investor pool that we have now, we've been able to secure some pretty good funding.

Where, so how do you see the trajectory of the company over the next couple of years?

It's a deeper versus wider approach. So I think a lot of brands, and this is where, excuse me, this is where being an importer and distributor before starting a brand has truly helped me. It's given me a looky-loo into how brands, some of their successes and failures, some of the things that they've done. Wrong, allowing me to pivot and make a decision as to how we run Delisa. And one of the biggest, uh, things I've seen brands, I think, regret is going way too big, way too fast, where they went really deep into their inventory and they spread out the inventory across the entire country, and it was basically a drop in the pan each state. So it didn't make enough impact, and the brand awareness wasn't there, so nobody knew about it. So it was a one-time buy from a district, from the distribution company in that state, and then they never reordered because it never gained traction. So our approach is a lot deeper versus wider. We're hyper-focused in South Florida, trying to kill it in our backyard. We're launching New Jersey May 1st, and that's a parlay state for us. It's a good, it's a good play. It's a great test state. It's extremely dense. Uh, you don't necessarily need a state rep for it. You can get it done with brand ambassadors. So financially, it makes a little bit more sense as far as how much, how big of a team you have to have there. But when I say it's a parlay state, they get busy in June when we start getting slow in June in Florida. It starts getting hot in South Florida, right? So that works. And then obviously all the snowbirds that come from the Northeast down, it's a good play. Pretty excited about New Jersey. That's where we're at. When really, I don't have enough data to support a decision moving forward until we have at least 6 months traction. So up until right now, we've been doing self-distribution with my company. So we've been— I've been knocking on doors, and we brought on a broker company in the last month to help us with sales, but all the accounts that we've placed, everything we've done has been through self-distribution, which is a challenge. A lot of restaurants and bars, they don't want to bring on a new distributor specifically for one SKU, right? So that's a big ask. And I had a high price point on it for, for a reason. I put a high number on it because it was a proof of concept period. When the distribution company takes over, we want the price to go down, we don't want it to go up. So they got to be the good guy going in, and it excites them, it gets them to where they go, oh, I like this product, it was moving at this price point, now that it's lower, I can put it menu and really move it. And that's, that was the game plan behind it. So we'll have a better idea 6 months from now, as far as how Jersey and Florida is going, as far as what our next plan is.

But so you're going to, it's going to be a slow rollout. You're going to pick your markets very carefully and strategically.

It's a slow rollout until it's not. So I think you look at brands like Breckenridge Brewery. I don't know if you're familiar with them or not, but fantastic job at doing a slow rollout. Lalo is another really good example that folk hyper-focused in Austin. They're from Austin. Spent quite a bit of time before they started trickling into Houston and Dallas and San Antonio. And, and they're all in the same state. They did a really good job. Now they're in 50 states in just 5 years.

Wow.

Um, and they did 5,000 cases year one in Jersey. So they've done a phenomenal job at spreading the brand awareness and using that slow approach on a single SKU. So we're mimicking them a little bit. We're taking some, you know, notes out of their book. And same thing with Breckenridge Brewery. They held that vessel pressure in Colorado for quite some time, trickled out to the West Coast, and then took a slow approach to the Northeast before they got bought out by, I think, Anheuser-Busch or Coors or somebody big. And then they were everywhere, in every grocery store in South Florida to Maine. So yeah, slow approach and hyperfocus until you're not, and then that's— you turn the light switch on and you go for broke.

But so one more question, I'll let you go, Mike. What's one thing about yourself that we'd never— we would never know about unless you told us? Revealed it to us.

I love writing. I, yeah, I actually wrote a children's book and then I wrote, I actually am writing, I just finished actually a, a movie. It's called Snowbirds. It's actually through the Writers Guild now, so I can say that, but it's completed. It's an animated movie about a pigeon that wants to fly south for the winter.

Yeah.

Yeah. So that's, that's something I do on my back time. I really enjoy doing that writing and I've been playing ice hockey since I was able to skate. I'm from Pittsburgh originally.

Oh, okay.

So that's Pittsburgh. I've lived there my whole life up until I was, I think I moved to Florida in 2008, whatever, however old I was then. But yeah, I moved. My son who's 16 plays hockey still. He's a goalie and I love hockey. It's great. Great sport.

Good for you. This has been great, Mike. Thank you so much for your time today.

Yeah, I hope I answered all the questions and, and yeah, it's been fun.

It was great. Doug Noll here. Thank you so much for listening to Listening with Leaders. If you are a successful executive leader who would like to be on this program, please visit podcast.dougnull.com/podcast. If you got something out of this interview, would you please share this episode on social media? Just do a quick screenshot with your phone and text it to a friend or post it on the socials. If you know someone that would be a great guest, tag them on the social media to let them know about the show and include the hashtag #ListeningWithLeaders. I love seeing your posts and guest suggestions. We are regularly putting out new episodes and content. To make sure you don't miss any episodes, go ahead and subscribe. Your thumbs up, ratings, and reviews go a long way to help promote the show and mean a lot to me and my 19. Want to know more? Go to my website, DougNoll.com, or follow me on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. That's @DouglasEnoll. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you on the next show.