Page 7 - BusinessWest June 17, 2024

don’t need to go as much as I used to,” Kozub said, noting, again, that the criti- cal to keep that distillery busy — at opti- mum output, the facility could increase production 10-fold — has prompted the latest adjustments to the business plan, capital raise, and plans to aggressively move into other states.
“Before, it was a case of wanting to grow; now, it’s kind of like we have to grow,” he told BusinessWest. “I’ll make this analogy ... instead of buying milk from the store, we now own the cow. We need to keep the distillery busier, and we need to essentially double the business that we’re doing now.”
Elaborating, he said he has no real desire to produce other vodka labels in Kamien, only V-One. Which means producing more of it.
“And to do that, we need to put more people, more salespeople, on the street, and tell the V-One story,” he said, adding that this need to hire and ratchet up marketing efforts — although the company still relies heavily on social media — was the impetus for the recent capital raise.
“My next goal is to get V-One in at least five more states in the next 12 to 24 months,” he said, adding that Florida will be the next target.
Entrepreneurial Spirit
The Sunshine State should be a natural next step, Kozub went on, noting that, while consumption of vodka in Poland is higher during
the colder months of the year — pri- marily because people there drink it straight — in the U.S., vodka is gener- ally mixed with other ingredients that are put over ice, making it a warmer- weather choice.
“You have to put someone in each market to tell your story.”
“A place like Florida has great, year-round weather for vodka drink- ing,” he said. “And there’s obviously
a lot of vacationing, a lot of people
by the pool. You really don’t want to drink heavy drinks when you’re by the pool; you want lighter drinks like a vodka soda or mojito.”
As he noted earlier, entering new states and new markets is difficult — and expensive. With immense com- petition in the vodka aisle, there is a strong need to build brand awareness and gain a foothold. And this requires boots on the ground, he said, adding that, while V-One works with distribu- tors, those large companies represent literally thousands of different labels.
“You have distributors in each mar- ket, but you also want to have some- one talking to those bars and restau- rants and liquor stores,” he told Busi- nessWest. “You need to have some-
BusinessWest
one else telling the story because these distributors are selling 3,000, 4,000, maybe 5,000 other items, and they’re pushing the big brands, so the smaller brands just get left by the wayside.
“So you have to put someone in each market to tell your story,” he went on, adding that he is looking to bring on several additional salespeople in the coming months to do this storytelling.
While Florida is the next primary target, the goal, as he mentioned, is to be in a handful of other states within the next year or two.
New York is another primary target, he said, adding that the plan after mak- ing some headway in that all-important
state is to move down the East Coast, perhaps into Virginia, Delaware, and North and South Carolina.
“We want to keep things on this side of the country for now,” he said, add- ing that the ability to ship products to different states (35 of them at present) enables V-One to expand its presence in that fashion. It’s a small but nonethe- less meaningful arrow in the quiver, but one that is growing steadily and has potential to continue the growth trajectory.
Overall, expansion into a new state comes with a price tag of $100,000
to $250,000 for marketing, additional salespeople, and other expenses, he
said, adding that this is just part of the cost of doing business.
And it’s a critical aspect of being at this important tipping point for V-One, as Kozub called it. As he noted, the company has progressed from wanting to grow to needing to grow.
“For me, it’s time to take that next big step,” he said, adding that he’s approaching this next phase for his company the way he has all those that have come before it — with a focus on that original dream of creating a vodka label and then taking it around the world. BW
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