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With today’s economic headlines, I submit that a relevant corollary to the adage “necessity is the mother of invention” might be “unemployment is the mother of entrepreneurship”. This has certainly been true in the case of Pat Brubaker, who after losing his gig as director of operations at local ad agency Oliver Russell went for months without so much as a serious job interview.
With little other recourse beyond leaving Dodge, Pat dusted off his “one of these days” business plan, rolled the dice on his 401K, and opened the wine store he and his wife had dreamed of owning since their days in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Say hello to Bueno Cheapo Vino, located in an unassuming little storefront at 770 S. Vista. The store opened in Novemnber with little fanfare beyond word-of-mouth, but a December 16 article written by the Idaho Statesman’s Brad Talbutt “blew the doors off” the business, according to Pat and his spouse and co-owner Heidi Jacobson.
Brad’s article does an excellent job of telling the human-interest side of the Bueno Cheapo Vino business story. For the purposes of this blog, however, the story dimension that intrigued me had more to do with the entrepreneurial vision of the Bueno Cheapo Vino business model. To whit, it offers the lesson that focusing on the kind of experience you want to create for an end user is ultimately of greater importance that the uniqueness of your business concept.
To be sure, there are plenty of places that you and I can go for a bottle of wine – and even during the years that I lived in the Muslim world, I doubt that I was ever more than a quarter of a mile from a vino purveyor. But what sets Pat and Heidi’s concept apart is that they started from the end point of creating a particular type of experience for their customers, and worked their business model backward from there.
The operative word in the store’s name, “bueno”, speaks partly to the selection of wines it stocks, which Pat and Heidi carefully select from a number of different distributors, both large and small. What they look for is lesser-known gems from domestic and foreign vineyards, along with better-known vintages from less familiar sources. Alongside the cabs and chards, you’ll find red wines from the Basque Country, crisply acidic chenin blancs from South Africa, and those most under appreciated of varietals (in Pat’s opinion), roses.
But “bueno” also applies to the experience that Heidi and Pat want people to come away with. “We want to strip away the sense of luxuriousness that is wrapped around wine, and have people see it as the Europeans do – more of a commodity beverage than a luxury item,” says Pat. “We want people to feel comfortable asking us questions about wine without feeling ‘dumb’.” Essential to creating this experience is limiting the selection – not only to avoid “overwhelming” people with choice, but in order for Pat and Heidi to be able to speak to every wine on their floor from their own personal experience with it. “If you can tell me a wine that you remember having liked,” says Pat, “I can probably identify one that we have with a similar flavor profile. But we can tell you about all of them.”
Especially in an era of social media marketing, focusing on the customer experience is a sure fire way to create the kind of “buzz” that dumping a ton o’ money into advertising simply can’t duplicate. Not that I’d discourage anyone from buying lots of advertising from the Idaho Business Review, mind you (hey, I know what side my bread is buttered on).
And speaking of social media, if you’d like to listen to an interview with Pat about Bueno Cheapo Vino, I invite you to visit my demo site for locally-owned restaurants, Behind The Menu (man, was that a smooth product placement segue, or what?). Readers of IBR are the first outside of a very small circle of hand-picked sycophants (thanks, Mom!) to get a sneak peak…and all kidding aside, I’d love to get your reactions. It’s the least I can do for my blog readers. © 2009 Idaho Business Review
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