Food & Beverage
Smooth finish
How to adapt as you grow
By Matt McClellan
Smart Business Northern California | January 2009
Page 1 of 2
Peter Byck
president and CEO, Winery Exchange Inc.
No matter how bad the
economy gets, people
will keep drinking. That’s what helps make Winery
Exchange Inc., the company
Peter Byck co-founded in 1999
with two partners, recession-proof.
“People aren’t going out to
restaurants as much, but they
still want that nice bottle of
wine or some premium vodka
— they’ll just drink it at
home,” says Byck, the company’s president and CEO. “That
saves them money, but they
still get to enjoy that luxury
item. We’re kind of recession-resistant.”
The company has proved
that, growing from $4.2 million
in 2002 sales to $44 million in
2007, and Byck expects sales
for 2008 to top $60 million.
Smart Business spoke with
Byck about how you can
determine if a new direction is
worth your time and why you
have to make a decision when
something isn’t gaining traction.
Q. How have you dealt with
the company’s exponential
growth?
We’re a management team
that can adapt. We started as a
(business-to-business) with four
businesses. One was trading
bulk wine and grapes online
back in the exchange day. We
also sold supplies online. We
did private-label wine, and we
had strategic information for
the wine business.
We constantly evaluate
what’s happening, so we
quickly cut off the things that
didn’t work — which was the
trading of the bulk wine and
grapes and the selling of the
supplies. They were B-to-B
models, and the wine industry
is too relationship-driven.
But then we focused on the
private-label wine and the
strategic information, and
we’ve really been focused on
that ever since. We’ve expanded; we constantly adapt.
Q. How do you determine
which ideas to pursue?
We’re open to all ideas,
because I can’t think of
everything. You have to
evaluate ideas based on
what the economics are
and how it fits with the
overall business model.
We’ve created a core
engine at this company,
which is the ability to
rapidly develop these
private-label programs
from all over the world.
If the idea can augment the engine and we
can get a good return
for the engine that we’ve
built, that’s going to be
something we look at
closely. It comes down
to, ‘Do we get a good
ROI from what these
ideas are?’
