Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Brahm Callahan. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Brahm, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Can you talk to us about a risk you’ve taken – walk us through the story?

I’ve spent a large part of my career taking risks, either through starting businesses, committing myself to a path (like trying to pass the Master Sommelier Exam) or acquiring assets. Risk is a scary thing, and generally it should be taken with great care. But growth and success often depend on taking some risk, and while it can be scary if you properly assess all the points of significant friction or issues in a risky venture you can often times be successful in a “risky” scenario. I have found over the years that the best thing to do is control as many unknowns as you can and look at the problems you are facing from as many angles as possible so that you can derisk what you can. There is also the idea of making small attempts at risky situations and finding small wins. Everyone wants to hit a homerun but even the best baseball players in the world strike out 2 out of 3 times…hit a bunch of singles and all of a sudden you have a ballgame.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I have been in the hospitality business for 25 years, worked in restaurants and retail as well as worked as a consultant in the wine industry for over a decade. In 2018 I started a company with a number of partners that is a Fine wine based Venture Company called Faucet LLC – we own a winery, work in import, export, and fine wine asset management. We also have a Fine Wine online wine merchant called Berkeley And. Stuart Wine Company LLC where we source fine and rare wines from all over the world for our clients. We have a best in class online website – www.berkeleyandstuart.com where we use all custom photography and I write all the content to help tell the story of the producer we work with. We really are trying to tell a story to our clients so they get to know the wines we sell as well as we do.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

I make mistakes all the time and I think you need to be OK with the idea that you aren’t perfect and building businesses is a learning experience – generally when you work in a new space your going to make what might seem like a stupid or frustrating mistake. But so long as you learn from that mistake and move on and don’t make it again you are better for it. At one point I was new to importing wine and switched transport vendors – I thought my new vendor was going to do the same import paperwork and processing as my old one but turns out they didn’t. I had a pallet of wine worth well over 150K stuck in customs and my options per the TTB were destroy it or send it back to France. I freaked out, blamed my self and was thinking worst case scenario. But I asked the transport company to hold the wine while I tried to figure something out – I got in touch with our compliance attorney, filled them in and after some looking we figured out a work around. We then had convince Customs and the transport company that we had a solution. It took a lot of my time, and some cash but we got it figured out and we solved the problem.

How did you put together the initial capital you needed to start your business?

We were looking at options of fund raising but really wasn’t interested in starting a company and giving away a bunch of ownership and having a new boss to report to. So after looking at all our options we put together an Asset backed capital raise – there was a lot of risk in acquiring a large asset, lending costs and market fluctuations were at the top – and we were able to successfully liquidate a large chunk of the assets for a significant profit. This allowed us to self fund our company and build a 5 year runway for either success or failure before we ran out of money.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.berkeleyandstuart.com
• Instagram: @brealsomm @berkeleyandstuart @faucet.wine

Image Credits
Jimmy Hayes Photography