We recently connected with Michael Smith and have shared our conversation below.

Michael, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

In 2019 my brother and I were looking into opening a brewery and distillery and I spent about a year travelling around and visited probably 50 different distilleries and breweries. I met with the owners and was trying to gather as much information as possible before we started our new venture. After almost a year of immersing myself into the world of beer, spirits, and cocktails I had not found the path I wanted to take. A few weeks later we were the first ones to arrive on a vacation trip with my siblings and their spouses. We grew up with fond memories of having Bushwackers on trips to the beach so we decided to make some Bushwackers and have them ready when the crew arrived. We ended up driving to 5 different stores before we had all the ingredients we needed to make them. After we prepared them and took our first sip, we looked around the kitchen at the mess we had made. That is when I had we had that aha moment and said to each other “why hasn’t anybody ever put this in a bottle like the margarita and pina colada mixes?”. That is when I said “This is exactly what I have been looking for this whole year!”. All the hurdles I had been concerned about with a new brand melted away when talking about the Bushwacker. Not only was it something that we had fond memories of but it was a cocktail that many people had the same experiences and memories of as we did. One of the toughest parts of creating a new brand is educating the consumers on what your product is and what it tastes like. With the Bushwacker, that had existed for almost 50 years already.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

Thanks to Michael Smith and his friend and business partner Carter Eckles, fans of one of the most popular cocktails in Florida and surrounding states now can enjoy the Bushwacker from the comfort of your home, on the deck of your boat, or as the signature cocktail at your wedding—just add ice. The version that Michael and Carter finally settled on includes Caribbean rum, real dairy cream, natural coconut, coffee and chocolate flavors, and caramel coloring; it is 17% alcohol by volume (ABV).

Michael and Carter grew up drinking the cocktail; Michael was in central Alabama, where The Bushwacker is popular. One night in 2019 the friends were on vacation and they decided to mix up a few batches of their favorite drink but they grew frustrated when they realized that they had to go to four different liquor stores and a grocery store to gather the ingredients. Taking note of all the readily available Margarita mixes and Piña Colada mixes, they questioned why nobody had ever created a mix for The Bushwacker. Neither of them had been in the liquor business before—Michael had recently sold his tech company and Carter was an owner in his family’s grocery store business—but they decided to follow what seemed like a great opportunity to do something different.

Michael and Carter spent almost all their life savings getting FDA approval and finally on March 4, 2020, they were ready to launch their company. Then March 14 dawned with the beginning of COVID and a distributor shutdown. The tenacious business partners didn’t give up.

“People were working from home so we found their home numbers and we called them. Nobody else was submitting anything. On May 5, 2020, we had 110 cases and we started shipping bottles to people at their houses; 45 days later we were out of the first 110 cases. By December we had made 2,000 cases and we were running out again.” Bushwacker’s distinctive cream-colored bottle adorned with groovy palm trees is now available in 2,500 liquor stores in Florida, Alabama, Georgia, and Tennessee.

A winning combination of luck, timing, and perseverance has established Bushwacker Spirits as a company to reckon with and they’re not planning on slowing down. Michael hopes to add a tasting storefront to the HQ in Sarasota. We hope to be the first ones in line.

Can you talk to us about manufacturing? How’d you figure it all out? We’d love to hear the story.

We originally believed we would start by having a distillery manufacture our product for us and eventually transition to manufacturing it ourselves. However, we underestimated the process involved in handling a product that has dairy in it. I had spent a year visiting distilleries and educating myself on the processes involved in manufacturing spirits but I didn’t envision ending up with a product that also includes dairy. We initially contracted in Florida to have a small distillery help us build recipe and manufacture our product. But about 3 batches in we had a complete disaster and had to throw away everything we had made. At the time, we had put every dollar we had into making that batch and figured it would be the end of the company. Luckily, we had shown enough sales to that point that we were able to approach family and friends as investors and they joined us. With our new capital we were able to start a search for the best fit for our product. We ended up all the way in Wisconsin at a distillery that specialized in cream-based spirits products. We thought we had found the solution to our problem at this point. We started concentrating on selling as fast as possible. About a year into that relationship we were growing fast and once again were in a position to have to put all of our funds into manufacturing the product to keep growing. Then disaster struck again. Even though the manufacturer we were using is one of the best in the country, the supplier for one of our ingredients had a quality issue and it cost us nearly a million dollars in inventory. We didn’t find this out until after we had already bottled a batch that would have been a year supply. This really took the company to its knees financially at the time and we are still recovering from that. The positive from it is that it forced us to concentrate more on quality control and risk mitigation. We now make smaller batches more often and have many checkpoints in place to lower the chance of those types of issues from happening again. All in all, we had almost 2 years of setbacks because of manufacturing growing pains. It can really pause the momentum and we are lucky to have made it through with the help of some wonderful investors and partners. My takeaways from our manufacturing experiences is to never take your eye off of the manufacturing side of things and to always have someone internally checking everything the co-packer does. My co-founder, Carter Echols, spends nearly all of his time now keeping an eye on the supply and manufacturing process and is constantly adding more quality control checks.

Can you talk to us about your experience with selling businesses?

Even though I have been a small business entrepenuer all of my life, I had mostly been in service type businesses that were not saleable as an aquisition. They were more of a business that served as a job for myself and up to a couple of partners or employees. So when I started a live-streaming platform in 2008 I knew how to build and grow a business, but I was inexperienced with how that business would be viewed by potential buyers. I, along with a talented partner, grew that business for 10 years and had great success from a revenue and profit standpoint. In 2017 we started to get offers to purchase the platform and we began that process. I was very suprised at how long it would take to close a deal. I figured “They want to buy the company so here is our price and we will start the paperwork”. Boy, was I wrong. We had that deal fall apart once they started low-balling us and we declined. Then other companies found out we wanted to sell and started calling me. Most of them were lower than our value offers no more than we could make in a few years by keeping the company and continuing to run it. Then the dark side of the process showed up. We had one company file an IP lawsuit against us that totally suprised us. After our lawyers went back and forth for a while I got a call from their CEO and he said “We will drop our suit against you if you sell to us at a discounted rate. You can either spend a couple of million dollars on fighting us or you can cash out”. After talking with my partners we decided that we just couldn’t let someone get away with that and we declined their offer and spent a lot of our hard earned dollars on fighting them for the next year. This derailed lots of other offers we had coming in because they all wanted any outstanding lawsuits cleared up before making an offer to us. After going through about half a million dollars in legal fees, we eventually got the case settled once they realized we were not giving in. Then, I hired a broker and put the company back on the market. We had an offer within 2 weeks and negotiated much higher than we were expecting. Here are a few things I learned through this process once our attorneys started the deal. The process could take from 3 months to 1 year to close. You are going to have to work for them for a year afterwards. You won’t be getting all of your money at one time. There will be a lot held back for a year or more while they make sure everything you showed them is accurate. You will have to be dilligent and make sure to go to them every time a payment is due and make sure they pay you. Have your t’s crossed and your i’s dotted. Make sure you have someone to help run your company because all of your time will be spent preparing information for the deal. And lastly, expect to pay around 10% of the acquisition price in broker fees, legal fees, and accounting fees. I sold that company in 2019 and put everything I had into starting new businesses. That is how I ended up with Bushwacker. That experience taught me to look at the value of a business in new way. We hire consultants often to take a fresh look at our company and make suggestions on how to grow value that can translate into an acquisition rather than just looking at it from an operational profit standpoint.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.bushwackerspirits.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bushwackerspirits/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DrinkBushwacker#
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/bushwacker-spirits

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