We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Pam Malcontento. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Pam below.

Pam , looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Folks often look at a successful business and imagine it was an overnight success, but from what we’ve seen this is often far from the truth. We’d love to hear your scaling up story – walk us through how you grew over time – what were some of the big things you had to do to grow and what was that scaling up journey like?

We took The Whiskey Hound from nothing to far beyond what we thought it would or could be in 2 years. 4 Key Factors did this: 1. Don’t overanalyze; dive in. Learn the legal and compliance stuff first, then just start making connections, building relationships, and attempt to say YES to anything that doesn’t immediately sound like a money/time sucker.
2. Allow yourself patience to learn from your mistakes and keep trying to improve. Packaging, formulations, sales processes, inventory and storage systems; whatever. Allow yourself to get inspired and energized by those middle of the night crazy ideas.
3. Promote yourself and your product shamelessly but stay humble and substantial. People know when you aren’t.
4. When you catch those big orders; just dive in and do what you didn’t think you could do. You’ll be ready to move on to the next volume level once you do it once.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

We create Whiskey and spirit based sauces that contain substantial amounts of spirits to create a truely unusual and delicous sauces that transform people’s meals. Our spices are unusual and multipurpose to be used to smoke ribs, season popcorn and caramelize salmon steaks and roasted potatoes with exotic flavors.

We strive to create a brand with personality for foodies and those that want to be foodies.

I worked in multi-national Fortune 500 companies for years is Quality and Food Safety and it was time for me to go back to my creative food roots; I payed my way through college working in some super cool restaurants in Arizona and Pennsylvania. Growing up in AZ I was obsessed with BBQ Sauce which took a backseat to salsa. I worked on my Bourbon Beer BBQ sauce once I understood and enjoyed Bourbon, living in Arkansas, immersing myself in their BBQ culture. Nashville was a super collaborative business atmosphere to launch this business and support other local business owners. I am proud to have our products in people’s pantries and to hear their rave reviews.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

Speaking corporate “language” and staying in the middle of the road to keep everyone happy. I had to learn to move out of what had become my comfort zone and do things I had never done and be outspoken. No corporate politics in The Whiskey Hound!

If you have multiple revenue streams in your business, would you mind opening up about what those streams are and how they fit together?

At the request of one of our largest customers Nashville Barrel Company, we started catering their events with Charcuterie and Hors d’oeuvres and Bourbon infused desserts. This has been so successful that we are fully launching The Whiskey Hound Catering this summer throughout the metropolitan Nashville area for business and personal events.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.thewhiskeyhound.com | whiskeyhoundcatering.com
• Instagram: thewhiskeyhound
• Facebook: nashvilleswhiskeyhound
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-whiskey-hound/
• Youtube: @nashvilleswhiskeyhound946