We recently connected with Tom McLendon and have shared our conversation below.
Tom, appreciate you joining 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.
Ninety nine percent of military veterans will tell you the number one thing they miss the most after leaving service is the camaraderie or the feeling of being apart of a team. I can certainly say that was my story. After retirement I found myself in a new job where friendships and camaraderie were not necessarily encouraged. It was increasingly hard to relate to my colleagues who had spent their lives climbing the corporate ladder and lacked a military background. For the first time in my adult life I wasn’t surrounded by people who had a similar background and purpose. It was lonely. My story isn’t unique, there are tens of thousand of veterans in the same situation. Oftentimes combat veterans can’t easily communicate their stories and experiences with friends and family who haven’t served. Unfortunately, those folks just can’t relate. And, that’s why we believe Warriors & Whiskey is a brilliant idea. Our mission is simple…to build a community of veterans and veteran supporters that want to share in rich camaraderie. Our whiskey clubs provide an incredible way for our members to reconnect and share stories while also exploring a common passion – whiskey. The clubs started, and continue, on social media platforms like Facebook, however, we have a robust ambassadorship program that is rapidly growing Warriors & Whiskey chapters across the country. These chapters are meeting in local distilleries, bars, and other venues to taste whiskies, but more importantly they are gathering to meet other people that they can relate to and share life stories. We’ve seen lives changed because of the simple yet powerful concept of brotherhood/sisterhood that we each share with all veterans. And, we’re not stopping with just the clubs. Our goal is to open micro-distilleries across the country that will not only provide amazing craft whiskies to the public, but will also serve as an official meeting place for our members. The VFW and American Legion were great resources for WWII through Korean War veterans, but unfortunately they’ve missed the mark with modern day warriors. We aim to close that gap by offering an amazing way for all warriors to gather and interact.
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?
Warriors & Whiskey is a whiskey experience company specializing in growing a community of military veterans and veteran supporters that want to reconnect to a team and foster amazing camaraderie, all while pursuing their passion for whiskey. The three founders, Tom McLendon, Milo Kaciak, and Jason Spencer are career Navy veterans that have an affinity for military veterans and want to make a difference in veteran lives. We absolutely fell into this business by happenstance. It’s a story of how opportunities can arise from everyday problems and how we all can capitalize on them if we just keep your eyes open. After a particularly challenging day, Jason found himself searching for whiskey clubs on Facebook. HIs goal was to join a local veteran whiskey club, but, to his dismay there wasn’t one. In fact, he couldn’t find any whiskey club that was associated with military veterans at all. So, he did what most military folks would do – he created one. The Veterans’ Whiskey Club took off with meteoric growth. Jason contacted Milo to help him moderate the club page and that’s when the idea for something greater was born. Milo brought me into the mix and the three of us created Warriors & Whiskey to start supplying club merchandise to its members. We suddenly found ourselves in a peculiar situation, we had an audience or follower-ship before we had a physical product. Our membership was driving our product line…a good problem to have. The clubs began growing at a rate of 500 to 700 members a week as word spread. As far as whiskey clubs go, ours is fairly unique. Most whiskey clubs are regional, however, ours is national. Regional clubs make sense for the type of activities that usually accompany whiskey enthusiasts. They conduct in-person whiskey tastings, barrel picks, bottle exchanges, and frequent local whiskey establishments. These types of activities are more difficult with a club that is spread across the nation. But give us a good challenge, and we’ll give you a creative solution. We began partnering with distilleries across the nation to provide our clubs with barrel picks that would be distributed nationwide by the distilleries. In addition to providing bottles to our members, most distilleries have agreed to donate a significant portion of the profit to veteran charities of our choice. We also created an ambassadorship program that is transforming our online presence into in-person city chapters that meet in local establishments. This has fundamentally changed the way we look at our clubs. These in-person meetups are therapy for those of us who need it. Stories flow, experiences rehashed, understanding and affirming nods from those who have also experienced similar situations began changing lives…and that’s why we do it. We’re starting a non-profit next year to pour more resources into helping veterans. We believe that through the power of community, veterans’ lives can be enhanced. Through our non-profit we plan to bring national and international travel experiences to qualifying veterans.
How did you put together the initial capital you needed to start your business?
The funding of our business is an ongoing battle. We’re just under two years old and we haven’t secured a reliable and steady source of income. (Although that’s about to change.) That may seem odd to most business owners, but let me explain. We didn’t start our business with a whiz-bang idea to sell a widget or particular service. We started it to answer a demand from our online club membership. Yes, we had a customer base before we had a product – weird. We simply began selling logoed merchandise from an ecommerce store. Some products were purchased wholesale, which required personal financing, while other products were designed and sold via drop-shipping websites requiring little to no upfront funding. Over time we strove to provide better quality products and moved to screen printing which required quite a lot of upfront purchasing which was funded by us three founders. The most surprising expenses have come from everyday operating costs to include website and email hosting, graphic design costs, legal costs, accounting and tax costs, mentorship/coaching costs, CRM software subscriptions, project management software, etc… We continue to bootstrap the business, which has been challenging, however, we’re on the cusp of securing our own line of whiskey that we anticipate will change things considerably. As we continue to push into the next, and more expensive, phase of our business, we’ll rely on investors and government grants to make our dream a reality.
How did you build your audience on social media?
Social media is a finicky beast. On one hand our club Facebook site grew incredibly fast, while our Instagram and Tik Tok audiences barely grew at all. We attribute the Facebook growth to simply providing a product (club) that resonates with our intended audience. Honestly, whiskey and the military have a long and storied past that make this club a no-brainer and veterans just want to be a part of it. Plus, the forum attribute of Facebook is ideal for our members to interact. Through experimentation we’ve learned a few things about social media that’s worth passing on to the uninitiated. Social media in general is best used for very niche markets. If you are targeting everyone, almost no one will follow you. People want to associate with special groups. They want to feel apart of an exclusive group, so give them one to be apart of. Also, each platform is used for a specific cause. Facebook, for us, is a way to bring our exclusive audience together to interact with each other. Instagram, on the other hand, is used to recruit members to our clubs and introduce our products. All social media require regular attention, else they atrophy. We’ve recruited several motivated moderators for our Facebook sites and they have proven their worth time and again. Jason spends a ton of time on Instagram just to keep it growing and relevant. If we don’t post regularly, our followership drops off pretty quickly. Oh, and video is king. You have to post videos to draw attention.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://warriorsandwhiskey.com/
- Instagram: warriorsandwhiskey_
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/warriorsandwhiskey
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/warriors-and-whiskey/
- Twitter: @WandWVeterans