Steered a distillery through two pandemic pivots

Two pivots in 2020#

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the distillery had to change both what it made and how it sold it. Production pivoted from spirits to hand sanitizer, and sales pivoted online. I helped lead both.

Pivot one: who do we donate to?#

I helped coordinate the distillery’s strategic pivot from spirits production to manufacturing hand sanitizer. This involved researching all potential recipients within the region and developing a system with which to evaluate and prioritize them. Balancing the interests of internal stakeholders and external community leaders, we forged apolitical guidelines for distributing 5,000 gallons of hand sanitizer per week to various agencies. In addition, the client’s policies had to follow FDA and WHO guidelines.

Documentation sample#

The following is a sample from the document, outlining the need for fact-based decision-making:

Evidence-Based Operations#

The plan should acknowledge evolving needs during a disaster while establishing processes. This includes creating project charters that define project managers, stakeholders, and staff to handle new eventualities and communications such as resource and PR strategies.

In addition, procedures should ensure that plans are consistent, but not necessarily identical (e.g., based on the individual vulnerable population’s actual needs); that resource management is coordinated (e.g., valuable resources are not wasted); and that specific attention is given to protecting the interests of at-risk populations (e.g., not only first responders but other critical staff and immigrant/at-risk populations).

Leadership will continue to monitor the situation as best it can, to ensure its processes meet the community’s evolving needs.

…

Summarized Decision-Making Model#

We will follow the steps below to operate:
1. Determine the facts: who needs hand sanitizer, how much do they need, where are they located, how will they accept delivery, and when do they need it?
2. Define the ethical issues: who are the stakeholders, and define any ethical issues involved (e.g., conflict of priority, the legality of delivery, physical ability to distribute, the health risk to internal staff, significant economic costs, priority based on bias, large volume request of a scarce resource, etc.)
3. Identify the application of outlined principles: fit within vulnerable populations, transparency related to the request and decision, legal authority to produce, triggers and lines, and within evidence-based operations.
4. Specify alternatives to fulfilling the need: ignoring the request, handing over delivery to another organization, delaying fulfillment, or denying the request.
5. Compare: are the alternatives a clear course of action in the case of imminent harm?
6. Assess the consequences of the proposed decision: positive and negative for alternatives, and positive and negative for applied decision. Including any short-run gain or losses that may conflict with long-run considerations and reveal unanticipated consequences.
7. Make a decision.
8. Monitor the decision. Iterate as needed.

Promotion#

In addition to this work, I authored speeches, articles, press releases, and contributed to the coordination of the PR campaign promoting this initiative.

Pivot two: an online store in under two weeks#

I spearheaded the launch of a $60k eCommerce initiative to facilitate the distiller’s business pivot during the pandemic. The MVP (minimum viable product) was deployed in less than two weeks and realized a cost savings of $10k under budget.

I collaborated closely with the sales team to establish a baseline scope and choose a hosting platform (Netsuite, Salesforce, Magento, Shopify, or Square). We established several core features needed, based on strict legal requirements for selling alcohol across various states and counties:

1. Provide purchase name and verify over 21
2. Lot numbers for each bottles
3. Limitation for bottle sales

As the project manager I had to liaise with several departments, ensuring their needs were met:

• Hospitality: Develop safety protocols for curbside pickup, as well as the methods for communicating these policies (such as staying in one’s vehicle while picking up orders) to customers.
• Legal: Ensure the shop and all its policies were compliant.
• Accounting: Ensure all required sales data was captured and exportable to accounting software.
• Production: Draft and check informational copy for accuracy.
• Design: Negotiate template look vs premium brand guidelines with minimal customization to reduce development time as well as risk. Design HTML transactional emails.
• Marketing: Develop all copy for launch announcements.
• IT: Test transactions, tax compliance, and transactional emails before launch. We created and tested the digital process to provide guests with a safe and convenient pickup experience.
• Company leadership: Stakeholder management, keeping sponsors updated on project progress and timeline.

Iterating to close-out#

After launch, I facilitated a lessons-learned meeting that produced launch checklists and improved processes in the hospitality department for future projects. We curated a backlog that included items such as automatic Netsuite integration, a task that we had suggested for launch but later deemed a "nice-to-have" as it proved far more challenging than anticipated (manual sync sufficed for the MVP).

We continued to iterate and learn from the shop until the end of its life. During close-out I worked with accounting to export all sales data from Shopify, checking that it was intact and contained each kind of data the accounting team would need in case of an audit—a mission-critical task in the alcohol industry. On my recommendation the company built out process checklists and kept the Shopify account open well after closure in the interest of compliance, justifying the cost-benefit of a small fee versus data retention.