If you are making good wine, your tasting room is busy but your winery is not profitable. It’s time for an independent Winery Profitability & Business Analysis.
There’s an old saying in the wine industry: “If you want to make a little money in the wine industry, start with a lot of money.”
This is a difficult business, but it is not an impossible business. Owners call me because they can see profitability on the horizon, but they can’t quite get there. The wine club is growing slowly. The tasting room is busy on weekends but sales never fully cover expenses. After years of trying, they don’t know where the fix is.
I find the answers that work for your unique situation. My analysis looks at the business as a whole — brand, positioning, costs, and how you’re selling across every channel — and then I dig into the numbers. I find you a route to profitability that will actually get you there. You get a written business analysis of what is happening, a roadmap to winery profitability and help to get you there.
How the analysis works
The PEMDAS framework — Planning, Engineering, Method, Distribution, Acquisition, Stewardship — covers the full arc of a winery business. A profitability problem rarely lives in just one place. I work through the whole arc to find where the business is leaking and where it has room to grow.
Brand & Marketing
A profitability problem is often a positioning problem underneath. I look at who you are selling to, how you are reaching them, what you are promising, and whether the experience you deliver matches the expectation and your vision. I show you how you compare to your local and regional competition through real benchmarks.
Revenue First
For most wineries, the path from red to black runs through sales. To change from losing money to profitability is revenue: your pricing relative to comparable wineries in your market, which channels are generating real margin, your wine club and tasting room profitability, do you have the right mix and plan to turn it around. I work through each of those in detail.
Cost Analysis
Packaging decisions — bottle type, closures, label choices, the number of different formats across your product mix — are hidden margin drains that owners often don’t see as cost problems. I examine your cost per case structure to find where those decisions are working against you and to establish the floor your revenue has to clear.
What you receive
My analysis lays out why you are not meeting your goals, how the pieces are connected and how you compare with wineries in your market. I include all of my sources so that you can see the benchmarks for yourself. The roadmap is the part you execute: the specific moves, in the order to make them, that get you to your goals. I don’t hide my assumptions and my numbers tie. As you move forward, I’m here to help you.
- Written analysis
- Roadmap to profitability
Why owners trust me
I have a deep understanding of how all of the pieces of a winery work together – from winemaking to sales. I understand the numbers, the margins and what information is critical for you to track. I’m not an accountant and this is not fractional CFO. I don’t just tell you what the numbers are. I tell you what they mean and what to do about them — from the perspective of someone who has been a winemaker, built wineries, and sold wine. My analysis is grounded in your actual market: your pricing and channel performance against comparable wineries in your area, not California averages that may have nothing to do with your winery.
I work solo and I work straight. I will tell you the truth the business has been avoiding, including when the answer is uncomfortable. I’m invested in seeing you succeed, not in the decisions that got you to here.
Client Work | Estate Winery Willamette Valley, Oregon
An estate winery in Oregon’s Willamette Valley had been making wine for years as a side business. The owners wanted to retire and run it full time. Finally living the dream they had been building for years. It had never turned a profit.
My analysis showed they were underpriced against local wineries of comparable quality and volume. At their price, profitability was not possible. The key was finding a price that met their values of providing quality with affordability. Raising their prices to just above the local average would get them there — and still sit within what their customers already expected to pay. They made the change. On the next wine club release, they were profitable for the first time. Not one member pushed back or dropped. Equally important, they felt like they were being honest with their prices.
Raising prices is not always the answer. Matching the right price to the wine, the values, the vision, and the customer is.