Issue link: http://winesandvines.uberflip.com/i/877508
32 WINES&VINES October 2017 Viewpoint A few weeks ago I attended a day-long seminar covering successful approaches to running a tasting room and wine club. The audience was a wide array of 50-60 industry professionals interested in learning how to grow or improve their current tasting rooms and wine clubs. As I took my seat at the seminar, I was hopeful that I would hear the nugget of wisdom that would unlock the mysteries of this industry I now find myself in. However, for all the good advice that I quickly tried to write down, I was surprised the one thing that didn't get a lot of mention or discussion was the only thing I've found so far as our winery's never-fail, tried-and-tested, key to success strategy: the importance of relationships, specifically the importance of building relationships with our consumers. As someone who grew up in Lodi, Calif., as the daughter of a winemaker and now manages most of the family business, I am both a "native" and a "newcomer" to the wine world. My family's small estate wine-production facility, The Lucas Winery, was one of the first wineries in Lodi when it began in 1978. We make approximately 2,000 cases per year, primarily Zinfandel and Chardonnay. My father, David Lucas, and my step-mother, Heather Pyle-Lucas, are wine industry veterans and met when both worked at Robert Mondavi Winery. As brief background, I spent 15 years of my career as a teacher and administrator at both the high school and middle school levels in the South Bronx. Having helped create and run a successful public school in New York City, I now spend most of my time consulting with other schools and districts interested in trying our strategies in their own schools. I bring this up because what I learned early in my career was that we could only teach students if they actually came to school, and it was much easier to keep them in school than to get them to return once they stopped coming. What is the never-fail, tried-and-tested key to our success strategy to keeping kids in school? Build relationships with them. This was core to everything we did. We hired teachers who had great rapport with kids, we created systems and structures to involve the whole family and extend services to them. We visited homes during the summer, took school-wide camping trips, and we made sure that every kid in our building knew they had an adult (their "advisor") who would notice if they were absent, would advocate for them and who cared about their well-being. Our students came to school. They graduated. They went to college. So, when I stepped back into the family business in 2015, I saw immediately a similar need to invest in relationships. As I tried to understand this new industry, I relied on the only experience I knew. I saw our wine club as a type of school and our wine club members as our students (our most important people). What did they need to stay in? To attend? To show up? Could it be the same thing that high school students in the South Bronx needed? Are we all really that similar? I believe the answer is yes. Our club members needed a relationship with our business not as customers, but as people. So for the past two years, our focus and priority as a business has been on building relationships with our wine club members. By every metric our wine club is outperforming the industry norm. Our new membership signups increased last year by 50%, and our net wine club growth was up nearly 10% over last year. More importantly, we are beginning to see a consistent trend in performance. It's not a fluke. Our wine club is growing. Our members are staying. To be clear, we had no idea what we were doing when we began making changes to our current wine club program, and we were hesitant. Like most small wineries, our wine club is a huge part of our business, and we didn't want to jeopardize it. We turned to some experts for a gut check. We enlisted the help of a market- ing and advertising agency, Vault 49, in New York City. Owned by a dear friend, we called in a favor and spent time working with them to rediscover what makes us authentic and unique. This was the first of three steps in focusing on relationships: 1. Build authentic relationships There has to be real investment on both sides for the relationship to be meaningful and to work. For us, this meant being able to communi- cate who we are and what we stand for as a b u s i n e s s . T h i s meant revisiting our values and how we live n MITRA GRANT The Business of Relationships: Lessons from the South Bronx