The Legendary Story of Jack Daniel’s

🧠 The Takeaways

Special Birthday episode: Why Jack Daniel is my most inspirational entrepreneur.

1. Turning sales opportunities into brand-building moments

2. Building successful relevant biz to the core biz.

3. Elevating a community with his success.

+ How I’m celebrating my birthday.

LBAB! Community - The Unplug Weekend

For this quarter’s digital detox weekend, I went to Oaxaca, Mexico with my closest friends from middle school.

Why Oaxaca?

1. It’s the Mezcal distillery capital (think Bourbon trail but for Mezcal).

2. It’s a culinary hub in Mexico.

1 of my friends on this trip and I did the Bourbon trail in Louisville back in 2018, and it was a great weekend. We sampled a bunch of bourbons we did and didn’t know. Ate a ton of great food and got to catch up. 

The goal: which we successfully accomplished, was the recreate that weekend around Mezcal with our wives.

Interestingly, both cities (Louisville and Oaxaca) are both culinary hubs and centers of iconic spirit production in their areas.

People who care enough to see where their alcohol is made always care deeply about food.

It was an incredible weekend where I got to experience a new culture, eat incredible food, and learn about a process I’ve always been fascinated by. 

I’ve been to Mexico a bunch of times but Oaxaca was different.

Let’s Examine This Biz

Note: As always, none of what follows is legal, tax, investing, financial, or any other sort of advice. And I was never here.

Since it’s my birthday weekend I’m going to take the newsletter in a different direction and talk about the most inspirational entrepreneur I’ve researched.

Jack Daniel. Yes, there is a real human behind the brand.

An orphan of the Civil War, he started bootlegging liquor across the south to make a living. After gaining fame, he partnered with a local preacher, Dan Call, who made whiskey with a freedman, Nathan “Nearest” Green, on his property.

After learning the recipe and figuring out how to sell the whiskey, Daniel partnered up with Call to start the Daniel Call Distillery.

The distillery was one of hundreds in the South in the later 1800s, but it quickly became one of the most well-known whiskies in the area through Daniel’s clever marketing and distribution tactics. 

He then broke away from Call to form his own distillery and grew it as a family biz.

In 1904, Jack Daniel’s Old No. 7 won Gold at the world’s fair, and the rest is history.

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Let’s Examine This Legend

Here are the 3 reasons Jack Daniel is the most inspirational entrepreneur I’ve studied.

1) He leveraged short-term wins to build a brand.

Everything about Jack Daniels’ life + his bizs were about survival. He resorted to bootlegging because he was a broke orphan without prospects. 

In the early days, the distillery survived by selling to anyone who would buy. This forced Jack and the company to invent creative forms of marketing and more reasons for customers to buy his whiskey:

• He would throw parties in downtown Nashville. Naturally, supplied with his own products.

• He funded the Silver Cornet Band to play at all local Lynchburg events. To create a festive drinking mood.

• He built 2 bars in Lynchburg. The whiskey drinks were made with… you guessed it.

What today sounds like the blocking + tackling of field/event marketing were innovative tactics that not only sold more whiskey in the moment but also built long-term positive associations with the brand. (The Silver Cornets are still an active band in Lynchburg, almost 150 years later).

Takeaway: Best way to build a brand: Get your product into people’s hands.

2) He turned his success into more relevant bizs

As Jack Daniel’s, the biz became so successful he leveraged his success into other complementary bizs.

Whiskey production consumes + creates a high amount of farm-related products.

To create Whiskey, you need:

• Wood to age barrels.

• More wood for the charcoal filters (what makes Jack Daniel’s sweeter).

• Corn, Wheat, and Barley to create the core mash.

• A TON of clean water.

The byproducts of whiskey:

• “Brew mash” - The leftover cooked wheat/grains.

• Ethanol - A portion of the alcohol that is too high proof to drink. (Today, it’s sold as Jet Fuel).

• Whiskey barrels - Sold to Wine/other liquor makers for aging.

Once the Whiskey brand became successful, he:

• Became the largest landowner (farms) in the region.

  • Trees + Grains for whiskey production.

  • Byproducts fed livestock.

• Created a donkey transportation biz (the main form of distribution at the time).

• Built multiple bars in town (to sell more whiskey).

• Started a Waterworks company selling the water from his lands.

Takeaway: He turned his cost centers into profit centers.

3) He funded his community through his wealth.

When you become an insanely successful biz owner, you don’t just become the largest employer in town, but you need to do something with all the $.

Instead of hoarding it, he created multiple enterprises/organizations to propel his wealth while building the community.

• He founded a bank in Lynchburg, TN.

• The distillery built a fire brigade, which is the largest fire department in the area.

• He hosted/funded an annual Christmas feast for the whole town.

The generally high employment of the area led to a school being built and children of all ages attending. (Sounds crazy now but was ahead of its time for rural Tennessee in the late 1800s.)

He ended up having no heirs, so he donated/spent most of his wealth and had a nephew take over the biz.

Takeaway: He became incredibly wealthy AND lifted his community up with him.

Final Thought

Jack Daniel is my ideal of American Entrepreneurship. 

A story of an orphan bootstrapping (Literally and figuratively) what became 1 of the most iconic brands in the world. Building an empire that supported an entire town in the process.

The biz’s trials and successes meant navigating immense risk from a production, market and customer perspective. The distillery faced ever-changing laws, Prohibition (happened after he died), and religious protesters literally destroying their products (part of the temperance movement).

A family biz for 100 years became what I consider 1/ the top 5 most iconic, globally recognized American brands.

I think a lot about how much of the lore around American Entrepreneurs was created from stories about Jack Daniel and. how some of those stories were inevitably influenced by general American folklore.

The more I learn about Jasper Jack Daniel, the more I believe our idyllic belief in Entrepreneurship is based on him. 

A model I strive to replicate in everything that I’m working on.