The Right Reason To Get Out of Bed

Posted by Tom Wark on Nov 30, 2006

Worst case scenario is you get up in the morning and shuffle off to a job you despise. I’ve done that. Believe me, it’s the worst possible career/work scenario.

Best case scenario is you get up in the morning and you know that through your job today you get to be a part of something groundbreaking, something you are excited about and something that’s going to drive real change.

That was today.

Today I got up knowing I would be sending out a press release that would hit, literally, 10,000 journalists’, wine writers’, magazines’ and wine bloggers’ email boxes and would deliver a message of hope and change.

Inertia Beverage Group is a client at Wark Communications. Today they officially announced to the world the birth of a system that allows restaurateurs and retailers in New York to order wine directly from wineries in California. It will eventually–soon–be deployed for other states too.  I know, it sounds mundane. But it’s not.

For the past five billion years a winery has had to procure the services of a wholesaler in New York in order to sell their wine to retailers and restaurants in that HUGE market. If you are a new winery or a small winery it has generally been very difficult to obtain the services of a wholesaler. They represent tons of wineries already and if the winery doesn’t stand to deliver enough immediate profit to the wholesaler, which they likely don’t, they simply don’t bother with new or small wineries.

Plus, restaurants and retailers in New York often can not get their hands on 1000s of wines for this same reason.

Inertia Beverage Group’s new REthink Wine Trade System changes all that. This launch has been a long time coming, involved countless man hours of programming as well as significant discussion with the regulatory powers that be in New York in order to make it a reality.

But today was the day.  I got to send out a press release that LEGITIMATELY included the words ‘historic", "paradigm change" and "groundbreaking". We don’t get to do that very much. No PR person gets to do that very often. So you can see why today was a Best Case Scenario work day.

Describing this new web-based software that Inertia has created, discussing its implications and trying to explain the complexity of the wine distribution system in America that it changes forever is not an easy thing to do unless you are talking to folks who already get it. Those were the folks I tried to talk to first today. In the coming days we’ll be explaining this system to those who aren’t so well informed. That will be tougher. But just as fun. More good reason to get up in the morning.

Why am I writing about this given I rarely write about Wark Communications clients?   I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how too often our careers tend to drive our interests, rather than our interests driving our careers. I think the later is clearly preferable, yet the former seems unavoidable. Isn’t the ultimate goal, when it comes to career, to move the slider as far as possible toward being engaged in what we enjoy? Shouldn’t figuring out how to do that occupy at least as much time as figuring out how to make sure you are out of the office by 5:00pm?

This has been my goal for the past two years. Today I was reflecting on the the degree of success I’ve had making my career meld into interests. Anyone who has read FERMENTATION for a while knows that I"m deeply interested in legal implications of wine distributing and the necessity of an equitable system. The REthink Wine Trade system Inertia is deploying helps level the playing field without plowing it up. It means more sales for small wineries, more access to great wines for restaurants and retailers and the potential for wholesalers to help incubate a brand without a significant outpouring of capital. When I can be involved in even a tangential way in launching this kind of system, you know it is a real "happy-to-get-out-of-bed" kind of day.