Brand opportunity arises
Founded in Philadelphia, Stateside started as a craft vodka company and quickly gained local popularity. However, a fresh demand emerged with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent closure of bars. With consumers confined to their homes, the desire for ready-to-drink (RTD) cocktails surged in the Alcoholic Beverage category. Recognizing this opportunity, Stateside seized the moment and successfully launched its version of canned cocktails: Stateside Vodka Soda and Surfside Iced Tea.
Ambitious Growth Goals Require the Right Talent, Fast
Motivated by its early brand success and consumers' enthusiastic adoption of its RTD line (Stateside Vodka Soda and Surfside Iced Tea), Stateside embarked on an ambitious nationwide expansion. The company faced the formidable task of swiftly extending its reach into numerous untapped markets while onboarding around twenty new sales contributors. The new roles included salespeople, State sales managers, and Regional sales managers. Securing these pivotal players within a tight 90-day timeframe was imperative to ensure operational readiness by January 1st.
As an unknown emerging brand in the new markets, Stateside needed to find sales talent with experience building awareness and supportive relationships with distributors. However, the company's limited visibility beyond the Northeast region posed a challenge in attracting top talent. Therefore, undertaking this focused, thorough, and time-critical search required the proficiency of a trusted talent management partner such as ForceBrands.The firm, with its specialized recruitment capabilities, a well-connected network, and an impeccable reputation among Alcoholic Beverage industry professionals, was the ideal Stateside employer brand ambassador.
When a Placed Candidate Becomes the Hiring Client
The complexity and scale of the search initiative were daunting to Stateside, but they had a proven partner in ForceBrands. The recruiting firm had recently placed John Grant as their VP of Sales. Having personally gone through the firm’s recruiting process, he wholeheartedly endorsed ForceBrands to lead the formidable buildout of the sales organization. He had faith in their strategy to secure highly skilled talent for his new team and ensure a positive experience for candidates throughout the process. Coming full circle, the recruiter who initially helped place him at Stateside would now recruit talent for his team.
I was confident in ForceBrands just from my personal experience as a candidate… So when I was a hiring manager… I knew they would be professional all along the way."
— JOHN GRANT, VP OF SALES, STATESIDE VODKA
Aligning Talent Strategy to Growth Strategy
“The inspiration for growing this brand as fast as possible is really competition and understanding that we are first to market with some product lines,” explains Bryan Quigley, one of Stateside’s Founders, “Knowing some of the other big players in the United States will be coming out with a copycat or trying to take market share meant we needed to be as fast as we can across the nation. To be first in the eyes of the retailer, the consumer, and the distributor.”
Quigley and Grant collaborated with the ForceBrands team led by Eric Rosen, Client Strategist, to align the growth strategy with the talent strategy. Due to the similar high frequency and turnover characteristics of RTD products and beer, Stateside’s initial idea was to recruit individuals from the beer category with established relationships with specific distributors. In addition to beer-savvy recruiters, Rosen oversaw a team of highly skilled specialists with sales talent connections at RTD alcohol and cocktail companies. With this well-rounded representation of industry experience, talent strategy could be aligned with growth goals in an efficient and quick manner.
We’re disruptors. We move fast. But we don’t do anything sloppy…The way ForceBrands operates and the way we operate was very cohesive… it was an ungodly amount (of positions) in a truncated timetable. ForceBrands understands the necessity to just move as quickly as possible."
— BRYAN QUIGLEY, FOUNDER, STATESIDE VODKA
There’s Just So Much Bandwidth at a Growing Brand
Stateside required a partner who could handle a complex hiring process with utmost organization and efficiency while maintaining seamless and constant communication. After all, Stateside's leadership is focused on actively building their business and cannot afford to divert their attention from mission-critical activities to manage the hiring process.
Grant says having a partner like ForceBrands under such tension makes all the difference. “Onboarding, hiring, training 17 employees, in addition to navigating hundreds of wholesale contracts at the same time all around the holidays, it was like a perfect storm,” he recounts, “But they did their job well. The fact that they had the recruiting part so buttoned up allowed me to focus elsewhere.” He continues elaborating, “I knew that they would provide a quality pool of candidates… really well screened. I knew they would be very plug and play.”
A Disciplined Project Management Approach For the Win
Rosen emphasizes that filling a single position requires one approach while recruiting talent for nearly twenty roles demands a disciplined project management process. In addition to Rosen as Strategist, the ForceBrands team included a crucial Project Manager, Connor MacWilliams. Like a quarterback on the field, MacWilliams assumed the responsibility of propelling the search initiative forward. With great skill, he adeptly led the recruiters, harmonized communications, was hyper-responsive, and transformed potential chaos into a seamless, efficient experience for the client. The approach was customized to Stateside’s preferences - from communication style to reporting requirements.
“Hiring at this scale is really complex… you're dealing with anywhere from three to five candidates for each position at any given time. So if we're extrapolating upon that, at its height, you could have upwards of like 80 to 100 candidates that you're considering for positions across the country,” explained MacWilliams, “There is not an Excel spreadsheet refined enough to be able to manage that workflow properly without having balls dropped… [I am] bridging communication gaps… synthesizing information. I can keep things streamlined, making it easy to make decisions without overwhelming the client.”
Done & Done: Delivering Talent that Matches IQ & EQ
To guarantee that candidates are not only matched based on functional role IQ, ForceBrands excels in immersing itself in the client's culture. This enables ForceBrands to pinpoint and secure candidates with the requisite skills for the role and who resonate with the client's Emotional Quotient (EQ). Rounding out the ForceBrands project team were Philadelphia-based recruiters who are passionate consumers of the brand, bringing a personal dedication to the success of this initiative.
“When you’re an emerging brand, especially opening in new markets, your recruiting team must not only be great talent acquisition partners but be a brand ambassador who builds excitement about joining the company,” Connor MacWilliams, ForceBrands
Stateside Vodka Recommends ForceBrands
The intricate search initiative ran like clockwork, and the Stateside team was delighted with every aspect: the coordination of candidate identification, talent analysis, and comparison, background checking, interviewing, and extending offers. ForceBrands’ excellence was rewarded with more searches added to the original mandate. In the end, ForceBrands delivered talent that matches the sales team and is a perfect fit for an exciting, high-growth brand.
“It was a very fluid process,” said Quigley, “[ForceBrands] did what we would think is a very tall task, and they accomplished it in a very short period of time, and delightful to work with… If you need to hire pivotal people and you’re under the gun, then take a hard look at [ForceBrands]. I would endorse them, for sure.”
He continues, “If you wanted to capture the essence of how well [ForceBrands] did, it’s just the way the sales reps hired mesh together. It’s just a family.”
