Ep 8: Finding Your Village with Thea Dwelle, Founder & Principal at Vine Wire Consulting

What if you are your own Finance Business Partner?  And what if you were able to combine your love of technology and wine into a viable business?  In this episode, we explore value creation from the perspective of an entrepreneur and business owner. Thea Dwelle, Founder & Principal at Vine Wire Consulting, shares her insights on making business decisions when the buck starts and stops with you, what customers are really buying when they introduce a new technology, and why Finance Business Partners need to be creative and see the big picture at every level.  Cin cin!

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Matt

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:02

I'm Matt Cooley. I'd like to welcome Thea Dwelley, founder and principal at VineWire Consulting. Hey, Thea. Hey, Matt. How are you doing? I'm doing great. Thanks so much for spending time with us today.

SPEAKER_00: 0:42

Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_01: 0:44

Please tell us about your business and how you came to the role that you have today.

SPEAKER_00: 0:49

Sure. I'm an accidental entrepreneur. I started my own consulting company, VineWire, in 2003 after a series of jobs in the mostly focusing on Salesforce and account-based marketing strategy jobs. And after my last job disappeared after a number of reorgs, as we know happens quite frequently in tech, I decided to strike out on my own. I actually did not intend to strike out on my own. I had found a really interesting job that blended my two passions, which are Salesforce technology and wine, and applied for the job thinking they'll never hire me. But they did. They just decided they wouldn't hire me as a full-time employee because I also have a blog that I write about wine and it was a conflict of interest. And so they became my very first consulting client. And from there, my consulting career was born.

SPEAKER_01: 1:40

Oh, that's outstanding. And I love the combination of Salesforce and wine. I mean, who does that? That's wonderful.

SPEAKER_00: 1:48

There's two people in wine country that do it because one of them was my business partner for a while. And there's over 400 wineries that use Salesforce. So it's not as small as you would think.

SPEAKER_01: 1:59

Oh, that's outstanding. All right, good. I hope we'll get more into that. So this podcast is for finance business partners to hear what skills and mindsets are really critical to long-term value creation for the organizations that they support. You and I have known each other for quite a long time. And what I love about your career story is how you've taken full advantage of the Silicon Valley tech scene and opportunities that that gave you, but then you charted your own path as a consultant, just as you said. And I think that's so cool. You have a technical marketing customer care background. background, an MBA, and various technical certifications. So you certainly know your stuff. I'd like to know what you think about us finance people. And as I said, you've known me for a long time. How has that view changed over the years? And don't use me as your benchmark for that.

SPEAKER_00: 2:50

I love that question because I do work with a lot of finance people as key stakeholders on a lot of my Salesforce projects. And they've changed quite a bit. I think that in 2020 in particular, and even starting in 2013, 2014, they've had to really put on more hats and think more creatively. In the olden days, you know, finance guys could be a little stiff. Maybe not you, but you

SPEAKER_01: 3:12

know. Who, us?

SPEAKER_00: 3:14

Maybe. I

SPEAKER_01: 3:15

don't recognize that.

SPEAKER_00: 3:16

So one of my jobs with developing Salesforce platforms is actually working with all the key stakeholders and understanding their needs. And it's really morphed because no longer are there strict, rigid things that you have to have for each department. You have to be able to be fluid and bend with a curve. And in the case of wine, I had to understand the agricultural calendar and what their quarters look like and what their incentives are and how things work differently in either the DTC, which is direct to consumer markets, or the three-tier system, which is how we distribute wine in America. So just understanding a totally different level of finance with wine, but then going to work with some very particular wealth management companies and understanding how wealth management and finance has grown on that side as well. Because the days of just having a personal advisor who knows you and you're their only client are really gone. And so having systems in place and having people that are flexible and able to roll the punches and move and just grow has been really interesting to watch over the last 10 years.

SPEAKER_01: 4:14

Okay. That's a great perspective. So for listeners that own their own businesses or actually, more importantly, aspire to do that someday, I want to ask how do you become a finance business partner to yourself, I guess? I mean, everything stops and starts with you. So how do you build those I have a really awesome tax accountant. He definitely

SPEAKER_00: 4:37

taught me a lot. And a lot of it is trial and error, but also a lot is just making friends with other entrepreneurs and learning from them. I come from a long line of entrepreneurs. You know, my father taught me a lot about being an entrepreneur in terms of business, but not a lot about money. So I had to basically form my own village and see who could help me in understanding what I needed to do to make my finances better as a business. but then also to actually figure out how to price myself in the market so I'm competitive but making money and how to run my business efficiently with a good bottom line because the first few years of starting any business I didn't know what I was doing I was just spending money and buying software and buying tools and I had to really learn how to spend smartly and to grow my business with both technology on my end to make my life easier and partners on my end to make my life easier and my finance partners are actually my competitors consulting agency that finds me work and people that refer me to other people for finding work as much as my accountants and my tax attorney and all these other people. So it's really building a village.

SPEAKER_01: 5:42

Oh, that's a neat way to look at it and the village concept. So I see some parallels in big companies. I work for a large company and that's interesting. It's really neat to hear. So I'm curious, when you're helping a customer implement Salesforce, for example, and I know you do more than that, but it's probably the bulk of your business. Is it really about the tool itself or are your customers buying something that helps build value in the overall business? And what kind of finance skills come into play in that situation? Can you give us a takeaway for finance business partners at companies of all sizes, like what you're really selling?

SPEAKER_00: 6:21

Sure. I mean, it's really a chicken and the egg situation because the tool is only as good as your business practices and that's only as good as your partners and your development. So I often have to help people really reshape their strategies and rules and shape a software piece around that. But that is up to and including the sales life cycle because I might come into a company that's an established company. One of my partners that I'm working with now is an established company, but they're really willy-nilly. It's back in the wild west days of tech. There's no accountability. There's no traction. There's no formal rules of engagement. And for finance, especially at a software company, you need to be able to track this information and things need to be a little bit more gated a little bit more clear. So I definitely go in and I make sure that we understand the business processes, but it's very helpful to have somebody from the finance team on your side as an ally to understand what they need out of the tool because they're going to need different things than your sales reps. Finance is going to need reporting and accountability and make sure all the boxes are checked. If that doesn't exist in your business process, I can't really put it into the tool. So it's definitely a balancing act of chicken and egg.

SPEAKER_01: 7:30

Okay. So you needed What I'm hearing is you really need us. That gives me a warm, fuzzy feeling then. All right, cool. So I'm a huge fan of your blog, which by the way, for our listeners is called luscious luscious. And you consult in the wine industry. You've participated on panels across the globe. Frankly, it's an awesome combination of business domain knowledge and your technical expertise that you bring to your clients. Where is value? being driven in the wine business today from your perspective? And if you're willing to throw it in, what are you actually drinking these days?

SPEAKER_00: 8:10

You know, it's interesting. Last year, I would have said value is in a completely different place than this year. 2020 has thrown everybody a curveball. I do a lot of work with very small wineries, and they're primarily the direct-to-consumer model, and they really have to drive things through smart websites and smart email campaigns and database campaigns. What I'm missing this year is people who didn't have a DTC presence have to, because we can't go to a restaurant. We can't necessarily go to a large format tasting right now. And wine lists at restaurants, they've shrunk so much that a lot of wineries that may have had a large on-premise, as we call it, audience don't anymore. So being able to pivot in 2020 and understanding your customer data, as well as the big picture data, is critical. And there's a huge lack of that right now in the industry. So this is what I do in the wine industry, what I love is using a tool like Salesforce or a winery specific tool and taking what we call big data aka what's going on in the industry what are the trends and matching that to your database and coming up with smart marketing campaigns because somebody who never did a marketing campaign in 2017 is now suddenly having to do a lot more because they can't just sell out of their cellar door or they can't just rely on a large restaurant business because unfortunately 80% of restaurants are going out of business this year in California alone.

SPEAKER_01: 9:29

So is it almost a survival tactic that they have to take on.

SPEAKER_00: 9:33

It is. It's a survival tactic for sure. And what I'm finding is I'm getting a lot more interest from wineries because they didn't have CRM and they have no idea what their customers were doing. And so being able to help them build that so they can go back to their existing customer database and remarket is critical. Wine industry is one that's very unique. It's not just like consumer packaged goods. Your audience is a relationship. And if you don't cultivate and build that relationship, they're leaving. People don't have a long attention span. band. They're out of there. They're going to the next winery. With 2,300 wineries in California alone, they don't have to go to your winery. You need to attract them and engage with them.

SPEAKER_01: 10:12

Right. Okay. So I'd like to ask all my guests, from your perspective, where is the finance business partner role headed and what should people be doing now to prepare for that future? And I love how, you know, this is sort of the final question here, but I love the conversation we just had because I again, for people thinking of a consulting career, owning their own business, or just basic value creation and providing that value with your partners. You've shared a lot here. So where is this role headed? Like, let's say the next five years.

SPEAKER_00: 10:46

You know, that's a really good question. I think things are so different right now and things will continue to evolve from right now. We have to be able to be creative. I don't think there's going to be anybody in 2021 that has a very strict role. We're working leaner. We're working smarter. We're working from home. A lot of the finance partners I work for are now actually becoming Salesforce admins, or they're also doing sales because that is just what's happening in the market right now. So just being able to find your village, as I said before, and being able to be flexible and pivot and not be in that strict role anymore, things are changing. And now as the Generation Z comes into the workforce, they're working in a totally different way than I worked. Most of my business right now, my business communication is on Slack. We're not emailing as much anymore. We're not even talking on the phone as much anymore. We're sending short, concise messages. So being able to understand the perspective of a younger, different generation, different trained financial team and pivoting off of that, nobody's job is a box anymore. We just have to be able to see the big picture at every level.

SPEAKER_01: 11:52

That's outstanding. I love that perspective and appreciate you sharing that. Well, listen, thank you for being with us today, Thea. I really appreciate it. Yeah, That's awesome. And thank you to our subscribers for listening to this episode of Upside Downside. We'll see you next time.