IAM1181- Wine Guide Passionate About Wine

Jennifer is a passionate wine guide with Traveling Vineyard. She lives in one of the most well-known areas in the country for Pinot Noir with her husband, a 5-year-old German Shepherd named Lexi and their rescue cat named Graycie. Her full-time career is as an executive assistant for a national insurance and wealth management company. Jennifer is excited to start traveling again and is looking forward to seeing her friends and family in the very near future.

• CEO Hack: Treating each quarter as a 12-week year each with its goals
• CEO Nugget: Get over the fear, the worst response you can get is a NO
• CEO Defined: Always improving on yourself while bringing others on board to also improve themselves

Website: https://www.travelingvineyard.com/guide/765548/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jenbringswine,

IG: jenbringswine

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Transcription

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00:09 – Intro

Are you ready to hear business stories and learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and level up your business from awesome CEOs, entrepreneurs, and founders without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresh values your time and is ready to share the valuable info you're searching for. This is the I AM CEO podcast.

00:37 – Gresham Harkless

Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast. I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Jennifer Collins of Traveling Vineyard. Jennifer, it's great to have you on the show.

00:47 – Jennifer Collins

Thank you so much. I look forward to talking to you and giving you a little bit more information about what I do.

00:52 – Gresham Harkless

Yes, absolutely. Super excited to have you on as well too. And super excited to hear about all the awesome things that you're doing. And I wanted to read a little bit more about Jennifer so I could hear about some of those awesome things. Jennifer is a passionate wine god with a traveling vineyard. She lives in Salem, Oregon, in 1 of the most well-known areas in the country for Pinot Noir with her husband, a 5-year-old German shepherd named Lexi, and their rescue cat named Gracie.

Her full-time career as an executive assistant for a national insurance and wealth management company. Jennifer is excited to start traveling again and is looking forward to seeing her friends and family in the near future. Jennifer, great to have you on the show. I love all the awesome things you're doing. We had so many great laughs before we got started, but are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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01:34 – Jennifer Collins

I am.

01:35 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Well, let's do it then. So to kind of kick everything off, I wanted to rewind the clock a little bit. Hear a little bit more on how you got started, what I call your CEO story.

01:44 – Jennifer Collins

So Traveling Vineyard is a direct sales company, very much like a Mary Kay or a Pampered Chef. And I'm an independent wine guide. So I'm kind of an independent contractor that works with them. I actually answered a Facebook ad. So I was looking for something a little bit different. I had an event planning background and I was kind of missing out on that as a career change happened for me.

I missed being out in front of people and I missed having a full calendar and I missed all the aspects that go with that. And I kind of this ad kept coming through for Facebook and said, hey, you know, do you want to share wine and get paid to do it? And it intrigued me. And I did all my homework. I watched every YouTube video I could on the company, on the CEO. I looked at their stats, contacted the corporate office, and almost 3 years ago, joined the team.

02:36 – Gresham Harkless

Nice, absolutely loved that. Happy 3 years. And it definitely sounds like, you know, you talking about that event planning background. It sounds like, you know, Last time you had those moments in life and like I've been preparing for this all my life and it sounds like those marrying of those 2 kind of worlds came together and you've been able to kind of you know hit the ground running from there.

02:54 – Jennifer Collins

Absolutely it was it definitely took a lot of that side of my brain so when you're an executive assistant you use a very detail-oriented very structured you know gotta have everything black and white And when you get to do event planning, you get to use a little bit more creative side, you can do you know, 1 of my favorite things was to do floral arrangements with really cool tablecloths and that kind of things. So it was marrying both sides of my brain that I love to work with the most. You know, I get to do the events where I get to be out in front of people and be super social and be the social butterfly, but it also requires a lot of detail and keeping your calendar full and keeping your hosts informed on what's going on. So yeah, it was a perfect marriage for me, for my dual brain.

03:39 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, it makes so much sense. And I think it's something that we often forget. Sometimes we could get in silos and say, we need to have the really, you know, focus, make sure we're looking at all the details and we can't be this or we can't be that. And, you know, we just get in those silos. But I think we often forget that a lot of times having both of those sides of the brain allows you to be more present, allows you to free up that time so you can help out those clients while at the same time you're making sure that you're taking care of all the details so you don't have to worry about that. Absolutely. Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. So I know we touched on a little bit, but I want to drill down a little bit more. Can you take us through a little bit more on how you serve your clients and what that looks like?

04:16 – Jennifer Collins

So traveling vineyards' whole premise is a try before you buy the environment. So when the company started, the CEO and 1 of his friends decided they wanted to kind of take the intimidation factor out of wine tasting. So if somebody is not familiar with it, and we all have to start somewhere, everyone has had an MD 2020 or a Boone's Farm experience, where it leaves you going, wow, did I really drink that? And then I could get the paint off my walls with it. So the point of this was that they wanted to make sure that people: felt comfortable and they wanted to be able to have it happen in their own homes.

So you can invite your friends, you can invite your people over. We do some food pairing education. So it's literally a try before you buy, I bring 5 bottles of wine to your home. And then you get to invite your friends. And we go through it, people can order wine that night and have it delivered to their home or delivered to the host, we can work with a lot of different arrangements on that. And I will tell you, I did an event last December and there were 7 people there and 4 of them had never been to a winery.

When they got invited to the event, they were, they said they were a little intimidated about coming they were anxious, and that they felt like there was going to be pressure about either buying or knowing more about the wine than they did. And they ended up not ordering, but all 4 of them walked away and said, thank you. Thank you for giving us that experience. So we know that when we walk into the winery, we don't feel so intimidated anymore, or we don't feel like we don't belong there. And especially in like the Napa area where the wine tasting fees are like $40, $50. And then you get in there and you're like, wow, I didn't like any of that, now what? So, and that's not to diss on Napa. I don't want Napa haters on me.

Please don't call me Napa. Don't add her, don't add her. No Napa haters. It's just that there's, that's the actual reality is the price point for the tasting. So it's just a great way to get to be able to like I said, try different varietals that you may not know you like. If you think you're a sweet wine drinker and you're like, I'm ready to graduate to Reds. That's how we kind of, it's an easy transition. With the pandemic, it's been a little bit harder. Obviously, we haven't been able to go into people's homes, but I have, my whole company has switched the model. We do online Zoom events.

So I can do, if you've got friends across the country, you would order the wine ahead of time, everybody is in their own homes. And then I do a Zoom presentation. So that has worked really nice because it also has helped people who have people across the country. So I've done events where we've done it, 04:00 East Coast time, 01:00 Pacific time, and we've got everybody in between, and they're all on Zoom getting to actually interact and have a good time together. So that's been really great as well.

07:06 – Gresham Harkless

Absolutely, I love that. And so would you consider that to be what I like to call your secret sauce? The thing you feel kind of sets you apart and makes you unique. Do you think it's your ability to be able to have those conversations to make sure that you are creating that great experience for the people that you work with?

07:20 – Jennifer Collins

I do. I think that there's, I think that 1 of my secret sauces is that I can actually get everybody involved. If you've got someone who would typically be a wallflower and doesn't contribute to the conversation, When you are talking to someone about wine and you're saying, okay, give me your 3 adjectives for it, right? That draws them out. And that actually helps them not feel like they are the wallflower. Or I always go, what food would you pair with this? You know, we make a joke about the fact that chardonnay and buttered popcorn is actually a meal. It's just not defined in the dietary structure.

But it is a meal. And then if you want to have a glass of red when you're done and throw some dark chocolate with it, it's it's a complete meal. So I think that that, I would say that that's 1 of the things is that, and a lot of my hosts have told me, we love how engaged you are with everybody. I don't focus on everybody that just has the wine knowledge that's there, even though I'm absorbing what they're saying, you've got to be able to reach everybody that's sitting in a room with you. If you've got 18 people, there's got to be something in that group that makes you connect with each 1 of them. The biggest compliment I can get is a thank you as they walk out the door and say they had fun and that they learned something.

08:33 – Gresham Harkless

I wanted to switch gears a little bit. And I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be like an Apple book or a habit that you have, but what's something that makes you more effective and efficient?

08:43 – Jennifer Collins

So as a team, our director decided that this year, some of our, leadership was going to read the 12-year week or 12-year month. I'm not gonna look at it. I talked to you about this before. And now I remember what it was. So what it is, it talks about how a lot of the people, a lot of companies take a year and they do annual planning. And so by your fourth quarter, if you haven't hit the numbers that you really want to meet, you're drowning, you're scrambling, you're trying to get those taken care of, and you're trying to make sure that that fourth quarter gets hit. This kind of does a reverse model on it, and they want you to treat each quarter as a year.

So when you do a 12-week year, you're going to actually have goals that are in those 12 weeks. And they said it's worked really well with Olympic athletes, professional athletes, because you work on your training program, and then you celebrate what you've done in that 12 weeks, and then you move on to the next 12 weeks. And the goals can roll over, but they actually have to be achievable. And I think it helps break out, you know, for all of us who are independent contractors, we're notorious for not doing anything with our taxes till the end of the year.

Like we pull out the shoe box and we find the receipts and we try to get everything into QuickBooks and our CPA is calling us going, where is it? Where is it? Where is it? And I think if you go back and you look at like a 12-week year, you're like, okay, for the first quarter, I'm going to make sure that last week in the first quarter, all of my receipts are logged in appropriately, all my mileage is up to date, and then you can roll into the second quarter. And I think it alleviates some of that fourth-quarter pressure. As my group has just started doing this since April, and it's been incredibly effective. People who are utilizing this and working this business full time, are finding great success with just making small incremental goals that you need to hit every day to hit that goal for the 12 weeks.

10:35 – Gresham Harkless

And so I wanted to ask you now for what I call a CEO nugget. So this could be a word of wisdom or a piece of advice. It might be something you would tell a client or if you hopped into a time machine, you might tell your younger business self.

10:46 – Jennifer Collins

If I could type into a time machine, I would say that it's funny because I'm super social. And once I'm in an event, I can pretty much own a room. But talking to strangers about my business is really hard for me. This is 1 of the reasons I did this podcast is because I wanted to kind of I'm working on myself, but to go up and actually talk to a person who's actually in a winery and say, Hey, you know, would you like to do an in-home wine tasting? This is what I do, blah, blah, blah. It's kind of what we used to call the elevator speech on how long you can get from what you talk about your business between floors 1 and 10. So I would tell myself, just get over it.

The worst they can say is no. And if it's no, it's not personal. When you ask something, they don't know you well enough for it to be personal. So they if they look at you and say you're crazy. No, I don't want to do that. I've gotten way more comfortable in the last year doing this because I've had to reach I've had to be resourceful and say do you want to do an online event? Would you like to do this? I've been reaching out to more business owners as well. Bea and I have definitely helped me with that, which is how we met. So that's what I would do. I would say just get over the fear and it's not personal.

11:59 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome, Awesome. Awesome. So now I wanted to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. We're hoping to have different quote-unquote CEOs on the show. So Jennifer, what does being a CEO mean to you?

12:10 – Jennifer Collins

Being a CEO means that you are always improving on yourself while bringing others up behind you to improve on themselves.

12:21 – Gresham Harkless

I love that. I love that because I think so many times as we've been talking about that empathy part, we can get so caught up in what we're doing, what a CEO is doing or entrepreneur or whatever title that might be. But I think the people that truly are able to kind of tap into that are not just improving themselves, they're creating reverberations. They're making such an impact on so many other people that not only are they making their world better, but A lot of times the people around them are kind of being impacted by that as well.

12:50 – Jennifer Collins

100 Percent. And this is when you take the leap of faith to go into direct sales, whether it's a full-time position or it's a part-time position, it's sales. It doesn't matter if I'm selling wine or if I'm selling cars. It's literally a leap of faith to be able to put yourself out there to do sales. So if it's not your comfort zone and you think you want to try, different people need different levels of encouragement and different people need different ways of encouragement.

You know, I tend to be a gift-giver when my team hits certain goals. There's Starbucks cards in the mail or there's some kind of trinket and they're kind of like, we don't need this. I'm like, okay, well that's how I accept my stuff, right? So why would you want it that way? And the other interesting thing is that in my industry, there's no defined age. So we have wine guides that are 21 and we have got wine guides that are 71. So learning how to navigate all of that for being able to work with them. You know, when when you say, Oh, yeah, just do a real Instagram. I'm like, well, sometimes that doesn't relate to everybody.

So how do we make sure that any of the wine guides that are on our team are getting the effective communication and encouragement to run their business the way they need to do it if they're not ready to jump on Instagram or if they're not ready to do TikTok or if they're not ready to do any of that stuff. So There are times when I feel like I'm in the middle of when we learned how to set our VCR and record shows, right? It's like, how do we teach everybody? And everybody was looking at us to do that. And now I'm looking at a younger generation to help me figure out other stuff. So I would say that that's a really big thing is being able to bring the people along with you to celebrate all the victories.

14:37 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. And I love that aspect and especially being able to kind of meet people where they are and understand who they are and what they're trying to do and understand the tools that we have a lot of times are ways to communicate and also to communicate to who a person is and how they're their quote-unquote love language or how they communicate and what they might see as appreciation. So it's so important that we forget about we don't forget about that human aspect and make sure that we're communicating. So Jennifer, absolutely appreciate that. I appreciate your time even more. What I want us to do is just pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional that you can let our readers and listeners know. And of course, how best they can get ahold of you and find out about all the awesome things you're working on.

15:16 – Jennifer Collins

So I would just love for anyone out there to contact me. I probably shouldn't give my phone number but I'm going to if you want to edit this out you can. It's 541-990-2404. You can find me on Facebook on Jen brings wine. That's my business page. And you can find me on Instagram with Jen bringing wine. I would love to hear from anybody who's interested in doing some holiday gifts. It's never too early to start thinking about that. Want to do an online event or are looking to possibly branch into wine sales with me? So that'd be awesome.

15:53 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Well, Jennifer, definitely we will leave that in and definitely put that in the show notes as well too so that everybody can follow up with you. But Truly appreciate you for all the awesome work that you're doing. Appreciate you for, of course, taking some time out with us today and all those great experiences that you're creating all throughout the world, it sounds like. And I appreciate your time, of course, and have a great rest of the day.

16:12 – Outro

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

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