How to Grow Your Business by
Constantly Raising the Bar
Too
many new startup founders think the quickest and most consistent path to
continued growth is customer acquisition.
EXPERT OPINION BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V
AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS @HOWARDTULLMAN1
Jul 22,
2025
Unicorn
Auctions, one of the fastest growing companies in Chicago, started from a
single auction of select wines and liquors drawn from a local seller’s
collection and has grown into a 75-person company with inventory worth more
than $100 million. Photo: Courtesy Company
The best entrepreneurs
know that we are living today in a “what have you done for me lately” world
where every client, customer and consumer are always looking for more—and they don’t want to wait. Better, faster, safer,
cheaper, easier, and ideally free. But these days, in many cases, even free
isn’t cheap enough. Smart solutions, cost-effective alternatives, and seductive
offers are just a click away. So, to compete successfully, you’ve always got to be raising
the bar. It’s not easy, but it is an unending and unavoidable challenge.
Too many new startup
founders think the quickest and most consistent path to continued growth is
customer acquisition. They get on a very expensive treadmill of conquest
marketing, where they’re always chasing new business. This may work for a
while, but it’s costly and takes their minds off the most important goals:
consistent, organic growth and very high retention—keeping customers happy so
they’re not going anywhere else.
Perhaps more
importantly, the cheapest path to new bottom line growth can be going deeper
with your existing clients and customers—they’re already in the house, easily
addressable, and familiar with your offerings, rather than looking exclusively
for new business. I’ve always called this strategy “knocking on old doors” and I can assure you that
there’s not a single business out there that has successfully and fully
saturated their current customer base. We’re talking about billions of dollars
of business just waiting to be captured.
The absolutely best
market research you can do is to ask your customers what additional services
and support they need and then figure out how to address and solve those
demands. Eliminating obstacles, friction, and pain points seems less sexy and
exciting than clanging the “new sales” gong, but it ultimately results in
ringing the company’s cash register more often.
It’s also important to
understand that your new offerings don’t have to be perfect on day one. Start
by borrowing the generic tools and basic technologies that are already out
there. You can ride someone else’s rails at little or no cost. It’s cheaper, faster, and smarter
than trying to build your own boat at the beginning and over-investing scarce
resources before you know whether there’s interest and a serious economic
opportunity. It doesn’t hurt to grow slow for a while. In fact, by putting
basic offerings out there and reacting quickly to user feedback – good or bad –
you actually make your customers into collaborators and partners in the
development and delivery process that creates some commitment, ownership and
loyalty on their part, which you simply can’t buy otherwise.
But if you’re not
careful, it can also be a slippery slope. There’s always an infinite customer
demand for the unavailable (“If it only cost a dollar, tasted like chocolate,
and cured cancer, I’d buy a bunch.”) They want it all and they want it right
now. So, move deliberately, but don’t promise too much or get too far out over
your skis. You can learn a great deal by looking, asking and listening – then
move ahead, ideally by under-promising and over-delivering. Meeting successive
and unmet demands builds momentum. Filling the service and access gaps cuts
down on friction. Providing smart and simple follow-on solutions to obvious
pain points is a great way to keep raising the bar and growing your business.
Unicorn Auctions is
one of the fastest growing companies in Chicago and a perfect example of the
iterative improvement process of incrementally building out your business to
continue to meet an increasing number of the needs and desires of your core
customers. What started a few years ago from a single auction of select wines
and liquors drawn from a local seller’s collection has grown into a 75-person
team now holding weekly auctions every Sunday night, serving over 100,000
customers, and holding inventory in its vaults worth more than $100 million.
What is so interesting
about the Unicorn story is that, in retrospect, everything they’ve developed
and added to their core business seems obvious, but none of it existed in a
vertically integrated fashion for the wine and spirits industry until these guys
built it on the fly—and largely by bootstrapping the business for several
years. They now have an end-to-end set of offerings—buy, sell, store, evaluate
and transport any and all of these items—anywhere in the world. And they‘ve
been profitable from the beginning.
It started with the fact
that almost all of their early customers were stuck with bottles and boxes of
whiskey – jammed into apartments, homes, garages, and the occasional storage
locker – without any accurate or accessible inventory of what they had and
basically no idea of what the items were worth. These were generally affluent
men who had everything they wanted and nothing they needed. Cars, clothes,
condos and cribs, watches and Wagyu filets, and eventually bourbon and fine
wine for their cellars. But not a clue about what to do with it. Providing a
simple digital collection management system was the first step in moving all
these valuable assets from an offline and often frustrating mess to an online
set of manageable and marketable assets.
Once the early
collectors started to realize the value of what they had accumulated, they
developed an interest in buying and selling these items, which led to the
earliest Unicorn auctions – built on a third-party platform—which the guys
developed just to get the business started. As soon as the sales began, the
clients realized that the logistical challenges were substantial—the bottles
were valuable, fragile, temperature-sensitive—and, of course, often still stuck
in their man caves, basements and wine racks.
So, Unicorn stepped in
to manage all the aspects of the buy, sell and delivery process and, in no time
at all, it also became clear to their clients that storing their collections in
Unicorn’s vault made a ton of sense from a safety, security, and ease of access
standpoint. One of the trickiest aspects of collecting consumables is that, if
you’re foolish enough to actually consume the stuff, all the accrued value
(apart from a roaring good time and an intense hangover) is gone. Neil Young
wrote a song in 2007 about this problem called Ever After. He described the
plight of the collector who had “got so many boxes that he’d never open, ‘cause
the minute he did they’d lose their value.”
This fact, and the
reality that a huge percentage of their clients’ inventory was already sitting
in Unicorn’s own vaults, led to the next breakthrough for Unicorn – turning
these bottles of bourbon into digital assets – which could be freely bought,
sold, traded or gifted without ever moving off the shelves in the vault. Each
weekly auction “sells” about 5,000 bottles of liquor.
Today, an enormously
high number of monthly transactions are fully virtual and hundreds of the
highest valued bottles of whiskey have been bought and sold multiple times (at
ever increasing values) in online digital transactions where the actual product
never moves an inch. Talk about ideal logistics.
Even more important than
the logistical efficiencies and far more valuable in the long run are the vast
amounts of data that the Unicorn systems capture regarding buyers’ preferences,
individualized transaction volumes, product selections, pricing, demand,
geographic disparities, etc. which not only drives the scope and accuracy of
its valuation algorithms, but also is critical information which the
manufacturers and distributors of all the whiskey, wine and other spirits in
the U.S. don’t have.
Amazingly enough, in our
hyper-invasive culture where we believe that every organization, agency and
entity we deal with in any capacity captures every conceivable piece of data
about our actions, preferences and behavior, the leaders in the liquor industry
know absolutely nothing about who their end purchasers are because of an
antiquated, multi-level and tiered distribution setup which has been around
forever. This keeps them from offering the kind of customized, compelling and
convincing experiences to their individual major customers and collectors that
every other major industry offers as a matter of course.
Unicorn, on the other
hand, knows virtually everything of substance about the parties on both sides
of every transaction it processes, and the company is just beginning to
collate, assemble and analyze all that information in formats which will be
invaluable to the industry’s manufacturers, distributors and retailers.
As I often say, data is
the oil of the digital age. Unicorn will be able to provide marketing,
merchandising, and manufacturing direction and event, engagement and loyalty
guidance to the entire liquor industry as it increasingly becomes the
marketplace and market maker for the world of whisky and wine.
