NEW INC. MAGAZINE COLUMN FROM HOWARD TULLMAN

 

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.

 

New INC. Magazine column by Howard Tullman

 

Why Everything Old is New Again

High tech may have accelerated during the pandemic, but high touch has become equally important. 

 

BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS@TULLMAN

We’re seeing an interesting resurgence in many different aspects of our daily lives of what I think of as the appeal of physicality. On a macro level, the primary concerns and the critical solutions for next decade or two - whether we’re talking about climate changes, environmental issues, urban congestion, or food insecurity - will have just as significant a physical component as any software element. Software may have eaten the world, but it won’t feed your family or fill a pothole or house the homeless. Even a billion bits won’t build a new building.

 We’re entering another cycle where manufacturing, material science, and simply making things will assume a new primacy and economic importance.

On a micro level, we’ve all realized the reassuring importance of the touch and feel of real goods, the smells and vibrations of machines and instruments, and the physical gratification and release which comes from all kinds of manual exercise, hard work, and serious sweat. The Who in Tommy were clearly onto something begging: “See Me, Feel Me, Touch Me, Heal Me”. We’re trying to get back in touch with ourselves. Any runner, any drummer, any builder, or any baker can tell you their version of the solidity, warmth, and authenticity embedded in these kinds of activities. There are emotional and physical reasons for the return of vinyl records and old-fashioned amps. Digital compression and portability were a short-sighted tradeoff for the immersive power and penetrating depth of the “real” music, which used to pound our heads and our hearts. After decades of the sterility of the digital world, it’s comforting and downright healthy to make something with your own two hands - whether art, music, manna, or material.

Amidst the angst, isolation and anxiety of the pandemic, taking greater control of our own futures, making radical changes in our lives’ directions, and learning or teaching ourselves something new were all sources of release, relief and satisfaction. Turns out the Stones were wrong; you can get both satisfaction and just what you need - if you work at it. Just one recent indication of the movement toward more meaning is the fact that more than 16 million people took up the guitar in one 16-month period of COVID-19. Fender’s sales of higher-end electric guitars almost doubled between 2020 and 2021 and the trendlines continue upwards. Another important indicator is the massive persistence in today’s streaming world of “old” music, which speaks more powerfully to us than the current commercial crap. 

The gig economy - for better or worse - has empowered millions of new doers, makers, and creators. It’s not clear that this is a real way to make a viable living and, for sure, far too many giggers are working for peanuts.  But not everything is about dollars and sense. There’s a lot to be said for the psychic rewards, both personally and collectively, in part because so many of these undertakings are shared and collaborative rather than asocial and solitary. 

Admittedly, plenty of these activities are still tied to the digital world. But any conversation you have with these folks about the joy and passion, the real spark and energy, and the ultimate satisfaction that so many of these “students” and lifelong learners are realizing comes from three things: first, the immersive and compelling mess and the tactile connection that making anything by yourself provides; second, the pride and psychological rewards, which flow from repeated attempts, painful stumbles, and the eventual learning and mastery of a new skill; and finally, the confidence, independence and sense of security that grows from the certain knowledge that you can now unilaterally create something unique, valuable and important.

There’s another element in this ongoing evolution and it’s especially interesting and intriguing because - in every sense - it’s actually a palpable desire to get back to the past. We may be kidding ourselves - in some ways looking back sweetly and sadly - to lost, happier times when, given life’s realities and the melancholy lies of history, those were, as always, the times that never were and the ways we never were. Nostalgia is an amazingly seductive and alchemic process whereby dreams become memories without ever coming true. It’s a lot like grammar - we find the present tense and the past perfect. But still, we hope and hang on. 

We can look longingly back, with some care, because too much nostalgia can suffocate the present. As Neil Young wrote in Ambulance Blues: “It's easy to get buried in the past / When you try to make a good thing last.” We all need to keep moving ahead. We long for a smarter, slower, and less stressful time and, here again, it’s a throwback desire which we associate most easily with tangible goods -; physical objects, concrete containers of tradition, legacy and heritage.

In troubled times, nostalgia can be an efficient narcotic - soothing, stabilizing, and far simpler than the rest of our lives. For the magic to work and take hold, though, it helps to be holding tight to something. The older and more traditional the better. Dad’s tools, Mom’s copper pots, a well-worn mitt or an ink-stained journal, or a trumpet you haven’t touched since you were 10.

And that’s how we ultimately arrive at a sad truth - while we regularly revere and constantly celebrate innovation, we rarely reward, appreciate, or acknowledge tradition. We disparage tradition too often as an easy excuse to avoid change, cling to the past, or hold on to the illusion of permanence. But change is everywhere today, and that rampant change is one of the few constants in our lives. However, this isn’t an either/or proposition because through thoughtful innovation we can recognize the value and importance of tradition and craft while we still change and move forward.

When you’re entrusted with a tradition, you’ve got to protect it. This may explain why a dozen or two of my favorite older entrepreneurs have all become classic guitar players and collectors. Or to be more honest, far more collectors than players, but it’s the thought that counts. They value and appreciate where they’ve come from and the importance of the continuity and connection to the past as they continue to build the cultures of their own businesses. So many entrepreneurs are superstitious in their own ways, and, if you asked why they’re attracted to these instruments, they’d say that hanging on to the past helps them deal with the fears of today. They understand that everything they’ve built might one day be simply swept away.

I expect to see a serious new wave of nostalgia, all kinds of revisited vintage material, a further explosion of thrifting and places like the Real Real although maybe not as grand, and movement toward reissues and remaking of all kinds of oldies and goodies.

This is also why I was so excited to see that Fender has recreated an entire new line of classic guitar and bass models based on legendary instruments (Telecaster, Stratocaster, Jazzmaster) called the American Vintage II series. There’s also a video series called “Music Never Dies” featuring performers talking about how their own music was so heavily influenced by the past. Fender’s CEO, Andy Mooney, notes that the demand for custom guitars with vintage specs which let players recreate the sounds and tones behind some of the all-time classic music is growing. The actual collectible antiques are just too expensive for most players today, but the newly issued Vintage period-correct models enable them to add those historic riffs and sounds to what he expects will be tomorrow’s iconic songs.

Just looking at the images of these monsters of old is amazing, but the thought that millions of new young artists will be able to use them to connect with the old traditions and build the new classics is what is really exciting.

In a word, deja new.

 

D: DIVE INTO MEDIA CONFERENCE

DICK COSTOLO - TWITTER CEO

PHILIPPE DAUMAN - PRESIDENT/CEO VIACOM INC

NEIL YOUNG - SINGER & SONGWRITER

WALT MOSSBERG  - EXECUTIVE PRODUCER

PETER KAFKA - HOST 

EDGAR BRONFMAN, JR - CHAIRMAN WARNER MUSIC GROUP