This week's guest is Lauren Moats, who joined us from Amsterdam. Lauren is currently the global director of On-Trade Excellence for Patrol Tequila, a founding partner of the award-winning Bitter-Slaying Cocktail Bitter's Company, Nightcap, Media Marketing Agency, and Women Celebrate Social Enterprise. We have a terrific conversation with Lauren with some of the topics we discuss, our how her drive and ambition led to her current role of Patron, the missing middle in the hospitality industry, and the importance of being a mentor and giving back to the industry. Lauren is a terrific guest, and make sure you check out the show notes for more information and all the links.
Enjoy the show. Okay, we're back with another episode of the industry podcast. My name is Kip. This is Dan.
How are you doing? I'm doing very well. Thank you. So how do things go with you?
Doing well. Things are good. How is business? Do you have the Christmas time?
Yes. Picking up. Lots of Christmas parties. If you are in the kitchen in Waterloo area, you should check out either of my spots.
Sugar run in downtown Kitchener is the speak easy. Tickets are on sale for New Year's Eve now on Eventbrite's Brown Man Alley. And then Uptown, Waterloo, it's battle on sisters, wine and spirits. And we have New Year's tickets.
They'll be available very shortly. It'll be a wine time dinner early in the evening. And then, DJ's late at night, myself and Dan, in fact. Yeah.
Oh, yes. Do yes to your. Yes, exactly. So check out both those places.
That battle on sister's bar, at Sugar Run Bar, on Instagram for all of the details. If you like what we're doing on this show, subscribe, rate and review. That's the best way to help us out. And if you wish to be a guest on the show or if you wish to support the show, then that's the industry podcast on Instagram or info at theindustrypodcast.club on email.
Zach Hannah does the artwork for the Instagram page. That's at ZachHannah.co. And you should check out all his great graphic works there. No, and as always, we talked about you always find the links in the show notes.
All right. Well, we have an amazing guest this week. So we're just going to get right to it and stop wasting time. Lauren Mote is joining us from answering him.
How are you, Lauren? I'm super great. How are you guys doing? We're doing a little bit of work on the show.
Yes. Thanks very much. Yeah, especially considering how busy you must be. So let's talk about from the beginning.
Why don't you tell our listeners exactly how you would characterize what your role is in general, because you're doing so many different things. How do you describe yourself when people ask? Can we talk about for a second that you're in Kitchen or Waterloo? Sure.
Yeah. I went to university in Waterloo. Oh, you did. Oh, nice.
Yeah, that was in 2000. I know I'm like jumping the gun here. We'll get to the rest of the bio. Of course.
No, in 2003 to 2005, I was at University of Waterloo. We went to the whole major. We went to the University of Waterloo grads ourselves. Oh, there you go.
That's cool. I didn't graduate there. I was in University of Toronto because where I transferred that anyway. It's part of a storied past.
But my cousin is still there. She owns formerly the Ambrosia Bakery. Oh, no. Yeah, so Ora or her dog is my cousin.
No, no, no. So anyway, one of her original locations was about two blocks from my house. I used to go there all the time and I'd sit down in Kitchener. So I don't see that as much as often before, but that place was fantastic.
Started as Golden Hearth and then became Ambrosia. And now it is called Orala, which is what our grandmother, our 104 year old grandmother Rose calls each of us. So she's Orala. I'm Lorala.
So there you go. A little tidbit fact about Kitchener Waterloo. Big shout out to Ora, go by and support her bakery and her bean to bar chocolate. There you go.
That chocolate is spectacular. It is. That's what really in the first place. I've got that for a lot of questions.
I'm getting back to this cocktail phase. Yeah. Yeah. So yes, I am I am tuning in today from Amsterdam.
It is Sunday night. It's about 7 p.m. It's really cold out. It's been dark for six hours already because as is the case in Northern Europe.
So we have a lot of time to ponder about what one will say in the podcast. But I've been in the industry, F&B for 26 years, and been in drinks specifically serving alcohol for 22. And I suppose if I learned this neat trick from my husband the other day, who's also been in the industry for over 30 years, that if I just break down my bio now into decades and explain it to people, it's just so much easier. But what I want to do today, which is, you know, developed from from my very long past in the industry doing a lot of different things, which I'm sure we'll get into, I am the global director of entree for patron tequila.
Everyone knows patron tequila, of course, just recently acquired by Bacardi. And I'm also the co-founder of Bittersling Bitters, which is an award-winning small batch Bitters company with only three ingredients, British Columbia spring water, whole botanicals, and only the finest Canadian non-genetically modified spirit. And that is lovingly handmade in British Columbia. So we are still my husband and I are still the owners of that company.
And we have lots of other things that we do. And we own a small sausage jog called the dog. So that's what I do right at this moment. Nice.
That'd be a little bit about what is your, like, what do you do on a day-to-day basis for a patron? Like what does the global director of trade ex-on-tradex ones do for the Trump? So in the spirits world for anyone tuning in that has never really worked a day in corporate or beyond the bar, as it were, entrain is the company's way or the industry's way of describing bars, restaurants, hotels, anywhere where people are working in the trade. And the trade, of course, are referring to bartenders or folks that work in those on-premise locations.
And so it could mean a wide range of things, but more often than not, it is related to trade advocacy. It is about pumping the investment, the training, and the, I guess, the importance and the accessibility to bartenders regardless of what level they perform at, whether they're seasoned veterans that have been in the industry for two decades, or they're brand new coming into the industry and picking up a shaker for the first time thinking, what do I use this for? So my job is to ensure that there are training and accessible resources available to all bartenders in a wide range of areas of the sector, bars, restaurants, hotels, dive bars, Michelin level, which we can say that now for Canada as our Michelin stars now, or four seasons are top-end. But I think the most important thing is that bartenders and the on-trader at the heart of every conversation that I have.
So before anything is developed, before we go on any global projects, before we do anything, it's always with the bartender and the operators in mind that we serve at the pleasure of making sure that those folks have what they need to run a successful and sustainable business. Beyond that though, there's a lot of fun. I mean, I'm working in the most exciting spirits category. As you know, Tequila has taken off in recent years and it is continuing to skyrocket.
And this represents a few different things. Number one, it's the bartender's favorite spirit to work with, a Gabby's spirit in general, and definitely my favorite that has never been knocked out of first place over the last several years. The second thing is that we are looking at ways of developing conversations where Tequila, not only just as a spirit category and a Gabby's spirit generally, are the liquids we're putting into glass, but it's connecting us back to the culture and the traditions and the landscape of where these incredible spirits are made and the people by whom are making them. And bringing those culturally significant conversations into our spirits is absolutely necessary, required, and expected.
And we do that as part of how we bring our trade advocacy and education agenda to life. Yeah. So now, I mean, that's super interesting. Are you doing a lot of traveling over the world to do this?
Is that sort of, are you on the road a lot? And also, how did you land an Amsterdam? Well, we'll touch on Amsterdam first because I think it is part of the travel part of this. In my previous role, I was working for another very large spirits company and I was managing a trade advocacy agenda with a small group of individuals in a market of 60 different countries, where we were working with hundreds of thousands of bartenders.
And a lot of the role that I had was a requirement to develop virtual and accessible digital learning tools, but also visiting the 60 countries to ensure that we were getting, we were getting FaceTime with the operators, with the folks that were running these bars and restaurants and also the bartenders right at the ground level to make sure that we were really representing the bartending community at that time and the level of education that they required. So that, I mean, that started in 2017, but I've been traveling to this sort of aggressive level. When I say aggressive, I mean, 300 days a year, around the road, 82% of my life was spent away from home. And so that was just steadily picking up from the occasional trip here and there with a brand starting in 2012.
And then just with our bidders company as well, just continued to grow and sort of picked up major speed in 2017. And then the head office for the company I was working for at the time was based in Amsterdam. And so being from Vancouver, I mean, obviously I'm born and raised in Toronto, but I moved to Vancouver in 2007. So that was where most of my, the formative part of my career took place.
It's very far away. You know, living in Canada, I'm getting to Vancouver, even from where you guys are in the KW area would take a very long time. It would destroy your entire day. I mean, it would take forever and it would cost what you would assume would be an entire day because it's quite expensive to travel in Canada.
So traveling from Vancouver to all of these far flowing locations around the world became really difficult because I couldn't come home in between. It was just too far away. So I was stopping in little spots along the way. And I was stopping more often than not in Amsterdam because the office was here.
But Amsterdam is actually quite a lot like Vancouver. It's the same size, it has the same terrible weather, it has like the same attention to sort of, you know, the outdoors and looking at things from a more holistic lens of wellness. Of course, they have the partying atmosphere that everyone knows about too. But I ended up spending quite a lot of time here in between trips and developed a bit of an international group or community in Amsterdam that I was very lucky to continue to come back and visit.
And then I brought my husband, Jonathan, along for a couple of those trips. And we both agreed that if the opportunity came up, and it did with Brexit, Brexit forced everyone that had a British passport that lived anywhere in the world that if you wanted to get over an experience, you know, being a legal resident of anywhere in the European Union, you had a pretty quick deadline to get that done. So we decided to go for it. And that was in December 2019, I think between agreeing that we were going to go getting all the paperwork and literally getting on a plane with seven suitcases with a container somewhere over the ocean to meet us three months later.
And I think I'll told it was four months start to finish, which was crazy to uproot our lives. And Jonathan was able to run the airplane from Amsterdam, he still does today. And I'm, you know, thriving doing my work and now since joining a patron, the office, oddly enough, in Europe is based in Amsterdam. So you know how that works.
But perfect timing. So that's how we got here. And the travel has, well, I mean, since I think it's like letting the animals out of the cages, you know, with COVID. So the moment we arrived in Amsterdam in December 2019, we didn't realize just like everyone else that, you know, we'd have two months to live, you know, two months experience, whatever we could before, you know, the unthinkable would happen in March.
And so being in, you know, lockdown for two years here in Amsterdam or 18 months to 24 months was not bad. I mean, it was terrible for us as business owners. I mean, we almost lost everything as I'm sure is a tale that everyone knows all too well. But you know, we managed to pull through and you know, we'll still be feeling the effects of the pandemic on our business for years to come.
And it was, I think the moment we were allowed to travel again, everyone just, I don't know if you experienced this yourselves, but even on a personal level, didn't matter where, didn't matter how much you would just figure out how to get on a plane and go somewhere and just have that extra incredibly engaged experience because you had no idea what was waiting around the corner. Yeah, a question on Amsterdam. What was it like without all the tourists? Well, actually the coolest part about Amsterdam is when there is no tourists because like the center part of Amsterdam, what everyone knows is a stereotypical Amsterdam.
Like when I say Amsterdam to you, what do you think of? Party time. I was just like, I was just like, July. Yeah, fun.
And I was just so many tourists. So, wow. So that small pocket, like those really beautiful buildings, you know, the canal houses, the canals that go right through the city, the semi circle, it's just, it's really, really beautiful. And that represents like a small part of Amsterdam life.
But when you move out, the Reich's Museum, we're past the museum plane, it gets into, oh, this is where people actually live. And it's not that far. I mean, if you ask, I can say this now, because I feel like I'm an honorary duchy because we ride our bikes everywhere, we don't have a car. But if you were to ask, well, how far away is your place?
Or what do I need to meet? And this, oh, well, it's a 10 minute bike ride. Okay, but that's anything more than that is just outrageous. So, perhaps we measure distances based on how long it takes us to get there on our bikes.
But, you know, it's so without the tourists, we had free reigns sort of to really explore. But I mean, with that comes the negative side that a lot of the businesses in Amsterdam didn't have a lot of governance support. So they really got locked up and we have a lot of friends at home, bars and restaurants here that I don't know how they managed to survive through because we had five lockdowns open and close, open, close. And so it was challenging.
But I think when I compare it to other parts of the world with the exception of Vancouver, Vancouver was open the entire time. Yeah, it was like it never happened there. Yeah, exactly. But I compare a lot of what happened in Amsterdam to say Toronto, Toronto was was brutally hit with restrictions.
And it was really tough. And we have quite a few friends that lost businesses there. So, yeah, we as well here in Kitchener, Waterloo, and I don't know how I made it through, but mostly you're like, but yeah, it wasn't just the lockdowns. It was restrictions as well.
You mentioned like we had one for months where you could only have 10 people maximum. And the including staff and you had to be closed by nine o'clock. It made no sense. Right.
Some of these, I'm surprised more places didn't close down honestly, but we don't need to talk anymore about COVID. Fuck that shit. Congratulations to you, your business is open. Anyway, so Amsterdam with a tourist was pretty cool.
I mean, the silver lining of it is that we could be outside, we could, you know, we could roam around, we had free rain, coffee shops, where you can still get take away coffees from the little windows and sorry, I have to say cafes and coffee shops are coming in something different. Yes, they do. Okay, so like when you're traveling, when you're back to traveling around, obviously that's probably great for like you're traveling for a pateron for your job with pateron, but you're also it's a great way to sort of promote your business as well, right? Because you're like, you're traveling around talking to people who are going to use the products.
Yeah, I think I in recent years, I've had to separate sort of the interest between, you know, when I work on full time and what Jonathan works on full time, I think in the beginning, you know, having a mom and pop company, so to speak, being two entrepreneurs that, you know, spent and still do spend every cent that we make in reinvesting back into our company. You know, Pittering's been around for 10 years. It'll be 11 years in February, so we've been doing this a long time and it was two years of R&D before that. So we're going into year 1314 now with Pittering.
And so I think in the beginning, the I think this is what a lot of brand owners start to understand as well. When you when you say to someone, Oh my God, global brand, people get really excited. They're like global every country, you know, 140 to 200 countries or however many countries are. And I think for small business owners, it's about conquering the few exceptionally well.
So while bidders were always in my bag because they are a ubiquitous part of making a cocktail and in the event I was traveling to countries where they didn't have access to bidders, for example, where I did quite a lot of travel outside of, you know, the eight to 10 countries, we actually have biddersling distribution. I would always bring extras because I would use them in guest jiffs or use them in different things. But then I would leave behind all the bidders and they would become these like special tokens, mementos, because they wouldn't be able to get them. And because they're alcohol based, they absolutely would not be able to get them.
So, you know, biddersling became almost like the accompaniment or the accoutrement to what I was doing. And so I've always worked for base spirits that have never had conflicts with modifiers, which was really important. I would never take a job with a brand that owned a bidders company or owned a non-potable bidders company. It's just not something I would ever do.
So the bidders have always been a nice accompaniment to making drinks or elaborating on how we develop flavors, the scientific understanding of taste and flavor, nosing spirits, you know, it's all sort of related to the same thing. It also helped to give, you know, a Canadian product of voice on a global stage. Again, I'm doing hand quotations. I know this is not how you're going to start out.
Yeah, no, it's not. Hand quotations. Hand quotations because, you know, global to everyone, again, might mean the entire planet, but for us, it means, you know, like 10, 12 countries maybe of where we can, we can really do some great work. And now today, Jonathan, he runs the entire company and we have a whole slew of bitter babes and, you know, ambassadors that work, that work on biddersling as part of their, you know, their day jobs working on bars and different things, we just supplement their income with doing a little bit of love with us.
And so I think because of the way we've done it, and I think from a financial standpoint, we could afford to do it any other way because we're self-financed, it became the coolest way to build biddersling organically was really just through, you know, hand-to-hand combat with bar centers. It's just like have a bottle, have a bottle, taste it, taste it, do this, do this. And people were free to just compare them against other brands that they were working with or use them alongside. And, you know, we've been doing that for, again, for 12 years since we had been seating the brand.
And so for us today, it feels like such an amazing community that we've been able to build. And it becomes synonymous with Jonathan and I. So even though when I travel and I'm teaching classes on, you know, the craft and process of making an additive free tequila, for example, with petroleum, always want to making drinks. It's like, and then I'm going to put in this all natural bidders, this one which also has an additive, you know, it just, and then leave them behind from the bartender's and everyone knows that I own biddersling.
So it's, yeah, it's pretty cool how we got to that point. And it's just been a really wild ride. I mean, we get tagged on Instagram all the time from bar centers and far fun places around the world. And we're trying to figure out how they got the bottle.
We're trying to look at the label to see what versions they were, because we've been vintages on our original bottles from like 12 years ago. And so we're always trying to figure out or try and recall, you know, where these individual bottles came from. And sometimes we were, we have to ask them, where did you get that bottle? That's got to be super satisfying, when you see that stuff, especially, and congratulations for keeping us going for over a decade now.
The other thing I wanted to ask you about regarding the travel is you received this year, like what I think is a super cool award, which is the mentor award at Tales of the Cocktail. And so this also links back to your traveling around and teaching and instructing bartenders all over the world, I'm sure. So talk to us a little bit about that award and how you feel about the receipt of it. So mentorship has always been the cornerstone of my training program.
So even in the last 22 years working in a wide range of different roles in the industry of having, you know, sitting down and hiring staff or training and developing staff for somebody else, we're doing consulting roles, managing businesses. The most important thing was about finding really incredibly passionate people and being able to provide the right environment with the right communication and the right tools so that they could blossom into whatever the version of their best self could be in that environment. And that has definitely taken some mentorship and leadership from other great people that have helped along the way, especially, you know, as you're coming up in the industry. But it's the most important thing that we can do is pass on anything we've got, any learnings whatsoever, even though we are all still learning and will continue to learn forever, being able to pass that down to not even next generation, but even current generation that may not have had access to any of the information or the opportunity.
So, you know, I look at the list of who was shortlisted for the spirited awards. And it's a list of incredible people that, you know, have we all are, you know, part of this peer to peer mentorship system in this community. So we've always tried to sort of remove the hierarchy in terms of you are my elder, therefore, you know, more, therefore, I must listen to you. I think if someone happens to be older than you or been in the industry longer than you may have some poignant advice and maybe choice, interesting anecdotes to share, but they aren't necessarily right because they're older than you or longer in the industry.
So I think, you know, going back to that list, everyone on that list has probably had some relationship with a hierarchical mentor. I have several and a lot of them have been very positive. But I think as the world is changing, as our industry is changing, as even the age groups are changing, the audiences are so different, what inspires them, what makes them tick, what they're interested in, where they want to go in life is so different. And so the way that they receive mentorship and the way that they receive education and resource also has to change.
So I'm just very happy that I have been working, I suppose, with a wide range of audiences for so long listening rather than telling. So I could sort of create a method of coaching and training that would be best suited for each of individuals along the way that showed like that really passionate side and that really incredible side for our industry. And so I've been, I've been nominated in this category for, you know, I feel crazy to even say several years. And I always thought, you know, it's great to be recognized, it's great to be on the top 10.
It's great that someone even nominated me, even if I don't make it to the top 10, if I make it to the top four, oh my God, like that is that is crazy. But to win it, it's such a massive honor because it is a it's an award that has been chosen by my peers. And so rather than an hierarchical system saying you deserve to win because it's your turn. That's not the case, like it's it's literally hundreds of people voting on that have decided that what they see that I'm doing, this is not a lifetime achievement award, what they see that I'm doing right here and right now is benefiting the people in the industry that matter the most and benefiting even them.
And that is a huge honor. And it's up to us as award winners in every category, whether in this industry or another, to take how you feel about winning that award and pay it forward immediately and continue to give back. It's not enough to just receive the award rest on your laurels and say, that's it, you do it. You do it.
It's done now. It is a huge commitment and a huge responsibility to be able to live up to the expectation of that award because you wouldn't want I wouldn't want people to turn around and say, wow, you didn't actually deserve it in the end. Right, I'm going to jump back a little bit to what you're talking about there when you're discussing mentorship and like how it's changing in the industry. Because this is something I've noticed even just like post pandemic, the kind of people who are entering the industry.
Have you noticed a shift in younger people coming into the industry and how they're looking at their careers in the industry? For me, and the reason I'm asking is I found there's been less of people who are looking at it as a career and more of people who are just looking at it as a side gig until they get to do the job they really want to do. Yeah, it's the number one thing that I am spewing right now and telling everybody it's we have lost the entire middle section of our industry. The middle section of our industry were the mentors and the trainers for the young ones.
And I don't mean young and age, it could be young and experienced or just coming in from adjacent industries. We have also lost the section of the industry that is a liaison between the veteran pro bartenders that have been doing this for a long time and the recruitment of those coming into the industry. So that whole section that does tend to turn over slightly every 10 years and usually brands and trade advocacy have sort of occupied that space in the past where it is going through a changeover where there's every brand is training on category, every brand is training on different topics. But we can't do any specialized training at the moment because we've lost this entire audience of bartenders.
So what we're doing right now is we need to repair the part of the industry that we've lost. And it is because of the pandemic and it's because of lack of benefits, lack of incentive, lack of cost of living. People just can't afford to live in this industry. And so we've got bartenders at the very top of the industry that have somehow managed to survive through the pandemic that have their own things that they need to take care of, they need to put themselves first, their families first, their businesses first.
And then you have the young ones coming in and they don't have the middle section of the industry telling them this can be a career. This can be your everything. These are the different branches and directions that you can take. This is the career journey and path that you could take.
This is how you can take the other hobbies you have and apply them successfully to working into this industry and then go forward into one, two, three, four, five different types of future. So we don't have that. And so what we're going through right now with say, Pichuan Perfectionist, which traditionally was a cocktail contest that was very singularly focused on one drink and awarding bartenders based on that one drink has transformed this year into a bartending program that is still has a contest aspect to it, but empowering more bartenders to come in through education, but then to meet each other. And this is part of their class of 2022, 23, if you will, and their job now going through the process is yes, you get to make amazing drinks with the Trunty Kula is the base.
You get to come up with wild and crazy ideas on how you envision drinks, rituals, service, flavors, whatever your wildest imagination. But what we expect from you coming out of this is you're the leaders of the industry. You are the leaders of this layer of the industry. And it's up to you now to feel empowered with us as your sort of like supporters and benefactors, if you will, to go back and train your group of industry folks that are coming in.
The people at your bar that are your, your equals alongside you, the operators that don't have time, and then the younger bartenders that are coming in thinking that this is just what they're going to do while they're waiting for school to finish and they're going to go off and do some sort of professional degree. So whatever it is, we've now moved down a generation and we're saying, we know you're probably not ready for this yet, but we need you. We'll give you everything we've got in order to support you on this journey and let's do it together. Yeah, I think that's super important.
And exactly right, like unfortunately we have now had to skip the middle part, but the point is we got to keep it moving, right? So otherwise the industry is going to collapse. But the other thing that I think is interesting now too is like what we can get across to people is that I've been doing this for 30 plus years and there's never been a time in the service industry where there have been more ways to practice the craft of being a bartender or even a server for that matter. Like you can be, you can do a whole business just on Instagram, you can be traveling consultant.
You like this, like when I came up in the industry, you were basically working at a brick and mortar spot and that was the gig. Yeah, well, listen, if I can be an example, I mean, there are many different examples, but I can share my own experience. And it's much the way, you know, how I provide mentorship and coaching as well is that, you know, I can share my story and then folks that are listening, they might say, Oh, well, that sounds a little bit similar to something I've gone through or I am going through or represents sort of my way of thinking or my train of thought down this particular path. I didn't graduate university.
You know, I just published a book a month and a half ago called The Bartenders Guide to the World in the first, probably 20 pages of the book is talking about all the things that I did and all the things that I didn't do and how it didn't matter. So I went, I went to University of Waterloo, had an amazing first year, loved it, had my life, had stayed in Waterloo. I would have gone on and had a very different life. I would have been a campus done.
I would have played, you know, varsity soccer. I would have gone to law school. That was my path. I was staying in Waterloo.
I didn't. I transferred to U of D and decided to be closer to my family, closer to my friends, continued to work full time, which I was not doing in Waterloo for that year. And it completely destroyed my academic life. And I at one point had to make a choice.
I remember very distinctly being at Lissa Lechbistro in Toronto where I worked with two of the greatest owners on this planet. It was still for this day, probably the greatest hospitality job or like bar job I've ever had. And I was looking at them thinking, my God, I'm really good at this, but I'm also really good at business. I'm great in business.
I'm great in academics. I'm great in all these things. It's kind of a way I can blend them together because I thought of going back and doing like an astronomy elective. It makes me really unhappy.
I love space, but I want to be outside of the telescope, you know what I mean? Yeah. So I decided to leave and decided the only way that I could do it was actually to leave Toronto. And so I left and went to Vancouver.
And I started only focusing just on how I could apply everything that I was gifted at from like the academic side and being able to apply that to what I loved creatively about the industry. And I just tirelessly focused on that. And the reason why Cho's Vancouver was at the time the Olympics were coming. So we had three years before the Olympics were coming.
And so every like global media, every single person be trying to come to Vancouver, it would put everything in Vancouver on the map. And I wanted to be there for that. Because if there was ever a time to do it, it was going to be then. And I just continued to work my way through.
I took different courses on like I became a Samelier than I did spirits courses. Then I did marketing courses. I did everything and just kept going through and moving up the ranks became a bar manager then a beverage director, then a Samelier, then a buyer, then a general manager, then a director of operations, then multi-unit, then consultant with the other things I was doing. Then business owner, then two businesses, then consulting.
So I just kept doing more and more. And eventually, I realized, wow, this is my transitional point now. This is where I can make the decision to move out from behind the bar completely and remove that as an identity, but still identify someone in the drinks business and move into a different realm. And that's when I made the switch and I moved into working in brand management and trade advocacy with formerly with the Azure and world class where I work globally.
And then from there, I learned again, as much as I could and still put my bartender stamp on everything, learn commercial, learn marketing, learn executive business development, just learn all of these different things and then continue to stick myself in the room and listen. And now, I mean, I don't work behind the bar anymore, so I make drinks occasionally. But I am now serving, I think the bartenders in our industry in a very different way providing maybe more obvious options for bartenders that I wish I had when I was younger. But I also don't have any regrets because I think exactly my path is exactly what I needed to do.
And that just goes to show that we are not defined by what we are doing right at this moment, we are defined by exactly how we spend the next several years. And I think for bartenders, I can think of a few bartenders that have been able to push against the grain like that and go into director or high level positions and some of the biggest spirit companies in the world that really operate in the third portion 500 companies. And I'm really proud. I'm really proud that I was able to do that.
And every day is still a learning journey. But I know that by going through this and sharing my story as often as I do with the book as well and with the video playing with Jonathan Oskar's podcast like this when we are doing together today, this helps for another young bartender or another business owner or another person working in hospitality to see that it really is possible to do something big and extraordinary regardless of where they are at the moment. Well, I think that's a great spot to end and learn. And I think you are a fantastic example to anyone who is trying to get in this industry and maybe looking at things just beyond being behind a bar or serving at a table.
You know that's a great career as well obviously. But it is good for people listening to know that there is, like you said, put yourself in the room and learn, then there is a path forward to almost anything you want to do in this business now. And you are not so constrained as it was like when you and I started out in this. Yeah.
And there is a couple of other notes I would love to share as well. In the last 20 years in our industry, we have been faced with a lot of different issues as well that not everyone would be a victim of or to be seen as having a disadvantage in a way. Being a female definitely had disadvantages in terms of working in corporate environments or in terms of running businesses for other people before the time where I suppose the paradigm would shift in such a way that yes, yes, we can shift against the grain. And even though it has been men at the helm of these programs this entire time, we can have women in here and this makes total sense.
So it took a long time for that to happen. And there's quite a few people in the industry, quite a few that you've actually interviewed on your podcast as well and more to come. That have helped to sort of pave the way for more women to come in. But there's also highlighting the underserved communities of the Black Indigenous people of color LGBTQ communities.
So I think we have so much work to do, but I think the ones that like myself that are in this very privileged position and also in a position where I work very hard to get here, but I understand that there elements of who I am that gave me the privilege to have the opportunity that we need to continue to fight for everybody that still does not feel as though they have the opportunity and the chance to really shine. So I always think about that as well and just making sure in the words of my friend Jackie Summers, who is the owner of Sorrelle Fibesas LeCure in New York, Jack from Brooklyn, he's an incredible activist and journalist. It's not enough to just invite somebody to a party, but you still have to get them to ask you to dance. So it's important that you've got, you know, you need the opportunity to be in the room, but if someone's not inviting you to sit at the table, inviting you to dance, whatever it is, then there's still a lot of work to do.
So I think for anyone listening in as well, there is definitely the opportunity to make a really really big difference, and there's always ways to smash the glass ceiling. So let's keep in touch on that. Okay, thanks, Lauren. I appreciate it.
Thanks for giving us your time. I know it's getting late for you. I mean, it's been dark for six hours or whatever anyway, but six weeks, six weeks. Well, thanks so much again for coming on.
We really appreciate it. We'll put all your social media links in the show notes so people can follow what you're doing at all times. And thanks again. Thank you very much, guys.
Enjoy your rest of your weekend. See you too. Cheers. Bye.