This week's guest is Montay Barrow joins us from Atlanta, Georgia. Montay is nearly two decades of experience in the alcohol beverage industry, with degrees in both engineering and marketing. Montay has extensive experience on both the operation side as well as the marketing side of fully understands both as of the business. Montay is co-founded Proof Theory, a holding company for niche brands, and Black Leaf Organic, first French organic vodka on the market.
Montay is a business leader with a lot of driving, determination, and we immensely join our conversation with them. Make sure you check out blackleafvodka.co and Proof Theory.co online and check the show notes for all the links talked about the interview. Enjoy the show. Welcome back to another episode of the industry podcast.
My name is Jeff. This is Dan. How's it going, buddy? Doing well, thanks.
How are you doing? Good. Yeah, as we're recording this, we're getting ready for the Christmas season, I guess, but not quite there yet, but when you're listening, it'll already be over. That's correct.
Probably be past New Year's, too. So this episode comes out. So I hope everyone had a happy new year and the Christmas. Yeah, we should let you know that Dan and I will take in a few weeks off from recording the podcast over the holidays.
So this is the last one you're going to get for a couple of weeks anyway. Yeah. Also might be a break later on in January as well because I'm happy to be out of town for a bit. So if you find a better podcast schedule is like every other week for a bit, that might be why.
Don't worry, we're still alive. We're still alive. This is actually episode 140, plugging along. Recent episodes include Chef New Year, regular, and her husband, Jeff.
And then we also had for that Lauren Mode coming to us from Amsterdam. Before that, what do we have? We had Elie Kudobo, who joined us on vacation at Dominican Republic. It's pretty cool.
And then prior to that, we had Matt. Oh, shoot. Matt. Yeah, Matt.
Lovely Colona. So those are the archives we should check them out if you missed any of those episodes. We should also let you know that if you are a fan of the show, the best way to help is to subscribe, rate, and review. You leave a little five-star review for us.
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If you're in the case of Waterloo Region, you're going to want to check out, especially now that we're into January, you definitely, you know, please come out. Dry January is bullshit. We all know dry January is bullshit. I don't believe in it.
Neither should you. So come on out to the bar. So Sugar Run in Kitchener is the one bar that I own that is the Speakeasy Downtown Kitchener. You can look at Sugar Run Bar on Instagram to find out the password and to try and figure out the location.
Offtown Waterloo, my other bar is Babylon Sisters, Wine and Spirits. And that's right on the main drag there on King Street. So you can check out what's going on there at Babylon Sisters Bar, DJ Dane every Friday night, very popular experience. And I guess that's it.
Anything else you want to talk about? I got nothing to do to say. That's for you. We've got to be consistent.
Perfect. All right. Well, let's just get right to our guest joining us from Atlanta, Georgia, his Montay borough. How are you, Montay?
I'm doing great, guys. How are you guys doing? Doing well. Thanks for coming on the show.
I got a little bit of a bug, but I'm powering through it. You don't take any offense in the podcasting world. No, no, you got to do it. You got to get in.
I think I got a little bit going on myself. So I guess everybody, if we get the call somebody can edit them out. It's funny. When you stop wearing a fucking mask every day, all of a sudden everybody's sick.
Anyway, Montay, you've had a pretty interesting career. So we wanted to talk to you about it. I guess we'll start out. After you finished college, you got a co-op opportunity with Anheuser-Blish.
Is that how you crept into the industry here? Yeah, yeah. I would say that was my first goal in the alcohol business besides being a consumer. Right.
It's actually kind of funny. I'll tell you a little bit about the Anheuser-Blish experience. What's funny is most of my adult life has been in drugs and alcohol. That'll make sense as I tell you the story.
It's a little bit of a drug and alcohol story. I grew up in Baltimore, Maryland. I went to a school in the University. Baltimore is a pretty blue-collar town.
People get in and do what they need to do and keep it moving. I'm a strong work ethic and there was always instilled in me. So my world at that time was always Baltimore. That's what I knew.
I went to school in Baltimore. It just so happened that they had some recruiters from Anheuser-Blish on campus looking for people who were interested in opportunities. I knew nothing about St. Louis the middle of the United States.
I had never been there. I wasn't much known about it. I kind of took a chance. It was a great experience that what kind of foreshadowed where a lot of my life would end up.
But obviously, I never knew that at the time. Right. What were your specific responsibilities doing the co-op? Academically, in school, I went to school for engineering.
So the co-op was actually more on the technical side of the business. I was literally working in some of the operations where they were actually making the beer. It wasn't the sexy side of the business where we were going out and riding on the back of the Closetails and going through the business. I was getting up and cracking and going in and smelling work, which is if you know anything about the business, it smells horrible.
Going inside of tanks and doing time studies and all that good geeky engineering type stuff. I got an opportunity while I was there to really see how that was my first real business opportunity. I'm still in school. I'm working for those who don't know what a co-op is.
It's basically like an extended internship. It was an eight month assignment where I actually took a break from school to work and had to have a bus travel around the world. It was just an interesting experience. Met some really good people and understood or learned very quickly a lot about my style.
Without being a people person, without being all about the numbers and the books. It was just a great experience. And so, what did you decide? People person?
I actually think I do gravitate towards being a people person because I learned throughout my life. I adopted the same will versus skill. I'd rather have the people with the will succeed and do than the people with the skill, but not the will to do it because you can really move mountains when people are, you can connect with people and move and sync with them. I'm definitely more in tune with the people to get the work done versus finding the best and brightest talent.
Right. So, how's that going to start working for the eyes? Yeah. That's the interest.
So, it's a big gap between that time and that's where the drugs and alcohol came in. After a house of bush went back to my senior year and undergrad and went to work. I ended up working for a bio tech company or a bio science company that actually manufactured mening vaccines. And then I did some consulting work in that drug space as well.
And my last stint in the pharmaceutical realm was at a place that just got bought out. And I was like, you know, I wanted to do something different. It just so happened that a gentleman who actually sat next to me in the office next to me at the pharmaceutical company had interviewed with Diageo. And he interviewed for this role.
It was a continuous improvement role. And they told him, you know, hey, you know, we like you. We have another role that you might be well suited for, but not this role. And he said, well, you know what?
I know somebody that will probably fit greatness role. And he pissed it over to me. Ironically, I had never heard of Diageo, but I was extremely familiar with the brands as well. Most people that listened to the play had no clue who Diageo is.
But you know, I was very familiar with the brands and come to find out, you know, that this was in Baltimore, it was the old seagram facility. And I used to ride past that facility pretty much all the time going to the airport. If you ever been to Baltimore, you can see the big brick warehouses. So I never knew that that was a Diageo site.
And that's kind of how I was introduced to Diageo. Yeah, there was a big seagram facility here in Waterloo as well, ironically. It was only a small section left because whenever they needed to redevelop something in this down, they just burn it down suspiciously on a weekend. It's a sad story, but some great liquid came out of that.
Yeah, yeah. Okay. So like when you get the job for Diageo, what is it exactly that you're doing? Yeah.
So at Diageo, and again, it's almost a prelude to some other things that had happened, right? So even if I was to back up, I jump into that right out of undergrad. Again, I mentioned to you that my background was engineering, right? So I did what any other engineer would do coming out of undergrad.
I started marketing company, right? Go fit. Right. So it was, I was the king of moonlight, right?
So I was literally an engineer by day and I had this side hustle if you will by night. So my nine to five was an engineer. My five to nine was I was actually going to an experiential marketing and quite a few of my clients happened to be in the alcohol space, right? So Martel, Konya, Xegram, Crown Royal, a lot of times I would do these activations for them in different markets.
And I got again a good sense of what I really enjoyed to do and what I like to do. And I realized that I was really connected to customers and the consumer experience. That's what I enjoy. You know, academically, I wasn't in that space, right?
So fast forward several years to my Diageo days. Again, I came on board in Diageo and that supply engineering capacity, but my goal was to basically lean into at this point nine years of side hustle in the marketing world that I had developed, right? So my role is very quite a bit initially upfront. I did everything on the supply side from, again, I talked about contains improvement.
So looking at process optimization, looking at ways to improve efficiency of how we made product, right? So the plant that I worked in, I think we produced around seven million cases of product, spirit products a year. So I worked quite extensively in that spot. And then I also started to take on hybrid roles because I ended up at, you know, again, I'm fast forward in a bit, but I ended up going back to school, getting the MBA in marketing.
So I literally had both a marketing and an engineering degree now to compliment the experience that I had. And again, that was an opposite. That was for me to essentially transition full time onto the that side of business, right? So I was doing a lot of hybrid roles in a space where I could speak both languages.
I was the supply guy who they could speak marketing and I was the marketing guy who could speak supply. So it was kind of one of those rare spaces where I knew how to kind of connect both worlds and I worked in a lot of roles that kind of connected both of those worlds and then ended up going moving up to the New York area working, actually ran sequence globally for a while. And then I was responsible for some innovation projects and strategy for the North American whiskey portfolio. Oh, well, crazy.
That's kind of how you get it done, right? Like you make yourself indispensable in two different worlds. You're the only guy who can speak of both sides of it. And they're going to need to keep you around.
Yeah. It's it's it's it's a great. Everybody always told me, while you are kind of a unicorn, you can kind of write your own ticket and it just it was funny to me because my own ticket was always even though I hadn't necessarily leaned into it. My own ticket kind of became I wanted to go back into that entrepreneurial space.
So that moonlighting that I told you about that I did for those nine years or so, it was always in me, you know, and it was something about being able to I mean, look, the audio treating me great. I was there for 12 years learned a lot again, traveled the world. I was everything from a plant manager. So I ended up at one point running that site in Baltimore that I mentioned, you know, so head around 120 employees and like, you know, I learned a lot about my style, learned a lot about just being able to connect the dots in a big organization.
But it was something always burning in me that wanted to be able to make my own way, you know, be able to create a business that my value shamed forward. And, you know, when opportunity kind of presents it, it sells, whether it's an opportunity you make, it comes from just kind of, you sometimes just got to go for it. It was at that time where it was like, you know what, I want to go for it. And I went for it.
Well, obviously I want to get into some of the businesses that you started here, but just came back to the other little bit. What would you say your favorite role was you did so many different things for them? What was your favorite? Wow.
It's funny, right? My favorite role was probably my least favorite role from in its inception. And what I mean by that is it was a role that actually didn't want that I had no desire to take, but I ended up taking it and end up being the biggest learning experience that I've ever had. And that was going back to that plant manager role in Baltimore because it was at a time where I was literally brought in to close down the facility.
Oh, yeah. Yeah. So if you can imagine what that's like, somebody tell you, hey, we want you to come in and take this huge responsibility on and by the way, we got to close it, you know, it's like, wow. And that was also at the time was about the transition back fully back into the martinsis.
I was like, not only it was a huge departure from what professionally my career, the direction I was taking my career and also kind of went to a job like, you know, there was people that have been there 30 plus years, you know, that's all they knew. So, you know, on paper, I didn't want any parts of it, you know, but it ended up taking on the task. And, you know, I realized when you asked me about, you know, my, is it the people or, or the product, you know, I mean, I say people because I was able to, I think I was in that row for about eight months, be from the time I took the row in time, everything transpired, but we were able to pull a trans, we ended up not closing the plant fully, but I mean, we reduced it down to 90 plus percent. We did it with dignity.
The people you would think, I think I'm a walking there with a target on my back, but, you know, I just went in and kind of like, look, I don't care about the norms. I don't care about what the protocol should be in this. I'm not asking for any, anything other than to just make sure that you have my back as, you know, when I had a conversation with my boss and he's like, I got you. And, you know, we were able to really do some amazing things on the time to this day.
A lot of those folks that worked with me and for me still reach out, you know, I mean, so it was definitely something I didn't walk into expecting to do at all, but, you know, it was, it was a great learning experience for me to know that, you know, you can tackle the anything that may look insurmountable if you do it with the right intentions of mine. It seems like you're the kind of guy, I might say that just basically sort of says yes to everything, you'll figure it out, now you're getting some new learning experience. So just say that's an accurate description. It's close.
I definitely don't say yes to everything. I am very comfortable in my nose, but this one was one of those ones where I think I knew, although my heart was no that it had to happen, you know. Right. Let's talk a little bit about proof theory.
Obviously you're putting out all your experiences and all the different jobs you've held into sort of creative, all these different things you can do. So is this what gave birth to like, does it look like a group there? Yeah, it was. So proof theory came about from years culminating into something that I didn't know was bubbling in board.
Right. So when I left the eyes, you know, I knew that I was going to ultimately do something back in the alcohol space on my own, but one to figure out what exactly that was and what it looked like. I had met a gentleman many years previously and I always say this. Anybody knows me, I always talk about an energy person.
Right. So I even click with you. I click with you. I don't.
If I don't, we can still have cordial relationship, but I kind of keep it moving. But if we don't click, but if we do click, I'm in tune with, you know, connecting and seeing how we can build together. This was someone that we just clicked right right off the bat. So right around the time I'm on the left, he had, he was an entrepreneur in the alcohol space, and he didn't have much alcohol experience other than his entrepreneur endeavors.
And what happened was we ended up talking and what should have been about a quick 45 minute conversation about, Hey, what's next? Isn't that we end up talking for hours and proof there was literally birth during the miss of that conversation. The concept behind proof. So if you think of the word proof PRO is somewhat of a double entendre, right?
So you have to work proof evidence of something, you know, establishing fact and truth, you know, so you have that part of proof. But then in our world, obviously proof is all about activating yeast, you know what I mean? That's the whole premise of the alcohol development, right? So that was that double entron to play and the proof that they're behind what we're doing.
Our whole goal was literally about how can we tap into an ecosystem or build an ecosystem that is somewhat underserved and underdeveloped for those who don't who obviously can't see me. I'm an African American and there's not a lot of African American alcohol brand owners who work within our industry. And it's a pretty large disparity, right? So it's how can we really tap into that ecosystem of ownership in the alcohol space and our whole focus with proof theory is kind of bringing some of those theories to life through nuanced and niche brands.
Specifically, how would you describe what proof theory does? Yeah, yeah. So proof theory leans into technology at scale, right? So I'll focus on curating elite brands.
And the part about underserved communities that that's the link is there are probably a lot of people or not even probably there are a lot of people like me who've had experience in the alcohol industry, but have never been able to participate at the table from an ownership standpoint. So part of what we do and part of our goal as we launch brands is to bring in individuals that actually help us become help us drive those brands, but from an equity position, right? So let's just say there's a blender here or the still of there or someone who's launched from a marketing standpoint, some of these major products. We're looking at bringing products to market, but bringing those in, utilizing those people, not just as work of these, but giving them an equity share in these little mini businesses that we're creating, right?
So it's almost like, it's almost like proof theory is a holding company where we're launching not just brands, but we're launching many businesses and those businesses will, you'll be able to participate in ownership in those businesses as we bring those brands to market. That's an amazing concept. Like it seems a little overwhelming to get it started though too. Like was it talking a little bit about the development of it?
Yeah, you know, call it naive to tell you or it's called it craziness, but it's kind of like, that's the different curves having worked with such a large organization, right? I've literally seen behind the curtain. I've worked behind the curtain. I've seen pretty much it all and I've seen a lot of brands and a lot of people in the industry throughout my year next.
This is now with my experience at the Ijo and me doing my stuff. It's over 20 years of being in those circles. It's daunting, but people do it. And you know, it's not the hardest thing in the world.
The easiest, the hardest part is just taking the first step. So the first step was my business part and I sit down saying, let's do it. You know what I mean? We literally said, hey, let's do it.
And it's like, okay, and we started to just climb the, we started to eat the elephant, right? So we said, what are we going to call ourselves and proof theory kind of emerged, right? So we started to kind of look at trends and see what's interesting out in the world. And oh, we found something that we thought might be quite interesting, you know, we started to talk, we're talking about names and we started looking at trade more.
So we literally, one step at a time started to build this out and then we started to say, you know, hey, are we drinking our own Kool-Aid? So we would bounce this off of colleagues, former colleagues, friends, family, and everyone was like, wow, you have something here. And we kind of looked at each other and said, look, let's just do it. And what's the worst that can happen?
It doesn't work. That's the worst that can happen, you know? Yeah, did you have to get a lot of investment capital to get this going off the ground or is this something just kind of built up slowly and then just kind of took in a lot of different, you know, sources of money and stuff. How does this work?
Yeah, so proof theory right now is self-funded. We are. Yeah, we will be taking in investing, but here's what's interesting about it, right? So this is kind of why we took our time to build this out the right way up front.
It's not necessarily about investing in proof theory. It's about investing in the brand that proof theory will launch because each brand again will be its own business. Right? So as we launch these brands, then you'll have an opportunity just like anybody.
I mean, you think of one of your favorite brands, if it's not owned by, let's say, a large, a large company, someone started. So the same, it'll be that same approach, right? And we'll have, it'll have its own P and L, it'll have its own values and purpose and function in place. And that's how we go at it.
So we haven't launched the first product under the proof theory umbrella yet. It's a product that we've been developing for probably where super anal about quality, right? So number one, I don't care, black owned, whatever you want to call it. Its quality is number one for us.
It's about how do we have the best product that's out there, right? And we're just, my big part and I'm super anal about that. So we've been developing this first liquid for literally about two years now. And I think we're finally at a point where both of us can be like, okay, I think we got it.
Instead of going back and forth with the distillery, the packaging, oh my goodness, is unbelievable. The packaging pretty much tells the story. So it's nothing off the shelf. So we're very, very dedicated into doing something that we know people will love.
And if you focus on that first, the investments will come. I would say that quality, what are some of the other things you're looking for when you're trying to launch certain brands? What's on your checklist? No, I mean, at the end of the day, it is a business, right?
So it has to be something that has some type of consumer pool. It has to be something that someone would actually want. Even if it's sometimes that's, that's even that's kind of a gray area because sometimes they might not know what they want it and you have to kind of tell them the value of how they're having this product, even though it's that maybe somewhat counterintuitive. But I mean, so quality, obviously, as you mentioned, is number one, but it's something cool, something that has to be something that we're interested in because I don't really want to play in any space where I'm not interested.
I'm not going to do it if I wouldn't consume it. It just has to be a unique proposition that's just a little bit outside of the norm, but not wholly outside of norm, but us being interested. Right. Well, it's honestly my dad's super cool business idea and I'm glad that someone's actually feeling that space in the marketplace because there's not a whole lot out there like it.
Talk to me a little bit about Black Leaf, how that came to be. Yeah, yeah. So Black Leaf improved their almost hard to the hip, right? Because my business partner is the same in both.
So the story is, you know, I'm listening to you how we develop proof theory. Now, my business partner several years prior had started Black Leaf. If you can't even get into how we met, even that story of Black Leaf is super interesting, right? So he's a finance guy, worked in the real estate business and he just had to be on vacation in Konya, France and he runs into a soccer player and the soccer player was pretty well known in the community.
He was married to a lady in Konya, and they ended up connecting and, you know, the soccer player knew everyone in the city and started introducing two some folks in the city. One of the people that he introduced him to was a gentleman named Bertrand LeCly who was like a fifth generation master of the still and they ended up sharing some pretty great Konya and Konya and, you know, again, this is before I met my business partner and he's like, you know what, he had that vision or that audacity probably more than vision to say, you know what, I love consumer products. I love great products. I would love to create something in that space.
So again, no alcohol experiments whatsoever. He ended up creating a product which would eventually become Black Leaf or organic vodka. So again, similar to me, where I was an engineer by day and a marketer at night, he was in his job by day and kind of had this little side gig, Ted was a vodka, but didn't really do anything with it and didn't really know what to do with it. And the response was always, this is a great liquid, but nothing came about from it.
So I was actually introduced to him because I'm focusing, hey, look, I know a guy named Marte who has a lot of alcohol experiments, you guys should meet because he maybe gave you some tips and help you out with some things. I met with, you know, it's kind of like, I was in the position where I would always heal this, you know, so I'm like, yeah, I'm here with him. Like, you know, like here we go again, somebody else wants some advice, you know what I mean? And then again, going back to the energy piece, you know, your energy introduces you before people know your name and before you walk to the building.
So it just was like instant, you know, and I said, you know, I'll help you as much as I can, just let me know what you need or what you don't need. And we kind of stay in touch, but this was years. So, so many years past and he had the brand again, did nothing with the brand. So then let's fast forward to 2019.
I'm leaving my corporate job. We had a conversation. We birth proof theory, right? So now we had proof theory and we literally go gung ho on creating our first product under proof theory, black leaf is still on the side, just sitting outside, right?
Because we wanted to make sure it kind of we didn't want to bring anything in if it didn't fit what I told you was the whole premise behind proof theory. So as we're building our proof theory, we're working on this first product. We kind of got saying, you know, we had this product over here that's not really doing anything with this phenomenal liquid, beautiful packaging. It kind of fits the mode of what we're doing with proof theory.
So we'd be crazy not to put some energy in kind of building this brand out. So we started to kind of put some momentum into the brand and literally like point gasoline on the fire, it just took off, right? So we launched in the DC market where my business partner resides. We got into the Maryland market.
I'm here in Georgia, so Atlanta. So we just got we got into Georgia about a year ago in Delaware and Kentucky. We just launched in California and Florida a couple of weeks ago and we got into Virginia. So we'll be in about 73 locations in Virginia, retail locations in Virginia next month.
And then online, we partnered with Flaviar and casters and reserve bar. So we're in about another 36 states online, right? So that's kind of the footprint. But then going back to the brand, how we able to really tap into those markets, the brand like, look, again, going back to the Kool-Aid conversation.
I don't want to make sure I'm not drinking my own Kool-Aid. I can sit here and tell you this is the smoothest vodka you'll ever taste in your life. But I've literally lived most of my adult life again in the alcohol space. I've tasted hundreds of not thousands of brands, whether those vodka, gin, whiskey.
This is literally one of the smoothest best spirits I've ever had, like literally hands down. And I'm a pretty look, I will tell you right now, yes, it's good, but it's not great. Like I'm just I'm telling you, it's that good. And we were able to enter a few contests recently.
We entered the New York Wine and Spirits contest back a few months back. We actually won best of class spirits, Forbes wrote up an article one and then people started out. So it's literally been taken off like crazy. The product is a beautiful product.
So organic meaning, no fertilizers, a pesticides and a production. We use winter week. So any mixologist, I know you guys. And if you quite a few folk gatekeepers in the bartender, the mizology world, especially when it comes to neutral spirits like a vodka, they'll always tell you winter week is typically it'll produce profile that's really open to mixologist.
And you know, we just the finders know about when we from Normandy, the packaging itself, the ink on the bottle is organic ink. We use a little bit less glass in the matter and the manufacturing of the glass. So you have this old eco conscious play. So I'll hold focus on black leaf.
We kind of call it making organic sexy, not sexy in an erotic or irresponsible way, but a sexy from the standpoint of this is aspirational, it's ambitious, you know, you can have the finest ingredients, organic ingredients, but it doesn't have to be on a brown paper label. It's a lot of people with dust on it at the bottom of the show. It's something that I can see in my back bar. I can put it out and people like, wow, what is that?
But then you taste it's like, wow. And that's what we did. Nice. So in terms of distribution, what was that like?
Was it difficult to go to the state by state? Because obviously every state's got their own different liquor lies. So what's that process like? Anyone in the alcohol business will tell you distributions always the hardest not to correct.
And it's the same with us. So it hasn't been super hard getting distribution. It's what's hard in the distribution world is really making sure that your product stays out in front of people because when you're in a different when you're in markets, you know, those distributors, regardless of how good or how big they are, you still have to be your sales team. You know, yes, they have the product and they make money when it's sold, but you got to remember, they're typically working with hundreds of brands, right?
And we're still the small brand. So like Ben says, one of our distributors in Georgia, Hamsa, Haptios. So you can imagine what that's like. So it's a lot of coaching and a lot of education.
So, you know, when I meet with the distributor, it's like, hey, look, elephant in the room. Yes, you represent Tito's and you represent this workhorse, but it's not about us trying to take Marcus Chantitos. I can be compliment you as you're doing the Tito's placement, right? Different, even though it's both vodka, very different propositions, different flavor profiles and different uses.
So it's been something that's, it's always, it's always part of the work and part of the journey. But, you know, I think we're focusing on coming up with the right stories, teaching and educating the distribution team and what makes it easier. So those men, so like when we like the, I just told you a four-jaw article that we were in or when we get acknowledgement from different groups, that goes a long way. You know, I mentioned that we just got into Virginia.
So, you know, we had to pitch to the state and we sent them a bottle before the pitch. They tasted it. The product literally speaks for itself. So it's hard to say no one's your taste.
And from a margin standpoint, we're basically a super premium product at a premium price point. So it's literally the liquid and the business. Just you'd be able to say no to it. Yeah, yeah.
It'd be great to see in Canada sometime soon. That's for sure. LCBO is one of my business board. Yeah, nice.
What's next for the brands? Where do you see yourself going in the next couple of years? Yeah. So with Blackleaf in particular, our whole focus is in depth, not width, right?
So what I mean by that is, again, having seen behind the curtain, I've seen a lot of brands like, oh, if I can just only get into, if I get at these 5,000 accounts and being every place at every time and I've seen them fizzle, right? So we want to be, we want to start in very succinct locations and build as much velocity in those accounts as possible, right? Really owning our backyard and owning accounts that we're in. And we want to do that.
And if you think about it, just for me alone in Atlanta, what there's like 12,000 restaurants and we're going to win about 150 accounts. So we have a lot of building that we're going to do in this space. We have a pretty strong marketing game plan that we want to roll out next year. As you mentioned, I think you asked a question not too long ago about how hard is it to get something off the ground from an investment standpoint.
We're still, we're actually still, so we're still in startup mode. Email the brand has been around. The product has been around for a while as a brand that we're going down is relatively new. So we're still, we're raising money.
So we're taking on investors for the brand. We talked with a couple of angels and VCs and obviously we're still out there raising for this next round. We hope to close out this round by March. But I mean, the sky's the limit with the likely for what we really did.
This brand, what's super interesting about vodka is it's almost like the forgotten alcohol, but the reality is it's still the largest, at least in the states, it's still the largest selling spirit. You know, people are talking whiskey into kilowatt, but vodka is still the number one selling spirit in the market, you know, one in three drinks on me with vodka, you know what I mean? And it's not by a long shot. The next largest category, I want to say it's like RTDs.
So it's very, but people have gotten boy's gotten stale, right? So again, going back to question, what's next is really to show them that, you know, vodka, the vodka category doesn't have to be boring. It doesn't have to be stale. I've converted so many whiskey into kilowatt drinkers facing this product, you wouldn't have imagined, right?
So we're in the process of really just building an awareness and building that affinity for the brand. That's what's next for Blackleaf. Nice. And so we've taken up a lot of your time here, so I want to take too much more about that.
Where can people find you online? What's your online presence? Yeah. So if you go to our website, Blackleaf, BLACK, LEAFVodka.co, you can find us there.
We'll really use Instagram as probably our main channel. So you can find us at BlackleafVodka on Instagram. And you can also find proof theory at proof theory PROOF, T-H-E-O-R-Y on Instagram as well. And then I am, what is my ID?
See, I'm a horrible ID for myself. So I am, I am Monte B. So I am M-O-N-T-E, the letter B is my Instagram. Wonderful.
I'll put all those links to the show notes. All right, Monte, thanks very much, man. It was a great interview and great to see you moving forward with this. Awesome.
Wish you all the best of luck in the future. Appreciate it. Look, I can't wait to talk more about the product that we're about to launch on the proof theory. So I'll definitely have to let you guys know because I think we got something that may shake up the world coming.
Thanks, Montec. Appreciate it very much. Cheers. Cheers.