What Does it Take to Succeed? Just 3 Things.

By Brittany Merrill-Yeng
Being a business owner is a constant balance—and not just of your time and resources. It is a balance of being so confident in your idea and your ability bring it to fruition while recognizing how little you know.
It is staying true to your course while remaining flexible as new obstacles that appear. To successfully balance all of this, the three most important things you need to achieve success are as follows:
Persistence
Persistence is essential to being a business owner. From the outset you will be faced with a chorus of “no’s” at every turn. “You cannot do this. This is not practical. It cannot be done.” Your new job is to make it work in the face of all of this resistance because, as the owner, it always falls back on you to make sure everything gets done.
Learn to ask questions that push people to find a solution. Or, better yet, get creative and find an alternate path. Start feeling comfortable being the person with the least experience in the room. You can still be the one to make a breakthrough in the industry.
I cannot begin to describe how many times we’ve been told something is not possible. Many times, accepting “no” as an answer would mean essentially giving up on my dream and letting all the people working for us down. Given these stakes, I would work until we found a solution. While I was new to the liquor industry, I am very fortunate that my experience as a patent litigator taught me how to craft the questions to get the answers I needed and be able to quickly learn from the experts.
Faith in Yourself
Perhaps, more importantly, you need to keep faith in yourself and what you’re doing. When we started our business, the “experts” said the concept would not work, our branding did not make sense and our price was way too high. Now, those are the key things that the “experts” are pointing to as the reasons we have been successful. We all hear about the importance of confidence and staying true to what you believe, but it takes a lot of restraint to hold your ground when everyone is telling you it’s the wrong course. For me, it is more than confidence; it’s faith in yourself.
In the end, it’s these things that you did differently that will make you successful. If you want to achieve something no one else has done before, you have got to do things no one else has done before. There is nothing more gratifying than achieving success in the face of all this doubt. It gets easier when your team starts to have faith in you too. Now, when we get to these junctures, I ask those around me to have patience and trust me. I’d bet on us any day.
Humility
While you cannot compromise on the core tenants of your business, you have to be willing to accept help and be flexible on the smaller things. And, even when you achieve the impossible, you cannot rely on your past success. You have to keep moving forward and improving to get your business to the next level. This takes a bit of humility.
There are many times you have to make a less than perfect fix work. You need to face the harsh reality that you will not be prepared to handle every challenge in front of you—but you will rise to it any way. You will learn and you will be better next time. Rather than staying down, walking away or hiding these moments, we celebrate them. These are our “Skrewball” moments. As we continue to push to new limits, I look forward to many more, knowing that we’ll look back, laugh, and wonder how we “winged it.”
Brittany Merrill-Yeng is a chemist turned attorney, turned spirits brand owner as the co-founder and managing partner of Skrewball Peanut Butter Whiskey. Merrill-Yeng was one to watch in 2019 as she took her small family owned company and grew it into a Hollywood favorite and national sensation in just one short year. The award-winning 70-proof original peanut butter whiskey has been awarded several honors, including the Double Gold Medal for Best Flavored Whiskey in the New York World Wine & Spirits Competition in 2018 and 2019, and just recently secured both Disability-Owned Business Enterprise (DOBE) and Women Business Enterprise (WBE) certifications.
For more information about the Skrewball brand, visit skrewballwhiskey.com.