Tito’s Handmade Vodka raises spirits for small businesses

In honor of its 25th anniversary, Tito’s is supporting entrepreneurs with 10 individual $25,000 grants.

By Taylor Berry, VP Brand, Tito’s Handmade Vodka

The story of Tito’s Handmade Vodka starts well before the first drop of juice made it out of a patchwork still in rural Austin over 25 years ago. It starts with a man named Tito Beveridge, and his curiosity to find what made him happiest. You’d think with a last name like Beveridge, his future would lead directly to the spirits business, but it took significant failures, left turns and a heavy dose of soul searching for his aptronym to be realized.

Some know exactly what they want to do with their life, with every road mapped out to fulfill a prophecy for their success. Tito thought he was one of those people when he enrolled in the pre-med program at Vanderbilt University. Enter left turn number one. After briefly working in a hospital, a harsh realization settled in: healthcare was not for him.

Tito retreated to his home state to attend the University of Texas at Austin and got a job on a Gulf Coast oil rig. Every day he noticed one man working inside with air conditioning and clean clothes. Jealous, he tapped one of his colleagues. “Who is that and how much does he make to look like that?” The answer? The resident geologist, who raked in over a million dollars a year. It may not be profound, but the idea of a science-based desk job with a seven-figure salary led Tito to pursue a degree in geology and geophysics at UT.

After graduation, Tito landed in Venezuela running heli-portable dynamite seismic crews and then managing groundwater geology in Colombia. The days were searing and brutal. As his feet sloshed around in the sweat that puddled at the bottom of his rubber boots, his gut told him he was lightyears away from the life he wanted, so he traded in rubber for leather and made his way back home.

Now stateside, Tito took everything he learned and set out to start an oil company. Uno Oil, aptly named because Tito was the “uno” employee, was short lived. Months after incorporating, Operation Desert Storm sent the price of gas tumbling, leaving Tito with a failed business, barrels of debt and a fading sense of direction.

The thing is, dreamers don’t let failures keep them down. Because that energy expelled dwelling on defeat is like the heat given off from electricity. It’s wasted. Dreamers instead take that energy and put it into their next adventure, only looking back to acknowledge what they’ve learned.

Tito was down, but not out. He was broke, but he had his friends and his life. For fun, Tito would scrounge together loose change, buy a case of the cheapest vodka he could find, throw some chopped-up habaneros into each bottle, infuse the hooch and jar it up as gifts for his friends. It wasn’t fancy, but it was undeniably Tito. People loved it.

Along the way, a friend got him into mortgage brokering, promising Tito a job where he’d wear a suit every day, and a sizeable paycheck. Was it his dream career? No. Did it keep him going? Absolutely. It was this job that led him to the greeting that would change the trajectory of his life forever.

One night at a party, a stranger came up to him and said, “Hey, you’re the vodka guy!” He quickly corrected the man with, “You mean, the Mortgage Guy.” The man proceeded to praise the legend of Tito’s infused vodkas, and Tito kept insisting that his future was in mortgages.

But that exchange got him thinking. What if he could be the vodka guy? What if these jars of infusions, filled with habaneros, could actually take him places? In the midst of introspection, a late-night public broadcast came on TV instructing viewers on how to uncover their passion. “Find the intersection of ‘what you love to do’ and ‘what you’re good at.’” Inspired, Tito drew a line down a sheet of paper and made those lists.

The end result? The start of that dream he didn’t know he had. A vodka company.

After a quick stop at his local liquor store, he learned that flavored vodka already lined every shelf, and his infusions couldn’t scale. What he needed was a “vodka so smooth you could drink it straight.” A vodka-flavored vodka.

Tito figured it was worth a shot.

He found a plot of land in rural Austin, built a 998-square-foot shack and pieced together a still using junkyard parts, relying on photos of prohibition-era moonshiners as a rough guide. He messed around with the recipe for months until he found a process that resulted in the smoothest vodka around. Ready to move full steam ahead, Tito hit a wall. No one would invest. Possible backers turned him down, convinced he would never get his permits — the State of Texas had never been home to an operating, legal distillery. So, he cleaned out his savings account, racked up 19 credit cards and funded the business himself.

He pored over code books and challenged Texas laws, ultimately convincing the state to get him a distilling permit and let him incorporate. He hand-bottled, glued on paper labels and screwed on copper caps, with little rest. But if you ask Tito, you don’t need much sleep to dream.

Unwilling to give up, he kept at it, giving his vodka away to friends, always accompanied by one simple request: “If you like it, tell 20 of your closest friends.” Well, they did just that.

Twenty-five years later, Tito’s Handmade Vodka lines shelves and fills glasses around the world. Once a small, bootstrapped operation, Tito’s has grown into a brand known for its fair-priced, award-winning product. It’s become a spirit synonymous with doing good and supporting thousands of nonprofit initiatives each year.

Tito planned to be a doctor. He wanted to be a geologist. He failed as an oil tycoon. He settled for being a mortgage broker. But it was all those journeys that gave him the perspective and spirit to keep going. He may have thought the linear path would lead him to happiness, but it was the winding road that provided him the map he needed to succeed. Dreamers don’t let failures keep them down. We want to find the next ten.

In honor of our 25th anniversary, Tito’s wants to give back to small business owners who are following their passions and making an impact in their communities, just like Tito did.

Through Love, Tito’s, the company’s philanthropic program aiming to turn spirits into love and goodness by joining forces with nonprofits across the country, Tito’s is launching the “Love, Tito’s Small Business Grant Program.” For this brand-new effort, we’re teaming up with Accion Opportunity Fund, a financial support system that provides diverse, determined small business owners with access to capital, networks and coaching, to deliver 10 individual $25,000 grants to help fuel small business owners who demonstrate our company values of grit, love, kindness, meaning and purpose.

The goal behind the “Love, Tito’s Small Business Grant Program” is to offer entrepreneurs one less obstacle to overcome and one more opportunity to succeed. Because if Tito Beveridge can turn a dream into a bottle, a bottle into a brand, a brand into a catalyst for making a difference, all that with a pocket of debt and word-of-mouth, imagine what he could have done with a little extra help.

To learn more about the “Love, Tito’s Small Business Grant Program,” visit aofund.org.

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