NEETU GODARA CO-FOUNDER AND CHIEF MARKETING OFFICER, AWARE BEVERAGES INC.

The average women-owned SMB had revenue of $470,000 in 2018, with 47% of them having one to 10 part- or full-time employees.

The average age of a woman who owns a small to mid-sized business.

Inspiration can come from everywhere, but it has to be pretty satisfying to see it come to life, something Neetu Godara can surely attest to. She met Daniel Beach and Kevin Folk through her brother and discovered they were all vodka soda drinkers for the same reason: no sugar. It was their go-to drink when they went to a bar, but there wasn’t anything ready-made in the local liquor store if they wanted the same drink at home or at the cottage.

“There was nothing in a can you could actually buy when we started this company that didn’t have sugar, didn’t have crazy artificial colours and wasn’t full of calories,” Godara says. “And we were like, wait, if all of our friends are vodka soda drinkers and we drink vodka sodas, how is there not a convenient option without all of the ‘garbage’ in the can?”

With that in mind, the three friends founded Whitby, Ont.-based Aware Beverages Inc., better known as Social Lite, in 2013 to bring just such a product to the market. Although there are plenty of alcoholic seltzers on the market now, it was a pretty difficult task to sell

The percentage of women who self-funded their business; 14% utilized a business loan (compared to 20% of men); 5% received partial funding from investor(s); and 5% said all the requested funding was from one investor.

The percentage of women SMB owners who have children under 18.

the idea to liquor stores at first. Cooler aisles are filled with brightly coloured sugary drinks, perfect fodder for younger drinkers not into the taste of wine or beer yet — think Mike’s Hard Lemonade or Smirnoff Ice. Yet Godara says they knew vodka soda in a can would work: one, because all their friends were into it; and two, the success of fizzy water despite initial skepticism.

After making a minimum order of 6,000 cases, the three started cold-calling liquor stores in Alberta, the only province where liquor sales are fully privatized. They didn’t shift many cases at first, but their first big break happened in September 2014 when a buyer at a chain of stores called Liquor Depot, one of Alcanna Inc.’s divisions, liked the product enough to make a big order. The second break came when the Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO), reportedly the world’s biggest buyer of booze, took on one of Social Lite’s products. “We looked at each other and we said, ‘Guys, you only get that shot once,’ Godara recalls. That was a definite deciding point, okay, we’re all out, we all quit and we better give it everything.”

Since then, Social Lite has been growing one can at a time, primarily through sampling. COVID-19, of course, put a dent in that type of marketing, but the company is adjusting. For example, it started a partnership with booze delivery service The Beer Guy in Ontario to give out 10,000 cans during the month of December. “That’s quite a large sample number for us to get potentially 10,000 new people to experience one of our best flavours and see what Social Lite is all about,” Godara says.

People always say entrepreneurship is a leap of faith, and that is my pet peeve, because it makes it literally sound like you’re jumping off a cliff. Why would anyone do that?

If I think about what we really did, for a year we worked on it as a project, we wrote a business plan, thought about how we would do it, figured out how we could get money, figured out how we could sell it in Alberta. And it was basically actions, step by step, so at the moment I quit, we had a plan and it didn’t feel like a giant leap of faith, that I was jumping into the abyss.

All three of us were working full-time gigs. We made the product and once we got that validation from that first big buyer in Alberta, we kind of said, ‘Okay, there is something here,’ but, responsibly, as small-business owners, we all quit one at a time because the company could only pay so many people at a time.

The money came from just us initially, but we did get a loan from a couple of people. BDC (Business Development Bank of Canada) was our initial loan, and now we operate on a revolving line of credit with RBC, so we’ve got enough behind us now that we can work with the banks. We got ourselves off the ground.

I remember when we signed our loan agreement, part of the agreement is that if you can’t pay it back, they can come after your house. I was terrified. I was like, ‘Oh, my God, not only do we have this loan, but I’m assigning my house to this loan.’

When you’re starting a small business, it’s all about being responsible. We were a true boot-strap company. We were not spending a penny unless we absolutely had to. We were working late. We were buying supplies from Dollarama. We were doing everything we could to keep costs low, because we wanted to make sure that we had a real business on our hands before we went ahead and spent all that money.

As a small company, we really have an ability to be nimble and listen and react really quickly to what people want. For example, this year, we launched our first-ever Social Lite Bold, which is 6% ABV in a vodka juice. That was our fans telling us, ‘I love Socialite, but sometimes I add a little more vodka or I add a splash of juice.’ We got that feedback and we turned around Bold pretty quickly.

So many big companies have now jumped into the game. In one way, it helps speed up the marketing process, because we had to do so much heavy lifting in educating people that you could get a drink that has no sugar in it. Now, we just need to be the best product out there.

We just made a decision to hire our own national team, so we’re in the process of hiring 15 new employees. We currently have four. Hiring our own national sales team really allows us to have feet on the street across the country, and to control our own destiny.

Because of COVID, there’s definitely been a huge shift in marketing strategy this year, because so much of our marketing is doing sampling. We did a big shift to digital marketing. We’re working with influencers, having influencers try it and talk about their review of the products. Doing different digital marketing on Youtube, Facebook and Instagram.

The scariest moment was actually just quitting. In the one or two months leading up to quitting, and I’m not an anxious person, I had so much anxiety over the paycheque. Obviously, I had bills to pay, and I had put in 10 years at a company building my career. It could have been a total failure. But once I gave it up and quit, I had this feeling of liberation: I’m out of this bubble, the world is my oyster, and whatever happens, happens.

AWARE BEVERAGES INC.