Tito Beveridge: Hitting It Against All Odds

At first glance, Tito Beveridge, the charismatic founder of Tito's Handmade Vodka, appears to be an unlikely success story, possibly even a complete fluke.

Beveridge tells Big Think he didn't set out to build a big nationwide vodka company. He just set out "to meet some girls, write off my bar tab, and maybe make $1,200 a month." So what's the moral of this story? Beveridge did what he loved, followed his dream, and ended up beating the odds. Maybe his success is not such a fluke after all.

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Transcript -- As I've kind of gone along in my careers, I was a geophysicist first, I worked for oil and gas companies, subsurface mapping, I was a well site geologist, I did seismic data processing. And then I became a mortgage broker. Which it seemed like it's not a likely path for a vodka maker, but actually, in the end, it ended up being like the perfect recipe in my mind for a vodka maker.

The turning point for me was when I saw this guy on TV and he said, "If you're trying to figure out what to do with your life, take a sheet a paper and you draw a line down the middle and on one side you put what you love to do, on the other side you put what you're good at." And it's usually good to have like a few glasses of Tito's before you do this just to kind of loosen yourself up, a little truth serum. And then you sit there and you look at it and you try to incorporate everything you wrote down, as many things as possible into what you're dream job is.

And the theory behind it is that if you're doing something that you love to do, that you're good at, then you'll work harder at it. And you'll probably be better at it and you won't feel like you're busting your ass, you'll feel like you're going out, you're having fun, and stuff that you would normally would want to do anyway whether you got paid for it or not. For me going out to this little shack that I built out in the country and cooking booze and sitting there like tasting these little test tubes just as it's coming off the still, I mean, to me that did not seem like work to me. And it still doesn't. I just still enjoy going out there, have a few test tubes in my back pocket. And so, you know, would I spend a lot of time doing work? Yeah, I mean, I had a cot out there, I lived there out of, you know, I mean, I lived next to the still with my dog.

And so yeah, I spent a lot of time doing it, but I enjoyed it. I think that's just kind of all part of it. I mean, as far as like hard work, it's like, I don't know, you know, I guess there's people that are workers and people that aren't. But I've always just looked at it like I enjoy working. You know, when I'm not working I just tend to like sleep later and later and next thing you know I'm waking up and it's like 3:30 in the afternoon. I don't do well. I'm one of these people that's like, I'm like an old bird dog, you got to keep me working all the time or I'll be out chasing rabbits or something. So hard work and tenacity, you know, following your dreams, you know, hitting it against the odds, it's like, you know, I mean I didn't set out to build a big nationwide vodka company. I really just set out to meet some girls, write off my bar tab, you know, maybe make like $1,200 a month, you know. That would just be awesome. You know, and it just, it just kind of kept going and going and going and going and, yeah. And it worked out.

Directed / Produced by Jonathan Fowler and Elizabeth Rodd