This year’s BevNET Live Winter conference in Marina Del Rey on Dec 8-9 was my first BevNET. Coming in without years of prior conference context turned out to be an advantage. Patterns surfaced quickly - not because they were loudly proclaimed on stage, but because the same themes kept reappearing across panels, hallway conversations, and quieter discussions with founders, operators, and investors.

What stood out most was the tone. The event didn’t feel louder or flashier. It felt more grounded. Less about bold predictions, more about the real constraints teams are actively navigating as brands scale, mature, and, in some cases, prepare for an exit.

Here are three takeaways that stayed with me after the event.

1. Exits are built long before the deal — through clarity, not hype

   
   The major exit conversations—Poppi, Health-Ade, and Spindrift—set the backdrop for much of BevNET. What struck me wasn’t the size of the deals, but how consistently leaders framed their exits as outcomes, not objectives.

   
   In each case, success wasn’t described as perfectly timed or opportunistic. It was the result of brands that had already achieved cultural resonance, operational discipline, and internal alignment well before M&A entered the picture.
   
   

   Poppi’s story highlighted how digital-first community building—often in unexpected markets—created momentum that felt authentic rather than manufactured. Health-Ade’s leadership emphasized something quieter but just as critical: trust and transparency between operators and investors long before a transaction was on the table. And Spindrift’s discussion made clear that recognizing when a company needs stronger operating infrastructure is often what unlocks the next phase of growth.

   
   The common thread was inevitability. These weren’t brands scrambling to package a story. They were businesses that already understood themselves well enough to move decisively when the moment arrived.

   
   
   

2. Velocity has become a credibility signal, not just a performance metric
   
   

   Across buyer and operator conversations, one word kept coming up—sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly: velocity.
   What felt different this year was how little patience there was for ambiguity. Vision still matters. Brand still matters. But those narratives didn’t carry much weight unless they were backed by a clean, defensible understanding of what was actually moving at the SKU and store level—and why.
   
   When shipments, depletions, POS, and promotions don’t line up, velocity stops being a fact and becomes an argument. And arguments don’t scale with buyers, partners, or investors.
   
   The brands that came across as most confident weren’t the loudest or most polished. They were the ones that could get to a shared version of reality quickly and stand behind it. Velocity, increasingly, isn’t just a performance metric—it has become a proxy for operational credibility.
   
   What this reinforced for me is that teams aren’t struggling because they lack data. They struggle when they can’t reconcile signals fast enough to act with confidence.

A brief note on the AI conversation

I also had the opportunity to present a workshop during BevNET titled “The Hidden AI Advantage – What Winning Brands Know Before You Do.” What struck me wasn’t enthusiasm for AI as a concept—that conversation has clearly moved on—but how consistently the questions centered on confidence and timing. Leaders weren’t asking for more analysis or more data. They were asking how to get to a clear, defensible answer faster, especially in moments when the business is scaling and decisions carry more consequence.

That dynamic echoed what I heard throughout the conference.

3. Leadership inflection points demand faster, clearer answers

   
   Day two of the conference leaned heavily into leadership evolution—particularly the difficult transitions that occur as brands scale. Founders spoke candidly about recognizing when intuition alone is no longer sufficient, and when the business begins to demand a different operating cadence, different questions, and sometimes different leadership roles.

   
   What resonated with me was how often these moments weren’t framed as failures, but as signals. When the number of unanswered questions starts to outpace the answered ones, it’s usually an indication that the business has outgrown its existing decision framework.

   
   This theme hit close to home. BevGenie came out of watching leadership teams reach this exact inflection point—where data exists everywhere, but clarity arrives too slowly, and decisions stall at precisely the moment speed matters most.

   
   The conversations at BevNET reinforced that this challenge isn’t theoretical. It’s shaping outcomes in real time.

Final thought

What tied these takeaways together was a shared sense of pragmatism. Less interest in abstract narratives. More focus on decision clarity, execution readiness, and leadership honesty.

Coming to BevNET for the first time, it was clear that the industry isn’t short on ideas or ambition. What it’s increasingly focused on is something harder to manufacture: confidence grounded in reality.

And that usually marks the beginning of real change.