The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast

Victoria wrote a book about building a personal brand, and then people kept asking her the same follow-up question: fine, I built it — now what? That question became the sequel. Influence Unleashed taught the construction. Influence Activated teaches what you do once it's standing. Her diagnosis of where most people go wrong is uncomfortable and probably correct: they lead with credentials and industry and job titles, when the truth is people do business with people.

She never takes a meeting cold. Prospective hire, new client, old client — she looks them up first, and she assumes they're doing the same to her. That's the whole argument in a sentence. Write your own narrative or accept the one strangers assemble for you. She's honest about using AI, honest about the filters, and firm that none of it works without something real underneath. And she has little patience for the quiet hope so many professionals live on: that doing excellent work will simply be noticed.

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WHAT YOU'LL LEARN:
- The inspiration behind the name CLINQ ZERO
- Anto's previous corporate experience
- How CLINQ ZERO differs from traditional wines
- The business model of non-alcoholic wine
- Future plans for CLINQ ZERO varieties
TIMESTAMPS:
[00:00] Welcome and Introduction
[00:06] Overview of CLINQ ZERO and Anto's Background
[00:30] Round 1: The Making of CLINQ ZERO Begins
[04:00] Round 2: The Business of CLINQ ZERO Starts
[06:12] Closing Remarks and Where to Find CLINQ ZERO

@thebestwinepod
Discover More from The Best 5 Minute Podcast Network:
Wine Podcast
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India, twenty-some years ago: the site manager who addressed her male employee instead of her

Aggressive versus assertive — and the word that gets used on women

Guilt aimed at driven mothers; Canada's six-month, now one-year, maternity leave

Working the day she gave birth to her second child; back at the desk after two weeks

"Well, ask a man"

Being the only woman in the room, routinely

Forrest on golf, the email he never got, and what exclusion feels like from the inside

"I drive a mean golf cart and I buy drinks incredibly well"

Finding other avenues to build relationships

Hiring for real-life experience over polish; MBAs rank low on her list

The seven-out-of-ten rule, and the coaching that fills the gap

Agility, growth mindset, good humans, good fit

#Unstoppable and #NoExcuses — the philosophy in two tags

The books: Unstoppable (co-authored, opening chapter), a personal branding book, The Power of Whole Human Leadership, a leadership transitions book, and the new Influence Activated

LinkedIn ranked her the #1 social seller worldwide during her IBM years

Forrest's promise to the audience: the wine is coming

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This part is where the numbers come out. Jeanine wanted twelve to fifteen hours of chill, driven by a specific need: she and her husband keep a second home in Albuquerque, the drive runs through desert heat, and she favors black vehicles, which is one more thing working against the wine in the back. What the finished product actually delivers exceeded her target — the twelve-pack holds for twenty-four hours and beyond, and she's tested it under a truck cover, deliberately engineering a heat trap, across the full twelve-hour run from Orange County to Albuquerque. The six-pack is the short-trip version: picnics, concerts, a day at the beach, six to eight hours as long as you keep it zipped.

She also talks about what she had to let go. She wanted a collapsible bag for boats and RVs, and the engineering wouldn't support it — the design couldn't hold temperature. That's the moment, she says, where her stubbornness had to give way to someone who actually knew better.

Then there's everyone else. Once word gets out that you're building something, people arrive with suggestions, and Jeanine's response to the two-pack and three-pack crowd is that she's already thought it through — the ice pack system doesn't earn its keep at that size, and plenty of simple bags already exist for a dinner out. Her real problem was never dinner. It was tasting rooms: buying six or nine or twelve bottles, then facing the next winery with nowhere to put them. Her husband wouldn't carry them in and wouldn't leave them in the car. What she needed, as she puts it, was a wine mule. He quit.

The centerpiece is her conversation with Travis Rosbach, co-founder of Hydro Flask, who asked her the obvious business question: why rebuild the entire cooler instead of just selling the ice packs? Her answer is the thesis of the whole product. The cooler companies built for beer, and wine bottles are taller. Loose ice chills unevenly and can overchill a bottle, and soaking labels means losing them — which matters not only for knowing what you're drinking but for the artist whose work is on the bottle. Rosbach laughed and conceded the point

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The Canadian tell — "out and about"

Growing up in Calgary; talked into the University of Calgary at sixteen despite offers elsewhere

Scholarship in hand, room and board free, and moving out anyway that first semester

Relocated to Toronto straight out of university, later to the US

One, two, sometimes three jobs at a time through school: banking, a doctor's office, acting and commercial work

Four or five hours of sleep at twenty — and what sleep looks like now

Her son's objection: "but then you have no social life"

The tuition bargain — maintain the GPA or repay the semester

C-suite, decoded: chief executive officer, chief operating officer, and the functions that reported to her

Recruited at twenty-four as COO and general manager, three months into new motherhood

Everything but finance in her remit, in a lean outsourcing P&L where mistakes cost money

Confidence read as competence — "rightfully or wrongfully so"

Just over forty M&A and divestiture transactions across the career

Twenty-six years in B2B professional services: outsourcing, consulting, technology

@thebestwinepod
Discover More from The Best 5 Minute Podcast Network:
Wine Podcast
Music Podcast
Travel Podcast

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