by Joyce Marcel, Vermont Business Magazine It is 1972 in Burlington, and a man named Howard Aiken has just created a new service for collecting and processing billing data. Based on that, the company he starts, Vermont Information Processing, soon has six employees. In 2001, Aiken sells the company — now 45 workers strong — to the employees. Since then, VIP has grown into a stealth behemoth, so secretive that its CEO won’t sit for an interview and its top-level employee-owners squirm when asked to quantify the company’s revenue.
Today, Aiken’s little company, now located in Colchester, is celebrating its 50th year in business. It has grown to 600 employee-owners and is widely credited with revolutionizing the national beer, wine and soda industry. Its recent yearly revenues, according to ZoomInfo Technologies, a leading go-to-market intelligence platform for sales and marketing teams, reached $99 million.
Operations Director Louise Morgan, who has been with VIP for 25 years, concedes the company has gained a reputation for secrecy. “We are kind of stealthy in that regard, only because we’re not big on marketing ourselves, or putting ourselves out there,” Morgan said. “We’re so busy focusing on our customers and providing what they asked us to do and delivering on those promises that we make.”
VIP’s customers range from giants like Anheuser-Busch and Molson Coors to local craft breweries. The company doesn’t limit itself to beer; it processes information for companies such as Pepsi as well.
VIP has grown, in part, through acquisitions, including MicroVane in 2003, BDN Collections in 2015, TradePulse in 2017, Vistaar’s US Beverage Alcohol in 2020, and Data Consultants Inc, BizStride and eoStar in 2022. It now has small offices in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Missouri, but its main campus remains in Colchester.
Before the rise of computers, everything was done on paper. Remember the sales books with the white page, the yellow page and the pink page? That was what data looked like when Aiken had his bright idea.
“Howard Aiken founded us as a billing service,” said Heather Burnett, who has been at VIP for 18 years. “He found a few customers in the southern part of the state. He worked with a hardware company, a produce company and a beer distributor. At the end of the day, they took their invoices, put them on a Greyhound bus and sent them off to Burlington. He rented space on a computer at night because it was the cheapest time to do it, and he would key in all the sales reports based on all those invoices, wrap the sales reports around those invoices and send them back down south on the bus the next morning.”
Aiken recognized that the one business that always paid on time was the beer distributor.
“He said, ‘This the business that I want to be in,’” Burnett recalled.
That customer, by the way, was DeWitt Beverages in Brattleboro. Farrell Distributing in Rutland, another VIP client, acquired DeWitt several years ago, so you could say VIP has serviced at least one company for 50 years. And Leader Distributing, a Pepsi bottler/distributor, is in Dewitt’s old warehouse in Brattleboro and went live with VIP a year ago. So, the beverage world spins round and round and VIP thrives.
“One thing that I take from that story is that the very first customer that he worked with is still a customer today,” Burnett said. “That is so important to us, because it really is about the relationships that we build with our customers — that long-term friendship, if you will — that we’ve developed over all the years. We have several customers like that, customers who have been our clients longer than a lot of marriages last.”
Dating back to Prohibition, the beverage alcohol industry has comprised three tiers: the producers, or the makers of the product; the distributors; and the retailers (grocery stores, bars, convenience stores, etc.). VIP offers data analysis for each tier.
“VIP is a software company that provides solutions for the beverage industry,” Morgan said. “We’re heavy in beverage alcohol, but we also work for a lot of nonalcohol-industry customers like soda bottlers and such. So, we have our customers — our suppliers or makers of products — like Anheuser-Busch or Absolut Vodka, and then the local distributors distribute that product to the retailers in local markets. We provide solutions for suppliers, distributors and retailers to help them streamline their businesses, sell more product and operate more efficiently. For many, we provide back-end services for improving their businesses so they can sell more product and be more efficient.”
Photo: VIP employees meet in a conference room named “The Tap Room.” Photo: Baldwin Photography.
Sierra Nevada Brewing, on the West Coast, is a pioneer in that regard. It has been in the craft beer business since 1980. It distributes its products in every state in the country as well as in parts of Europe, Australia and Asia. It has been a client of VIP for about 15 years.
“We and other suppliers like breweries, wineries, distillers, etc sell our products to distributors, who in turn sell all our products into individual retail outlets,” said Rhonda Swanson, sales information manager for Sierra Nevada. “We have a little over 400 beer distributors around the country that we sell our beer to. When the beer distributors sell beer into each of the retail accounts, they share that information back to VIP. Hundreds and hundreds of distributors of beverages send their sales data to VIP every night.”
VIP collects and processes that information and makes it available to suppliers for a monthly fee.
“VIP’s data allows us to have a more granular view of where our product is going at the retail level,” Swanson explained. “We use this data to understand where our products are selling well — or not — and to identify opportunities for additional sales. We’ve seen VIP grow and evolve, and over the years they’ve developed a variety of tools for suppliers that leverage the sales data they collect from distributors. They are truly a valued vendor partner of ours.”
Closer to home, VIP lists among its clients Citizen Cider of Burlington, the third-largest craft cider brand in the Northeast.
Justin Heilenbach, the president and co-founder of the company, which employs 90 people, says he is a big fan of VIP.
“We work with wholesalers all over, and they’re all blown away when we tell them that VIP is located near us and that we know them and we’re friends with them,” Heilenbach said. “They’re not just managing data for Citizen Cider; they’re managing data for global beverages like Budweiser. We’re a small customer in the big picture of things. So, to be able to have that kind of dialogue with them is awesome.”
VIP provides Citizen Cider with the data and the tools the company needs to evaluate how its brands are doing in the marketplace. “For example,” Heilenbach said, “VIP has a geo-locator feature that allows a sales rep in downtown Boston to put into their phone all the accounts that sell Unified Press Cider, and they’ll all show up on the map.”
Citizen Cider can drill down to study a single account or survey the entire national market using VIP data, Heilenbach added.
“For example, I could look at Brattleboro Co-op and see how many cases of each of our products sold in the last 36 days,” he said. “You can go down to the individual account level. You can also look at whole states. Each wholesaler has its own sales team. I can look at what an individual salesperson — one who doesn’t work for me but who works for the wholesaler — has sold, specifically. We can use that to acknowledge them. ‘Hey, you’ve been our No. 1 rep in the market in the last year; here’s a gift card.’ It’s an incredible amount of data.”
VIP’s data can be a sales tool and can help make marketing strategy. It can help with pricing and inventory management. A company pays for the level of data it needs.
“It’s live on our phones,” Heilenbach said. “We use VIP data to prepare for every sales meeting. It’s the primary way that we manage sales strategy for our business.”
Another VIP client is Zero Gravity Craft Brewery, a leading Vermont-based regional brewery that distributes products across New England, New York and New Jersey, with emerging distribution markets in Pennsylvania; Washington, DC; and Virginia. The company currently has around 75 employees and operates out of two facilities, one in Burlington and the other in South Burlington.
“Simply put, we utilize VIP as a primary tool to help streamline our sales team’s efforts in identifying market trends and opportunities,” said Zero Gravity’s sales analyst, Cody Semmelrock. “VIP is able to provide us with as close to real-time market information as possible. At 50,000 feet, we can look at year-over-year and month-over-month comparisons for how different distributor sales levels have changed in the marketplace. But the service goes far beyond general sales levels.”
Zero Gravity can then track percentage or volume changes and other key performance indicators across its many different product SKUs (stock-keeping units).
“With this tool, we can create a multidimensional scoreboard that will help us win,” Semmelrock said. “VIP provides our team with essential information in driving efficient and effective sales strategies, making sure that we are allocating our resources effectively in each one of our markets. For example, we can track how well a given product’s sales increase came directly after a specific marketing campaign in a certain location. These types of insights assure that our spends are achieving the return on investment we would hope for and help make sure we can continue to grow moving forward.”
Solutions
VIP’s offerings have grown exponentially more complex over the years.
The company has software developers who develop specific applications…
Read More: Tracking the beverage industry: Vermont Information Processing