Industry Speaker Series

The Virginia Wine Coalition partners with top industry experts to help your winery grow through our Industry Speaker Series. We connect Virginia wineries with leaders in viticulture, winemaking, and wine business strategy to inspire innovation and progress. Join us as we share insights, best practices, and new techniques to strengthen Virginia wine’s presence in the marketplace and set your winery up for lasting success.

All instalments of the Industry Speaker Series are available in podcast audio format on the Virginia Wine Coalition Spotify channel.

Previous Speaker

Zane Stevens

June 22nd, 12-1pm

View Recording

June 22nd, 12-1pm

Numbers That Grow Wineries: 5 Costly Financial Blind Spots

This session kicks off the initial rollout of the Virginia Wine Coalition’s Cost of Production project, a coordinated effort to help Virginia wineries understand what it truly costs to make and sell their wine. The project will roll out in stages through the end of June, and this lunch and learn sets the foundation for everything that follows.

Most wineries run beautifully on instinct and dangerously on the wrong numbers. Great wine, thin margins, capital tied up for years before a bottle is sold, and seasonal swings that can make a strong year look frightening or a weak year look fine. In this practical, winery-focused seminar, Zane Stevens of Protea Financial shows you how to treat your numbers as a steering wheel rather than a rear-view mirror.

Designed for owners, GMs, and anyone who touches the financial side of a winery, this session walks through the five blind spots Zane sees most often in winery books, and the practical fix for each. You will leave understanding the difference between tax accounting, which looks backward to minimize one number, and decision-making accounting, which looks forward to grow a healthy, profitable business.

What we’ll cover:

No true cost per case: why pricing without a real cost-to-produce means every price is a guess
Casual inventory: treating your single biggest asset as an estimate, and how to value and reconcile it properly
Cash vs. accrual confusion: how seasonality hides whether you actually made money
Flying blind on margins: tracking margin by channel and against benchmarks so you know what “good” looks like
Tax-first thinking: why optimizing the tax bill before the business is profitable starves growth

We will close with what good actually looks like in practice: financials you trust monthly, cost and margin by wine and channel, a short KPI dashboard, and tax handled as the last step rather than the first. Bring your lunch and your questions.

Who Should Attend:

This session is designed for winery owners, general managers, bookkeepers, and anyone responsible for pricing, inventory, or financial decisions in the Virginia wine trade.

Speaker:

Zane Stevens is the Founder of Protea Financial and has specialized in the wine and beverage world since 2014, beginning his career at KPMG before building a firm dedicated to operational accounting for wineries. With more than twelve years spent in the day-to-day details of winery books, he brings hands-on expertise in bulk-to-bottle costing, TTB compliance, club and DTC accounting, and M&A. Named to the North Bay 40 Under 40 in 2024, Zane is a firm believer that good numbers grow good businesses.

Previously Recorded

AI + SEO For Winery Websites (Amy Sarah Marshall)

Building Regional Credibility (Nova Cadamatre MW)

DC Consumer Focus Group (Matthew Brown)

U.S. Consumer Insights (Dr. Liz Thach, MW)

Distributor Relationships & Closing the Sale (Claudia Chamberlain)

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