One of the most frequently asked questions at Park Street is “What is the difference between front and back-office tasks?”
Front-office tasks deal with any aspects of the business that directly correlates with revenue generation or is customer-facing, most notably sales and marketing.
Other practices that occur within the business are considered back-office operations. Some key examples of back-office operations for alcohol beverage companies include:
- Federal compliance
- State compliance and license infrastructure management
- Logistics and supply chain management
- Order processing and fulfillment
- Distributor and control state customer service
- Chargeback/billback management
- Accounting, reporting and systems
Structuring Your Beverage Alcohol Company
There are three different approaches that beverage alcohol companies typically take in structuring the front and back-office divisions.
- The integrated model, which you would typically have at larger international companies, where all front- and back-office operations are handled in-house.
- The bundled model, also known as agency model, in which a brand works with another beverage alcohol company, outsourcing both the front- and back-office tasks to support its growth. While it is still used in some cases, this model is not as common now as it was a decade ago.
- The unbundled model, which outsources back-office tasks by way of a third-party, allows the company to put more of its focus on revenue drivers (i.e. sales, managing relationships with their customers, expanding markets, etc)
The Benefits to an Unbundled Approach
The unbundled approach allows beverage alcohol entrepreneurs to utilize the economies of scale offered by providers like Park Street. For example, these providers save smaller brands from having to build out a license infrastructure in all 50 states. It also provides an element of risk mitigation because Park Street has an entire team of in-house attorneys and regulation experts that stay up to date on changes across each market. Think of it as pooling resources together with many brands of all shapes and sizes so that the brand owner can take advantage of scale.