From the time he was a young boy, Gallo lived and breathed wine. His father’s winery might have never taken off to the degree the family had hoped, but it was still an important introduction into the business for his young son. Once he was at the helm of his own vineyard operation, Gallo still might not have had much in the way of resources, but what he did have was his own manpower, and lots of it.
“We could afford one tractor,” Gallo recalled of his upstart days, “and there were times I drove it for 12 hours, then turned it over to Julio who drove it for another 12 hours.” There were only two of them, but together, the Gallo brothers did the work of twice as many people. It was that spirit of dogged hard work and set the E&J Gallo Winery apart from the hundreds of others.
Gallo was an avid deep-sea fisherman, but even when he would go on his vacations, he could not resist the temptation to work. He would use any opportunity in a new area to try and introduce his wines to new buyers. For decades, he would travel around the country on his own in his car, stopping in every grocery store that he passed to persuade the store managers to carry his product. Where they already did carry wines, Gallo made it his mission to convince them to move the wines from where they usually were – behind the counter – to prominent floor displays.
Gallo did not just live and breathe his own wine. Of course, he wanted his products to do well on the market, but Gallo took a much more prominent role in the industry as a whole. He produced commercials promoting wine, he sat on wine promotion boards, and he became chair of the Wine Institute. He also mentored future generations of wine producers and put up billboards promoting wine throughout the country. Not to mention the fact that he was his own best customer. Gallo loved drinking what began as his red table wine, but later became his Cabernet Sauvignon.
Each and every work day, right up until the time he passed away at 97 years old, Gallo made it a habit to work straight through until 6:30 p.m. He would then go home and work another three hours from the comfort of his own house.
The New York Times said that Gallo “had a compulsive need to be the best at what he did.” It was for that reason that he would spend as many of his waking hours as he could working on creating the most successful winery in the world. He may have been aggressive in all of his packaging, pricing, and marketing, but nothing made the difference more than Gallo’s willingness to put in the time. Gallo was able to build a wine empire with little else in the beginning other than his own two hard-working hands.
Lesson #2: Nothing Makes Up for Dogged Hard Work
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