By Alexi Cashen, CEO
Planning for the year ahead means making decisions before you have all the answers. How much wine will you sell? What inventory will you need? How healthy are your account margins? These three tools can help you work through those questions.
1. Sales Forecasting: Let math do the mathing
Forecasting sales for 2027 is harder than it’s ever been, with market shifts, tariffs and margin pressure all at once. Gut feel won’t cut it. We’re forecasting our 2027 numbers with the Holt-Winters method, which reads three things in your history: your baseline, your trend, and your seasons. Excel has it built in as the Forecast Sheet, so you don’t need a data scientist. Here’s how we use it: the low end of the forecast range is our plan, and anything above it is upside.
*Try this: Export 3 years of monthly depletions by SKU, open the Forecast Sheet in Excel, and compare what it predicts to what you’d have guessed.
Here are three resources to explore:
2. Inventory demand planning: From Art to (Mostly) Science
Buy too much and your cash sits in a warehouse. Buy too little and you lose your spot on the wine list. AI tools can now predict what you’ll need season by season and SKU by SKU, accounting for things like holiday spikes and allocations. Eric Gonzalez at OptiMind has built AI prompts you can plug into the AI tool you already use. He also offers 1:1 AI training, tailored workshops, and custom AI implementation work.
*Ready to learn more? Contact Eric
3. Account Profitability Analysis: Five Cases is the New Three
Landed costs are behind you. Your future margin is decided at the last mile. Profitability by door is the best single number for controlling costs because it shows what each delivery actually earns once freight, handling and the delivery are counted. This is a blind spot most companies miss.
*Try this: Rank your accounts by average cases per delivery, and flag any door that’s under five cases. We have a tool to share with you that takes minutes. Contact our sales team to learn more.
Looking at the bigger picture?
In Start at the Finish Line, we share how we’re approaching the year ahead—and why our planning starts with a feeling, not a revenue target.
