The Champagne Dame: How diversification helped Kyla Kirkpatrick bounce back after losing 90% in revenue

Kyla Kirkpatrick is the face behind The Champagne Dame, an events, education and tour business which, pre-pandemic, was taking home more than $1 million in yearly revenue.

When COVID-19 hit here in Australia, Melbourne-based Kirkpatrick watched the business lose 90% of its revenue when she was forced to cancel her regularly scheduled tours to France.

Yet thanks to a pre-planned diversification strategy, Kirkpatrick was able to take home $2.4 million from an aligned business, Champagne Emperor.

So why was Kirkpatrick already preparing to diversify her business before any whispers of COVID-19 were about, and what made Champagne Emperor take off so well?

In an interview with SmartCompany Plus, Kirkpatrick tells all.

One in the same

Kirkpatrick admits she really was already doomsday prepping before there was even a whisper of a global pandemic.

“But I was preparing for something to affect me personally — not for something that affected the world,” she says.

Her background is in commerce, and Kirkpatrick says that one of the key principles anyone who studies business or economics learns is the need to have a diversification strategy.

“You learn to not have all of your eggs in one basket, to make sure you minimise risk,” Kirkpatrick says, reflecting on her studies.

So when Kirkpatrick’s partner left his job to come and work at Champagne Dame — he’s a winemaker by trade, after all — Kirkpatrick realised it was actually “really risky”.

To counteract such risk, Kirkpatrick launched Emperor Champagne in 2017, an e-commerce platform offering more than 80 champagne brands and 300 cuvees.

Kirkpatrick acknowledges that she’s “very lucky” that her thinking was correct and that she was prepared for a pandemic-sized disaster — even if she was actually preparing for something far different.

A symbiotic journey

While The Champagne Dame started with just Kirkpatrick on the books, the diversification strategy over the past few years and changes brought on by the pandemic means that the team has now grown to seven.

And as the pandemic eases off and restrictions continue to dwindle, Kirkpatrick says the two businesses can and will continue to co-exist in this symbiotic manner — not only in staff, but in customer acquisition as well.

“We have an incredible lifecycle of customers,” Kirkpatrick explains, across The Champagne Dame and Emperor.

“So you might come to a champagne masterclass and do an educational tutorial with me, and leave with some champagne. And then from then on, you’ll go to Emperor to buy your champagne,” she uses as an example.

“The same is true in reverse.”

Kirkpatrick attributes such a strong lifecycle to her team’s attention to customer service, emphasising that you “can’t come into a market like this — with big dominant players, such as Dan Murphy’s — and not be better”.

“You have to be better. You have to be faster. You have to be sharper; your packaging needs to be better.

“Everywhere where I could provide a competitive advantage for myself, I have.”

And a competitive advantage it is.

As rumours swirl of a champagne shortage on Australian shores, Kirkpatrick assures that she’s once again ahead of the trouble.

“We’ve got two containers on the water [in Melbourne] at the moment, with nearly 15,000 bottles ready to fill that hole,” she says.

Keeping it close to home

Despite the 90% loss of revenue for The Champagne Dame business, Kirkpatrick does acknowledge that the Emperor business managed to see a 400% month-on-month growth in revenue — which Kirkpatrick not only attributes to the aforementioned customer service, but also to keeping the business close to home.

As it happens, bringing the Emperor business to the forefront wasn’t the only pivot Kirkpatrick made. In fact, before COVID-19, Kirkpatrick had planned to roll her offerings out globally.

“We had spent months and months and months documenting every single aspect of the business, basically putting ‘Champagne Emperor’ in a box” Kirkpatrick says, running through the user manuals, typification and processes included.

Just before the pandemic, the business had sold its first licence to Singapore — with plans to further expand to China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and a bunch of other markets in the near future.

“Obviously when COVID-19 struck, it was very difficult to roll out a global enterprise without being in those countries,” Kirkpatrick admits.

That’s why the business pulled back and focused solely on its domestic strategy, resulting in the incredible 400% month-on-month growth while people at home were “drinking more, and not just drinking cheap stuff”.

Despite borders opening, Kirkpatrick admits she “hasn’t decided” whether to pick up the plans for the international expansion yet.

“I’m really going to focus domestically for the short term and if I find that I get that humming and all of our ducks are in a row, then we can revert our attention to international,” she says.

Risk versus reward

So what’s Kirkpatrick’s advice to other businesses that relies on the face and name of a single person?

Kirkpatrick says it’s all about thinking about this person-risk, and minimising it.

“If you are the brains trust that makes your business, how can you put other people around you or how can you put other systems in place to mitigate anything happening?”

Kirkpatrick also stresses the value of having more than one source of income.

“I always have multiple sources of income, and I think that’s super important for people,” Kirkpatrick emphasises.

Cheers to that.