Our Courses
More than 600 students have started one of our courses
If you have thought about getting into distilling you are in good company. Since we started in 2020, we have helped more than 60 distilleries to plan, execute their vision and open their doors across Australia and New Zealand. You'll see some of them here in the Distillers Gallery.
Our courses are designed for you to complete online, in your own time. We also have an awesome mobile app, so you can work through the courses on the move.
Our courses are available for anyone considering starting a distilling business in Australia or New Zealand. If you're in New Zealand visit this page for more info.
Course 1: Planning Your Successful Australian Distilling Business
This course has seven in-depth modules to help you work toward your licence and determine if launching a distilling business is right for you.
After guiding you through a lot of research, the course helps you work out all the steps needed to plan and start our distilling business and create:
- A Business Plan
- A Marketing Plan, and
- An Advanced Business Financial Model.
If at the end of the course, if you decide this is something for you, the course helps you complete your Australian Taxation Office (ATO) paperwork to apply for a licence to manufacture spirit in Australia. You need this licence even before you order your still(s) and equipment.
Read more about the Planning Your Successful Distilling Business course or to watch a preview of the course.
Course 2: Launching Your Successful Australian Distilling Business
The follow-up course from Planning Your Successful Distilling Business, this course is for people who have decided to start a distilling business in Australia or New Zealand.
It's ideal for:
- Graduates of our Planning course
- Distillers ready to grow, and
- Distillers looking to perfect or improve areas of their business.
Over the 11 modules, you are given access to an enormous amount of content from the four Co-founders of The Distillers Institute and professional consultants, advisers and industry personnel.
There are more than 40 templates to help you hit the ground running. Some of these include:
- GANTT chart / project plan: with more than 100 tasks in five phases, it lays out what you need to do when, in what order, how long each task takes and if they have any dependencies. It visually shows you the critical path of opening your distilling business
- Complex Business Financial Model: building on the Advanced Business Financial Model included in the ‘Planning’ course, this model adds more granularity to your budget. It includes detailed Cost of Manufacturing, automatic cost increases (and reduction, due to economies of scale) as you grow and a budget by month in the next year, so you can load your budget into your accounting software and easily run a monthly budget versus actual report
- Organisation chart and Job Descriptions: simple and effective one-page Job Descriptions for all the roles needed in a distilling business, which you can pick-and-choose from then tailor. The organisation chart allows you to easily modify it for your unique business
- Production templates: from documents to spreadsheets to help you track inventory, costs and production data, and
- Marketing and distribution tools templates and information, and
- The deep thinking and systemisation needed to take a good business to a great a business.
Read more about the Launching Your Successful Distilling Business course, and watch a preview of the course.
