“Like a Toddler Watching a Baby”: Ali Anderson's First Gig
by Ryan Brown
You've probably held a bottle of Joseph Magnus Bourbon at some point. Maybe you turned it over on the shelf, read the label, dropped it in the cart for a dinner party or a gift. What you didn't see was everything behind it: a great grandson digging through his late mother's closet, a syringe pulled through a century old cork, and a woman who spent her twenties absolutely convinced she would never go into sales.
Ali Anderson has seen all of it. Today, she's the CEO of Craft Co, the company behind Joseph Magnus, Copper Craft Distillery, Thatcher's Organic, Artisan Spirits, and a growing list of premium brands, all run out of a distillery and social house in Holland, Michigan. But when she sat down with me on My 1st Gig, we didn't start with any of that. We started in a 900-student high-rise dorm at Saint Louis University, where a 22-year-old was handed a staff of eight and told, more or less, “Good luck!”
A Toddler Watching a Baby
Ali's first professional title was Community Development Coordinator at Saint Louis University. Translated out of HR speak, that meant she ran the tallest dorm on campus. Nine hundred students, a staff of eight to help her manage it, and she was only 22 years old. She'd cut her teeth as an RA at Ball State, confiscating alcohol from kids who were, functionally, her peers, which in hindsight might have been foreshadowing. She describes running the SLU dorm as being a bit like a toddler watching a baby.
The job taught her two things that never left her. How to manage chaos, the 2 a.m. calls, the fire alarms that may or may not be real, and how to lead people who were essentially her own age, without the benefit of much more experience than they had. "How do I lead these people when I'm really in their same stage?" is how she put it to me. Looking back now, she doesn't think running a company is all that different. It's just a more chaotic dorm with better resources.
Eating Her Words
Ali grew up around sales without wanting any part of it. Her dad was a pharmaceutical rep, her mom worked in a pharmacy, and Ali swore up and down that selling to people was, in her word, gross. She would eat those words more than once.
After the dorm, she landed her first corporate job at Lucent Technologies, hired on the spot as a customer service rep fielding frontline calls from engineers and customers. She had no idea what she was doing, which turned out to be the whole point of taking the job. Lucent paid for her MBA with no strings attached, and she kept getting promoted as she learned to translate the company's legacy systems into newer platforms like SAP.
She stayed almost five years, through what the office grimly nicknamed FMP Thursdays, shorthand for the days layoffs came down. She watched longtime employees, guys who had trained her, get pushed toward the door. It taught her exactly what kind of company culture she didn't want to build, and she left grateful for the training and the degree, ready to try something else entirely.
Finding the Creative Side
A marriage, a move from Saint Louis to Alexandria, Virginia, and a stretch selling asset management software for a scrappy startup out of Napa followed. Then came kids, and with them, a moment Ali never saw coming.
She remembers lying her oldest daughter, Genevieve, down for a nap, lying beside her, and crying, which was not something she normally did. She realized in that moment she couldn't go back to her corporate client work. So, she leaned into something she'd always kept in her back pocket, a love of photography that traced back to studying piano and staying creative in college.
What started as a way to stay home and keep creating turned into a photography business that ran for nearly a decade, with weddings, newborns, and family portraits. Some of those clients are still close friends, and every so often, she still gets a call. The baby she photographed at two weeks old is graduating from high school now. She likes to quote Ruth Bader Ginsburg about this stretch of her life: "You can have it all, just not all at the same time.”
The Bottle in the Closet
The spirits chapter started the way a lot of good stories do, with an old friend and a text message. A friend from her Saint Louis days called to say he and a partner were starting a distillery, built around a discovery: Joseph Magnus's great-grandson had found a sealed bottle in his late mother's closet, dated May 1892. They'd already pulled the liquid from the cork with a syringe and cold-called some of the biggest names in the industry to help figure out what they had. What they needed now was someone who understood sales, and people.
Ali agreed to help, at 6 a.m. on a Saturday, just until they found somebody permanent. That was more than ten years ago. Joseph Magnus opened its doors on September 12, 2015, and that discovery became the foundation of what Craft Co is today. A few weeks before our conversation, Ali finally got to taste the liquid pulled from that 1892 bottle herself. She says it tasted like heaven, and turned spearmint by the end of the glass, the kind of transformation you only get when a whiskey has had 127 years to think things over.
Ask the Question
Before we wrapped, I asked Ali what she would tell someone standing at the start of their own career. Her answer: don't be afraid to ask the question that makes you feel dumb. She went to business school twice and still didn't know basic industry terms when she got into spirits. She would Google them quietly, or just ask outright on distributor calls. “Nobody remembers the question,” she told me. “They remember the mistake you made because you were too proud to ask it.”
It's a fitting note for a career built on exactly that instinct, walking into a room she didn't fully understand yet, whether that room was a dorm at 22, a call center, or a distillery, and figuring it out by staying curious about the people already there. Ali has spent three decades proving that the thread connecting a lemonade stand, a corporate cubicle, a camera, and a nine-year-old bourbon is the same thread the whole way through. It's people. She just kept following it.