As Vice President of the International Division for Ernest and Julio Gallo Winery, Jeff Yapp built the international business from a small export operation into 45 percent of all US wine exports. But the story worth telling is not the number. It is where he learned to lead, which was not in a corner office.
Everyone starts in the dirt
Gallo had a philosophy about leadership that Jeff carried for the rest of his career. Every family member who entered the business started from the ground up, working the fields, grafting plants, learning the company from the soil to the shelf. Anyone headed into sales carried a bag like any other rep. When Jeff arrived to build the international division, he was not handed a title and a view. He was given a sales territory. He worked displays, stocked shelves, and learned the business at the level where it is actually won or lost. It did not matter that he had already run large operations. What mattered was understanding the thing from the bottom.
Execution you can see with your own eyes
Jeff learned execution from a leader who, well into his 80s, still walked in and out of stores studying the shelves and the displays, judging for himself whether the plan on paper was actually happening on the floor. He never needed a report to tell him what was going on. He went and looked. Jeff made that his own habit for good, on the theory that it is easy to assume a plan is being followed and impossible to be sure unless you are standing there.
Humility as a discipline
The same leader would ask questions until you hit the wall of what you knew, then keep going until you had to say I don't know. That was the right answer. Guessing does not build credibility, and pretending to know weakens trust. Real leadership, Jeff took from it, is the willingness to admit the gap and then do the work to close it.
Ambition, and the number that followed
With that foundation, the ambition was not to export a little more, it was to lead every market they entered. In less than two years Gallo became the number one imported wine in both the UK and Canada. The distribution network Jeff built reached more than 50 countries, and along the way he brought home a Cannes Film Festival Honorable Mention and a Gold Mobius award for creative excellence. Underneath all of it was one belief, that success is decided in a single moment, when a customer reaches out and picks your product off the shelf, and that everything in the business exists to earn that moment.