Serial Entrepreneur Adam Levy (Executive MBA, ’01) Imbibes the Spirits of Success

It was late 2001. Adam Levy had just graduated from the Zicklin School’s Executive MBA program, and the tragic death of his friend and Zicklin classmate Shai Levinhar on 9/11 had made him rethink his career path. 

“Shai was working in the World Trade Center on 9/11,” Adam says. “The minute I saw the second plane hit, I knew he was dead.”

Adam, who hails from an entrepreneurial family, had always wanted his own company. He had a successful career in tech sales but as “a liberal arts major who had no business fundamentals,” he knew he needed to go back to school. He’d chosen Zicklin’s Executive MBA program primarily for its flexibility; its once-a-week classes let him continue his busy schedule of frequent flights to Silicon Valley. 

Adam especially enjoyed his classes in entrepreneurship and information systems and adds that the program provided “amazing, wonderful” support. But his newfound business chops made him overconfident. When his best friend, who worked for a music equipment manufacturer, needed a new business partner, Adam took the money he’d scored from an initial public offering at his tech employer and used it to launch Brooklyn Gear in January 2002. 

The company manufactured and sold music equipment and worked with the bass players for Bon Jovi, Beyoncé, Prince, and other famous musicians, but “I had no idea what I was doing,” Adam confesses. “I didn’t play an instrument or have a genuine passion for the industry. I just wanted to own a business and make money.” 

Long story short, Brooklyn Gear failed, and Adam was forced to liquidate it under Chapter Seven. “I lost my IPO money and almost my marriage and family too,” he recalls. 

But he gained perhaps the most important business lesson of all—that he needed to build a company he was passionate about. So he followed his nose (and tongue, teeth, and throat) into a new career in the spirits industry, which he began writing about as a beer-and-whiskey-aficionado-turned-journalist. He also continued working in tech—his other passion—and eventually co-founded NetTects, a value-added reseller of cybersecurity solutions. 

One day, while reading Malt Advocate magazine, Adam learned that in many major spirits competitions, around 85 percent of the entrants win medals. “That’s like third grade soccer, where everyone gets a medal,” he fumes. “As a whiskey freak, that made me mad.” His ire inspired the idea of a merit-based spirits competition, one judged by actual buyers—liquor importers, distributors, sommeliers, mixologists, bartenders, and the like—doing blind taste tests and judging liquids by category and price. 

“For example, judges will taste 10 Irish whiskeys priced between $35 and $50. We tell them the price and ask if they’d buy it for that price,” Adam explains. “People buy based on price, so we judge based on price.” 

Adam invited several of his industry contacts to sign on as judges, and the New York International Spirits Competition was born. The idea proved so popular that Adam quickly expanded to other cities and from spirits to wine and beer. He’s now the founder of the International Beverage Competitions, a series of annual spirits, wine, and beer competitions held in New York City, Australia, Germany, and Asia. 

A serial entrepreneur, Adam is also known as the “Alcohol Professor,” a website he founded with articles on wine, beer, and spirits that supports his beverage competitions (and, he adds, stays independent by not taking money from liquor advertisers). It’s the best known of the “professor” titles he’s acquired—Cheese Professor, Chocolate Professor, Vinegar Professor, Olive Oil Professor—all things he loves to consume, now subsumed under the Professor Media Group. 

When he spoke to Zicklin News, Adam was preparing for a business trip to Singapore to run the Asian edition of the International Beverage Competitions. And he’s not stopping there. Indeed, it’s no coincidence that one of his most memorable Zicklin experiences was the international study tour, which in 2001 took him and his Executive MBA cohort to Hong Kong and China. 

“That was my first trip to Asia and it opened things up to me,” he says. “Now I go to Asia for business all the time.”

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