Risks of Life, Marisa Wilairat Shares Her Wisdom

The Alexi Cashen Podcast

Marisa Wilairat is the Alcohol Compliance Manager at Elenteny Imports, a multi-faceted logistics company dedicated to growing their partners’ businesses in the wine, beer, and spirits industry. Elenteny handles all the details of compliance, logistics, and delivery for their clients so that their team can focus on sourcing and selling exceptional wines, beers, and spirits.

Before joining Elenteny Imports, Marisa was an Associate Attorney at Sullivan & Cromwell LLP. She holds a Doctor of Law (J.D), Magna Cum Laude, Order of the Coif from the University of Michigan Law School.

In this episode…

Why is alcohol compliance so difficult? It's complicated because all rules for all states aren’t centralized in one place. You often have to research each state individually, and navigating state websites can be difficult. When you do find rules, you have to make sure you're reading them within the full context. The text itself is difficult to parse through to then understand in common language. You can read the rule or an advisory over and over again, and you can still be unsure about what it means. Furthermore, rules can change. Even if you find them, learn them, commit them to memory (which, who can do for all the states?), or find a way to keep the rules documented, you have to keep updating them.

But Marisa Wilairat is different. She is no stranger to risks and challenges—the very things that come with alcohol compliance. She went from quitting her job at a reputable law firm in New York to delving into the alcohol industry she knew little to nothing about. Despite the alcohol industry being a highly-regulated and risk-filled industry, she came to enjoy her work.

Marisa considers working in alcohol compliance both a burden and an honor; the responsibility she has towards their clients at Elenteny Imports and towards the regulations which she needs to consider with every transaction makes her job incredibly fulfilling. And according to Marisa, the risks she’s had to overcome in the industry has been a wealth of resource of wisdom and learnings about life in general.

On this episode of the Alexi Cashen Podcast, Alexi interviews Elenteny Imports’ Alcohol Compliance Manager, Marisa Wilairat, about her work in the company and the growth that she has experienced through her role. Marisa shares her story about the significant career risks she took, the burden and honor of risk-taking, leadership lessons she gained throughout her career, and the milestones and achievements that she has reached with Elenteny Imports. Stay tuned.