Josh Wand was 19, studying hospitality and working in a Las Vegas cigar shop, when a customer named Tim Haughinberry started asking questions. The conversation led to a job helping build a cigar division at Southern Wine & Spirits of Nevada. Wand learned sales, distribution and how a product reaches a customer. He also acquired an example of something he would spend years doing for other people: spotting a possible future before its owner had quite worked it out.
He had imagined a career opening hotels. At the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, he also entertained the idea of owning restaurants. Then the people supplying those businesses began to interest him. There were brands to represent, routes to market to understand and teams to assemble. Hospitality had more doors than the one marked restaurant owner.
That detour eventually produced ForceBrands, a recruiting business; PINATA, software for coordinating work in the field; and CreatorForce, a practice for the companies attached to recognizable faces. Today, Wand is a general partner at The Family Fund & Founder Community and executive chair of ForceBrands. The settings have changed from a shop counter to a cap table. His interest in arranging the right introduction has proved unusually durable.
A restaurant plan takes a detour
Wand graduated from UNLV in 2000 with a bachelor’s degree in hotel administration. His education included internships in Japan and with Walt Disney. The travel and practical work opened up the supply side of hospitality, where a person could help build what restaurants served without owning the dining room.
By 2004, he was national sales director of Montecristo Rum, a division of Sidebar Spirits. He was also helping offer students the sort of industry access he had received. The young graduate was already returning the favor. Teaching someone how a business works can begin with letting them through the door.
Wand’s subsequent account of running a rum business includes hiring, business development and a national sales and distribution network. Those responsibilities gave him an education in the people a brand needs around it. A product can occupy a bottle quite comfortably. A business has to occupy an organization, with all the expense and occasional awkwardness that entails.
Hotel administration, class of 2000.
A rum business next.
Recruiting followed in 2007.
The introductions become a business
His account of the recruiting idea places him at the South Beach Food and Wine Festival in 2006, making mojitos on the sand. One champagne-company contact needed a regional sales manager. Another was considering a change of jobs. The two conversations suggested a service hiding inside the conversation itself.
BevForce launched in 2007. Wand kept the initial brief narrow: beverage businesses needed people who understood beverage businesses. Familiarity with the trade mattered. A candidate’s previous title was only part of the assignment; someone also had to understand the kind of company that person was joining.
That distinction helps explain the appeal of a specialist recruiter. Consumer brands can look charmingly simple from the shelf. Behind them sit distribution relationships, sales territories and decisions about who can handle the next stage. Wand had worked inside those demands before offering to help other founders hire for them.
Rachel Doueck’s memory of joining offers a smaller, more useful picture of the early company. She became its fifth employee after an introduction to Wand, bringing experience in recruitment and bartending. They took calls together; he coached her. In her anniversary account, the early brand conversations included Vita Coco, KIND and St. Germain.
Wand’s own recollection of the Broadway loft supplies the furniture: a ping-pong table served as a conference table. A start-up can save money on meeting rooms and still find an extravagant number of meetings to hold. Doueck’s account also gives the relationship a longer perspective, through several jobs inside the company and, eventually, the experience of training others.
The practice expanded into food with FoodForce in 2014 and into additional consumer categories. In January 2018, ForceBrands had more than 55 employees across eight US locations. That is a historical snapshot, and an illuminating one: the beverage specialist had become an employer with its own growing set of people decisions.
Wand also developed PINATA after seeing clients struggle with work beyond their internal teams. Launched in 2016, it addressed field activations and the coordination between brands, agencies and people doing the work. Recruiting had shown him one problem close up. It had also given him a view of the problem next door.
- 2007BevForceFind people for beverage brands.
- 2016PINATACoordinate teams in the field.
- 2023CreatorForceConnect creator brands with operators and partners.
- 2025A new CEOChoose the next leader for ForceBrands itself.
The person on the package needs a team
CreatorForce arrived publicly on April 25, 2023. Wand developed and launched the practice through ForceBrands, with Daniella McBride leading creator partnerships. The proposition reflected work the parent company had already done with roughly 70 creator or celebrity brands, including Feastables and Chamberlain Coffee.
The launch put familiar corporate jobs inside an attention-grabbing category. Executive search covered leadership and board roles. Recruitment reached vice presidents, directors and senior managers. A job board served entry-level hiring, ambassadors and social media coordinators. The celebrity might be an unusual founder. The organization still had vacancies.
“They need an experienced team behind them to support them.”
Josh Wand, on the CreatorForce launch
The design had two directions. A creator-led company might need someone to run its operations. An existing brand might need a creator partner. McBride brought experience spanning entertainment, talent and brand incubation. Wand brought years of consumer-sector hiring. Between them lay a practical translation job: working out what each party expected to contribute.
His move from New York to Los Angeles also deepened relationships with talent agencies. But Wand’s description of the opportunity included a demand on famous partners: participation. Buyer meetings and trade shows belonged in the picture. A partnership needed to connect with the person’s identity and the actual business. Recognition could get a product noticed; someone still had to do the work after the introduction.
The practice has since moved into another chapter. Cr8tify, McBride’s agency, describes CreatorForce as merging into it in 2025. Its present offering includes talent sourcing and agreements involving cash, equity, royalties and advisory roles. CreatorForce belongs in Wand’s story as a business he developed and launched, with an evolution that continued through McBride’s agency.
A seat on the other side of the table
Investing extended Wand’s relationships into another part of company building. The Family Fund & Founder Community publicly debuted in March 2023 with a $25 million fund. Wand, Sean Kelly and Kurt Seidensticker were its founding general partners. Its limited partners included consumer founders and operators who could bring experience along with money.
At launch, the group described a collaborative approach, investing alongside other firms and drawing on people who had already built businesses. The promise was access to useful judgment: someone who understood a distribution question, a leadership vacancy or a difficult stage of growth. For Wand, years of recruiting supplied a close view of how companies assembled themselves.
His remarks later that year added a caution about financing. “Capital should be fuel on the fire for growth,” he said. The timing mattered. Raising money came with obligations and expectations, and founders needed to consider the stage of their business before deciding to take it.
The Family Fund’s publicly announced fund size in March 2023. A launch figure for the investment vehicle, separate from Wand’s personal finances.
By January 2026, Wand and Kelly were discussing investor evaluation on the Startup CPG Podcast. The conversation asked founders to examine investors’ focus, incentives and behavior when an investment struggled. A founder choosing capital was also choosing a relationship. That made the questions before a deal rather consequential.
Hiring the next person, including your successor
In June 2025, Wand appointed Rob Ganjon CEO of ForceBrands and remained on its board. The company now lists him as founder and executive chair. After years advising other businesses on leadership, he had made a leadership decision for his own. The founder’s next contribution could take place from a different seat.
His public work has also become a series of conversations. Make Magic, his Substack newsletter, features founders and investors he admires. Its subjects have included Mark Ramadan, associated with Sir Kensington’s and Hu, and Springdale Ventures co-founder Genevieve Gilbreath. The interviewer gets to keep asking people how their businesses came together.
Wand has called himself a “Motivator in Chief.” In describing his management, he has favored access, listening and employees having room to contribute. One welcome ritual was particularly literal: new hires received a money tree, a plant meant to suggest that growth needs attention. It is an agreeable piece of office symbolism, provided somebody remembers to water it.
For all the ventures and job titles, the cigar-shop story remains a useful place to leave him. Haughinberry met a student and offered him a way into an industry. Years later, Wand’s work still involves finding a place for someone else’s abilities. The next company, the next hire or the next partnership begins with getting two people into a conversation worth continuing.