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Gary Shansby is meticulous. Everything he does is characterized by a thoroughness—an extreme attention to detail. This quality is obvious when you meet Gary. He is always perfectly groomed, although his sartorial finesse never seems forced or foppish; it’s always natural and comfortable.

This meticulousness has been a hallmark of Gary’s business life as well. Just one of his marketing successes would be enough to turn a person into a business icon, but Gary has an incredible string of conquests that puts him in a class by himself.

The latest triumph is Partida tequila, his first venture into the alcoholic beverage industry. Where many others have fallen by the wayside, he has succeeded in creating a powerful new brand in a crowded marketplace. He has done this—as he has repeatedly done in the past—through the force of hands-on marketing. “To build a brand, particularly a new brand,” he told me recently, “you really have to do it yourself. No one else is going to do it for you.”

After graduating from the University of Washington and its Business School, where he focused on marketing, J. Gary Shansby went to work for Colgate-Palmolive. After a rapid ascent at that company, he moved to American Home Products (now Wyeth) to head up its over-the-counter drugs division. Then he moved to the Clorox Company.

“To this day,” he explains, “every time I go into a store I look at where the various sections are placed, what brands get positioned at eye level.”

While creating strategic planning and marketing strategy as a senior partner at Booz, Allen & Hamilton, he was approached in 1975 by a small, badly-managed company called Shaklee. Not wanting to get involved with them, Gary gave the company a list of outrageous demands he would want if he were to get involved. Instead of walking away as Shansby had hoped, Shaklee agreed to his demands. In short order, he transformed the operation and found himself as CEO of a company that produced a line of successful nutritional and personal care products with annual sales in excess of $500 million.

In total, Gary has taken on more than 50 companies. Subsequent successes include: Famous Amos Cookies (bought for $3 million and sold for $61 three years later); La Victoria Salsas; Terra Chips; Spic and Span; Vitamin Water; Mauna Loa Macadamia Nuts (sold to Hershey); and Voss water from Norway.

But Gary had never tried his considerable marketing skill in the alcoholic beverage industry. He and his lovely wife O. J., a glamorous San Francisco socialite, own a home in Mexico, and during frequent trips there he became fascinated by tequila. So, in 2001, Gary decided to create a super-premium tequila of his own.

In his usual meticulous manner he went about discovering all there was to learn about the tequila market. During his investigations, just by chance, he was introduced to Sofía Partida, whose family is a longtime grower of blue agave and controls 5,000 acres of plantings. He immediately conceived of an estate-grown tequila, with the source of production owned and managed by the brand. As a result, in partnership with this well-established family, Partida tequila was born.

“I went in knowing I was going to have to spend in the neighborhood of $25 million to succeed in this very competitive market,” Gary told me in his dramatic office atop the Transamerica tower in San Francisco. After crafting a product that was felt to be superior by most who tasted it, he set about creating a thorough marketing strategy. “Distributors liked the marketing approach of going after affirmation of the heritage of the brand. This is a Mexican brand and everything is developed in Mexico. They also looked at my track record and knew that I was not going to let it fail. They didn’t take it on because they thought it was going to be an immediate success but they thought it had a long-term potential. They basically said, ‘Prove it!’ without saying it.”

During the period in which he was developing Partida, Gary, now 70 years old, was diagnosed with prostate cancer. He weathered that storm without ever taking his eye off the Partida ball. Like most other hurdles in his life, that one was eventually cleared. He is cancer-free today.

The creation and success of the Partida brand should be a case study taught in every advanced marketing course. Gary has been intimately involved in every aspect of the procedure, from brilliant package design, to the logo, to the bird symbol. He has overseen the elegant yet rich flavor profile of the final products (called “simply the finest tequilas that money can buy,” by THE TASTING PANEL contributing editor F. Paul Pacult).

Gary is impressed with the goodwill that pervades the beverage industry. In consumer packaged goods, “you didn’t even want to be seen with or even talking about a competitor. You tried to find the best way to put them down. You don’t see that here,” he told me. “We [tequila producers] have gathered as a group two or three times and I couldn’t even begin to tell you how open and friendly everyone is with each other. People ask me what I do about my competition and I tell them that my only competition is Partida . . . ourselves. You can’t worry about other people.”

Shansby has hired award-winning bartender Jacques Bezuidenhout (recipient of THE TASTING PANEL’s first Up-and-Comer Award as San Francisco’s Best Bartender in 2006) to be Partida’s roving ambassador, and has created a revolutionary interactive concept called Tequila Confessions in which people reveal their most vivid tequila experiences. Shansby has also established the Tequila Re-Education Program to dispel the various myths that surround the category. (Visit www.partidatequila.com.) The entire Partida effort is high-powered, meticulous and very successful—just like Gary Shansby.