Latest / Craft Brewery Financial Training Podcast / Brewery Spotlight: Presidential Brewing

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Brewery Spotlight: Presidential Brewing · Craft Brewery Financial Training Podcast

• 0:00
  Speaker 01: Today on the podcast, we start our new series called the Brewery Spotlight on the Business of Beer.
• 0:04
  Speaker 01: These are going to be real world insights from breweries who are making it work.
• 0:08
  Speaker 01: So each month we're going to shine a spotlight on one exceptional brewery to explore what makes their business thrive.
• 0:14
  Speaker 01: So today we're going to speak with Jake Losey from Presidential Brewing.
• 0:18
  Speaker 01: Brewing, and in our conversation, we're going to go beyond the beer to uncover best practices and financial strategies, sales tactics, and real-world lessons that Jake has learned.
• 0:29
  Speaker 01: So this is going to be your front row seat to learn from your peers who are building profitable, resilient breweries and raising the bar for the industry.
• 0:37
  Speaker 01: So for now, please enjoy this conversation with Jake Losey from Presidential Brewing.
• 0:42
  Speaker 01: Welcome to the Craft Brewery Financial Training Podcast, where we combine beer and numbers to provide you with tips, tactics, and strategies so that you can improve financial results in your brewery.
• 0:53
  Speaker 01: I'm your host, Kerry Shumway, a CPA, CFO for a brewery, and a former CFO for a beer distributor.
• 1:00
  Speaker 01: I've spent the last 20 years using finance to improve financial results in our beer business.
• 1:05
  Speaker 01: Now I'm helping other craft breweries to do the same.
• 1:08
  Speaker 01: Are you ready to take your brewery financial results to the next level?
• 1:12
  Speaker 01: Okay.
• 1:13
  Speaker 01: Let's get started.
• 1:25
  Speaker 01: and share best practices.
• 1:39
  Speaker 01: So I'd love to tell you a little bit more about this.
• 1:42
  Speaker 01: If you are interested in learning more, please email me, kary at beerbusinessfinance.com.
• 1:47
  Speaker 01: That's K-A-R-Y at beerbusinessfinance.com.
• 1:52
  Speaker 01: Or you can visit bbfassociation.org.
• 1:55
  Speaker 01: That's bbfassociation.org to learn more.
• 1:59
  Speaker 01: Hey, Jake.
• 2:01
  Speaker 01: Welcome back to the podcast.
• 2:03
  Speaker 01: How are you doing today?
• 2:04
  Speaker 00: Oh man, it's another beautiful sunny day up here in Michigan.
• 2:08
  Speaker 00: Excited to see you again, Cary.
• 2:10
  Speaker 01: I'm excited to see you too.
• 2:12
  Speaker 01: So for people that might not be familiar with you and your brewery, why don't you give them some background?
• 2:17
  Speaker 00: Yeah, so my name is Jake Losey, and I started Presidential Brewing Company with my wife Kaylee back in 2019.
• 2:24
  Speaker 00: Presidential is just this wild, silly idea.
• 2:29
  Speaker 00: It kind of came from a thing that we used to do called New Beer Fridays.
• 2:32
  Speaker 00: And basically every Friday we'd get together, we'd drink a beer that we never had before.
• 2:38
  Speaker 00: It was a small group of people.
• 2:40
  Speaker 00: And we kept doing this until we started to run out of beers at the store, which if you can believe was possible in 2012.
• 2:46
  Speaker 00: And we started to run out of beers at the store.
• 2:47
  Speaker 00: It still was.
• 2:48
  Speaker 00: And so one day we decided to make a beer.
• 2:50
  Speaker 00: We made an oatmeal stout, which was one of my favorite styles.
• 2:54
  Speaker 00: And when that beer was ready to drink, it tasted awesome.
• 3:00
  Speaker 00: And I don't think we were expecting that.
• 3:01
  Speaker 00: So I felt that that beer deserved a name because it was good.
• 3:05
  Speaker 00: And at the time, it was an oatmeal stout and Obama was president.
• 3:09
  Speaker 00: And we just kind of combined the two together and called it Oat-bama.
• 3:11
  Speaker 00: And that was really kind of the beginning of the whole journey right there.
• 3:17
  Speaker 00: From there, we came up with a bunch of other silly beer names.
• 3:21
  Speaker 00: And before long, I started talking to a realtor.
• 3:25
  Speaker 00: And I didn't even hardly know how to make beer at this point.
• 3:29
  Speaker 00: And here I was in position to someday open a brewery.
• 3:34
  Speaker 00: Now, that was six years before we would actually do very much about it.
• 3:38
  Speaker 00: But the idea for the business was born that day.
• 3:42
  Speaker 00: And it was really about creating a space that kind of married this idea of silly beer names and presidents in a time that was pretty tumultuous.
• 3:52
  Speaker 00: Even in 2012, the political landscape was weird.
• 3:55
  Speaker 00: And I really had a lot of fun with kind of poking at all of the different president names.
• 4:04
  Speaker 00: And a lot of them, like Obama, is not really insinuating anything.
• 4:08
  Speaker 00: You know, a lot of our names tend to stick more in that vein, like a Rutherford B.
• 4:13
  Speaker 00: Hayes or a Sherbert Hoover or a Calvin Creamidge is our cream ale.
• 4:18
  Speaker 00: But some of them, we do tend to kind of poke a little bit at a presidential story.
• 4:22
  Speaker 00: We had a beer called a WMD, which was kind of fun.
• 4:26
  Speaker 00: And we had another one, it's I Did Not Inhale.
• 4:29
  Speaker 00: And so...
• 4:29
  Speaker 00: Some of these things you can kind of have a little bit of fun with, but the premise was marry presidents and beer names together and then just kind of have fun with it and make this really immersive theme.
• 4:41
  Speaker 00: So that's kind of where we ended up with at Presidential, and we've got a really cool theme that bleeds through the entire taproom.
• 4:51
  Speaker 01: That's incredible.
• 4:51
  Speaker 01: I love that.
• 4:52
  Speaker 01: And I was going to say, like, every great superhero has an origin story, right?
• 4:57
  Speaker 01: If you think of, like, Spider-Man or Batman,
• 4:59
  Speaker 00: superheroes...
• 5:00
  Speaker 01: So your origin story was you guys got together and you ran out of beers to drink.
• 5:03
  Speaker 01: So you're like, the heck with this.
• 5:05
  Speaker 01: We're going to make our own beers.
• 5:06
  Speaker 01: I love
• 5:06
  Speaker 00: that.
• 5:06
  Speaker 00: Yeah.
• 5:06
  Speaker 00: Well, it's fun to think that I'm a superhero.
• 5:08
  Speaker 00: I don't know if I agree with that.
• 5:09
  Speaker 00: Yeah, you are.
• 5:11
  Speaker 01: You're a beer superhero.
• 5:12
  Speaker 00: Yeah, it's an awesome backstory.
• 5:16
  Speaker 00: And what was really cool about this is that New Beer Friday that started as a group of four or six people started to grow.
• 5:23
  Speaker 00: And as I was building my homebrew skills, I was inviting people to my house every month to come and try these new beers.
• 5:29
  Speaker 00: And so New Beer Friday grew from six people to 15 to 20 to 30.
• 5:35
  Speaker 00: And eventually we had 65 people showing up at my house once a month, all trying these new beers that I was making.
• 5:41
  Speaker 00: And And the craziest part is that I didn't know that I was doing it at the time.
• 5:45
  Speaker 00: I wasn't necessarily committed to presidential brewing as a business.
• 5:49
  Speaker 00: I thought of it more as a homebrew like set of names.
• 5:52
  Speaker 00: And before long, I started to realize, like, I've built a fan base already.
• 5:58
  Speaker 00: I actually have my first customers already excited for what I might be doing.
• 6:04
  Speaker 00: And frankly, I can't fit any more people in my house.
• 6:08
  Speaker 00: So I guess we probably ought to think about a next step here.
• 6:14
  Speaker 00: And yeah, it's pretty wild the way that it all got started for us.
• 6:18
  Speaker 01: Yeah, that's very cool.
• 6:19
  Speaker 01: So you kind of had your own built-in tasting panel, you know, people that could give you feedback on what you were brewing and kind of know if, okay, I'm on point with this or, or, or not.
• 6:30
  Speaker 00: And they had no problem being honest either.
• 6:32
  Speaker 00: I'll tell you that.
• 6:34
  Speaker 01: Well, that's how your friends usually are.
• 6:35
  Speaker 01: Yeah.
• 6:36
  Speaker 01: Oh yeah.
• 6:36
  Speaker 01: Those are, those can be your best customers, but, oh, that's very cool.
• 6:40
  Speaker 01: I love that.
• 6:41
  Speaker 01: And you, you know, you see you scratched your own itch, right?
• 6:42
  Speaker 01: It's like a lot of businesses, I think, start that way where they're solving their own problem to a degree, you know?
• 6:48
  Speaker 01: Yeah.
• 6:48
  Speaker 01: But you married, I love how you married the creativity and just had fun with it because I think that's an interesting theme that, you know, I think a lot of breweries do start with that passion and want to have fun and then business gets hard and then maybe the fun goes away and that's really unfortunate.
• 7:04
  Speaker 01: But it sounds like you've been able to maintain that and, you know, keep it creative and fun for yourself and for everybody else.
• 7:12
  Speaker 00: We definitely went through the business gets hard phase, too.
• 7:15
  Speaker 00: It definitely it was a challenge.
• 7:18
  Speaker 00: And I think that what happens for a lot of us is as breweries, we get excited about the beer and we want to come in and we want to just we know we make great beer.
• 7:26
  Speaker 00: We want to just get this in people's glasses and have people drinking it, enjoying it.
• 7:30
  Speaker 00: And then you realize that there's a whole business that you have to run that comes with it.
• 7:34
  Speaker 00: It's not just making beer.
• 7:36
  Speaker 00: It's it's all of the things that come with business.
• 7:38
  Speaker 00: It's hiring.
• 7:39
  Speaker 00: It's it's staff leadership.
• 7:41
  Speaker 00: It's it's accounting.
• 7:42
  Speaker 00: It's all these things that you probably weren't necessarily considering, at least not to the right degree at that point in time.
• 7:50
  Speaker 00: And then all of a sudden you find yourself like, oh, shoot, I've got to piece the rest of this together.
• 7:56
  Speaker 01: Yeah, that's right.
• 7:58
  Speaker 01: It's a lot.
• 7:58
  Speaker 01: And I think the industry has come around to that now, right?
• 8:01
  Speaker 01: Where we're like, okay, it's not just brewing beer.
• 8:03
  Speaker 01: It's actually running a business that happens to brew beer and all the things that need to support that effort.
• 8:09
  Speaker 01: And it can be very eye-opening and you can learn You know, the hard way or the easy way if you get into it, you know, fully understanding kind of the scope of all the things that are needed.
• 8:20
  Speaker 01: But that's hard.
• 8:20
  Speaker 01: It's hard to see that.
• 8:22
  Speaker 00: Yeah, for sure.
• 8:23
  Speaker 01: So let's talk about, on a positive note, I want to hear, like, what's been your biggest win?
• 8:28
  Speaker 01: Say, if you look back over the last 12 months, do a little reflection.
• 8:31
  Speaker 01: And, you know, we usually save reflections for, you know, New Year's resolutions.
• 8:35
  Speaker 01: And we're recording here in June, so what the heck.
• 8:38
  Speaker 01: So if you look back over those 12 months, what's been your biggest win?
• 8:41
  Speaker 00: Yeah, I would say there's a couple of things that come to mind for me.
• 8:46
  Speaker 00: One is that we're breaking records left and right right now, which is awesome.
• 8:50
  Speaker 00: It's a lot of fun.
• 8:51
  Speaker 00: We've got a board in the back of the building that shows our record-selling day, our record month, our record week, and we just keep changing those numbers.
• 9:00
  Speaker 00: That's encouraging for us and for the team.
• 9:02
  Speaker 00: We all get pretty excited when we get to cross one of those numbers off and write something new on there.
• 9:07
  Speaker 00: I think that...
• 9:09
  Speaker 00: One of the most profound experiences over the last year that I would call a win is a day that we were dealt a pretty heavy blow by Mother Nature.
• 9:19
  Speaker 00: We have an outdoor concert venue, and our outdoor concerts are so much fun.
• 9:24
  Speaker 00: It brings in a ton of people.
• 9:26
  Speaker 00: And what happened is the wind blew hard enough and we didn't have power on a day that we were expecting a really big concert.
• 9:34
  Speaker 00: We had an artist that was going to come in and whenever he plays, it's always a whole bunch of people that show up.
• 9:39
  Speaker 00: And my leadership team and I, we talked about it and we said, what if we got a generator out here and ran the show anyways?
• 9:48
  Speaker 00: And we didn't even have internet.
• 9:50
  Speaker 00: Nobody around us had power.
• 9:52
  Speaker 00: We were able to connect all the pieces, get all the things in order to still have a show when we really had no business being able to pull it off.
• 10:01
  Speaker 00: I think that that's probably one of the moments over the last year that was a really big win, just because it showed the resilience of the team and the creativity and the ability to kind of get through a situation.
• 10:13
  Speaker 00: We didn't ask for that to happen to us, but we figured out a way to deal with it.
• 10:18
  Speaker 00: And I'm really proud of the team for the way that we kind of battled that issue.
• 10:22
  Speaker 00: And we had a great night as a result.
• 10:24
  Speaker 00: So I think that's one of my favorites.
• 10:27
  Speaker 00: That's great.
• 10:28
  Speaker 00: Yeah, I
• 10:29
  Speaker 01: love that because I think it just demonstrates that, you know, shit happens, right?
• 10:34
  Speaker 01: And it's like, you know, what are you gonna do about it?
• 10:37
  Speaker 01: You know, it'd be easy enough to just say, ah, throw up your hands, ain't nothing I can do and cancel the thing.
• 10:43
  Speaker 01: But you guys got creative and worked hard and figured it out and had a solution.
• 10:45
  Speaker 01: And, you know, I think when things like that happen, you know, it's just, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's It obviously just boosts the morale of the team.
• 10:54
  Speaker 01: Hey, we did it.
• 10:54
  Speaker 01: Because it's not going to be the last time you have a challenge that you need to overcome.
• 10:58
  Speaker 00: Not at all.
• 11:00
  Unknown: Yeah.
• 11:00
  Speaker 01: That's a great story.
• 11:02
  Speaker 01: I love that.
• 11:02
  Speaker 01: Let's shift now and maybe talk about operational practices.
• 11:07
  Speaker 01: Has there been any one or a combination of operational practices that you've implemented that's improved efficiency or profitability that
• 11:15
  Speaker 00: you'd like to share?
• 11:22
  Speaker 00: And this group of five of us, we meet once every week.
• 11:33
  Speaker 00: And this meeting...
• 11:35
  Speaker 00: It's called an L10 meeting, and it comes from the EOS, the Entrepreneurial Operating System.
• 11:42
  Speaker 00: If you've ever read the book Traction, it's mentioned in there, but if you haven't, I would recommend it.
• 11:48
  Speaker 00: It's a good book, and it specifically talks about this meeting structure.
• 11:52
  Speaker 00: We've implemented this meeting structure, and one of the things that I think is really key is I came from a corporate background.
• 11:58
  Speaker 00: I spent a lot of time in meetings, and when I started the brewery, I thought, what if I got away from these dumb, stupid meetings and never had to do it again, which sounded awesome, seemed like a great idea, and it didn't work at all.
• 12:13
  Speaker 00: We have too much stuff that we have to talk about.
• 12:17
  Speaker 00: And the problem is that meetings can very quickly derail or be pointless.
• 12:22
  Speaker 00: I think that that's probably what I didn't like about a lot of my corporate meetings was feeling like, what are we even accomplishing?
• 12:30
  Speaker 00: What are we doing here?
• 12:31
  Speaker 00: And so...
• 12:32
  Speaker 00: Having this meeting structure, the L10, level 10 meetings, what it does is it kind of holds a very specific structure, and it kind of gives you a space to put action items under people.
• 12:48
  Speaker 00: It's got kind of shorter-term goals with to-dos that are more like one-week tasks, and then it's got longer-term goals, which we call rocks, and these are quarterly, like, bigger things.
• 12:59
  Speaker 00: But what's been really awesome about this...
• 13:02
  Speaker 00: in this structure.
• 13:04
  Speaker 00: People are more accountable to each other.
• 13:06
  Speaker 00: been incredibly useful.
• 13:36
  Speaker 00: And I can't recommend this structure enough.
• 13:38
  Speaker 00: 90 minutes once a week.
• 13:41
  Speaker 00: And I think we've gotten three times as much done compared to what we were doing before.
• 13:46
  Speaker 01: That's so good.
• 13:48
  Speaker 01: You're right.
• 13:48
  Speaker 01: Same with me.
• 13:49
  Speaker 01: Corporate background, meetings that just took years off my life.
• 13:53
  Speaker 01: And you just sit there like, why?
• 13:55
  Speaker 01: Why?
• 13:56
  Speaker 01: And it was awful.
• 13:57
  Speaker 01: So I totally agree with that.
• 13:59
  Speaker 01: And it's really not the meeting, right?
• 14:01
  Speaker 01: It is the structure.
• 14:03
  Speaker 01: You're absolutely right.
• 14:04
  Speaker 01: And I think we feel, maybe as a species, we feel better when we know our time is being invested well and we're getting that return and where there's action.
• 14:14
  Speaker 01: Because you use the word like action items, goals, accountability, getting stuff done.
• 14:19
  Speaker 01: There's purpose to this, right?
• 14:22
  Speaker 01: And that's so critical in order to make you feel like, all right, this is a great use of time.
• 14:26
  Speaker 01: You know, the other thing I would throw in there, and maybe I'd ask you this is, we used to do this thing or try to do it where, you know, meetings are a place to make decisions, you know, not to like, you know, so if you have something that you need to decide on, you, you send people in advance, Hey, here's the project or the idea, here's the background or the basis for it.
• 14:44
  Speaker 01: Think about it, you know, kick it around.
• 14:46
  Speaker 01: But when we come to this meeting, you know, maybe a quick discussion, but we need to decide, you know, if we're going to do this or not, as opposed to meetings come in and you just sort of hash and rehash and, you know, kind of, it feels like you spin your wheels a lot.
• 14:59
  Speaker 00: Yeah.
• 14:59
  Speaker 00: And one of the key sections of our meeting structure is called IDS, which is short for identify, discuss and solve.
• 15:06
  Speaker 00: And I think to your point, that solve part is the that's the main motivation.
• 15:11
  Speaker 00: We want to identify the problems that are not even necessarily problems.
• 15:14
  Speaker 00: It could be opportunities, but identify what we need to work on, discuss what a solution would be and then implement it.
• 15:20
  Speaker 00: And so part of solving then is sometimes assigning tasks to somebody else on the team or whatever it might be, or even the next step.
• 15:29
  Speaker 00: of getting a quote from a contractor.
• 15:30
  Speaker 00: It's just something to take whatever the next step forward is.
• 15:36
  Speaker 00: Yeah,
• 15:38
  Speaker 01: that's a great suggestion.
• 15:39
  Speaker 01: So, all right, so I'll put that link for folks.
• 15:41
  Speaker 01: So it's traction, it's the EOS model level 10 meetings and all the good stuff.
• 15:45
  Speaker 01: And I guess the takeaway for people listening is to really avoid the DSMs.
• 15:49
  Speaker 01: You just invented this The dumb, stupid meetings.
• 15:55
  Speaker 00: Yes, yes.
• 15:56
  Speaker 00: Avoid dumb, stupid meetings.
• 15:58
  Speaker 01: I think we'd all feel better for that.
• 15:59
  Speaker 01: All right.
• 16:01
  Speaker 01: Let's talk about tracking financial performance.
• 16:04
  Speaker 01: So you've outlaid a great structure for us.
• 16:06
  Speaker 01: What sort of metrics do you guys look at regularly?
• 16:40
  Speaker 00: Yeah, so there's the obvious ones.
• 16:42
  Speaker 00: We care a lot about sales.
• 16:44
  Speaker 00: And so for us, one of the things that we do in our business is we project sales week by week for the entire year.
• 16:50
  Speaker 00: One of the things that I love about this is the sense of feeling on track or off track as a business.
• 16:57
  Speaker 00: So we can use historical data to kind of help us figure out where we should be performing at in this given week of each year, because we are definitely a seasonal business.
• 17:08
  Speaker 00: And we can track over history April and July look different for us and how much different versus taking a goal of, say, we want to make a million dollars and dividing it by 52.
• 17:20
  Speaker 00: We could be really let down a lot of weeks of the year if we aren't using this projection that's actually true to how our seasonality works.
• 17:29
  Speaker 00: So we've got a seasonal projection and we look every week.
• 17:32
  Speaker 00: How did we do against our weekly goal?
• 17:35
  Speaker 00: That's one of the key things that I love to look at.
• 17:38
  Speaker 00: Next metrics are really more about how did we get there?
• 17:41
  Speaker 00: And so one of the metrics that I like to use that I don't really know if anybody else is using this, I pay attention to the dollars sold in food compared to the food labor hours that we paid.
• 17:54
  Speaker 00: So I'm trying to figure out how much food did we produce per hour of labor in my kitchen?
• 18:00
  Speaker 00: And we had a different You know, set of goals for a little while.
• 18:07
  Speaker 00: Now I've got a salaried manager and I don't include her labor in this number.
• 18:12
  Speaker 00: But with a salaried manager in there, we're targeting being above $65 of food sold per hour worked in the kitchen.
• 18:20
  Speaker 00: And that includes our prep time, our line cook, our cleanup time, whatever.
• 18:24
  Speaker 00: All of that's included.
• 18:26
  Speaker 00: As long as we're over that number, it's a leading indicator that kind of points to the fact that we're going to meet our labor targets, generally speaking, in our kitchen.
• 18:36
  Speaker 00: So that's kind of the margin there.
• 18:38
  Speaker 00: So that's a really key metric that we track every week.
• 18:41
  Speaker 00: Another one that I like to look at is add-on sales.
• 18:45
  Speaker 00: And so add-on sales are...
• 18:47
  Speaker 00: Thank you.
• 18:50
  Speaker 00: Thank you.
• 18:54
  Speaker 00: that ticket is likely to be higher, not just for the reason of the add-on sale being there.
• 19:14
  Speaker 00: And so I took some data and I looked at it and I found that excluding the add-on sales, the average ticket was higher whenever there was an add-on sale present.
• 19:26
  Speaker 00: And so I think that what that comes down to for me is I feel like that points to a customer feeling better served, more hospitable experience Those add-on sales actually make a deeper relationship with your customers.
• 19:41
  Speaker 00: And so we hold our team to a pretty high standard with that.
• 19:45
  Speaker 00: We're looking for 10% of our sales to be add-on sales.
• 19:48
  Speaker 00: And that is a metric that I think is really important, and it's done a lot of good for us.
• 19:54
  Speaker 00: And people care about it because they know that it affects their tips.
• 19:59
  Speaker 00: But also we have a bonus structure that their add-on sales are tied to their bonuses as well.
• 20:04
  Speaker 00: And so people are invested in it.
• 20:07
  Speaker 00: And so those are two really key metrics that we pay a lot of attention to.
• 20:11
  Speaker 00: Another one is I look at...
• 20:14
  Speaker 00: Ticket completion time, specifically for our kitchen side, for you breweries out there with kitchens, it can be devastating sometimes.
• 20:23
  Speaker 00: But when you start kind of getting things to start clicking, there's some really cool systems out there.
• 20:28
  Speaker 00: We use Toast for our point of sale.
• 20:30
  Speaker 00: And Toast, we have the kitchen display system.
• 20:33
  Speaker 00: So you can click a button to say this order is ready.
• 20:35
  Speaker 00: And it's awesome.
• 20:37
  Speaker 00: It notifies the staff that this is ready.
• 20:39
  Speaker 00: You can come pick it up in the window.
• 20:40
  Speaker 00: But it also gives me data to say this is how long these tickets take to complete.
• 20:44
  Speaker 00: And so I'm tracking a ticket completion time.
• 20:47
  Speaker 00: And I'm trying to figure out 95% of our tickets are done in what amount of minutes.
• 20:53
  Speaker 00: 95% of our tickets this last week were completed in 28 minutes or less.
• 20:57
  Speaker 00: That was within our goal.
• 20:59
  Speaker 00: We want to be under 30.
• 21:01
  Speaker 00: And so that's kind of where we're tracking.
• 21:04
  Speaker 00: And what's interesting about this is, especially with that other labor number, having those two things, if one's high, the other one's probably out of spec.
• 21:13
  Speaker 00: And so they kind of have a relationship.
• 21:16
  Speaker 00: We found a place where we're happy.
• 21:18
  Speaker 00: We want it to be that happy medium.
• 21:20
  Speaker 00: We don't want our ticket times to be 45 minutes at the expense of having a really great looking food sales per labor hour number.
• 21:28
  Speaker 00: So those are some key metrics.
• 21:30
  Speaker 00: We really need those two to balance out in order to create a great experience for our customers, but also not overspend on labor for our kitchen.
• 21:38
  Speaker 00: So those are some of the key ones that I tend to pay attention to as a leadership team.
• 21:43
  Speaker 00: And then as a business owner, you're looking at other things too.
• 21:46
  Speaker 00: I'm paying a lot of attention to food margins and I want to make sure my prime costs are where they should be when you add your food margin plus your labor margin together.
• 21:57
  Speaker 00: And then just making sure that you adhere to what your budgeted categories are, because right now I'm spending a lot of money fixing broken heating and cooling equipment.
• 22:07
  Speaker 01: Those are the ones that are toughest to budget, right?
• 22:12
  Speaker 00: Yeah, it's a
• 22:13
  Speaker 01: fortune sometimes.
• 22:14
  Speaker 01: Those are great metrics, though.
• 22:15
  Speaker 01: It sounds like a lot on food.
• 22:18
  Speaker 01: Did that come about because of just the nature of food being a little more volatile in terms of...
• 22:23
  Speaker 01: Yeah,
• 22:24
  Speaker 00: so...
• 22:24
  Speaker 00: I mean, I think that a lot of it comes down to the idea that food is harder to do well, I think is probably the best thing.
• 22:34
  Speaker 00: And this is harder to do well for a number of reasons.
• 22:36
  Speaker 00: First of all, customers have really high expectations for food, where their expectations on beer are probably a little different.
• 22:43
  Speaker 00: Not very many customers can go home and make their own beer.
• 22:47
  Speaker 00: Most customers can go home and make their own panini or whatever it is that you sell.
• 22:51
  Speaker 00: And so they're judging against what they can do on their own.
• 22:55
  Speaker 00: And they're trying to decide whether yours is good enough to exceed that.
• 22:58
  Speaker 00: So you've got a quality issue.
• 23:00
  Speaker 00: You need an experience that matches that quality.
• 23:03
  Speaker 00: So you need to be able to deliver it on time and in a good presentation that it appeases them.
• 23:08
  Speaker 00: And at the same time, food has a way worse margin than beer.
• 23:13
  Speaker 00: Beer that I make, I can sell and make a lot more money on beer than I can on food.
• 23:18
  Speaker 00: And so you're flirting with disaster, it feels like, when your margins are as thin as they are on food.
• 23:25
  Speaker 00: By the time you take out your labor and your food costs, you're doing really well if you have only spent 60% of that dollar that you just earned.
• 23:34
  Speaker 00: You're doing really well.
• 23:36
  Speaker 00: And so that leaves 40% to try to cover the rest of your expenses.
• 23:40
  Speaker 00: And that's just, that's a tough gig.
• 23:42
  Speaker 00: So I pay a lot of attention to food just because of the tight, tight margins.
• 23:48
  Speaker 00: And really the, it's not just financial margins.
• 23:52
  Speaker 00: It's also your margin for error with your customer.
• 23:55
  Speaker 01: Yeah.
• 23:55
  Speaker 01: Yeah.
• 23:56
  Speaker 01: Great points.
• 23:56
  Speaker 01: Great, great numbers too.
• 23:57
  Speaker 01: Thanks for sharing those.
• 23:59
  Speaker 00: Yeah.
• 24:00
  Speaker 01: Looking at the other side of the coin, you know, so that's once they're in, you know, how do you, what do you measure?
• 24:04
  Speaker 01: sort of the experience and the metrics around it.
• 24:07
  Speaker 01: What are you guys doing to drive taproom, like actually get people butts in seats as they say, anything that's working particularly well for you guys?
• 24:16
  Speaker 00: Yeah, this is one of my favorite parts of our business.
• 24:18
  Speaker 00: I love doing this.
• 24:19
  Speaker 00: I didn't realize that marketing and advertising was going to be so much fun, but I really enjoy it.
• 24:23
  Speaker 00: So we have a lot of different things, and I think of marketing as kind of a big picture.
• 24:28
  Speaker 00: There's a lot of different ways to market to people, and we try to use many of them and centralize the message across all the platforms at once.
• 24:37
  Speaker 00: So when I talk about this, I'm thinking about we have an email list that we use every week.
• 24:42
  Speaker 00: We have a radio deal where we go and Our local rock radio station, every Friday morning I go there and we drink our first beer of the weekend.
• 24:51
  Speaker 00: And it's kind of fun.
• 24:52
  Speaker 00: We go out and share a beer and talk about which beer we're drinking and people listen to it.
• 24:57
  Speaker 00: We have digital advertising where we're geofencing certain areas and putting ads on phones.
• 25:05
  Speaker 00: We have advertising on TVs that shows up when you're watching Hulu or whatever.
• 25:11
  Speaker 00: We have Facebook ads that I create for a lot of the bands and stuff that we're doing.
• 25:16
  Speaker 00: you get all these different channels, these different ways to communicate to people.
• 25:21
  Speaker 00: And one of the things that I think is really important is to try to synchronize your message across all those channels.
• 25:27
  Speaker 00: You want to have a campaign that's pretty contiguous, that when you hear it on the radio and you see it in the email, that it reminds you of the same thing.
• 25:35
  Speaker 00: And so that's one of the things is to kind of think about marketing holistically and understand that there's a lot of ways people might be hearing your message.
• 25:42
  Speaker 00: And there's some people might only hear it on the radio and some people might only read it in the email or might only see it in the digital stuff.
• 25:49
  Speaker 00: So sharing that same message across all the platforms has been a really good, useful tool for us.
• 25:57
  Speaker 00: Some of the things that are really fun to do, we have email is a weirdly important tool.
• 26:05
  Speaker 00: thing for me.
• 26:06
  Speaker 00: It's not something that I expected to be important, but it is.
• 26:09
  Speaker 00: Our email list right now is about 6,500 people, and I have roughly 2,500 people every week open whatever it is that I send to them.
• 26:17
  Speaker 00: So that's 40-ish percent, somewhere in that range.
• 26:22
  Speaker 00: And what's interesting about this is now I'm getting all of these people that are seeing something that I wanted them to see for the week.
• 26:30
  Speaker 00: And so we keep email kind of short and sweet, but we put a focus on building our email list.
• 26:35
  Speaker 00: One of the ways that we do that with our Wi-Fi system, when you come to the brewery, if you want to log into our Wi-Fi system, it's free access.
• 26:42
  Speaker 00: But instead of just having a password written on the wall, we have, it's called a guest portal.
• 26:46
  Speaker 00: And the portal, you have to put in your email address.
• 26:49
  Speaker 00: And when you do, it logs you into, it automatically puts you into my MailChimp account.
• 26:55
  Speaker 00: And so now you'll start receiving emails from us.
• 26:57
  Speaker 00: What's even more fun with this, though, is that three hours after you first log into our MailChimp system, you're going to get an email from us that says, hey, thanks for coming out to Presidential.
• 27:08
  Speaker 00: So glad that we had you out.
• 27:10
  Speaker 00: Here's any of our beers for a dollar on your next visit in the next seven days.
• 27:15
  Speaker 00: And so I call this a boomerang offer.
• 27:17
  Speaker 00: It's something you throw it out there and it's going to come back to you.
• 27:20
  Speaker 00: That's the idea.
• 27:21
  Speaker 00: We want to do this as often as possible.
• 27:23
  Speaker 00: Give people that reason to come back.
• 27:25
  Speaker 00: Because getting them there is hard enough.
• 27:27
  Speaker 00: Getting them to come back is really that's where that's where you can really start to influence your traffic.
• 27:33
  Speaker 00: And so we give these boomerang offers as often as we possibly can.
• 27:38
  Speaker 00: Last night, I ran karaoke and we do it's karaoke bingo.
• 27:43
  Speaker 00: So what a silly, ridiculous combination of things.
• 27:46
  Speaker 00: But when people get bingo, they get to spin this digital wheel and their prizes on there and it could be $5 off your next visit or 10% off your next visit.
• 27:55
  Speaker 00: your next visitor, a free ice cream, your next visit.
• 27:58
  Speaker 00: And all these boomerang offers keep people coming back.
• 28:00
  Speaker 00: And what it does is it builds a new list of regulars.
• 28:04
  Speaker 00: You get people that start showing up as a pattern in their life.
• 28:07
  Speaker 00: So boomerang offers, definitely a big deal.
• 28:10
  Speaker 00: We want to use those as much as possible in order to get people to keep showing back up to your place.
• 28:17
  Speaker 01: Yeah.
• 28:17
  Speaker 01: I love that.
• 28:18
  Speaker 01: So important.
• 28:19
  Speaker 01: And, you know, it's funny because the $1 beer offer, I've heard variations on this.
• 28:25
  Speaker 01: And when I'll mention this to maybe other brewery owners, they're like, oh, geez, I don't know, $1.
• 28:29
  Speaker 01: And I'm thinking, but that $1, and I've seen the stats on this.
• 28:33
  Speaker 01: I don't know if you checked out Tapwise or they have actual data that says that in certain circumstances, that $1 barrel turns into $17.
• 28:41
  Speaker 01: So this is like this huge return on investment.
• 28:43
  Speaker 01: Have you guys seen something similar with that?
• 28:47
  Speaker 00: I haven't gone down to that level, but I can tell you that worrying about a $1 beer is probably something that you shouldn't worry too much about.
• 28:55
  Speaker 00: First of all, the reason we do it for a dollar is because we have to cover our costs legally to remain compliant with our MLCC out here.
• 29:05
  Speaker 00: We can't sell it for less than what our costs are.
• 29:07
  Speaker 00: So none of our beers cost me more than a dollar per serving.
• 29:10
  Speaker 00: So you've definitely already covered your costs, but probably that person is going to stick around and enjoy another beer, at least.
• 29:19
  Speaker 00: And if they don't, they may not have been the right customer for you anyways.
• 29:23
  Speaker 00: And you may have found out that you don't need that customer anymore.
• 29:27
  Speaker 00: I think that was a weird...
• 29:29
  Speaker 00: It was a weird thing that took a little while for us to really lean into and accept that we are not supposed to be everybody's brewery.
• 29:37
  Speaker 00: And if you are only in this for the $1 beer, you're going to come this one time, and I probably will never see you again.
• 29:43
  Speaker 00: But we figured this out, and now we can move on and part ways and free you off to go get dollar beer somewhere else.
• 29:51
  Speaker 01: That's a great point.
• 29:52
  Speaker 01: Yeah, like when you're starting a business, you're not for everyone.
• 29:54
  Speaker 01: You really do have your raving fans, and you've got to niche down and all that.
• 29:59
  Unknown: Yeah.
• 29:59
  Speaker 01: I think that's a really smart way to think about it.
• 30:01
  Speaker 01: And I love the whole...
• 30:03
  Speaker 01: So I'll just kind of go back and underscore a couple of things you mentioned because I really like...
• 30:07
  Speaker 01: So from a strategy standpoint, sort of synchronizing your message across all those channels.
• 30:12
  Speaker 01: Love it.
• 30:13
  Speaker 01: Super important.
• 30:13
  Speaker 01: So you can really benefit from focusing on what do you want people to hear?
• 30:17
  Speaker 01: What do you want them to do?
• 30:19
  Speaker 01: The radio thing, I think, is great because I don't hear that a lot.
• 30:23
  Speaker 01: I hear a lot of social media and social media and social media, but...
• 30:26
  Speaker 01: You've mentioned two things that are pretty, well, actually three, really.
• 30:30
  Speaker 01: So if I go radio, email, love that.
• 30:34
  Speaker 01: And then TV ads, that's so cool.
• 30:36
  Speaker 01: So Hulu, so they're able to actually target, like you mentioned geofencing for your digital.
• 30:41
  Speaker 01: So Hulu and whatnot can do that for TV?
• 30:44
  Speaker 00: Yeah.
• 30:45
  Speaker 00: Yeah.
• 30:46
  Speaker 00: Uh, so I do a lot of this advertising work through town square who owns the radio station.
• 30:50
  Speaker 00: Uh, they also have all sorts of cool marketing packages where they can be on digital TV and, uh, yeah, they'll just, we've built some videos and put them right in.
• 31:01
  Speaker 00: And, uh, we actually had, there are some people out here during like major, major sports games, uh, the local commercials during the super bowl.
• 31:09
  Speaker 00: We were actually part of some of that in, in Portage, Michigan.
• 31:12
  Speaker 00: So it's kind of crazy to have presidential brewing show up in the super bowl, but there we were
• 31:16
  Speaker 01: that's great I love that you know particularly Super Bowl for sure but you know Hulu I'm just thinking of now because of course the bear is coming back that that's yeah if you watch that but pretty popular and I imagine if you could sneak in on that you're gonna get a lot of a lot of new eyeballs too
• 31:32
  Speaker 00: Oh, yeah,
• 31:33
  Speaker 01: for sure.
• 31:33
  Speaker 01: That's cool.
• 31:34
  Speaker 01: Well, let's pivot now and talk a little bit about staff training.
• 31:38
  Speaker 01: It's a real challenge.
• 31:39
  Speaker 01: I think of the folks we talked to, it's the first, second, or third issue is just, A, getting people and then getting them trained and keeping them around and making sure the culture is a place that really fosters retention and whatnot.
• 31:54
  Speaker 01: What has worked well for you guys when it comes to staff training or team culture?
• 31:59
  Speaker 00: Yeah, I think that really any group Any well-run business could tell you what their values are, their company values are.
• 32:07
  Speaker 00: And I think this is a gap for most people that are struggling in their businesses.
• 32:11
  Speaker 00: They don't know what their values are.
• 32:12
  Speaker 00: You haven't established what actually matters.
• 32:15
  Speaker 00: and which characteristics you're looking for in people that work on your team.
• 32:19
  Speaker 00: And so we went through an exercise as a staff a couple years ago now to really hone in on what our values were.
• 32:25
  Speaker 00: And we've got five of them, and it's really key.
• 32:29
  Speaker 00: Now we kind of know that these are the characteristics that we are going to make hiring decisions based on these things to start with.
• 32:36
  Speaker 00: We're also going to have corrective conversations based on these same values.
• 32:41
  Speaker 00: So I think having some values and using them, leaning into them, making sure that people all understand what they are and using that terminology often is a big part of developing and then maintaining your culture.
• 32:54
  Speaker 00: As far as the training side, that's actually our values are part of our training process.
• 33:00
  Speaker 00: New employees need to learn what those are.
• 33:03
  Speaker 00: and they need to be able to recite from memory, we actually have a test at the end of your training period.
• 33:09
  Speaker 00: So training period is a designed set of days.
• 33:12
  Speaker 00: It's usually between eight and 10 days that you might have a shorter shift the first day, which is more about kind of onboarding and getting used to where do you, which door do you come in and where do you put your jacket and where is your workstation going to be?
• 33:26
  Speaker 00: We do some of the paperwork and some of the– all of the making sure that you're in the right systems stuff that day.
• 33:33
  Speaker 00: Then the next day is more about– say you're a bartender.
• 33:38
  Speaker 00: You're going to shadow one of our existing bartenders that we've established as a trainer.
• 33:43
  Speaker 00: And you're going to hang out with them for the day and follow them around.
• 33:46
  Speaker 00: But we also give you the test on that day.
• 33:49
  Speaker 00: That first day we'll give you the test that says this is what you're looking to learn over the next week.
• 33:54
  Speaker 00: And they'll take it and they'll kind of see these are the gaps that I need to focus on.
• 33:59
  Speaker 00: And they then can ask questions of the bartender as they're going.
• 34:03
  Speaker 00: Like, oh, man, I know I got this wrong.
• 34:05
  Speaker 00: What do we do here?
• 34:07
  Speaker 00: How do we– when I need to merge a ticket, how do I do that?
• 34:11
  Speaker 00: And so– Some of those things really kind of come out of that.
• 34:16
  Speaker 00: So I really like this system of having a designed set of days where you've got kind of an intentional, this is what we're working on today.
• 34:27
  Speaker 00: And then a test at the end of that to see, did you learn all the things?
• 34:32
  Speaker 00: And are you committed to the values that we say are important here?
• 34:35
  Speaker 00: I can tell you from my experience, I've worked so many times.
• 34:39
  Speaker 00: We've had a number of people that are incredibly talented that didn't match with our values.
• 34:43
  Speaker 00: And it was miserable, miserable to work with those people.
• 34:47
  Speaker 00: They're not bad people.
• 34:48
  Speaker 00: They're bad fit for us.
• 34:49
  Speaker 00: That's all it is.
• 34:50
  Speaker 00: And so...
• 34:52
  Speaker 00: I have a very high emphasis on our company values and our team all understands and supports that and works with that as well.
• 35:00
  Speaker 00: And that is a difference maker.
• 35:03
  Speaker 00: Our culture is as strong as it's ever been because we have prioritized it.
• 35:07
  Speaker 00: We've made that the thing that we care about.
• 35:11
  Speaker 01: And how did you come up with those?
• 35:12
  Speaker 01: Because I think that's...
• 35:13
  Speaker 01: People aspire to that, right?
• 35:17
  Speaker 01: To have these values and then to communicate them and then obviously to live them.
• 35:20
  Speaker 01: How did you come up with your list and maybe take us through that a little bit?
• 35:24
  Speaker 00: Yeah, yeah.
• 35:25
  Speaker 00: So this was, this came from a book that I read called Your Restaurant Sucks by Donald Burns.
• 35:32
  Speaker 00: And he's pretty affronting kind of guy.
• 35:36
  Speaker 00: But I read this book and I was like, man, I feel like I've been doing this wrong.
• 35:40
  Speaker 00: I think he's onto something here.
• 35:41
  Speaker 00: And so I sat with my, we had a leadership team at the time.
• 35:45
  Speaker 00: And I had them all read the book with me.
• 35:47
  Speaker 00: And we kind of started, what we did is we basically brainstormed, what do we see today in the things that we see going well?
• 35:56
  Speaker 00: What are the characteristics that we think we see right now out of our staff?
• 36:00
  Speaker 00: And kind of identifying that.
• 36:03
  Speaker 00: of those characteristics, which ones do we want to keep seeing?
• 36:07
  Speaker 00: Because not all those things are things we want to keep seeing.
• 36:10
  Speaker 00: You have people that don't really care about showing up for their shift on time.
• 36:15
  Speaker 00: That's a problem for us.
• 36:16
  Speaker 00: We can't rely on you.
• 36:18
  Speaker 00: I can't schedule you and know that you're going to show up.
• 36:21
  Speaker 00: That's a big issue.
• 36:22
  Speaker 00: And so I think that sitting as a team and coming up with a big list, I think we had probably 30 different words in this word cloud.
• 36:32
  Speaker 00: And so you start to look for trends.
• 36:34
  Speaker 00: Some of the words look similar and you kind of combine them together.
• 36:37
  Speaker 00: And you work your way down and you really want to have between, I would call it four to seven values, nothing more than that.
• 36:46
  Speaker 00: It's really hard to remember a whole lot of words.
• 36:49
  Speaker 00: And so when we did it too, we also sought for each of our values to be just a one word thing.
• 36:55
  Speaker 00: So in our values actually spelled an acronym, it spells the word CHARGE.
• 37:00
  Speaker 00: It doesn't necessarily mean a whole lot to us other than it helps us to remember this.
• 37:06
  Speaker 00: But our values are collaboration, hospitality, appreciation, respect, growth, and excellence.
• 37:14
  Speaker 00: Those are the things that we kind of go by.
• 37:17
  Speaker 00: And so these particular values kind of came out of this exercise of describing those characteristics that exist on our team now that we want to keep seeing going forward.
• 37:29
  Speaker 00: And anything that doesn't fall into that, we need to make sure that we work that out of our system.
• 37:35
  Speaker 00: And specifically hiring and firing according to those values.
• 37:40
  Speaker 00: We've had to have a couple of those tough conversations to say, you know, I think that you're really good at this, that, and the other, but you are not living up to our expectations in this respect area.
• 37:51
  Speaker 00: When you don't show up to your shift on time, that isn't respecting your team.
• 37:55
  Speaker 00: It's not very collaborative because you're leaving the burden on everybody else to pick up your slack until you get there whenever that happens to be, that mismatch of values doesn't work here.
• 38:06
  Speaker 00: We can't have you continuing to drag that down.
• 38:09
  Speaker 00: So we've had to part ways with good people that just don't match our values.
• 38:15
  Speaker 01: Yeah, I love that.
• 38:16
  Speaker 01: I think people need these road signs, if you will, because we've come up with situations throughout the day where we need to make a decision and you're not there to like guide them every time.
• 38:28
  Speaker 01: So they need to lean back on, I think these values, these principles, these sort of guiding lights to help them.
• 38:34
  Speaker 01: It's not going to give them a hundred percent clarity, but if they're faced with a decision and they're like, oh yeah, right.
• 38:40
  Speaker 01: Hospitality.
• 38:41
  Speaker 01: You know, we got to, this has got to come first.
• 38:44
  Speaker 01: This is one of our core values.
• 38:45
  Speaker 01: I think that can be really useful for people.
• 38:48
  Speaker 00: One of the things that we do to really reinforce these values, my goal is to get everybody to be able to recite all these values from memory as well.
• 38:55
  Speaker 00: It's hard to do because, you know, we've got a list of six different words here.
• 38:59
  Speaker 00: But we, every week, we have an all-team communication that goes out, and I try to find somebody that leaned into one of those values really hard over the last week and call it out.
• 39:09
  Speaker 00: And it's a really cool way to kind of honor somebody who's doing the right things, but it also shows people when you do collaboration well, it looks like this.
• 39:18
  Speaker 00: When you demonstrate excellence, it looks like that.
• 39:20
  Speaker 00: And so it kind of gives– it's twofold doing that, but it's reinforcing these values and the importance that we put on them, but it's also– Showing people, I see you.
• 39:31
  Speaker 00: I saw what you did.
• 39:32
  Speaker 00: Thank you.
• 39:33
  Speaker 00: I love what that was.
• 39:35
  Speaker 00: That's awesome.
• 39:37
  Speaker 01: I've heard it phrased in a way like you're going to give people a reputation to live up to.
• 39:42
  Speaker 01: Give them a really high bar and say, I've seen you do that.
• 39:45
  Speaker 01: That's what I want to see again.
• 39:46
  Speaker 01: So that's really cool.
• 39:48
  Speaker 01: That's really cool.
• 39:49
  Speaker 01: I love that, Jake.
• 39:49
  Speaker 01: All right, let's pivot again.
• 39:52
  Speaker 01: And I want to talk about, come back to marketing and maybe one marketing initiative thing.
• 39:58
  Speaker 01: or I'll use the word story-driven campaign that's made an impact.
• 40:02
  Speaker 01: But really, any marketing initiatives that come to mind for you that have worked particularly well?
• 40:07
  Speaker 00: There's a couple.
• 40:08
  Speaker 00: One of them was kind of fun.
• 40:10
  Speaker 00: A couple years ago, I had this harebrained idea to say that beer tasted better on Tuesdays.
• 40:16
  Speaker 00: And...
• 40:17
  Speaker 00: It was trying to get people to come into the taproom on Tuesday, obviously.
• 40:21
  Speaker 00: But what was fun about this is I came up with this really creative story about Dr.
• 40:27
  Speaker 00: Suds and all the research that he did and found some files in Joe Biden's garage.
• 40:33
  Speaker 00: And we did all, like just all the shtick with this.
• 40:38
  Speaker 00: And, you know, some billion dollar grant that was used and we studied it and had panels and we learned a Scientifically, the beer tasted better on Tuesdays.
• 40:50
  Speaker 00: And so we've run this campaign.
• 40:52
  Speaker 00: for a while now and I'm going to tell you Tuesday is not necessarily a bang up day but the number of people that have come in and talked to me about Dr.
• 41:01
  Speaker 00: Suds it just cracks me up so people pay attention to that stuff and something as weird and off the wall as that sticks out in somebody's memory they go oh my gosh presidential is that goofy place that thinks beer tastes better on Tuesday and whatever but that was a silly and it wasn't even a real story that was a made up story but it definitely It created some buzz.
• 41:24
  Speaker 00: It created some attention.
• 41:25
  Speaker 00: And maybe people didn't show up on Tuesday, but I can tell you that sometime on Friday, they're telling their group of friends about how they got this email about some ridiculous scientific experience.
• 41:37
  Speaker 00: And now they need to go to presidential to...
• 41:40
  Speaker 00: because they're all talking about it.
• 41:42
  Speaker 00: So something as weird and off the wall as that was, I think was creative and actually drove sales.
• 41:50
  Speaker 00: Maybe not specifically on Tuesday, but I think throughout that campaign, it definitely drove some sales for us.
• 41:57
  Speaker 01: Dr.
• 41:57
  Speaker 01: Suds, well, I'm going to remember that.
• 41:58
  Speaker 01: And I think that I would agree.
• 42:00
  Speaker 01: Beer does taste better on Tuesday
• 42:03
  Speaker 00: or pretty much any day of the week.
• 42:05
  Speaker 00: That's right.
• 42:06
  Speaker 00: Yeah.
• 42:06
  Speaker 00: Tuesdays are perfect day for drinking beer.
• 42:09
  Speaker 01: That's so good.
• 42:10
  Speaker 01: I love that.
• 42:10
  Speaker 01: So back to your days, you know, when you guys are sitting around, you know, the kitchen in your house and trying new beers and whatnot.
• 42:20
  Speaker 01: You know, now you're in a point where sometimes we have to balance innovation, you know, making new beers, keep it because everybody, what's new?
• 42:28
  Speaker 01: What's new?
• 42:28
  Speaker 01: How do you balance like?
• 42:30
  Speaker 01: New beers with the consistency in your core product success.
• 42:34
  Speaker 01: Because that's a lot of focus and time and energy.
• 42:37
  Speaker 01: How do you think about that?
• 42:39
  Speaker 01: And maybe even how do you kind of curate your portfolio when it comes to the beer lineup?
• 42:46
  Speaker 00: Yeah, I love this.
• 42:47
  Speaker 00: And I think this is really important.
• 42:48
  Speaker 00: Before I opened our brewery, I was a brewery goer.
• 42:52
  Speaker 00: Not that I'm not anymore, but I just do it less than I used to.
• 42:55
  Speaker 00: One of the things that I always loved about my favorite breweries are the ones that had stuff coming on tap all the time.
• 43:01
  Speaker 00: I didn't like going to the places that only ever had the same stuff.
• 43:05
  Speaker 00: 10 beers.
• 43:06
  Speaker 00: So that was something that I prioritized.
• 43:09
  Speaker 00: And we've got a pretty small set of taps.
• 43:14
  Speaker 00: We only have 12 taps inside our tap room.
• 43:16
  Speaker 00: We've got an additional 10 that we can use in the summertime outside.
• 43:20
  Speaker 00: So that kind of opens some avenues for us.
• 43:23
  Speaker 00: But generally speaking, we designed our core product versus rotating product based on this 12 tap system.
• 43:31
  Speaker 00: And for our core products, we kind of, we had to see what our core products were.
• 43:37
  Speaker 00: I had an idea of what they might be, and I was wrong on so many fronts.
• 43:41
  Speaker 00: There's no way you could have convinced me that my Cremale would be my number one selling beer because I'm an IPA guy.
• 43:47
  Speaker 00: And, you know, what's wrong with all you people?
• 43:49
  Speaker 00: But that's how it worked out.
• 43:52
  Speaker 00: And so Cremale, I can't not have that beer on tap.
• 43:55
  Speaker 00: I have to have that beer on tap.
• 43:57
  Speaker 00: That is one that you will not come to Presidential Brewing and not see Calvin Creamage on tap.
• 44:02
  Speaker 00: Another one that became kind of a signature beer for us was our Sherbert Hoover.
• 44:08
  Speaker 00: It's a fruited kettle sour.
• 44:10
  Speaker 00: And we started our first one was raspberry vanilla.
• 44:12
  Speaker 00: Right now on tap, we have orange creamsicle.
• 44:15
  Speaker 00: This beer is one of our, like, this is the one that gets buzzed.
• 44:18
  Speaker 00: People talk about this beer.
• 44:20
  Speaker 00: And so I always have a Sherbert Hoover on tap.
• 44:23
  Speaker 00: It's not a specific one, but one of these fruited sours is on.
• 44:27
  Speaker 00: And so that's two beers.
• 44:29
  Speaker 00: beers already that I have to always have.
• 44:31
  Speaker 00: Another beer that I always want to have is the Obama, the first beer that I ever made.
• 44:38
  Speaker 00: And some of that is, it's twofold.
• 44:39
  Speaker 00: Some of it is just the story behind, you know, we started with this beer.
• 44:44
  Speaker 00: But also there's, I wanted to always have a dark beer.
• 44:47
  Speaker 00: You go to a lot of breweries and typically dark beers kind of fade into the I wanted to make sure there was something out there because I love dark beers.
• 44:57
  Speaker 00: I love stouts.
• 44:59
  Speaker 00: I love porters, any of those.
• 45:00
  Speaker 00: And so having something that was darker on tap at all times was important.
• 45:05
  Speaker 00: So we prioritized that.
• 45:06
  Speaker 00: So now we're up to three that are always static.
• 45:09
  Speaker 00: We learned that I had a– I actually learned this from Vinny Calerzo.
• 45:16
  Speaker 00: He's the guy that was Russian River.
• 45:19
  Speaker 00: And he did a rotating single hop IPA.
• 45:22
  Speaker 00: And so every time he'd brew this beer, he would change the hop.
• 45:26
  Speaker 00: And I loved that concept because it's a cool way for us as brewers to get to know what a hop can do and how we might want to use it in other beers.
• 45:33
  Speaker 00: So we have a rotating hop IPA that's called the Write-In Ballot.
• 45:36
  Speaker 00: And every time we do a new one, right now it's Write-In Ballot Sabro.
• 45:40
  Speaker 00: And it's the first time we've ever used that hop, so it's kind of fun.
• 45:43
  Speaker 00: That's another.
• 45:44
  Speaker 00: So we're up to four now.
• 45:46
  Speaker 00: And then Rutherford B.
• 45:47
  Speaker 00: Hayes, our hazy New England IPA, that beer is so popular, we can't not have that.
• 45:53
  Speaker 00: one on, people will flip their lids.
• 45:54
  Speaker 00: So we have five beers now.
• 45:58
  Speaker 00: And then there's the importance to put on gluten-free.
• 46:00
  Speaker 00: And so we have a cider.
• 46:02
  Speaker 00: We can do ciders as well.
• 46:03
  Speaker 00: And it's not any particular cider.
• 46:05
  Speaker 00: I can have any cider on and I'm good with that.
• 46:07
  Speaker 00: So that kind of, some of these channels afford some rotation through them.
• 46:11
  Speaker 00: So the cider is not always this cider.
• 46:14
  Speaker 00: It can be any of our ciders.
• 46:15
  Speaker 00: Sherbert Hoover could be any of our Sherbert Hoovers.
• 46:18
  Speaker 00: But that six out of my 12 taps are static.
• 46:21
  Speaker 00: They are, they can't be any Anything but these things.
• 46:24
  Speaker 00: And so it does.
• 46:26
  Speaker 00: That's where we kind of built our core off of that.
• 46:28
  Speaker 00: We will always have these beers.
• 46:30
  Speaker 00: You can get these anytime you come in.
• 46:32
  Speaker 00: That gives us some room to play with some other stuff.
• 46:36
  Speaker 00: But it's only six taps.
• 46:38
  Speaker 00: And so then you have to be careful with how much beer do you make when you want to do a 10% Imperial Stout?
• 46:46
  Speaker 00: Do you want to sit on this for the next 12 months and take up one of your six remaining taps for that long?
• 46:51
  Speaker 00: Probably not.
• 46:53
  Speaker 00: So you make a smaller batch.
• 46:55
  Speaker 00: And that's kind of where you have to...
• 46:59
  Speaker 00: be a little bit different than a home brewer and start really thinking about what are people going to buy and focusing in on that.
• 47:08
  Speaker 00: So we have a handful of seasonal releases.
• 47:11
  Speaker 00: Throughout the year, our first one is I Did Not Inhale, which is we release that on 420 every year.
• 47:19
  Speaker 00: That one's always fun.
• 47:20
  Speaker 00: But that one's only on for the day.
• 47:22
  Speaker 00: We make just enough beer to run out of it by the end of 420, which is perfect.
• 47:26
  Speaker 00: The next seasonal release is we have a couple of kind of like summertime beers.
• 47:32
  Speaker 00: One of them is a Mexican lager.
• 47:34
  Speaker 00: One of them is a Hefeweizen.
• 47:37
  Speaker 00: And those are both like we try to get those out right around the beginning of May when we open our beer garden.
• 47:42
  Speaker 00: And so those are...
• 47:44
  Speaker 00: usually used on the extra taps outside.
• 47:48
  Speaker 00: But generally speaking, we make those once a year, and this is the time to get it.
• 47:52
  Speaker 00: If you want it, you've got to come now because we ran out of that Mexican lager.
• 47:57
  Speaker 00: It lasted like two and a half weeks.
• 47:58
  Speaker 00: It was gone, and it was a seven-barrel batch.
• 48:00
  Speaker 00: I couldn't believe how fast it flew.
• 48:02
  Speaker 00: We just released.
• 48:05
  Speaker 00: We do this every summer on Father's Day, Founding Fathers, which is a double IPA.
• 48:09
  Speaker 00: It's a 10% Imperial IPA.
• 48:12
  Speaker 00: IPA that I brewed for my dad back in the day.
• 48:14
  Speaker 00: And so that one comes on.
• 48:17
  Speaker 00: And then we've got a couple other seasonal.
• 48:19
  Speaker 00: I've got a peanut butter beer that comes on every year in October, a peanut butter porter.
• 48:26
  Speaker 00: We've got a lager called the Buckstops here that we put out right before hunting season.
• 48:32
  Speaker 00: And then next week we have a special, it's a Belgian wit beer that we put out We're going to, on the 3rd of July, watch the movie Independence Day in the beer garden and put out this wit beer called President Whitmore.
• 48:45
  Speaker 00: And it's going to be just a riot.
• 48:48
  Speaker 00: We did this last year.
• 48:49
  Speaker 00: I'd always kind of had this vision before we started that we would do, you know, U.S.
• 48:54
  Speaker 00: presidents, but also TV and movie presidents as well.
• 48:56
  Speaker 00: And so this was the first foray into it a year ago.
• 48:59
  Speaker 00: And we're doing it again this year.
• 49:01
  Speaker 00: And I'm really excited.
• 49:02
  Speaker 01: That's awesome.
• 49:03
  Speaker 01: I love that.
• 49:04
  Speaker 01: It's a real balance of, you know, you got something for everyone in terms of, you know, styles and whatnot.
• 49:09
  Speaker 01: And a lot of creativity, it sounds like that drives it.
• 49:12
  Speaker 01: And what I love about that, too, is it's like very going back to the thing that's memorable.
• 49:16
  Speaker 01: You know, people are going to really remember that.
• 49:19
  Speaker 01: So it gets a nice, thoughtful approach to curating the portfolio and keeping it fresh for folks.
• 49:26
  Speaker 00: Well, yeah, and those rotational beers, those seasonal ones, they're all spread out through the year.
• 49:31
  Speaker 00: So we have them kind of strategically inserted in different time pockets so that we can get those things on tap and make room for them accordingly.
• 49:41
  Speaker 00: And it also creates cool events for us throughout the year, too.
• 49:44
  Speaker 00: It gives us room to do something extra weird in November for buck stops here, where November is traditionally one of our uglier months.
• 49:53
  Speaker 00: It's a really fun day to have in the middle of november
• 49:57
  Speaker 01: so you got dr suds for tuesdays and the buck stops here for for november yeah on and on yeah i think that's really smart too is to be thoughtful and thinking about you know the whole calendar and what are sort of the natural or seasonality type things that people are going to connect with anyway because you're sure if you have hunters there that's that's sort of a natural thing so that's that's that's really cool how you guys have laid that out
• 50:21
  Speaker 00: yeah
• 50:22
  Speaker 01: So let's do our wrap-up question here.
• 50:24
  Speaker 01: It's the advice time.
• 50:25
  Speaker 01: It's advice time, Jake.
• 50:27
  Speaker 01: So the question, of course, is what advice would you give to other brewery owners who are looking to grow and create a financially sustainable business?
• 50:37
  Speaker 00: Oh, boy.
• 50:37
  Speaker 00: Man.
• 50:37
  Speaker 00: Well, I'll...
• 50:42
  Speaker 00: Do this in two parts.
• 50:43
  Speaker 00: The first part is for a lot of you out there, you may be in this part of running your business where it's not quite fun yet.
• 50:49
  Speaker 00: And I kind of, I remember adopting this mentality of like starting a business and At least it seems that your job is to make money for a lot of other people for a good long time.
• 51:01
  Speaker 00: And if you can survive that amount of time long enough, then you get to make some money for you too.
• 51:06
  Speaker 00: So you may be in that phase right now where you're just making money for other people.
• 51:11
  Speaker 00: I want to tell you that, first of all, I was there too.
• 51:14
  Speaker 00: I did that too.
• 51:15
  Speaker 00: And I think that every brewery owner that's found any modicum of success would tell you the same thing.
• 51:20
  Speaker 00: We all got to do that.
• 51:21
  Speaker 00: And if you're stuck in that spot right now and you're just feeling like, man, all I'm doing is paying these people bajillions of We all probably shared in that.
• 51:29
  Speaker 00: But there is a light on the other side.
• 51:32
  Speaker 00: The key, the biggest key, if you want to reach any level of sustainable success, you've got to stop trying to do it on your own.
• 51:39
  Speaker 00: If you're trying to do everything yourself, you are never going to get there.
• 51:42
  Speaker 00: So I published a book last year.
• 51:44
  Speaker 00: It's called Shifting Gears.
• 51:45
  Speaker 00: And in this book, I kind of outline these different speeds that you might be operating at when you're running your business.
• 51:53
  Speaker 00: And so the neutral is kind of having the idea.
• 51:56
  Speaker 00: First gear is more about committing to the idea and actually having a financial investment in it at a certain point.
• 52:01
  Speaker 00: And second gear is really just the gear around opening day.
• 52:05
  Speaker 00: The few weeks that kind of go on either side of opening day.
• 52:08
  Speaker 00: The reason that gear is so early is because we all view opening as the destination and it is not even close to the destination.
• 52:16
  Speaker 00: You have so much work ahead of you past getting open.
• 52:18
  Speaker 00: And one of the things that I've kind of seen is I feel like breweries often get trapped in second gear.
• 52:26
  Speaker 00: And if you know anything about driving a vehicle, second gear can go 40 miles an hour at 6,000 RPMs.
• 52:33
  Speaker 00: And so the engine's burning and burning and burning.
• 52:36
  Speaker 00: And this is like you in your business working 65, 75 hours a week, just trying to keep the lights on.
• 52:44
  Speaker 00: This is exactly the way that this works out in a car.
• 52:48
  Speaker 00: It's how it goes for so many entrepreneurs.
• 52:49
  Speaker 00: We get stuck in second gear.
• 52:51
  Speaker 00: The key to getting out of second gear is developing people and processes.
• 52:55
  Speaker 00: If you don't have people and processes, you are never going to get out of that spot where you are doing those 70-hour weeks.
• 53:02
  Speaker 00: You just can't.
• 53:03
  Speaker 00: The reality is running a million-dollar business is not possible on your own.
• 53:08
  Speaker 00: You're just not going to pull it off in this industry anyways.
• 53:11
  Speaker 00: There may be other industries where you can do a million dollars on your own, but in a brewery space, you don't have the hours in the week to pull it off.
• 53:18
  Speaker 00: So if you are in that spot right now and you're thinking, man, all I'm doing is making money for a bunch of other people, you're probably right.
• 53:25
  Speaker 00: But there is a way to get past it, and it starts with you jotting down.
• 53:31
  Speaker 00: You have to have learned what your processes are, first of all.
• 53:33
  Speaker 00: That's kind of part of what your job should be right now, is identifying the way that you need things to get done.
• 53:39
  Speaker 00: Then turn them into processes and hire people to run those processes.
• 53:44
  Speaker 00: That's what you've got to do.
• 53:45
  Speaker 00: And hiring those people and building into those people through things like those team meetings or choosing to hire people based on your core values, those are some of the key pieces Thank you.
• 53:57
  Speaker 00: Thank you.
• 54:13
  Speaker 01: Hmm.
• 54:13
  Speaker 01: That's great.
• 54:14
  Speaker 01: I love that.
• 54:14
  Speaker 01: And that, you know, you're talking, I'm like, okay, I got to talk to you again, maybe down the road about how you go from second to third and more detailed, but we'll leave that as a cliffhanger for people.
• 54:22
  Speaker 01: And I'll also say, check the book out shifting gears on Amazon, right?
• 54:26
  Speaker 01: I imagine you can grab it there and places and, and we'll link to that, but that's, that's so good.
• 54:31
  Speaker 01: You know, it's like, cause we're always looking for these reference reference manuals too.
• 54:35
  Speaker 01: And, you know, you've, you've written it.
• 54:36
  Speaker 01: I mean, you've lived it.
• 54:37
  Speaker 01: So definitely encourage people to check that out.
• 54:39
  Speaker 01: And, Yeah, there's
• 54:42
  Speaker 00: a lot of cool stuff in there.
• 54:43
  Speaker 00: I think that it could help anybody that's in that place right now where you feel stuck in second gear.
• 54:47
  Speaker 00: There's definitely some things in there that can help you escape.
• 54:52
  Speaker 01: Awesome.
• 54:52
  Speaker 01: Well, Jake, as we wind to a close, tell people where they can find you.
• 54:55
  Speaker 01: I mean, where are you guys and what do you have coming up here?
• 54:58
  Speaker 01: This podcast will get out here somewhere in late June, early July.
• 55:03
  Speaker 01: What's coming up that's exciting for people to come see you guys at Presidential?
• 55:08
  Speaker 00: Yeah, so we're in Portage, Michigan, which is southwest Michigan.
• 55:11
  Speaker 00: If you're in and around this area, we'd love to see you.
• 55:13
  Speaker 00: What you should know is this time of year, we've got concerts outdoor every Friday and Saturday, and it's really just a ton of fun.
• 55:21
  Speaker 00: We have a lot of amazing music that comes into town, usually a full band thing, and we'll see 180 people at most of these concerts.
• 55:29
  Speaker 00: So if you like a good party, we definitely have those.
• 55:33
  Speaker 00: For other things, I know that we've got an event on the 3rd of July.
• 55:38
  Speaker 00: Like I mentioned, we're watching Independence Day in the beer garden.
• 55:41
  Speaker 00: I'm super excited about that.
• 55:42
  Speaker 00: It's going to be a ton of fun.
• 55:43
  Speaker 00: 4th of July, we've got a DJ dance party during the day.
• 55:47
  Speaker 00: And we're doing this release of, it's called Primary Election, where we actually have three different beers competing for a spot on our tap list.
• 55:56
  Speaker 00: And so we actually have three different porters that have been brewed, and people are going to come in, you get a flight of the three, and you get to vote for your favorite.
• 56:04
  Speaker 00: And we which one has the most votes is the one that we make again.
• 56:07
  Speaker 00: The other two, we never make again.
• 56:08
  Speaker 00: So primary election that starts July 4th and it'll continue on the next 10 days.
• 56:14
  Speaker 00: So through the 13th, uh, anytime in there, come out and see us, get one of those flights and vote for your favorite and help us choose the next beer that we put on tap.
• 56:23
  Speaker 01: Awesome.
• 56:23
  Speaker 01: Jake, this has been so great.
• 56:25
  Speaker 01: So much great information.
• 56:26
  Speaker 01: I always really appreciate talking to you.
• 56:28
  Speaker 01: I feel like I get smarter every time I talk to you, which is, which is really, um, why we do this, to learn from other people and share these ideas.
• 56:36
  Speaker 01: So thank you so much for your time and sharing your knowledge with us.
• 56:40
  Speaker 00: Absolutely.
• 56:40
  Speaker 00: Thanks for having me on.
• 56:41
  Speaker 00: It's always a pleasure.
• 56:43
  Speaker 01: Thank you for listening to the Craft Brewery Financial Training Podcast, where we combine beer and numbers so that you can improve financial results in your brewery.
• 56:51
  Speaker 01: For more resources, tools, guides, and online courses, visit craftbreweryfinancialtraining.com.
• 56:58
  Speaker 01: And don't forget to sign up for the world-famous Craft Brewery financial training newsletter.
• 57:03
  Speaker 01: Until next time, get out there and improve financial results in your brewery today.