The Eras Of BrewDog

Era 1: Fraserburgh. 2007-2011

In 2007, in a derelict shed, we set up one tiny brewery with one very big mission: to make other people as passionate about great craft beer as we are. With 2 humans and 1 dog we set out to change the world.

We put absolutely everything on the line. We set the business up with ￡20,000 of life savings and a ￡30,000 bank loan. Our initial ramshackle brewery was cobbled together on a shoestring budget as we begged, borrowed and bartered our way into existence. For the first year Martin and I did everything from bottling the beer to doing deliveries and from brewing to trying to keep our accounts up to date. 95% of small businesses fail in their first 24 months and we had to fight tooth and nail long enough to stay in the game and make a difference.

Era 1 was defined by crazy beers such as Tactical Nuclear Penguin, smashing industrial generic beers, high profile PR stunts, running our tiny brewery really hard and doing all we could to try and ensure we could pay our small team at the end of each month. We also opened our first retail locations in Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Camden. We announced our arrival in the capital by driving a tank through the streets.

Our first handful of employees were so pivotal to what everything we have gone onto build as a business and many of those early Fraserburgh team members remain with us today.

In Era 1 we had no experience, no money and no choice to do whatever it took to survive. There was simply one objective say alive as a business at all costs. Luckily, and due to the remarkable success of a crazy idea we had called Equity For Punks, we managed to make it through those perilous early years.

Era 2: A New Brewery – 2012-2015

In late 2012 our brand-new brewery opened its doors in Ellon, ready to brew more craft beer than ever before. By now we were growing like crazy every year and our growth was breaking all types of records. The craft beer revolution was beginning to really kick and we were the main protagonist.

Our new brewery enabled us to scale and to professionalise. Or at least attempt to professionalise. We started to invest in HR, but too slowly, we started to think ore seriously about health and safety in the brewery but this was an area that still had nowhere near enough focus.

High-growth brought daily challenges for our inexperienced team and some of these challenges we handled better than others. Before starting BrewDog I was working on a north Atlantic fishing boat and I now found myself thrust into leading a 500 person organisation which was completely new to me. I definitely made mistakes and looking back there are definitely things I would have done differently, but overall I am proud of how our business developed between 2012 and 2016.

We became a Real Living Wage Employer, opened over 40 amazing new craft beer bars and started building a new brewery in America. We brewed some amazing beers from Jack Hammer to Tokyo and we continued to turn the beer scene on it’s head.

Our mistakes were as high profile as our successes with ours very much being the story of a company and leadership team growing up in public. We wore our heart on our sleeves, took a stand for the things we believed in and did not give a damn what anyone thought.

We got to 500 team members and the efforts of all of these people had a massively positive impact on what we had already built, and what we would go onto achieve as a business.

Era 3: Post TSG Investment 2016-2018

It is fair to say that we lost our way a little in this period. We did some amazing things like opened a fantastic brewery in America, built a distillery, broke the world record for crowd funding and secured external investment but we also struggled to keep up with the demands of running what was the fastest growing business in the UK at the time and a I let a few strategic mistakes compound themselves.

In April 2017 we took investment from TSG in a deal that valued our business at ￡1bn. Naturally this changed everything for us and in hindsight we could have a managed this change better. We had always been very tight on spend in our business but with cash to burn we began to spend on things we did not need and we lost control of our culture: the saddest part of this was how many people we had to let go for savagely abusing their expenses. When some of your own team think it is acceptable to steal from the business, you know something is badly wrong. ?

Furthermore, I very mistakenly believed the only way to take BrewDog to the next level was to hire an experienced and expensive senior management team. I assembled an all-star cast with impressive resumes and hearty pay-checks but within 12 months we had parted company with of all 7 of them. Despite being fantastic people and leaders, they just did not integrate into our BrewDog culture. Furthermore, installing a whole new senior management team in one foul swoop was always destined to fail. It was an expensive lesson.

During this period we also had some pretty high profile PR missteps, did some crazy things like open a HotDog restaurant and pretty much lost our focus as we struggled to find the right way to successfully run a business that continued to grow incredibly quickly all over the world.

In era 3 we also had some extremally tumultuous relationships at a senior level and functional dysfunction was our modus operandi. For me, era 3 is characterized by many strategic missteps, all of which had an impact on our team. We lost our culture, we lost our focus and despite big investments in HR these investments were ineffective and during this period we were definitely not as good an employer as we aspire to be. ?We continued to grow, but era 3 was a grind.

Era 4: Stabilising The Ship 2018-2020

We had to stabilise the ship and we did.

We made some major changes to the structure of our senior team which enabled me to focus more on the overall strategy and high impact growth projects which is where I feel I can add the most value as CEO. We introduced the BrewDog Salary Cap which means no-one can join our business and be paid more than 7 times the salary of the entry level position in our company. Because of this we have no option but develop the next generation of BrewDog leaders from within our own ranks and we are much stronger as a result. The Unicorn Fund profit scheme was introduced in it’s current format – a ground-breaking program where we share 10% of our profits evenly with all of our team members.

We regained the operational discipline that has been key to our journey so far and we got our cost base and our spend back under control and due to the hard work of our amazing team, our financial performance back on track.

Our US brewery was the fastest growing brewery in America and our Doghouse Hotel in Columbus was named one of the best 100 places on the planet by TIME magazine (wow!). We opened an amazing brewery and tap room in the heart of Berlin in a historic gasworks building dating back to 1901 and we started building our new brewery in Brisbane. These new breweries helping us brew our beer closer to our customers and fans as international expansion remained very much our focus.

Hazy Jane proved a big hit beer wise and we became the world’s leading independent beer brand and the world’s leading craft beer brand (independently verified by brand finance). Not bad for as business started in a garage only a decade before.

We had a great team in place, we were ready to take on the world and had no idea that in March 2020 the global pandemic would bring our business to it’s knees.

Era 5: Navigating the C-19 Storm 2020-2021

This era was incredibly tough. C-19 has descended our world into a chaos that was almost completely unimaginable. We lost 70% of our revenue overnight. We had to close almost 100 locations globally and I genuinely did not believe our business would make it through the storm. We had to let go of around 5% of our team through a voluntary redundancy process and many of our leaders agreed to take pay cuts, or even no salary at all, to help ensure our survival. We were fighting for our life every single day.

I am incredibly proud of how our team has managed to navigate our way through C-19 and all of the ways we continued to show business can be a force for good such as donating over ￡1m worth of sanitiser which we made at our distillery. However, getting the business through 2020 took a heavy toll, furlough, working from home, redundancies, the ongoing uncertainty as to whether our business would survive and just living through a pandemic overall was extremely intense.

During the pandemic we also completely pivoted our business and became the world’s first carbon negative brewery as we looked to set a new standard in sustainability. We also embarked on an ambitious plan to reduce our emissions and we bought 9,500 acres of the Scottish Highlands that we are turning into the Lost Forest where we will plant millions of trees and restore peatlands to pull up to 1 millions tons of carbon from our atmosphere.

In 2021 we also received an open letter from some former team members criticising our company culture. We decided to use this as a catalyst to get better and embarked on an independent review of our culture so that we could build a plan, together with our amazing team members, to be the best company we possibly can be. You can read the full independent review and our actions points here: https://www.brewdog.com/uk/independent-culture-review

Era 5 also saw an explosion in our online sales, another world record for equity crowd funding and remarkable growth as we continued to expand our sales despite all of the challenges. We also expanded our brewery with new canning lines, ordered a new brewhouse and set out a plan to build one of the world’s leading beer brands over the next 5 years.

Era 6: 2022 - Onwards

Era 6 is all about taking BrewDog to the next level and building our business on our 3 pillars: Beer, Planet & People.

Beer – we want to share our passion for world class craft beer as we look to try and build one of the world’s top 5 beer brands, for context, we are currently ranked 16th globally. It is startling, but if we look at the world’s top 10 leading beer brands they were all founded over 100 years ago. There has been no premium global beer brand successfully launched in the last century.?

Our mission simply has to be to change that.

Planet – sustainability is at the core of everything we do. As the world’s first carbon negative brewery we are looking to set a new standard in sustainability and inspire other companies to do the same. With sustainability we are putting our money where our heart is.

People – we have always said that our long-term destiny is determined by how well we look after our amazing people. Whilst we have not always got everything right from a culture perspective the aspiration remains the same. In Era 6 we want to work closely with our amazing teams to ensure BrewDog is a business we are all very proud to be part of.

Hold Fast

We are flying the flag for independence, for better beer, for better business and for protecting our planet in an industry dominated by out-dated behemoths.

As a team, a community and a collective we can redefine beer on a global level whilst setting a new standard in sustainability. Our growth gives us the opportunity to amplify the impact we can have. This is our opportunity to change the world of beer forever.

James