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A lot of brewers start out as an avocation. Say, an entrepreneur has a successful exit and takes some of those earnings and starts their passion project of starting a brewery. That’s actually the way that GoTab got started. Our CEO, Tim McLaughlin, started his brewery after many years as a successful e-commerce entrepreneur.
But that previous business success usually isn’t enough. Most business owners and entrepreneurs aren’t satisfied with just keeping the lights on. After they get up and running, most decide they need to make their brewery a going concern. It’s intuitive. They’ve built something they’re proud of, and that they love, and want to make sure it is sustainable. What’s more, they have employees and customers that they’re committed to. They want to make sure their business is around for a long time.
And that’s when the key question comes into play: do you want to be right or do you want to be rich?
What do we mean by being right? By that we mean, maybe you started as a gritty little spot with a bar and a few barrels and found success with that. But over time, the success wanes, or business stagnates. The market is telling you something. It’s telling you that to grow you need to make some changes.
The places that are expanding and that are opening extra tap rooms recognize that there's a hospitality aspect to the whole thing. The product is good. What else is good? Is there any live music? It's a common thing and that's easy to pull off. Do people like coming to play board games, trivia night, or a cornhole tournaments?
We see so many examples of this. A local tap room in Vallejo for example, a friend of one of our execs, has grown to become a huge part of the local community. They decided to launch a weekly cornhole tournament, with brackets, trophies, the works. They promote their weekly tournament on social media and pull it off with not that much effort at all. Their sales are increasing because they made this minor investment and put a couple things up on social media. All of a sudden, they’ve been able to generate 150 additional customers coming in a couple times per week just because of this very low amount of extra effort. That's the mentality that it takes. What can you give people that they're going to remember? And what are they going to tell their friends about?
Beyond those activations, it’s the little things that can take a mediocre performing brewery or tap room and turn it into a high-performing, revenue generating venue: It's finding out if someone wants another beer before they have to come to you. It's recognizing an empty glass on the table, getting out from behind the bar. You're going to make more revenue. If you have a cool place, that people want to hang out in, that’s the bottom line.
In our next video, we talk about how to lean into growth. The steps to take to put yourself in a position where your brewery is growing and expanding, not staying stagnant.
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