Brewery Spotlight: Presidential Brewing

Each month, the Beer Business Finance Association will shine a spotlight on one exceptional craft brewery to explore what makes their business thrive. 

In this exclusive conversation, we hear from Jake Lohse, Founder of Presidential Brewing. 

We go beyond the beer to uncover best practices, smart financial strategies, creative sales tactics, and the real-world lessons they've learned. 

This is your front-row seat to learn from peers who are building profitable, resilient breweries and raising the bar for the industry.

Whether you're a new brewery or a seasoned operator, you’ll walk away with fresh ideas and proven tactics to grow sales, improve profitability, and strengthen your business.

Resources

• Learn more about Presidential Brewing
• Check out Jake's book: Shifting Gears, The Ultimate Road Map to Crafting Your Legendary Brewery or Restaurant
• Get the free brewery finance bulletin

Transcript

Speaker 01: 0:00

Today on the podcast, we start our new series called the Brewery Spotlight on the Business of Beer. These are going to be real world insights from breweries who are making it work. So each month we're going to shine a spotlight on one exceptional brewery to explore what makes their business thrive. So today we're going to speak with Jake Losey from Presidential Brewing. 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. 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. So for now, please enjoy this conversation with Jake Losey from Presidential Brewing. 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. I'm your host, Kerry Shumway, a CPA, CFO for a brewery, and a former CFO for a beer distributor. I've spent the last 20 years using finance to improve financial results in our beer business. Now I'm helping other craft breweries to do the same. Are you ready to take your brewery financial results to the next level? Okay. Let's get started. and share best practices. So I'd love to tell you a little bit more about this. If you are interested in learning more, please email me, kary at beerbusinessfinance.com. That's K-A-R-Y at beerbusinessfinance.com. Or you can visit bbfassociation.org. That's bbfassociation.org to learn more. Hey, Jake. Welcome back to the podcast. How are you doing today?

Speaker 00: 2:04

Oh man, it's another beautiful sunny day up here in Michigan. Excited to see you again, Cary.

Speaker 01: 2:10

I'm excited to see you too. So for people that might not be familiar with you and your brewery, why don't you give them some background?

Speaker 00: 2:17

Yeah, so my name is Jake Losey, and I started Presidential Brewing Company with my wife Kaylee back in 2019. Presidential is just this wild, silly idea. It kind of came from a thing that we used to do called New Beer Fridays. And basically every Friday we'd get together, we'd drink a beer that we never had before. It was a small group of people. 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. And we started to run out of beers at the store. It still was. And so one day we decided to make a beer. We made an oatmeal stout, which was one of my favorite styles. And when that beer was ready to drink, it tasted awesome. And I don't think we were expecting that. So I felt that that beer deserved a name because it was good. And at the time, it was an oatmeal stout and Obama was president. And we just kind of combined the two together and called it Oat-bama. And that was really kind of the beginning of the whole journey right there. From there, we came up with a bunch of other silly beer names. And before long, I started talking to a realtor. And I didn't even hardly know how to make beer at this point. And here I was in position to someday open a brewery. Now, that was six years before we would actually do very much about it. But the idea for the business was born that day. 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. Even in 2012, the political landscape was weird. And I really had a lot of fun with kind of poking at all of the different president names. And a lot of them, like Obama, is not really insinuating anything. You know, a lot of our names tend to stick more in that vein, like a Rutherford B. Hayes or a Sherbert Hoover or a Calvin Creamidge is our cream ale. But some of them, we do tend to kind of poke a little bit at a presidential story. We had a beer called a WMD, which was kind of fun. And we had another one, it's I Did Not Inhale. And so... 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. 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.

Speaker 01: 4:51

That's incredible. I love that. And I was going to say, like, every great superhero has an origin story, right? If you think of, like, Spider-Man or Batman,

Speaker 00: 4:59

superheroes...

Speaker 01: 5:00

So your origin story was you guys got together and you ran out of beers to drink. So you're like, the heck with this. We're going to make our own beers. I love

Speaker 00: 5:06

that. Yeah. Well, it's fun to think that I'm a superhero. I don't know if I agree with that. Yeah, you are.

Speaker 01: 5:11

You're a beer superhero.

Speaker 00: 5:12

Yeah, it's an awesome backstory. 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. And as I was building my homebrew skills, I was inviting people to my house every month to come and try these new beers. And so New Beer Friday grew from six people to 15 to 20 to 30. And eventually we had 65 people showing up at my house once a month, all trying these new beers that I was making. And And the craziest part is that I didn't know that I was doing it at the time. I wasn't necessarily committed to presidential brewing as a business. I thought of it more as a homebrew like set of names. And before long, I started to realize, like, I've built a fan base already. I actually have my first customers already excited for what I might be doing. And frankly, I can't fit any more people in my house. So I guess we probably ought to think about a next step here. And yeah, it's pretty wild the way that it all got started for us.

Speaker 01: 6:18

Yeah, that's very cool. 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.

Speaker 00: 6:30

And they had no problem being honest either. I'll tell you that.

Speaker 01: 6:34

Well, that's how your friends usually are. Yeah. Oh yeah. Those are, those can be your best customers, but, oh, that's very cool. I love that. And you, you know, you see you scratched your own itch, right? It's like a lot of businesses, I think, start that way where they're solving their own problem to a degree, you know? Yeah. 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. 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.

Speaker 00: 7:12

We definitely went through the business gets hard phase, too. It definitely it was a challenge. 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. We want to just get this in people's glasses and have people drinking it, enjoying it. And then you realize that there's a whole business that you have to run that comes with it. It's not just making beer. It's it's all of the things that come with business. It's hiring. It's it's staff leadership. It's it's accounting. It's all these things that you probably weren't necessarily considering, at least not to the right degree at that point in time. And then all of a sudden you find yourself like, oh, shoot, I've got to piece the rest of this together.

Speaker 01: 7:56

Yeah, that's right. It's a lot. And I think the industry has come around to that now, right? Where we're like, okay, it's not just brewing beer. It's actually running a business that happens to brew beer and all the things that need to support that effort. 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. But that's hard. It's hard to see that.

Speaker 00: 8:22

Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 01: 8:23

So let's talk about, on a positive note, I want to hear, like, what's been your biggest win? Say, if you look back over the last 12 months, do a little reflection. And, you know, we usually save reflections for, you know, New Year's resolutions. And we're recording here in June, so what the heck. So if you look back over those 12 months, what's been your biggest win?

Speaker 00: 8:41

Yeah, I would say there's a couple of things that come to mind for me. One is that we're breaking records left and right right now, which is awesome. It's a lot of fun. 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. That's encouraging for us and for the team. We all get pretty excited when we get to cross one of those numbers off and write something new on there. I think that... 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. We have an outdoor concert venue, and our outdoor concerts are so much fun. It brings in a ton of people. 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. 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. 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? And we didn't even have internet. Nobody around us had power. 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. 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. We didn't ask for that to happen to us, but we figured out a way to deal with it. And I'm really proud of the team for the way that we kind of battled that issue. And we had a great night as a result. So I think that's one of my favorites. That's great. Yeah, I

Speaker 01: 10:29

love that because I think it just demonstrates that, you know, shit happens, right? And it's like, you know, what are you gonna do about it? 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. But you guys got creative and worked hard and figured it out and had a solution. 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. Hey, we did it. Because it's not going to be the last time you have a challenge that you need to overcome.

Speaker 00: 10:58

Not at all.

Unknown: 11:00

Yeah.

Speaker 01: 11:00

That's a great story. I love that. Let's shift now and maybe talk about operational practices. Has there been any one or a combination of operational practices that you've implemented that's improved efficiency or profitability that

Speaker 00: 11:15

you'd like to share? And this group of five of us, we meet once every week. And this meeting... It's called an L10 meeting, and it comes from the EOS, the Entrepreneurial Operating System. If you've ever read the book Traction, it's mentioned in there, but if you haven't, I would recommend it. It's a good book, and it specifically talks about this meeting structure. We've implemented this meeting structure, and one of the things that I think is really key is I came from a corporate background. 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. We have too much stuff that we have to talk about. And the problem is that meetings can very quickly derail or be pointless. 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? What are we doing here? And so... 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. 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. But what's been really awesome about this... in this structure. People are more accountable to each other. been incredibly useful. And I can't recommend this structure enough. 90 minutes once a week. And I think we've gotten three times as much done compared to what we were doing before.

Speaker 01: 13:46

That's so good. You're right. Same with me. Corporate background, meetings that just took years off my life. And you just sit there like, why? Why? And it was awful. So I totally agree with that. And it's really not the meeting, right? It is the structure. You're absolutely right. 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. Because you use the word like action items, goals, accountability, getting stuff done. There's purpose to this, right? And that's so critical in order to make you feel like, all right, this is a great use of time. 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. Think about it, you know, kick it around. 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.

Speaker 00: 14:59

Yeah. And one of the key sections of our meeting structure is called IDS, which is short for identify, discuss and solve. And I think to your point, that solve part is the that's the main motivation. We want to identify the problems that are not even necessarily problems. It could be opportunities, but identify what we need to work on, discuss what a solution would be and then implement it. 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. of getting a quote from a contractor. It's just something to take whatever the next step forward is. Yeah,

Speaker 01: 15:38

that's a great suggestion. So, all right, so I'll put that link for folks. So it's traction, it's the EOS model level 10 meetings and all the good stuff. And I guess the takeaway for people listening is to really avoid the DSMs. You just invented this The dumb, stupid meetings.

Speaker 00: 15:55

Yes, yes. Avoid dumb, stupid meetings.

Speaker 01: 15:58

I think we'd all feel better for that. All right. Let's talk about tracking financial performance. So you've outlaid a great structure for us. What sort of metrics do you guys look at regularly?

Speaker 00: 16:10

Yeah, so there's the obvious ones. We care a lot about sales. 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. One of the things that I love about this is the sense of feeling on track or off track as a business. 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. 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. 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. So we've got a seasonal projection and we look every week. How did we do against our weekly goal? That's one of the key things that I love to look at. Next metrics are really more about how did we get there? 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. So I'm trying to figure out how much food did we produce per hour of labor in my kitchen? And we had a different You know, set of goals for a little while. Now I've got a salaried manager and I don't include her labor in this number. But with a salaried manager in there, we're targeting being above $65 of food sold per hour worked in the kitchen. And that includes our prep time, our line cook, our cleanup time, whatever. All of that's included. 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. So that's kind of the margin there. So that's a really key metric that we track every week. Another one that I like to look at is add-on sales. And so add-on sales are... Thank you. Thank you. that ticket is likely to be higher, not just for the reason of the add-on sale being there. 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. 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. And so we hold our team to a pretty high standard with that. We're looking for 10% of our sales to be add-on sales. And that is a metric that I think is really important, and it's done a lot of good for us. And people care about it because they know that it affects their tips. But also we have a bonus structure that their add-on sales are tied to their bonuses as well. And so people are invested in it. And so those are two really key metrics that we pay a lot of attention to. Another one is I look at... Ticket completion time, specifically for our kitchen side, for you breweries out there with kitchens, it can be devastating sometimes. But when you start kind of getting things to start clicking, there's some really cool systems out there. We use Toast for our point of sale. And Toast, we have the kitchen display system. So you can click a button to say this order is ready. And it's awesome. It notifies the staff that this is ready. You can come pick it up in the window. But it also gives me data to say this is how long these tickets take to complete. And so I'm tracking a ticket completion time. And I'm trying to figure out 95% of our tickets are done in what amount of minutes. 95% of our tickets this last week were completed in 28 minutes or less. That was within our goal. We want to be under 30. And so that's kind of where we're tracking. 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. And so they kind of have a relationship. We found a place where we're happy. We want it to be that happy medium. 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. So those are some key metrics. 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. So those are some of the key ones that I tend to pay attention to as a leadership team. And then as a business owner, you're looking at other things too. 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. 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.

Speaker 01: 21:38

Those are the ones that are toughest to budget, right?

Speaker 00: 21:42

Yeah, it's a

Speaker 01: 21:43

fortune sometimes. Those are great metrics, though. It sounds like a lot on food. Did that come about because of just the nature of food being a little more volatile in terms of... Yeah,

Speaker 00: 21:55

so... 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. And this is harder to do well for a number of reasons. First of all, customers have really high expectations for food, where their expectations on beer are probably a little different. Not very many customers can go home and make their own beer. Most customers can go home and make their own panini or whatever it is that you sell. And so they're judging against what they can do on their own. And they're trying to decide whether yours is good enough to exceed that. So you've got a quality issue. You need an experience that matches that quality. So you need to be able to deliver it on time and in a good presentation that it appeases them. And at the same time, food has a way worse margin than beer. Beer that I make, I can sell and make a lot more money on beer than I can on food. And so you're flirting with disaster, it feels like, when your margins are as thin as they are on food. 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. You're doing really well. And so that leaves 40% to try to cover the rest of your expenses. And that's just, that's a tough gig. So I pay a lot of attention to food just because of the tight, tight margins. And really the, it's not just financial margins. It's also your margin for error with your customer.

Speaker 01: 23:26

Yeah. Yeah. Great points. Great, great numbers too. Thanks for sharing those.

Speaker 00: 23:29

Yeah.

Speaker 01: 23:30

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? sort of the experience and the metrics around it. 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?

Speaker 00: 23:46

Yeah, this is one of my favorite parts of our business. I love doing this. I didn't realize that marketing and advertising was going to be so much fun, but I really enjoy it. So we have a lot of different things, and I think of marketing as kind of a big picture. 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. So when I talk about this, I'm thinking about we have an email list that we use every week. 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. And it's kind of fun. We go out and share a beer and talk about which beer we're drinking and people listen to it. We have digital advertising where we're geofencing certain areas and putting ads on phones. We have advertising on TVs that shows up when you're watching Hulu or whatever. We have Facebook ads that I create for a lot of the bands and stuff that we're doing. you get all these different channels, these different ways to communicate to people. And one of the things that I think is really important is to try to synchronize your message across all those channels. 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. 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. 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. So sharing that same message across all the platforms has been a really good, useful tool for us. Some of the things that are really fun to do, we have email is a weirdly important tool. thing for me. It's not something that I expected to be important, but it is. 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. So that's 40-ish percent, somewhere in that range. 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. And so we keep email kind of short and sweet, but we put a focus on building our email list. 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. But instead of just having a password written on the wall, we have, it's called a guest portal. And the portal, you have to put in your email address. And when you do, it logs you into, it automatically puts you into my MailChimp account. And so now you'll start receiving emails from us. 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. So glad that we had you out. Here's any of our beers for a dollar on your next visit in the next seven days. And so I call this a boomerang offer. It's something you throw it out there and it's going to come back to you. That's the idea. We want to do this as often as possible. Give people that reason to come back. Because getting them there is hard enough. Getting them to come back is really that's where that's where you can really start to influence your traffic. And so we give these boomerang offers as often as we possibly can. Last night, I ran karaoke and we do it's karaoke bingo. So what a silly, ridiculous combination of things. 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. your next visitor, a free ice cream, your next visit. And all these boomerang offers keep people coming back. And what it does is it builds a new list of regulars. You get people that start showing up as a pattern in their life. So boomerang offers, definitely a big deal. We want to use those as much as possible in order to get people to keep showing back up to your place.

Speaker 01: 27:47

Yeah. I love that. So important. And, you know, it's funny because the $1 beer offer, I've heard variations on this. And when I'll mention this to maybe other brewery owners, they're like, oh, geez, I don't know, $1. And I'm thinking, but that $1, and I've seen the stats on this. 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. So this is like this huge return on investment. Have you guys seen something similar with that?

Speaker 00: 28:17

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. 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. We can't sell it for less than what our costs are. So none of our beers cost me more than a dollar per serving. So you've definitely already covered your costs, but probably that person is going to stick around and enjoy another beer, at least. And if they don't, they may not have been the right customer for you anyways. And you may have found out that you don't need that customer anymore. I think that was a weird... 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. 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. 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.

Speaker 01: 29:21

That's a great point. Yeah, like when you're starting a business, you're not for everyone. You really do have your raving fans, and you've got to niche down and all that.

Unknown: 29:29

Yeah.

Speaker 01: 29:29

I think that's a really smart way to think about it. And I love the whole... So I'll just kind of go back and underscore a couple of things you mentioned because I really like... So from a strategy standpoint, sort of synchronizing your message across all those channels. Love it. Super important. So you can really benefit from focusing on what do you want people to hear? What do you want them to do? The radio thing, I think, is great because I don't hear that a lot. I hear a lot of social media and social media and social media, but... You've mentioned two things that are pretty, well, actually three, really. So if I go radio, email, love that. And then TV ads, that's so cool. So Hulu, so they're able to actually target, like you mentioned geofencing for your digital. So Hulu and whatnot can do that for TV?

Speaker 00: 30:14

Yeah. Yeah. Uh, so I do a lot of this advertising work through town square who owns the radio station. 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. 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. We were actually part of some of that in, in Portage, Michigan. So it's kind of crazy to have presidential brewing show up in the super bowl, but there we were

Speaker 01: 30:47

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

Speaker 00: 31:03

Oh, yeah,

Speaker 01: 31:03

for sure. That's cool. Well, let's pivot now and talk a little bit about staff training. It's a real challenge. 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. What has worked well for you guys when it comes to staff training or team culture?

Speaker 00: 31:29

Yeah, I think that really any group Any well-run business could tell you what their values are, their company values are. And I think this is a gap for most people that are struggling in their businesses. They don't know what their values are. You haven't established what actually matters. and which characteristics you're looking for in people that work on your team. And so we went through an exercise as a staff a couple years ago now to really hone in on what our values were. And we've got five of them, and it's really key. 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. We're also going to have corrective conversations based on these same values. 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. As far as the training side, that's actually our values are part of our training process. New employees need to learn what those are. and they need to be able to recite from memory, we actually have a test at the end of your training period. So training period is a designed set of days. 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? 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. Then the next day is more about– say you're a bartender. You're going to shadow one of our existing bartenders that we've established as a trainer. And you're going to hang out with them for the day and follow them around. But we also give you the test on that day. That first day we'll give you the test that says this is what you're looking to learn over the next week. And they'll take it and they'll kind of see these are the gaps that I need to focus on. And they then can ask questions of the bartender as they're going. Like, oh, man, I know I got this wrong. What do we do here? How do we– when I need to merge a ticket, how do I do that? And so– Some of those things really kind of come out of that. 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. And then a test at the end of that to see, did you learn all the things? And are you committed to the values that we say are important here? I can tell you from my experience, I've worked so many times. We've had a number of people that are incredibly talented that didn't match with our values. And it was miserable, miserable to work with those people. They're not bad people. They're bad fit for us. That's all it is. And so... I have a very high emphasis on our company values and our team all understands and supports that and works with that as well. And that is a difference maker. Our culture is as strong as it's ever been because we have prioritized it. We've made that the thing that we care about.

Speaker 01: 34:41

And how did you come up with those? Because I think that's... People aspire to that, right? To have these values and then to communicate them and then obviously to live them. How did you come up with your list and maybe take us through that a little bit?

Speaker 00: 34:54

Yeah, yeah. So this was, this came from a book that I read called Your Restaurant Sucks by Donald Burns. And he's pretty affronting kind of guy. But I read this book and I was like, man, I feel like I've been doing this wrong. I think he's onto something here. And so I sat with my, we had a leadership team at the time. And I had them all read the book with me. 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? What are the characteristics that we think we see right now out of our staff? And kind of identifying that. of those characteristics, which ones do we want to keep seeing? Because not all those things are things we want to keep seeing. You have people that don't really care about showing up for their shift on time. That's a problem for us. We can't rely on you. I can't schedule you and know that you're going to show up. That's a big issue. 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. And so you start to look for trends. Some of the words look similar and you kind of combine them together. 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. It's really hard to remember a whole lot of words. And so when we did it too, we also sought for each of our values to be just a one word thing. So in our values actually spelled an acronym, it spells the word CHARGE. It doesn't necessarily mean a whole lot to us other than it helps us to remember this. But our values are collaboration, hospitality, appreciation, respect, growth, and excellence. Those are the things that we kind of go by. 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. And anything that doesn't fall into that, we need to make sure that we work that out of our system. And specifically hiring and firing according to those values. 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. When you don't show up to your shift on time, that isn't respecting your team. 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. We can't have you continuing to drag that down. So we've had to part ways with good people that just don't match our values.

Speaker 01: 37:45

Yeah, I love that. 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. So they need to lean back on, I think these values, these principles, these sort of guiding lights to help them. 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. Hospitality. You know, we got to, this has got to come first. This is one of our core values. I think that can be really useful for people.

Speaker 00: 38:18

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. It's hard to do because, you know, we've got a list of six different words here. 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. 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. When you demonstrate excellence, it looks like that. 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. I saw what you did. Thank you. I love what that was. That's awesome.

Speaker 01: 39:07

I've heard it phrased in a way like you're going to give people a reputation to live up to. Give them a really high bar and say, I've seen you do that. That's what I want to see again. So that's really cool. That's really cool. I love that, Jake. All right, let's pivot again. And I want to talk about, come back to marketing and maybe one marketing initiative thing. or I'll use the word story-driven campaign that's made an impact. But really, any marketing initiatives that come to mind for you that have worked particularly well?

Speaker 00: 39:38

There's a couple. One of them was kind of fun. A couple years ago, I had this harebrained idea to say that beer tasted better on Tuesdays. And... It was trying to get people to come into the taproom on Tuesday, obviously. But what was fun about this is I came up with this really creative story about Dr. Suds and all the research that he did and found some files in Joe Biden's garage. And we did all, like just all the shtick with this. 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. And so we've run this campaign. 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. 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. It created some attention. 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. And now they need to go to presidential to... because they're all talking about it. So something as weird and off the wall as that was, I think was creative and actually drove sales. Maybe not specifically on Tuesday, but I think throughout that campaign, it definitely drove some sales for us.

Speaker 01: 41:27

Dr. Suds, well, I'm going to remember that. And I think that I would agree. Beer does taste better on Tuesday

Speaker 00: 41:33

or pretty much any day of the week. That's right. Yeah. Tuesdays are perfect day for drinking beer.

Speaker 01: 41:39

That's so good. I love that. 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. 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? What's new? How do you balance like? New beers with the consistency in your core product success. Because that's a lot of focus and time and energy. How do you think about that? And maybe even how do you kind of curate your portfolio when it comes to the beer lineup?

Speaker 00: 42:16

Yeah, I love this. And I think this is really important. Before I opened our brewery, I was a brewery goer. Not that I'm not anymore, but I just do it less than I used to. One of the things that I always loved about my favorite breweries are the ones that had stuff coming on tap all the time. I didn't like going to the places that only ever had the same stuff. 10 beers. So that was something that I prioritized. And we've got a pretty small set of taps. We only have 12 taps inside our tap room. We've got an additional 10 that we can use in the summertime outside. So that kind of opens some avenues for us. But generally speaking, we designed our core product versus rotating product based on this 12 tap system. And for our core products, we kind of, we had to see what our core products were. I had an idea of what they might be, and I was wrong on so many fronts. 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. And, you know, what's wrong with all you people? But that's how it worked out. And so Cremale, I can't not have that beer on tap. I have to have that beer on tap. That is one that you will not come to Presidential Brewing and not see Calvin Creamage on tap. Another one that became kind of a signature beer for us was our Sherbert Hoover. It's a fruited kettle sour. And we started our first one was raspberry vanilla. Right now on tap, we have orange creamsicle. This beer is one of our, like, this is the one that gets buzzed. People talk about this beer. And so I always have a Sherbert Hoover on tap. It's not a specific one, but one of these fruited sours is on. And so that's two beers. beers already that I have to always have. Another beer that I always want to have is the Obama, the first beer that I ever made. And some of that is, it's twofold. Some of it is just the story behind, you know, we started with this beer. But also there's, I wanted to always have a dark beer. 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. I love stouts. I love porters, any of those. And so having something that was darker on tap at all times was important. So we prioritized that. So now we're up to three that are always static. We learned that I had a– I actually learned this from Vinny Calerzo. He's the guy that was Russian River. And he did a rotating single hop IPA. And so every time he'd brew this beer, he would change the hop. 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. So we have a rotating hop IPA that's called the Write-In Ballot. And every time we do a new one, right now it's Write-In Ballot Sabro. And it's the first time we've ever used that hop, so it's kind of fun. That's another. So we're up to four now. And then Rutherford B. Hayes, our hazy New England IPA, that beer is so popular, we can't not have that. one on, people will flip their lids. So we have five beers now. And then there's the importance to put on gluten-free. And so we have a cider. We can do ciders as well. And it's not any particular cider. I can have any cider on and I'm good with that. So that kind of, some of these channels afford some rotation through them. So the cider is not always this cider. It can be any of our ciders. Sherbert Hoover could be any of our Sherbert Hoovers. But that six out of my 12 taps are static. They are, they can't be any Anything but these things. And so it does. That's where we kind of built our core off of that. We will always have these beers. You can get these anytime you come in. That gives us some room to play with some other stuff. But it's only six taps. And so then you have to be careful with how much beer do you make when you want to do a 10% Imperial Stout? Do you want to sit on this for the next 12 months and take up one of your six remaining taps for that long? Probably not. So you make a smaller batch. And that's kind of where you have to... 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. So we have a handful of seasonal releases. Throughout the year, our first one is I Did Not Inhale, which is we release that on 420 every year. That one's always fun. But that one's only on for the day. We make just enough beer to run out of it by the end of 420, which is perfect. The next seasonal release is we have a couple of kind of like summertime beers. One of them is a Mexican lager. One of them is a Hefeweizen. And those are both like we try to get those out right around the beginning of May when we open our beer garden. And so those are... usually used on the extra taps outside. But generally speaking, we make those once a year, and this is the time to get it. If you want it, you've got to come now because we ran out of that Mexican lager. It lasted like two and a half weeks. It was gone, and it was a seven-barrel batch. I couldn't believe how fast it flew. We just released. We do this every summer on Father's Day, Founding Fathers, which is a double IPA. It's a 10% Imperial IPA. IPA that I brewed for my dad back in the day. And so that one comes on. And then we've got a couple other seasonal. I've got a peanut butter beer that comes on every year in October, a peanut butter porter. We've got a lager called the Buckstops here that we put out right before hunting season. 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. And it's going to be just a riot. We did this last year. I'd always kind of had this vision before we started that we would do, you know, U.S. presidents, but also TV and movie presidents as well. And so this was the first foray into it a year ago. And we're doing it again this year. And I'm really excited.

Speaker 01: 48:33

That's awesome. I love that. It's a real balance of, you know, you got something for everyone in terms of, you know, styles and whatnot. And a lot of creativity, it sounds like that drives it. And what I love about that, too, is it's like very going back to the thing that's memorable. You know, people are going to really remember that. So it gets a nice, thoughtful approach to curating the portfolio and keeping it fresh for folks.

Speaker 00: 48:56

Well, yeah, and those rotational beers, those seasonal ones, they're all spread out through the year. 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. And it also creates cool events for us throughout the year, too. It gives us room to do something extra weird in November for buck stops here, where November is traditionally one of our uglier months. It's a really fun day to have in the middle of november

Speaker 01: 49:27

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

Speaker 00: 49:52

yeah

Speaker 01: 49:52

So let's do our wrap-up question here. It's the advice time. It's advice time, Jake. 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?

Speaker 00: 50:07

Oh, boy. Man. Well, I'll... Do this in two parts. 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. 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. And if you can survive that amount of time long enough, then you get to make some money for you too. So you may be in that phase right now where you're just making money for other people. I want to tell you that, first of all, I was there too. I did that too. And I think that every brewery owner that's found any modicum of success would tell you the same thing. We all got to do that. 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. But there is a light on the other side. 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. If you're trying to do everything yourself, you are never going to get there. So I published a book last year. It's called Shifting Gears. And in this book, I kind of outline these different speeds that you might be operating at when you're running your business. And so the neutral is kind of having the idea. First gear is more about committing to the idea and actually having a financial investment in it at a certain point. And second gear is really just the gear around opening day. The few weeks that kind of go on either side of opening day. 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. You have so much work ahead of you past getting open. And one of the things that I've kind of seen is I feel like breweries often get trapped in second gear. And if you know anything about driving a vehicle, second gear can go 40 miles an hour at 6,000 RPMs. And so the engine's burning and burning and burning. And this is like you in your business working 65, 75 hours a week, just trying to keep the lights on. This is exactly the way that this works out in a car. It's how it goes for so many entrepreneurs. We get stuck in second gear. The key to getting out of second gear is developing people and processes. 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. You just can't. The reality is running a million-dollar business is not possible on your own. You're just not going to pull it off in this industry anyways. 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. 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. But there is a way to get past it, and it starts with you jotting down. You have to have learned what your processes are, first of all. That's kind of part of what your job should be right now, is identifying the way that you need things to get done. Then turn them into processes and hire people to run those processes. That's what you've got to do. 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. Thank you.

Speaker 01: 53:43

Hmm. That's great. I love that. 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. And I'll also say, check the book out shifting gears on Amazon, right? I imagine you can grab it there and places and, and we'll link to that, but that's, that's so good. You know, it's like, cause we're always looking for these reference reference manuals too. And, you know, you've, you've written it. I mean, you've lived it. So definitely encourage people to check that out. And, Yeah, there's

Speaker 00: 54:12

a lot of cool stuff in there. I think that it could help anybody that's in that place right now where you feel stuck in second gear. There's definitely some things in there that can help you escape.

Speaker 01: 54:22

Awesome. Well, Jake, as we wind to a close, tell people where they can find you. I mean, where are you guys and what do you have coming up here? This podcast will get out here somewhere in late June, early July. What's coming up that's exciting for people to come see you guys at Presidential?

Speaker 00: 54:38

Yeah, so we're in Portage, Michigan, which is southwest Michigan. If you're in and around this area, we'd love to see you. 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. 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. So if you like a good party, we definitely have those. For other things, I know that we've got an event on the 3rd of July. Like I mentioned, we're watching Independence Day in the beer garden. I'm super excited about that. It's going to be a ton of fun. 4th of July, we've got a DJ dance party during the day. 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. 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. And we which one has the most votes is the one that we make again. The other two, we never make again. So primary election that starts July 4th and it'll continue on the next 10 days. 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.

Speaker 01: 55:53

Awesome. Jake, this has been so great. So much great information. I always really appreciate talking to you. 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. So thank you so much for your time and sharing your knowledge with us.

Speaker 00: 56:10

Absolutely. Thanks for having me on. It's always a pleasure.

Speaker 01: 56:14

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. For more resources, tools, guides, and online courses, visit craftbreweryfinancialtraining.com. And don't forget to sign up for the world-famous Craft Brewery financial training newsletter. Until next time, get out there and improve financial results in your brewery today.