Brewdog Founder: The Untold Story Of One Britain’s Fastest Growing Companies: James Watt

James Watt is the CEO and founder of Brewdog, the Scottish craft beer sensation that is now valued at $2 billion. A former sea captain, he’s had to navigate increasingly choppy waters at Brewdog. But after a string of allegations rocked the company, ranging from personal impropriety to financial misconduct to marketing scams, James has had to start from scratch in Brewdog’s reputation, and on his own management style. For the first time, James walks us through his mistakes, what he denies, and what he defends. Where does the line blur between a hard-driving start-up and a toxic culture. It’s a tricky balance many challenger companies have to contend with. James’ is a story where he sailed a little close to the wind, when the revelations dropped it looked like everything he built could slip away. Can he navigate Brewdog back to dry land? He tells us exclusively how he plans to. Follow James: Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/brewdogjames Twitter - https://twitter.com/BrewDogJames Follow me: https://beacons.ai/diaryofaceo Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Steven Bartlett?

  You've had a lot of controversy over the last two years. Bullying, lying, unfair dismissals, all of this stuff. What did you say to that?

• 0:06Speaker 01

  I did, I did push people too far.

• 0:10Steven Bartlett?

  How fast did Brudal grow?

• 0:11Speaker 01

  We have grown on average 87% a year.

• 0:14Steven Bartlett?

  Fucking hell.

• 0:15Speaker 01

  Everyone told us, make your beer cheaper, change your name, change your packaging. And we didn't listen to any of that. How can we get our name out there with no money at all? So we had to do things that were intentionally provocative. And sometimes we can cross that edge as well. The best entrepreneurs have got to find a way to do things differently to how other people are doing things. We've got two very simple tests that we apply to everything that we do. So the first test is.

• 0:40Speaker 02

  This is the worst public health crisis for a generation.

• 0:45Speaker 01

  I've only ever been in tears once in my job. And I wrote down in tears addressing our team in March of 2020. Thinking that we're not going to be able to pay you. We're not going to be able to keep you in a job. I think people don't realise like being a CEO is a very, very lonely job at times.

• 1:06Steven Bartlett?

  That day. Talk me through what it's like to be a CEO when 300 people sign a letter making these allegations about toxic workplace culture, unfair dismissals, all of this stuff.

• 1:20Speaker 01

  So without further ado, I'm Steven Bartlett and this is the Diary of a CEO. I hope nobody's listening, but if you are, then please keep this to yourself.

• 1:36Steven Bartlett?

  James, what is the, you've listened to this podcast before. So you know, I have a theme of where I start. I'm like trying to frame it as a surprise that I'm going to start with your childhood. But first, thank you for being here. It's, you know, it's always lovely to hear that people are guests that we have and also kind of understand the format. Where I wanted to start with you is to take you right back because that for me is always the context of somebody. So when you, when you look back and when I read back at your early years in that small fishing community you grew up in. Was it Gardenstone?

• 2:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, Gardenstone up in the North East of Scotland.

• 2:09Steven Bartlett?

  When you, when you look back yourself at the foundational shaping pivotal events of like those early years that are.

• 2:18Steven Bartlett?

  Responsible for who you became in your life, the first events that you look back and go, that's the first dot I can connect. What are those?

• 2:26Speaker 01

  I think there's a, I think there's a few. So grew up in a tiny fishing village northeast of Scotland. My dad was a fisherman. My mum was a schoolteacher and being a fisherman is tough. And I just remember like the kind of hard work ethic instilled from like grandparents, who was grandfather, who was also a fisherman, my dad, who was a fisherman. So kind of really hard work and really honest, kind of salt of the earth type character. But then he was always away and I'd be at home with my mum and my relationship with my mum was was never that good. And I think I struggled a lot when I was, when I was a kid. I had quite a severe speech impediment when I was, when I was grown up. And this is something I haven't spoken about before. So, so that kind of always made me a little bit of an outsider, a little bit of a loner, always felt a bit socially awkward.

• 3:11Speaker 01

  As I grew up and became a bit older, I had quite severe acne. So again, outsider, loner, socially awkward. And I think it's a trait that a lot of entrepreneurs have in common. They're a bit socially awkward. And I think if you're less likely to read social cues, then you're less likely to do the same thing as everyone else, which in business is amazing. And also a bit of an inadequacy complex when I was a kid as well. So kind of mum's standards are quite high. So whatever I did wasn't good enough. 98% in a test, why wasn't 100? When a swimming competition, why did I win it with an even better times? Like any achievement wasn't quite good enough. So growing up, bit of a loner, bit of an outsider, bit of a kind of inadequacy complex as well, which I think from a business perspective,

• 3:53Speaker 01

  those things combined are good, but made it kind of quite tough for me at certain stages of my childhood.

• 3:58Steven Bartlett?

  On that point of, I can relate a lot, a lot to a lot of that. Especially the, the thought of feeling a bit like an outsider or feeling somewhat different. Were you bullied in school?

• 4:08Speaker 01

  A little bit. I mean, the speech impediment was something that all the kids love to make make fun of. And then the kind of acne that I had that was quite severe in high school was something a lot of kids made fun of as well, which just kind of makes you feel even more like an outsider when you're growing up, I guess.

• 4:19Steven Bartlett?

  Speech impediment?

• 4:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, when I was like four, five, six, seven, eight, there was like certain words and certain letters that I just couldn't say. And I kind of worked really hard with a speech therapist and got there. But for a few years, it was a lot of words I couldn't say. And because of that, I just wouldn't speak to people because I was scared to let them see that I had a speech impediment. So very quiet, very insular, like spending time by myself. And that kind of shaped a lot of my early childhood, I would say.

• 4:43Steven Bartlett?

  When you said that you you think entrepreneurs have that trait in common where they somewhat feel like outsiders, why do you think that's a common trait in entrepreneurs?

• 4:51Speaker 01

  For me, the best entrepreneurs, they've got to see things differently. And they've got to find a way to do things differently to how other people are doing things. So if you go and do the same as everyone else, you're just going to get the same outcome as everyone else. And if you start off a business that way, you're just going to get lost in the mix. And I think 90% of small businesses fail within the first two years. So I think outsized returns or doing something amazing with a business only comes when you bet in some way against the conventional wisdom. And if you're not tied to the conventional wisdom or tied to social cues, I think you're more likely to see that. There's a quote that I love, which is if 99% of people think you are wrong, you're either massively mistaken or about to make history. So it's just that maybe not caring too much what people think and finding your own way to do things and finding your own way to

• 5:35Speaker 01

  come at a business, an opportunity or a problem. And I think if you're a bit of an outsider, it maybe helps with that.

• 5:41Steven Bartlett?

  You mentioned your mum as well.

• 5:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, my relationship with my mum was was always quite tough. So nothing, nothing was ever good enough for for mum when I was a kid and had a few issues later. And I haven't spoke to my mum for over 20 years now.

• 5:56Steven Bartlett?

  Really?

• 5:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:59Steven Bartlett?

  Since you were in your teens.

• 6:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, nineteen, twenty was when I stopped speaking to mum.

• 6:05Steven Bartlett?

  Did you ever, because sometimes when I think about, you know, my own parents, I, with, with age, I've built a bit of, I guess, empathy towards why they are the way they are. You know, and you kind of, when you grow a little bit older, you understand the world a bit better and psychology, but you go, well, maybe that's why they were the way they are. Have you thought about that with your mother?

• 6:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, I definitely have thought about it and it's something I continue to think about. And there was just a lot of kind of challenging things when I was a kid and then when I was in my teens, that I think it made it difficult for us to have a relationship. And for me, it's, it's easier just not to, not to have contact with her, which, which is tough. But I've got a fantastic relationship with my dad and my rest of the family. It's been that way for a long time now.

• 6:45Steven Bartlett?

  Did that have an impact on you? That, that sort of really tough feedback that you could, you were never enough or that your work was never enough?

• 6:53Speaker 01

  Possibly, but I think it just, I think it gives you a bit of a inadequacy, inferiority complex, which I think has kind of been with me for, for a long time. And there's ways to, to numb it. So can numb it, can numb that voice in my head that's like, never been good enough, not good enough. Can numb it with a business achievement, with like doing a thing, with a book launch that goes well. So you get that almost temporary escape from that feeling by doing something that can be measured objectively, like succeeding in business.

• 7:26Steven Bartlett?

  Use the word temporary though.

• 7:29Speaker 01

  Because it's, because it's, it's always there. It's, it's always there. And I think a chip in your shoulder in terms of like motivation is, is quite a powerful thing to have. But it's that kind of saying, it's like everywhere you go, there you are. It's kind of always, always there at a certain extent.

• 7:45Steven Bartlett?

  Your dad, he, he, he sounds like he was a very hardworking individual.

• 7:50Speaker 01

  He, he was indeed, I mean, still to this day, he's in his late six days. He's a lobster fisherman, which is a kind of tough and tense.

• 7:57Steven Bartlett?

  I've seen.

• 7:58Speaker 01

  Narly job, every single day, regardless of the weather in the North Atlantic. He's like pretty much out in his lobster fishing boat. So yeah, very focused on work and that work ethic, that determination.

• 8:12Speaker 01

  I think a bit of kind of resilience as well. So I spent actually six years with my dad on the North Atlantic before I set up the business. So I studied law and economics at university. I got a job in a legal office. I quit after two weeks. So I sat there in a cheap suit doing glorified admin and I was like, this is just not how I want to spend my life. I don't want to stay in this office. And I saw myself like being maybe 40, 50 years in the future, kind of retired and sitting in that same office and all in a suit and stuff. I was like, this is just not for me. So I spent four years studying to do a job for two weeks. I quit and did something completely the opposite. So I got a job in the fishing boat. And when I was doing that, I went to nautical college part time. I became a first mate. I became a qualified captain.

• 8:50Speaker 01

  And I kind of cut my teeth in the high seas in the North Atlantic. And I think it taught me so much about resilience, about teamwork, about adversity.

• 9:00Steven Bartlett?

  What did you, what did you, what did you learn then? Sort of practically and actionably, what did you learn from, was it five years roughly you spent on that boat?

• 9:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:06Steven Bartlett?

  So you come out of university, you try it out as a lawyer, working in laws for two weeks.

• 9:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:11Steven Bartlett?

  Then you go and join your dad.

• 9:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:13Steven Bartlett?

  And eventually you work your way up to being captain on that boat.

• 9:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:16Steven Bartlett?

  And you're on a trawler in the North Atlantic.

• 9:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:19Steven Bartlett?

  Which is a stupid thing to do. If you're me and you're as big of a coward as I am, going out on those seas, I've seen the documentaries. Is it like the documentaries?

• 9:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's very much like those documentaries. So some of those were made in my home port up in Scotland. And I know some of the people that were on some of those boats. So I mean, very much like that. The North Atlantic in January and February is a pretty scary place.

• 9:41Steven Bartlett?

  What did you learn from doing that about life and people?

• 9:45Speaker 01

  I think the main lesson that I learned is, and it's one I've applied to the business as well, you only really see what someone's made of when things are difficult. It's only when things are going wrong. It's maybe a force 10 storm. You're trying to get the net back in the boat. It's dangerous. It's gnarly. It's two o'clock in the morning. Everyone's been up for 24 hours. It's at those times that you usually see what someone's made of. And I think that's something you can take to business as well. When everything's going well, it's easy for everyone in your team to look like a superstar. It's only when things are really, really difficult that you see who can you depend on? And I've almost got this test that I use when I'm building my management team. And we've got an amazing management team at the moment, but the test is, would I want to be in the deck of a North Atlantic fishing boat at two in the morning?

• 10:30Speaker 01

  In a storm with everything going wrong with this person by my side? And if the answer is yes. It's usually kind of bodes well for how we work together and how we look to build the business together.

• 10:39Steven Bartlett?

  And in that example of what I want to be on this, on the deck with them at 2am in the morning when everything's going wrong, what are the character traits which would make someone in that situation a good person to be with on that deck?

• 10:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's something called the Stockdale paradox that I think is really important and kind of ties into this. So James Stockdale was an American naval captain who was a prisoner of war camp for six years. And it's actually in the book Good to Rate by Jim Collins, which is a fantastic business book. And he's got a philosophy which is you've got to confront the brutal facts of your current reality without ever losing faith that you're going to prevail in the end. And I think it's just such an important lesson for life and business. You've got to believe that you're going to get there in the end, but that belief can't blind you from tackling the most difficult things about your current reality head on with resolve, with optimism. But you've got to kind of hold that paradox in your hand. We're going to get there. We're going to achieve this

• 11:35Speaker 01

  thing, but we've got these huge challenges at the moment. Let's lean into those challenges. And I often start my business meetings with my senior team in the very same way. Okay, let's put the agenda at the side. Let's everyone write down a piece of paper. What's the three most difficult things you're facing in this business at the moment? And let's discuss those before we discuss anything else.

• 11:55Steven Bartlett?

  And why is that important?

• 11:56Speaker 01

  Because it means you're facing the problems and the challenges. And I think it's so easy for a business, especially a business like ours, we've always got so many exciting projects. So at the moment, we're opening a fantastic location on the Strip in Las Vegas. We're opening 20 plus locations in India. We've got a fantastic location opening in Waterloo Station. So it's so easy to get caught up in the excitement of those things. And everyone wants to speak about the exciting things, but you've got to balance that with, okay, we've got these challenges at the moment. And how we lean into those challenges, how we tackle those challenges is what to a large extent is going to determine our destiny. So we need to make sure that whilst we're focused on the exciting things and what we want to achieve, we're focusing on the really tough things we're facing on a day to day basis as well.

• 12:35Steven Bartlett?

  Interesting. I might steal that.

• 12:38Speaker 01

  Well, I stole it as well.

• 12:41Speaker 01

  Steal the thing that I stole.

• 12:42Steven Bartlett?

  Did I say that out loud? I thought I was thinking it. Yeah, so I, you're right, because there's always kind of an elephant in the room at companies where many individuals in the room will know that there's certain challenges and issues, especially in the leadership team. They'll have the clearest idea of what those are, but sometimes they're quite uncomfortable to talk about, right? They are the things that are least enjoyable to commit brain time and resources to. So I guess that's a very smart way. You spent, so you spent five years on this boat, which was a really, you know, brave thing to do in my, in my estimation. You're captain of the boat.

• 13:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, I spent a bit of time captain of the boat with my dad.

• 13:21Steven Bartlett?

  Captain of the boat. Why, why did you leave that, that role?

• 13:25Speaker 01

  Well, I didn't, I didn't quite leave it. So Martin, who's my best friend from, from high school, we go way back.

• 13:31Steven Bartlett?

  We're.

• 13:31Speaker 01

  Dicky. Yeah, Martin Dicky, we're flatmates at university together. We started making beers at home. So in Martin's mum's garage, we would make beer and we started to get into beer when we tasted an American beer called Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. We tasted it was like, wow, we love this. So we would dedicate our weekends to kind of trying to recreate that in Martin's mum's garage. And in 2007, we'd always wanted to start a business. We decided to turn our hobby into a job. So we, we got a £20,000 bank loan. I had £30,000 of life savings and we decided to set up this business. We set up in a derelict, dystopian industrial unit in Fraserburgh and a godforsaken industrial estate and we had no money. So it was beg, barter, bootleg to kind of set this facility up.

• 14:14Speaker 01

  We had like old dairy tanks, our water tanks were plastic tanks from a local garden centre because we had no money to buy stainless steel tanks. And we set out in this slightly naive, I think you could call it mission, to build one of the world's best beer companies with, with two humans and a dog, no experience, no capital, no business plan. Nothing but just a huge amount of passion for fantastic beer, a huge amount of disillusionment at the status quo of the beer market, which was essentially just big mass market, global mega corporations who turned beer, a thing that we love, in a lowest common denominator comedy, commodity product. And we wanted to make fantastic quality beers and opens, open people's eyes to this.

• 14:57Speaker 01

  Diverse spectrum of flavour, taste, quality that they never knew existed and take them on this beauty journey with us. And that's what we set out to do in 2007. But the first, the first few years were so, so tough.

• 15:07Steven Bartlett?

  What gave you the right to start a beer company?

• 15:09Speaker 01

  Nothing at all.

• 15:10Steven Bartlett?

  You can't make, I can't make beer. How did you go about educating yourself on how to make beer?

• 15:17Speaker 01

  So Martin studies how to make beer and distilling at university. So Martin is there, do the kind of solid technical background and he's always kind of taken more of a lead in the beer side of the business. And I've always kind of been more in the kind of business side, the sales side, the market inside, the expansion side of the business. So yeah, first couple of years, it was me selling beer at local farmers markets, selling beer out of the boot of my beat up Volkswagen Golf, but we couldn't afford to pay ourselves. So I moved back in with my dad, Martin moved back in with his mum. I had to start working in the fishing boat again, part time, just because nobody wanted to buy our beer. Everyone told us, make your beer cheaper, make your beer with less flavour, make your beer with less hops, change your name, change your packaging. And we didn't listen to any of that. I mean, we were determined to, okay, if we're going to

• 15:59Speaker 01

  fail, let's fail doing something that we love. Let's fail doing something that we're insanely passionate about. And let's just keep going and see if we can find a way, find our breakthrough to somehow make that work. And that breakthrough for us came in 2008.

• 16:14Steven Bartlett?

  And you, you described that period as being one of the toughest of your life, that first year.

• 16:20Steven Bartlett?

  Give, give me a detailed flavour of the hardest. Is there a moment in that period where you account maybe your hardest day?

• 16:27Speaker 01

  I think so, yeah. So we did everything, the two of us. So it was just the two of us. So we did the accounts, we did the sales, we made the beer, we packaged the beer, like the whole thing. And we filled bottles by hand. So fill by hand, put on a cap by hand, put on a label by hand. The tanks held about three and a half thousand bottles of beer. So that took us kind of 20 hours to do. So we did that. And then, straight through the night, the next day, I was kind of, okay, let's, let's go and see if I can sell some of this beer. So I had a few cases in the back of my car. Punk IPA, which is our flagship beer today, was that it was the beer that we were trying to sell back then as well. I visited six or seven different local establishments and gave them my best sales pitch. It's handmade, it's local, it's full of flavour.

• 17:07Speaker 01

  Everyone said no. The last person didn't just say no, he tasted it and he just spat it back into the

• 17:15Speaker 01

  And just gave me the bottle back and essentially told me to get out. So I remember just walking to the car and just wondering, okay, what the hell am I going to tell the bank? We've got this loan, we can't pay the loan back, we can't pay their rent in the building. I've been up for almost 30 hours. This is going nowhere. Like, what can we do to try and get this business to survive? And for me, that was a, that was a very tough moment.

• 17:36Steven Bartlett?

  Why didn't you quit? Would have been easier. Could have just gone back to the boat, could have been captain, back out on the sea, lobsters, all that.

• 17:44Speaker 01

  There was no way we were going to quit.

• 17:45Steven Bartlett?

  Why?

• 17:45Speaker 01

  We were, we were going to die in a ditch for this thing. It's, we're just so passionate about it and

• 17:52Speaker 01

  back to that inadequacy complex, this voice in your head, you're not good enough, you can't do it. If I quit, that voice wins. Couldn't let that voice win. So we kept on going, we kept on going. And I think any business story, there's a moment where you get a bit of luck, where you get a bit of good fortune. So for us, that came in 2008. We sent some beers into a Tesco beer competition. So this was at a time that we were selling, let's say, 10 cases a week at most. Sent the beer to the Tesco beer competition, kind of forgot about it and got back to local farmers markets and all those things. A few weeks later, got a phone call from Tesco saying it would finish first, second, third and fourth in this Tesco beer competition. So I was like, okay. So I went down to

• 18:34Steven Bartlett?

  Wait, is that the same beer that the guy spat out?

• 18:36Speaker 01

  Same beer the guy spat out.

• 18:37Steven Bartlett?

  Really?

• 18:38Speaker 01

  Came first. Came first.

• 18:41Steven Bartlett?

  The same beer?

• 18:41Speaker 01

  The same beer.

• 18:42Steven Bartlett?

  Same temperature?

• 18:43Speaker 01

  I think so.

• 18:45Steven Bartlett?

  That's interesting.

• 18:47Speaker 01

  So I went down to, went down to Cheshunt, which is where the Tesco headquarters were at the time and met the Tesco team. And I sat there with my best poker face on as they told me, James, your beers are fantastic. We want to put these four beers into 500 stores nationwide and we can sell 2,000 cases a week. So I signed a contract to do that without telling them anything at all about the fact this was two guys and one dog filling bottles by hand. And there was no way we could, there was no way we could meet that order. So we'd four months to figure out a way to do this. So got back, sat down with Martin and was like, okay, we've got this opportunity, but we need a plan. And we decided, okay, we need a bottling machine. That's going to cost us a hundred thousand pounds. We need tanks. That's going to cost us fifty thousand pounds. So went to the bank, which was Bank of Scotland,

• 19:28Speaker 01

  who we banked with at that time. And this was 2008. So this is when global economy is going into this huge tailspin. And we sat down and like, okay, let's, let's pitch this as hard as we possibly can. This is our chance. So we told them about the contract with Tesco, young up and coming company, but we need a hundred thousand pounds for a bottling machine, fifty thousand pounds for tanks. And they just laughed us out of the bank. There was like, James, Martin, you're not paying your loan back. It's a tough time for banking. There's like no way we can give you this money here. So undeterred, what we did, we went to the bank that was across the streets. We got an appointment there with HSBC and we said to the guys at HSBC, our bank, Bank of Scotland, have just offered us an amazing finance deal and this bottling line and this fermentation tanks.

• 20:10Speaker 01

  We've got this contract with Tesco, but if you match this deal, we're going to shift all of our banking to you. We're going places as a company. We'd love for you to support us. And they, they gave us the money. So business plan year one and two was make hoppy American beers and tell lies to banks.

• 20:24Steven Bartlett?

  Are they still, are they still your bank?

• 20:25Speaker 01

  They are still our bank to this very day.

• 20:29Speaker 01

  I waited, I waited 10 years until I told them, until I told them the truth. I thought there was like a safe amount of time. They're not going to take the money back. We got, we got the bottling machine in, we got the tanks in. The first beers came off the bottling line two weeks before they were due to go into Tesco. And we got the beers into Tesco. They sold okay. Year one, year two, they sold a bit better. And we were able to kind of start building our business from there. That gave us a foothold. And at the end of 2009, I was able to quit being a part-time fisherman and just focus a hundred percent.

• 20:55Steven Bartlett?

  By 2009?

• 20:55Speaker 01

  End of 2009.

• 20:56Steven Bartlett?

  Two years.

• 20:57Speaker 01

  Two and a half years.

• 20:58Steven Bartlett?

  Wow. And so that, that, that first year where they're selling okay, and then the second year where they're selling much better.

• 21:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:04Steven Bartlett?

  What was the causal factor of that sales increase that started to get the thing, get things moving? Was it word of mouth? Was it marketing? Was it?

• 21:11Speaker 01

  It was, it was community. So the, one of the most important things in the history of our business has been community. So it got to, it got to 2009. And we'd exhausted the money we could get from banks regardless of what we said, but we are a capital intensive business. So we need money for stainless steel tanks to expand. And we were expanding quite quickly at that stage. And it was, how can we get money to expand our business? And we spoke to some potential investors, but it just didn't feel like they were right fit for us as a business. So in 2009, we came up with this concept that we called Equity for Punks. Yes. So this was crowdfunding before crowdfunding was even a thing. And we thought, okay, if we can sell some of our business to the people who enjoy the beers that we make, we can hopefully create this whole new business model. We spoke to five legal companies up in Scotland and they all told us what they're trying to do is essentially impossible.

• 21:56Speaker 01

  You can't, you can't do this.

• 21:59Speaker 01

  Spoke to a sixth company that says, okay, we can maybe do it, but it's going to cost a hundred and fifty thousand pounds. There's a lot of risks. Nobody's done this before. We decided to do it. It cost us a hundred and fifty thousand pounds at a time that we'd fifty thousand pounds in our bank account. So we gambled the entire future of our business on making this completely unshy, untested business model that we just came up with called Equity for Punks a success. I was so nervous. Like the day that we launched Equity Punks, it's the most nervous I've been on this business journey because I knew if it doesn't work, game over for us, the business. So many people told us it was a bad idea. So many people told us, people are not getting to buy shares in a company on the internet. People that don't want to invest in a beer company. People just want to buy beer. This is a silly idea. There's too much paperwork.

• 22:44Speaker 01

  People's not getting to send in checks, which they had to do back then as well as, as opposed to we'd someone line payments, but those were cumbersome. So most people paid by cheque. But we wanted to do something different. And with Equity Punks, what we've been able to do is shorten the distance between ourselves and the people who enjoy the beer that we make. So we don't just have investors. We've got community. We've got advocates. We've got ambassadors. We've got people who believe what we believe, who want us to succeed and who are on this journey with us. The first Equity Punks was enough of a success to keep us in the game. We raised five hundred thousand pounds from about six hundred thousand, six hundred investors. But since then, we've gone on to build a community of two hundred and ten thousand people. And we've raised almost a hundred million pounds through Equity Punks. And for me, it is.

• 23:26Speaker 01

  The most special thing about our business, so the largest shareholder in our business is Equity Punks and our team, which I think is really cool. So we are community owned, we're people owned and having that community with us, who then, when they walk into one of our bars, they feel like they're walking into one of their their own bars. When they buy our beer off the shelf, they feel it's their own beer because they are part owner of that company. So completely new business model for a consumer brand in the 21st century, one that takes our consumers with us. And that community element is amazing. They're our biggest fans, they're our harshest critics. We get fantastic feedback from them. They help us find new locations, they help us develop new beers. And Equity Punks has been key to what we've done.

• 24:04Steven Bartlett?

  As we sit here in 2020, one of the biggest words in marketing is community now.

• 24:07Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 24:08Steven Bartlett?

  And you've kind of detailed that, I was going to ask you, but you've detailed very clearly the value of community. And the Equity Punks thing, when I, when I, when I read that, I think, okay, it's one way to raise money, but there's other ways to raise money. But it's really more about getting greater buy-in from your existing customer base and turning them into advocates and to diehards, which is, increases loyalty, it gets them to evangelize. As you say, when they buy beer, they're, they're basically, it's almost like there, there's a discount on that beer. I know there is actually a discount as well, but there's actually a discount on it because they're enriching themselves. So it's a really interesting, innovative model. Is that similar to what like crowdfunding, equity crowdfunding is today? Was this before this?

• 24:45Speaker 01

  Very similar. So this was before, but it's very similar to what that is today. And I think you've articulated what the model is perfectly. And for each of our beers that they drink, because when the company, they get a tiny little bit better off financially, which is an amazing incentive to have a second can of Hazy Jane or Elvis use or Punk IP in a Tuesday, in a Tuesday evening. And it's never just been about the money because we could have raised money in other ways, but it's about building a different type of business and a business that's focused on community. And we do so much with our community and we have our big AGM in Aberdeen, our annual meeting. Last time we had 15,000 Equity Punks come for our annual meeting. So I think it's like the most attended AGM in the, in the UK. Yeah. So we do the business things, but we've got fantastic live music, we've got amazing beers. And it's just the day where kind of everything that we love and believe in just comes together in one day and it's always fantastic.

• 25:29Steven Bartlett?

  On money raising, did you, you, the BBC released a podcast, you might have seen yesterday, like a podcast and the, you know, I know you've had a contentious relationship with them. One of the things that they they leveled at you, which I wanted you to respond on was in those hard times, they said your dad is wealthy.

• 25:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:45Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah. So they said there was a suggestion that your dad might have been loaning you money.

• 25:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. So my dad is wealthy, if not excessively wealthy and not nearly as wealthy as BBC said. And the only support my dad ever gave the business was there was a period where one of the banks wanted to withdraw a loan. And he secured that loan for us for six months until we got moved over to HSBC. So we were kind of very determined to do the whole thing ourselves. So the only support was ever the short term security on a loan until we moved it.

• 26:13Steven Bartlett?

  And then like going to your your marketing thesis, because this is really what's defined.

• 26:19Steven Bartlett?

  BrewDog in the eye of the consumer, in the eye of someone like me that doesn't honestly drink beer, but knows about the brand and considers it to be a famous brand and watched it on LinkedIn and social media over the years, build its sort of acclaim. What is your like your principles that underline your marketing thesis? Because your marketing thesis is very, very different to to pretty much nearly all brands in this country. There's maybe a 0.1% that maybe have copied or that have been inspired or that, you know, chicken and egg, I don't know who came first. But it's a very unique thesis towards marketing. What underpins it?

• 26:48Speaker 01

  We've got two very simple tests that we apply to everything that we do from a marketing perspective. So the first test is would or could another business do this thing? And if the answer is yes, we've got to seriously consider why we're doing it. The second test is if I spend a pound on this, is it going to give me a 10x return compared to how a competitor would spend that pound? So we are in an industry dominated by global behemoths of businesses who are hundreds of times our size. And we are, we're closing that gap and we want to close that gap. But we only close that gap by making our market and our communications, everything we do work so much more effectively than theirs. If our market is only as effective as theirs, we don't close that gap and we lose. So the two tests are could or would another company do this?

• 27:33Speaker 01

  And is it going to give me a 10x return versus how my competitor would spend that money?

• 27:37Steven Bartlett?

  And if I'm thinking about how to get a drive a better return on marketing, you know, and then I think about what you've done, I see, well, we've got to be probably bolder to win share of voice. We've got to try and win headlines in more extreme ways because nobody's going to be writing about you for for the fun of it. If you're a smaller sort of challenger challenger brand. And the second thing I think is kind of we've got a. Do that on new platforms. We can't fight out on TV or in newspapers because those are the way you kind of throw huge amounts of money and you get a return. So new platforms and new approaches. And that's very much kind of signifies what I've seen from BrewDog. Very, very bold.

• 28:13Speaker 01

  Very bold and intentionally bold and especially bold in our early years when we had no budget whatsoever. So the challenge was how can we get our name out there with no money at all. So we had to do things that were intentionally provocative, that were on the edge. And sometimes we can cross that edge as well. But that enabled us to get our name, our message, our business out there with no budget at all. So we have driven a tank through the streets of London. We've thrown taxidermy cats out of a helicopter over the Bank of England. We've put Vladimir Putin in the front of a beer label. So we've done a lot of things, low budget, high impact. But we've tried to make it that everything we do ties back and is underpinned by what we're passionate about. So there has to be a connection there. So does this reinforce what we believe in, what we're trying to

• 28:57Speaker 01

  do as a company? Because otherwise it's just hollow and it's fake and it's false. So how does this reinforce the core beliefs that drive this business, which is try to build a return of business and a huge passion for fantastic beer?

• 29:08Steven Bartlett?

  One of the more extreme things, I saw the Vladimir thing. What else have I seen? I think, to be fair, I think I've seen it all because I'm obviously a marketer and running a marketing company and seeking inspiration from lots of different brands and seeing what they're doing and the impact it's having, especially on social media, which is my battleground. The thing I read about more recently was that you put in a complaint about your own beer, which triggered press?

• 29:31Speaker 01

  We did. So this was all the way back in 2008 and we had a few running battles with a few bigger players. One of them was the Portman Group. So the Portman Group was an industry, still is an industry regulator. And for me, it is a thinly veiled cartel funded by the big drinks businesses who've got a vested interest in making sure that small businesses are not successful. And there was a few rulings at the pack that were just so, so. Silly and frivolous that we wanted to make a statement. So we complained about one of our own beers to make a meta statement about how silly the process is and how essentially corrupt it was as an organisation funded by the big beer companies, big drinks businesses, who've got vested interests in making sure the small ones are not successful.

• 30:14Steven Bartlett?

  How does that work? So you make a beer that is really high in AVB. Was that the correct term?

• 30:18Speaker 01

  It was, yes. We made a beer called Tokyo 18%. Now, if you looked at the newspaper headlines in the UK when we launched that beer, you would have thought that I was single-handedly responsible for the downfall of Western civilisation by making an 18% beer. We had it in the sun, binge drinking, blame this man with like a cut out of my head and a bottle of Tokyo. That took a bit of explaining to my very religious grandmother, but that's another story. But everything we did with that beer was, we just made a thousand bottles. It was very expensive. It was for connoisseurs. It was for aficionados. And we want to elevate the status of beer. And I think the more someone can understand and appreciate something, the less likely they are to abuse it. And we make expensive products for people who

• 31:00Speaker 01

  love fantastic beer. So it was to make a statement of, you've got all these big companies doing very cheap alcohol that's likely to be abused, trying to ban products of this company that's looking to elevate the status, increase education awareness around beer, and lead people to appreciate and enjoy beer in a more elevated way.

• 31:19Steven Bartlett?

  And when you see yourself in the sun with a cardboard cut out of your face, is that kind of swings and roundabouts? Is that good from a marketing perspective? Is that a good outcome? Because you were trying to get headlines. You complained about your own beer. You were trying to get headlines. So is that job done?

• 31:36Speaker 01

  I think in that one, to a certain extent, it was job done. And to kind of show you how odd things were back then. So this was kind of 2009, 2010, when we were starting to get momentum and the beer scene was starting to change. So the big companies had it their own way for way too long and things were starting to change. There was an award ceremony in Scotland in 2010, put together by the BII, the British Innkeepers Institute. And we'd got a heads up before the award ceremony, "Hey guys, you're going to win the award for Scottish Bar Operator of the Year, so you guys better come to the award ceremony." So we went there, we booked a table. They were just about to announce. I was like halfway up to the stage to get the award and they announced a different company. I was like, "Okay."

• 32:18Speaker 01

  But then the other company didn't want to take the award because our name was engraved in the trophy. It's like, well, we don't want it. So the next day I spoke to the person that organised the award ceremony. It's like, what, what happened? Like, you told us we were going to win. And he was like, well, Diageo, one of the world's biggest drinks companies, they were the main sponsor. They told me five minutes before we were due to give it to you. If they gave it to you guys, they was going to pull all future sponsorship.

• 32:42Steven Bartlett?

  You're joking.

• 32:43Speaker 01

  So we felt we didn't have an option. So we put this online. It blew up. It was trending on Twitter globally that day. Diageo issued us a formal apology about the whole thing. That apology was kind of broadcast news, but it just showed back then how the dynamic in the beer industry was changing and how the big beer companies and big drinks companies were acting towards that change, of which the portmoneau was one manifestation of it.

• 33:06Steven Bartlett?

  Did you take that personally?

• 33:09Speaker 01

  I took that as a sign that we're doing the right thing. So I think unless other businesses are copying you or trying to knock you, then you're not doing well enough. So unless you're doing something that's worthy of people copying it, and like a lot of people moan, oh, I'm being copied. It's like, unless you're being copied, you need to up your game and you need to do better. Unless your competitors are trying to knock you down, you're not enough enough of a threat to your competition. So I took that as a sign that we're on the right track. We're doing the right thing. Let's keep going.

• 33:36Steven Bartlett?

  The other extreme marketing thing that I saw, which was, when I first read it, I thought this is fucking hilarious, is the Elvis estate tried to copyright infringe you for calling your your US beer, which I think is your most popular US beer.

• 33:50Speaker 01

  It is Elvis juice.

• 33:50Steven Bartlett?

  Elvis juice. They sent you a copyright statement, just sort of like a basically a notice that you're violating the copyright?

• 33:57Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 33:58Steven Bartlett?

  And you responded with some Elvis rhyme?

• 34:02Speaker 01

  We did.

• 34:03Steven Bartlett?

  And, and on the, on the art, on the LinkedIn post that I saw, it said you changed your name to Elvis.

• 34:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:08Steven Bartlett?

  Then the BBC come out and say that didn't happen.

• 34:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:11Steven Bartlett?

  What is the truth in this one? What, did you change your name to Elvis?

• 34:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, we did. And just to go kind of back in the story. So Elvis sent, not Elvis himself, Elvis's estate sent us a letter saying we couldn't use the name Elvis in a beer. And if we did, we had to pay them a license fee for every can, case and bottle of beer that we sold. So what myself and Martin did, we changed our names to Elvis and we sent them a letter back saying that they couldn't use our name on their music and they had to pay us a license fee for every time they played one of, one of Elvis's songs. Got a huge amount of publicity at the time. We were both Elvis for a few weeks. And then we changed our names back. So the BBC. Attacked us on that, as they have on many things. However, the BBC misunderstood the Scottish procedure for changing the name. So they said, we didn't change your name by deed poll. That's not a Scottish thing.

• 34:58Speaker 01

  In Scotland, you need an official declaration to change your name, which we did.

• 35:01Steven Bartlett?

  So what's that, just signing a piece of paper?

• 35:02Speaker 01

  You sign an official declaration piece of paper and that counts as a name change in Scotland.

• 35:06Steven Bartlett?

  And you don't even have to send it to anybody?

• 35:07Speaker 01

  Don't have to send it to anyone in Scotland. So we met the Scottish requirements, which is what we said we did. But yeah, my grandmother was very unhappy and she insisted I change my name back to, back to James.

• 35:17Steven Bartlett?

  BrewDog's marketing has been so bold and it's been so standout. And in terms of how hard you've, in terms of the return on every dollar you've spent, it seems to have been a pretty astounding return per dollar spent because you've done these like big viral activations. A lot of them are like parodies or they're like taking the piss of big corporations. They're sticking it to the man in various ways or going at the, you know, the incumbents in the industry. Some of them though, that they, the, even the example you gave there of they're complaining about your own beer.

• 35:47Speaker 01

  With the Portman Group.

• 35:48Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah. Obviously the complaint wasn't real.

• 35:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:51Steven Bartlett?

  Cause it was you.

• 35:52Speaker 01

  Cause it was me.

• 35:52Steven Bartlett?

  What is the line between, between like truth in, when you're doing these stunts and virality? And untruth for you? And where, where do you play? Are you willing to do something that is from a marketing perspective? That is not necessarily true, like complaining about your own beer? If you believe it will help reach the outcome, which is to stick it to the Portman Group?

• 36:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I think with that one, it wasn't necessarily untrue because afterwards we said, we made this complaint. So it was us who disclosed the fact that we made the complaint.

• 36:23Steven Bartlett?

  So you were true, okay.

• 36:24Speaker 01

  And we disclosed that to just show how ridiculous the system, the system was. So if we hadn't said it was us that complained about it, then I would accept that was being a bit dishonest. But the fact that we came out and we said, hey, the system fundamentally doesn't work. And we wanted to expose that by, by making this complaint was what we intended to do there.

• 36:40Steven Bartlett?

  When we first started talking about marketing, one of the things you said was we made a lot of mistakes.

• 36:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:46Steven Bartlett?

  Took things too far.

• 36:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:47Steven Bartlett?

  What did you take too far? In hindsight now, now that you're a big global brand and everyone is, you know, looking back at all the steps when you weren't so big.

• 36:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. I think the mistakes that we've made in marketing is when we've tried to do something which is on the edge or which is controversial. Which needs explaining. So if you look at the thing in its totality, then it is potentially a positive thing. But if you only see a snapshot of it, then your takeaway from that could be negative. So I think a lot of the mistakes that we made from a market perspective, and we did some amazing things, but we did make some mistakes, was when we got too clever with the concept and the intention behind it, which was genuine, got lost. So a famous example of one of the mistakes that we made in marketing, for International Women's Day, we wanted to highlight the gender pay gap. This was a project that was put together by some of the fantastic

• 37:40Speaker 01

  women we've got in our business. And we made a beer called Pink IPA that we always get to sell 21% cheaper to women to highlight the gender pay gap, which was something that we felt passionate about. And then the proceeds from sale of that beer went to charities, which help women and women's pay in the workplace and these kind of things. But then what happened was people just saw Pink IPA. And it looked like we were, it was, the beer itself was a parody of products which market themselves towards women. But then it just looked like another product that marketed itself to our women. And if anyone dug into it and understood, okay, this is to highlight the gender pay gap, and they're doing some good with the money, and they're doing a new cause, people just saw the Pink IPA, they saw the image, and came to the conclusion that we're just doing the thing that we were going to fight against. And that was a key

• 38:22Speaker 01

  key learning that people just see a snapshot of a thing. So you need to make sure that all of the message that you want to land is in that snapshot, because a lot of people's not going to dig deeper into what it is.

• 38:33Steven Bartlett?

  What I got from that was that, like, you've got to create a marketing campaign where the context is, sort of, can't be separated.

• 38:39Speaker 01

  Can't be separated, exactly.

• 38:40Steven Bartlett?

  Because it will be separated if it can be.

• 38:43Speaker 01

  Exactly, 100%.

• 38:45Steven Bartlett?

  Coming from being the captain of a boat, to being the captain of BrewDog, quite literally, that is your job title.

• 38:50Speaker 01

  That's my job title, yeah.

• 38:53Steven Bartlett?

  What adjustment was needed? Because on a boat, when you're up all night, and there's men there, and you know, you've got a, your screen, was it, was the, give me a snapshot of what the crew are like on a boat, a trawler.

• 39:09Speaker 01

  So, a lot of my best friends to this day are the guys that I worked with on the fishing boats.

• 39:16Speaker 01

  But these are an unusual and interesting set of characters as well. It takes a certain type of person to kind of do that type of, do that type of work and do that type of work on an ongoing basis. And I mean, they're, they're, they're hardworking, like to have, like to have fun, like to mess about a little bit, but all, all about the, kind of all about the hard work. And especially when things get difficult, like seeing a good, through an efficient boat come together and work hard to get them kind of through a tough time together was kind of really inspired me when it came to like business and leadership, kind of later down the line.

• 39:49Steven Bartlett?

  I can see you being a very good captain on a boat. You, and I just generally, you're, you, in a couple of moments, you know, I didn't know you before you'd walked in the door, but in a couple of moments that I've been with you, you're very focused and you're someone that I feel like, and I don't know you, but you feel very resilient. And then you, you add that to the fact that this is your business. And you said before, I think you said it in your book, that no one will ever love the business like you do.

• 40:16Speaker 01

  No.

• 40:17Steven Bartlett?

  You, you being so hardworking, so out of balance in your own life, as you've described, how do you not then have that expectation on others? Cause this is something that I honestly, I struggled with. I struggled with, especially in the early years of my business, was understanding that I was a bit fucked up.

• 40:35Steven Bartlett?

  And that, in fact, everyone else was normal and that I needed to understand. It goes back to me saying about the dark side and the cost of my childhood and the insecurities, I was a bit fucked up. So how did, how do you contend with that?

• 40:47Speaker 01

  For the first 10 years of the business, I would say I contended with that very, very badly. So there's like a lot of intensity, there's a lot of drive, there's a lot of determination, there's a lot of passion there. And understanding how to lead people, how to take people with me on that journey has definitely evolved over time. And I'm now CEO of a business that's got 3,000 people. Before that, I maybe managed a handful of people in a fishing boat, but that is it. So it would go from like no experience in being a CEO, no experience as being a leader, to managing 3,000 people at this speed and adding this, like this year, well, last 18 months cumulatively, we're going to add 1,000 people to the team. So it's like a thousand amazing, well-paying jobs in our recession, which our country, which

• 41:32Speaker 01

  our economy needs. So we're expanding all the time, but just how steep that learning curve is to go from not managing anyone to managing 3,000 people with all the kind of stresses and strains of growing a business. And I think if I look back and reflect a little bit, we've definitely had challenges and well documented challenges along the way. And we've had periods of such intense growth that we maybe haven't focused enough on our people and our culture during that period. And as a leader, I've always just been so focused on building something, on delivering an exceptional value to our customer and making sure every time someone opens one of our beers or visits one of our bars, the experience is amazing and knowing that if someone is choosing to spend their money with us, they're making a choice to do that versus one of our competitors.

• 42:15Speaker 01

  Therefore, we need to set the bar incredibly high and pushing incredibly hard. And as a leader, because of that drive, because of that determination, because of that focus, I've definitely pushed some of the team members too far in the past. And I think that's been, that's been well documented, but that's came from a place of doing this because we want to build something amazing. And it took a bit of time to understand that, okay, they're as amazing as their team are, they don't have the same level of investment in the business as I do. Some of them want to push it that hard, some of them just don't. And for a while, there was just like, I'm going to run through this wall and I want everyone else to run through the wall as well. Not everyone's going to run through that wall. And again, a big lesson, and I've kind of reflected a lot in leadership in the last

• 42:55Speaker 01

  12 months is to take people with you, you've got to make them understand the why behind what you're doing. And my kind of first decade of a leader is like, we're doing this, this is what we're going to do, let's go. And what I've kind of found more recently is like, if people understand, okay, we're doing this, but this is why, this is what it means for you, this is what it means for the business, this is why it's a fantastic thing, this is why it's going to help us achieve objectives where everyone's going to win together. It's much easier to take people with you on that journey, whereas in the first 10 years, I was just like, go.

• 43:27Steven Bartlett?

  That's such an important lesson because you know, the example you gave there, on in one hand, you're like dragging people and all the studies show across all industries that when people don't go voluntarily, it's it's burnout, it's pressure, it's stress, it's, you know, and then when what you said there is leadership is in fact inspiring them to come with you.

• 43:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:46Steven Bartlett?

  And when it's voluntary, in terms of they know why they're going and they want to go, then all the psychological implications across multiple studies that I've read about are significantly improved. You said you've been on a leadership evolution.

• 43:59Speaker 01

  I have.

• 43:59Steven Bartlett?

  So, speaking honestly, what has that evolution been from when you started as a leader and the business starts to explode to the person that sits here in front of me today? What have you had to work on and remove?

• 44:10Speaker 01

  So it absolutely still is a journey and I absolutely believe that I can get better as a leader and I think one of the most important things that I've done in the last 12 months, we appointed an amazing independent non-exec chairman in Alan Layton, who's done some fantastic businesses, so much experience, so having someone there who's like a mentor to me, because like if I hang out with my buddies, they want to speak about football and golf and that kind of stuff, they don't want, hey, I've got this kind of leadership challenge, it's like they don't care, which is, which is amazing, but then being a CEO is a very, very lonely job at times and I can say that's really lonely. And there's another quote that I love from Ben Horowitz, author of one of my favorite business books, and it's like the first rule of CEO psychological meltdown is not to speak about CEO psychological meltdown.

• 44:52Speaker 01

  So I think people don't realize like being a CEO is fantastic, but it's lonely, it's it's intense, it's it's difficult. So having Alan's kind of help and guidance through that journey, I think is really important. And I would say in the early years of the business, I managed it like a captain would manage a small team in a fishing boat. Whereas now I'm looking to evolve my leadership style into a CEO of a kind of medium to large company, which is a bit less intense, which is maybe a bit less demanding, but which is more about taking our people with us on this journey. So here, here's the, we're going to do this and it might be tough, but this is what it means for us as a business, this is why we're doing it, but then also making sure that incentives are very much aligned, making sure that, okay, we want to create a business

• 45:35Speaker 01

  model where we win together as a company, which I think is really powerful and we've always wanted to build our radically different type of business, a business that rejected how things were done and what big business was as usual, and that's been key. And I think if you look at, we're community owned, we're the world's first carbon negative beer business. And the new things that we've launched with our people, it makes us a fundamentally and radically different business. So we've recently launched the blueprint, which is, I think, the biggest, most important announcement in the history of our business. So firstly, I decided to give almost a hundred million pounds of my own equity in the business to the team. So it's over the next four years, but that means each salary team member receives a hundred and twenty thousand pounds worth of equity. And that's in the valuation today.

• 46:16Speaker 01

  So if we double in size, then that could be significantly more. And that's about recognizing like, we are all in this together. We want to win together. We want to work hard to win together. And it's about incentivizing our team to act like business owners, but rewarding them like business owners. The second part of that was, we wanted to create a completely new model for how a hospitality business works. So we've got over a hundred amazing hospitality venues all over the planet. Each of our bars now share 50% of the profits with the team that work there. So it's a whole new model where if you visit one of our bars in Tokyo, in Berlin, in Cleveland, in Australia, you know that, okay, half of the profit that this mart makes is shared with amazing people that put this experience

• 47:01Speaker 01

  together. So we want to kind of elevate the standard of hospitality, elevate the standards of kind of careers within hospitality. We've always been a real living wage employer, which has been very important for us. But sharing 50% of the profits with our team, I think, helps us attract and retain fantastic people. I think it's something that's going to resonate with our customers. And I think it's something that's going to help us elevate the hospitality experience for consumers. And consumers are ultimately the thing which drives our business.

• 47:26Steven Bartlett?

  That's the thing. You know, the first point was like inspiring people to come with you as opposed to dragging them, which again, many CEOs, many leaders fall into the trap of doing that because we are so blinded by our own mission that we forget to communicate and bring other people on. But the second thing you touched on there is, if, you know, we sometimes CEOs sit here, and I've probably been guilty of this, you said you've been guilty of this, is like, looking at, you know, the team that you've built and, and maybe questioning at times why they're not moving with the same energy that you are, but they're not incentivized to. They're not going to be a hundred millionaire, gazillionaire, if this all works out. They are getting their, their remuneration regardless of outcome. So the second piece that I've garnered from that of leadership is also to align incentives.

• 48:10Steven Bartlett?

  And if you want someone to act like an owner, you have to make them an owner. Which it seems like common sense, but it's not so common.

• 48:17Speaker 01

  It's not so common. It took us a while to get there, but that is exactly like we've got reasonably high expectations of our team. We like to push hardware in that industry dominated by companies much bigger than ours. So we need to be on our A game. We need to push things as a business, but we need to recognize the hard work that hundreds and thousands of people put into our business every single day. They're the people that make the beer, that deliver the beer, that make the magic happen for the customer. And I want their incentives to be as aligned as my own. And I want them to feel as much ownership as I do. And I want them to share intrinsically in the success of the business. But hopefully by doing this, we can create a new business model that in a few years' time, I can then sit down with other CEOs and okay, like we've

• 48:59Speaker 01

  invested in our people this way, but we've become a better business because of it. And then do other businesses then decide to do the same thing? Is it maybe normal in five years' time for every hospitality business to share 50% of their profits with the people at work in their site? And if that happens, then we haven't only made the lives better for the people at work in our business, but we've managed to fundamentally change our industry, which would be really cool.

• 49:19Steven Bartlett?

  A lot of successful businesses in the country, I'm thinking of the Ben Francis, I'm thinking of the Huels, hashtag ad, just in case the NSA come for me. A lot of business owners that have gone through extremely high growth, and I've sat here with those CEOs of those companies, they get out of the way.

• 49:33Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 49:34Steven Bartlett?

  They realize, especially in your case, because this was your first shot at business.

• 49:37Speaker 01

  This is my first shot, yeah.

• 49:38Steven Bartlett?

  So you're gonna fuck up, like many, like.

• 49:40Speaker 01

  Many, many, many times.

• 49:42Steven Bartlett?

  I fucked up a lot as well, hugely, over and over again, and still today. But they get out of the way. So Ben Francis stepped down as CEO when there was 30 people, the founder of Huell, Julian stepped out of the CEO role and put someone in. Did that ever cross your mind? And why didn't you do that sooner? If you knew that you didn't, you had, because learning on the job when you got 2,000 people is a high risk.

• 50:03Speaker 01

  It is a high risk thing. So I'm very passionate about being CEO and it's something I want to continue doing for the foreseeable future.

• 50:10Steven Bartlett?

  Why?

• 50:11Speaker 01

  Because I think we are only just starting. So a question that I get asked a lot when I speak to the media is like, how do you feel about what you've done, what you've built, what you've achieved so far? And I wouldn't say the feeling is quite as numb as indifference, but it's, it's close to that.

• 50:29Steven Bartlett?

  Really?

• 50:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. And for me, what is exciting is where can we take this from here? So we want to build one of the world's best beer companies. We want to build one of the world's best companies overall. I look at companies like.

• 50:43Speaker 01

  Whole Foods, or Tesla, or Google, or Amazon, or Starbucks, I mean, that is the scale of the ambition. We want to do what they've done in their industry for beer. So what I'm insanely excited about is, okay, we've given ourselves a platform. We've now got over 3,000 staff. We now make beer in four continents. We've now got over 100 locations. We've got significant sales momentum. Where can we take this from here? And I think what we've done so far gives us an opportunity to do something meaningful, to do something impactful, to do something that enriches the lives of our customers, to do something that helps us save the planet and fly the flag for sustainability, something that helps us look after our team members even better, but helps us have a huge impact. And what I'm very excited about is, okay, what can we do as a team, as a company, as a collective,

• 51:28Speaker 01

  as a community over the next five to 10 years? That's what I'm focused on. That's why I get out of bed in the morning. And that's what I'm really excited to continue doing with a fantastic management team and team that we've got in the business.

• 51:39Steven Bartlett?

  I was startled when you said indifference. You genuinely, the way that you feel about what you've achieved so far is quite close to indifference, kind of just none more, like just meh. Honestly?

• 51:51Speaker 01

  It's close to indifference. So we've done some fantastic things, but overall, we're still relatively small in the overall scheme of things. I'm like, in terms of like, if I spend like, maybe 5% of my time thinking, okay, this is good. 95% of it's, okay, in the next 12 months, we can open our fantastic site in Vegas. We can plant millions of trees in the lost forest in Scotland. We can reduce our carbon emissions. We can launch some fantastic new beers that our customers are going to love. We can open 15 new locations in India. We can continue investing in our people. We can make the profit share thing amazing. We can try and make sure that the equity that our people have in our team is as valuable as possible. We can continue expanding our German business.

• 52:31Steven Bartlett?

  Biggest beer brewery, aren't you?

• 52:32Speaker 01

  16th most valuable beer ever done, yeah.

• 52:34Steven Bartlett?

  So in 2007, if I'd gone, when you were doing, you know, you'd taken that 20K loan from the bank, and I'd gone and seen you and Dicky, and I said, listen, couple of years' time, you're going to be the 16th largest brewery in the world, and you're going to have thousands of staff all around the world, and 111 locations, or whatever it is, you're going to be opening a thing in Vegas. You would have, and I said, how do you think you're going to feel on that day? What would you have said to me?

• 52:58Speaker 01

  Well, I think there's two answers to that question. So one answer is the answer that I would usually give to the media, which is like, if you go back to 2007 and now you've built this, could you have envisaged it? Could you have imagined it? And the answer that you've kind of got to give to the media, because anything else sounds too self assured. No, I could never have imagined it. It's been amazing. But the answer that I don't usually share is, of course I imagined it because if me and Martin didn't imagine it, how can we build it? How can we make it a real thing if it wasn't something we're kind of planning to do or planning to, planning to build? So I think if you went back and asked me that question there, I would have been very excited about the journey and the joy of building something.

• 53:39Steven Bartlett?

  But you, if I said, how would you feel today? So in 2000, I'm speaking to 2007 James and Dicky.

• 53:46Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 53:46Steven Bartlett?

  And I'm saying, by the way, look at this. This is what, where you get to in 2022.

• 53:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:51Steven Bartlett?

  You would, you would, I'm guessing you would assume that on that day in 2022, you would be really content.

• 53:57Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 53:57Steven Bartlett?

  But you're clearly not. You're not content, are you? Because you're saying that, yeah, you're saying you're indifferent.

• 54:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, if you'd asked me that then, I would, yeah, I'm going to like spend half of my time in the office, half of my time travelling and then, and then just chill. Whereas what I'm doing at the moment is the exact opposite of that. And what I'm focused on is, okay, where do we take this thing from here? Can we make a, can we make a real difference? Can we create the world's first top 10 beer business for over a century? And that's an exciting challenge.

• 54:25Steven Bartlett?

  I've come to learn from doing this podcast that we almost need to make goals that can never be completed for that very reason. And so words like better, like we'll, we'll make BrewDog better is a much more useful word than we'll become number one. Because when you become number one, there's nowhere to go from there. And it's an anti climax.

• 54:45Speaker 01

  Well done.

• 54:46Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, exactly. So there's an, there's a real anti climax about reaching these peaks. So it's almost like trying to climb a mountain where there is no peak. And that is, that's ultimately life. And then you die somewhere along the journey. But that kind of goes against the trend of like goal setting and what's your goal? And what's your five year plan? And this kind of underlying assumption that finish lines will make us euphoric. Have you experienced that? That's kind of why I was asking the question about 2007.

• 55:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I mean, I guess the closest thing we've had to a finish line is in 2017, we took a big investment in our company. The company was valued at just over a billion. So one of my things was always like, let's see if you can build a unicorn. So unicorns are startup companies which get to be valued over a billion called unicorns because they're so there, there's so few of them happen in the UK and especially in Scotland. And I always thought, okay, if there was ever something that would make me feel, okay, I've accomplished that thing, I've done that thing, I'm complete, happy, content, it would be okay, build a unicorn like that for me, that was my win an Oscar score, scored a win in goal in a World Cup final, but like for me, that was build a unicorn.

• 55:53Speaker 01

  And then the next day I was just like, okay, let's, let's go, where do we go from here?

• 55:58Steven Bartlett?

  That was your first big sort of cash win for personally, because the money, some money went into the company, some money went to the founders.

• 56:03Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 56:03Steven Bartlett?

  So that was your first big dealing with being a cash millionaire.

• 56:07Speaker 01

  Yes, and a fun, a fun story from that. So the money came into myself and Martin and I had Bethany, so it was like well into the tens of millions, I had Bethany, my amazing assistant, transferred it from the lawyer's account into my bank account. For some reason, we, there was a typo in the, in the account numbers and it went to somewhere in Russia, the money was lost for four days at a point in time, we thought there was, the money wasn't going to come back. So I went from the euphoria of, okay, I've built a unicorn, I've got a huge cheque in my bank account, where the fuck is the money? What am I going to do now? So in the fifth day, the boss of the boss of the boss of the person managed to find

• 56:52Speaker 01

  a way to get the, get the money back and we got the money back. But for the five days after the deal, the money was missing, which is even lost, which is even never coming back.

• 57:00Steven Bartlett?

  Russia, what a place to send it.

• 57:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, the start code sent it to a bank in St Petersburg and they're like, well, the bank might not even want to send it back. I was like, okay.

• 57:09Steven Bartlett?

  Oh my God.

• 57:11Speaker 01

  So now, now double, triple cheque, every start code that I send cash to.

• 57:16Steven Bartlett?

  What was that day, what was that, that like emotionally? That's, that was what you were aiming for in many respects in terms of financial freedom? What was it like?

• 57:25Speaker 01

  And maybe it's a theme of people you have on here, but often when you get to where you think is good, the thing that's good to make you happy. Couple of days. And then your reality is, is, is almost the same. The demons are there, the challenges are there, the opportunity is there. But with people I've spoke to as well, it's never just this euphoric moment where you sail into the sunset and live happily ever after. It's a bit of a, a bit of a celebration, a bit of a kind of quietening of the voices of the head for a few days and then go again.

• 58:02Steven Bartlett?

  When you say the demons, what do you mean?

• 58:05Speaker 01

  That inadequacy complex, like you're not good enough, you're never going to manage to build a business. This business is going to go nowhere, you're going to be a failure, you're going to be back in a fishing boat, you should have listened to everyone who told you not to set up the business, they were right, they told you it was a bad idea.

• 58:20Steven Bartlett?

  Who put that voice in your head?

• 58:26Speaker 01

  I think a combination of early childhood, potentially partly parents, despite being well intentioned. There was a story from my childhood where I've been obsessed with sharks my entire life. So my favorite hobby is to go diving with sharks. It's like, I'm happiest when I'm under the water with sharks. I recently went to Guadalupe Island off the coast of Mexico, dive with some great white sharks. So like being under the water with sharks is, is my happy place. And when I was a kid, I would always tell people, when they asked me what I want to be, I want to be a marine biologist, I want to study sharks. And when I was eight or nine years old, my parents told me to go and get my shark book. I was like, wow, okay, they're finally interested in something that I love. So pajamas on, just before bedtime, went to my bedroom, come through with a shark book. Mother opened up the shark book and went through the four authors in the shark book.

• 59:11Speaker 01

  And it's like, James, look, this person PhD, this person PhD, this person PhD, they've all got PhDs. It's just not something you're going to be able to do. So you need to stop telling people you want to be a marine biologist, you need to stop telling people you're going to study sharks, because you just won't manage to get a PhD. So you need to think of something else. And I just remember not saying anything, taking my shark book and just like walking back to my bedroom and in tears, like, okay, no more, no more sharks, James.

• 59:37Steven Bartlett?

  Have you ever forgiven your mother for the way that she was?

• 59:43Speaker 01

  Don't think so.

• 59:44Steven Bartlett?

  You don't?

• 59:49Speaker 01

  But I think there was a lot of incidents like that, and that's where that voice comes from. And I mean, the voice, the voice is very much part of me. And I think it's helped me push, maybe push too hard at times, it's helped me do some fantastic things. And, but I mean, it's, it's always there. And after that big deal, it was like, okay, you've done that. But now unless you can do this, then that voice starts up again.

• 1:00:10Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, I just, I worry about that a little bit because, um, yeah.

• 1:00:20Steven Bartlett?

  Why don't you think you've forgiven her?

• 1:00:23Speaker 01

  There was a lot of other things that happened subsequently, ended up in a messy court case with my father. And I just didn't want anything to do with it. I was like, this is your thing. Sometimes people don't get on. Fine, just start it out. It's, it's, it's not my thing. And she called me as a witness in the court case, which meant I had to sit there for five days in the court of session in Edinburgh. This was when I was studying law in the court of session, with some of the students I was studying with, watching the case. And I was like, sitting there waiting to be called. And I don't think she'd ever had any intention of calling me. And somehow she just wanted to subject me to the pantomime that was playing out that I didn't want any part of. And I was forced to sit there and watch it, which was, which was tough.

• 1:01:03Steven Bartlett?

  When people talk about forgiveness, they, they always say that it's a process of like, letting a prisoner go and realising you were the prisoner the whole time. Another, another question, I mean, well, I was going to ask, are you, do you think you've healed from it? But you've just said that you still have that voice today.

• 1:01:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, but on some level, maybe I want that voice.

• 1:01:24Steven Bartlett?

  Interesting.

• 1:01:24Speaker 01

  So maybe it's like, well, if you lose that voice, are you going to be able to do these things? Is the voice the thing that makes you able to build a business with your best friend from scratch to what we've built?

• 1:01:39Steven Bartlett?

  But isn't that what the voice would say?

• 1:01:41Speaker 01

  That is what the voice would say.

• 1:01:42Steven Bartlett?

  The voice values validation. It's, it's desperately seeking validation. So of course, the voice would say, what if you lose me? Then you'll lose, then you won't be validated anymore. And validation is so important to us. This is a really interesting topic that I, this was the last chapter in my book, and I actually didn't know, I knew what I wanted to try and get to, but I didn't know what the answer was until I started writing. And it's this whole idea of feeling if you're enough yet? Do you feel like you're enough yet? And I thought that

• 1:02:08Steven Bartlett?

  The reason why I was ambitious was because I didn't feel like I was enough. So it was this driving force. But in fact, I came to learn that because I didn't feel like I was enough, I had fake ambitions. I wanted a Lamborghini and to impress people. These were never my ambitions. And the closer I got to feeling like I was enough, my ambitions changed. I still had ambitions. I didn't lose ambition, but they became intrinsically driven ambitions. Like, I want to have a wife and I want to do things like a podcast where it doesn't pay a shit ton of money. It's not the best financial use of my time, but it's an intrinsically driven thing. And so maybe your ambitions will change, but you'll be happy with the change.

• 1:02:47Speaker 01

  I think that's a great point and I love your book, by the way. And I've actually highlighted a few. Yeah, I love that. I have a few points in that, in that section. And I think at the moment ambition are things that can be measured objectively because that objective measurement helps with, helps that voice. But at the same time, you're right, the voice is like, well, if you lose me, you're going to lose your edge. I'm what makes you able to do all these things. And

• 1:03:07Steven Bartlett?

  Has that voice changed over the years with your success at all?

• 1:03:11Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:03:11Steven Bartlett?

  Not at all?

• 1:03:13Speaker 01

  It just moves the goal every time.

• 1:03:14Steven Bartlett?

  Really?

• 1:03:15Speaker 01

  Moves the goalpost. Achieve it. Goalpost.

• 1:03:17Steven Bartlett?

  No change at all in that voice? Fucking hell.

• 1:03:19Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:03:21Steven Bartlett?

  That explains, explains a lot to be fair, because you've really been hell for a level with your business. So the, one of the things you announced, which you talked about earlier, is this, this new manifesto for your business called the BrewDog Blueprint, creating the business of tomorrow. And this is kind of the late stage vision for a, a much more sustainable company. When I say sustainable, I'm talking not about carbon emissions. I'm talking about a company where your team and your, your mission can be achieved in a sustainable, holistically sustainable way. You've had a lot of controversy over the last two years.

• 1:03:53Speaker 01

  I don't just think over the last two years, I think controversy has followed us almost every year since 2008.

• 1:03:59Steven Bartlett?

  And much of that you've actually welcomed. You've tried to get controversy. It's been central to your marketing strategy. And it's actually, from my estimation, especially in those areas, served you tremendously well because this made the marketing dollar work a lot harder. The controversy in more recent years starts with this Punks with Purpose letter that was written, 300 of your ex-employees and some of your current employees at the time, and think in 2020 or 2021?

• 1:04:23Speaker 01

  2021.

• 1:04:23Steven Bartlett?

  Came out with these allegations of bullying, lying, fear, toxic workplace culture, unfair dismissals, all of this stuff. When people hear about the Blue Dog blueprint, they might think it's a knee-jerk response to that.

• 1:04:38Steven Bartlett?

  And that without that moment where, you know, those employees had written that letter about their experience at BrewDog, you wouldn't have gone on the journey and published that new vision for BrewDog. What do you say to that?

• 1:04:51Speaker 01

  I would say that's completely not the case. Firstly, let me speak about how we've been as an employer. So I think it's completely fair to say there's been points on the high-growth journey of this company where we could have done more to look after the people. As a first-time CEO leading a company that was expanding super rapidly in the US, in Germany, in the UK, at times we didn't invest enough in HR, we had unrealistic expectations of our team, and I think a fair amount of feedback in that letter was valid. So we've always wanted to be the best employer we can be. The aspiration has always been to be a fantastic place to work. And we've always believed that our long-term destiny is determined by how well we look after the fantastic people in our business. And I think that has been core to our DNA since day one.

• 1:05:33Speaker 01

  Have we always lived up to that in the high-growth periods? No, we haven't. And I think we fully accept that. And off the back of that feedback, we did a full independent review of culture. We spoke to over a thousand people inside and outside the company, and we made a whole host of changes. We invested in HR, we put a pay increase in place across the board. We added resource where we felt we were under-resourced as a company. We put in place an independently managed ethics hotline and loads of other things. I think we had a few years where we missed the mark from a people perspective, high growth, inexperience in my behalf, unrealistic expectations, difficulties in COVID.

• 1:06:09Speaker 01

  I think we've reset things now. I think we've put some fantastic things in place. And then on top of that, we've launched a blueprint, which I think helps create a whole new model for business going forward, which is something we're very excited to do.

• 1:06:19Steven Bartlett?

  When that letter came out from Punks with Purpose? That day, talk me through what it's like to be a CEO when 300, you know, people sign a letter accusing you of all these, making these allegations about toxic company work culture. What's it like for you that day?

• 1:06:37Speaker 01

  Tell. It's, I mean, this is my, this is my life's work and some of that feedback was fair and valid. I think some of the feedback was, was disingenuous, but we took the approach of whether we agree with it or not, we're going to use this as an opportunity to get better. And maybe in two, three, four years' time, we can look back and say, as difficult as this was, we've become a better company because of it. How can we engage with this? And how can we use it to get better? Because ultimately, our people are the most important thing in our business and we want to be the best business we can long term. And we've just got to use it as a catalyst for, for getting better long term as a business.

• 1:07:11Steven Bartlett?

  What did you think was fair?

• 1:07:13Speaker 01

  I think it's completely fair to say that I, at times in the journey, have been too intense, that I have been too demanding, that I have set standards for the team, which I would set for myself, but then for a lot of the team members, that is unattainable. And I fell into the trap of picking bits and pieces from some of my favorite business leaders' philosophies. So Jeff Bezos has got a philosophy that standards need to be unreasonably high. And unless people think they're unreasonably high, they're not high enough. And I would just pick bits and pieces without kind of taking maybe the whole philosophy. And I just pushed for such high standards, unrealistic deadlines. And it was because I was so focused on, let's build a thing, let's create more jobs, let's create more

• 1:07:55Speaker 01

  progression opportunities for our team, let's deliver more value for our customers, let's create amazing moments of customer magic, let's continue, let's continue building. So the intention was a hundred percent good. And because I was so bought in and so focused in that, I did, I did push people too far.

• 1:08:10Steven Bartlett?

  What was the most hurtful thing that you read? So you, that, that letter came out, the BBC did a documentary, the BBC did this podcast, which is kind of just the same as the documentary. What was the most hurtful thing that you read, written about yourself?

• 1:08:22Speaker 01

  Well, I think for, for me, there's the difference between, okay, this is genuine feedback, because people had a valid concern, and because people want to help make us a better business, which. Fully accept, want to listen to that feedback all day long with us. There's been unfortunately, two things mixed together. So there's been the valid feedback, which we listen to, which we accept, which would become a bit better business. There's also been people who have been on a mission to inflict as much damage as they can on me and on the, and on the business with mistruths, with misrepresentations, with dishonest statements and dishonest claims.

• 1:09:05Speaker 01

  And I know a lot of these individuals and unfortunately, I can't say too much at the moment because there's two ongoing court cases. But there's been a large amount of criminality involved in this as well. And hopefully one day I'm able to speak about it, but some of the things that's happened in the background are completely shocking. It's almost like a movie plot. So you've got the kind of two things mixed up in our case. You've got valid feedback from ex-employees about, okay, you could have done better here. You didn't invest enough in HR, that these things were difficult that we follow here. And the other side, you've got people taking advantage of that moment just to try and inflict damage in me and the company for, for whatever reasons, we've always had haters as a business as well, perhaps more than any other business. And I always felt to have people hate you, you need to be successful doing something that you love.

• 1:09:50Speaker 01

  And I think there's a big difference here and you spend some time in the US between how US people relate to successful business people and how UK people relate to successful business people. And I think in the US, it's, they cheer you on from the sidelines, they support you because they, their mindset is they think that can be them someday. Whereas in the UK, I think it's maybe a bit more jealous of success and they don't think it's going to be them. So therefore they're, they're jealous of success, which I think is a bit to play there as well. So yes, some of the elements of feedback that I felt wasn't coming from a genuine place where some of the kind of hardest to hear. Whereas the other bits of feedback that was fair and genuine, I was there for all day long. But the disingenuine bits of feedback were, were tough because they just all get reported the same way in the media.

• 1:10:32Steven Bartlett?

  Fair and, fair and genuine feedback then. So you, one of the things that you actually do at your company and you were doing during this growth period is doing the, the old net promoter score thing. One of the things BBC reported on.

• 1:10:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:41Steven Bartlett?

  In your head office, the, the score for when people ask, were asked the question, how likely are you to recommend BrewDog as a good place to work? Was minus 54% and then company wide, the score was minus 18%.

• 1:10:51Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:10:52Steven Bartlett?

  How does one, when you, because that's just a number.

• 1:10:54Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:10:55Steven Bartlett?

  How does one go about getting to, getting the context of that number and then improving it, the number? Because if I got that number, I, I wouldn't know where to bloody start.

• 1:11:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:04Steven Bartlett?

  Well, I mean, I, I would start with surveys, but it's a difficult thing to change, right? Because that's a, it's an awful number, you know?

• 1:11:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I don't think you can change it based on a number. And I think the mistake that we may be made in the past was when we knew we had an issue with our culture, we've tried to fix those issues in a vacuum. So it would be me and a couple of our senior leaders and, okay, we know we've got this issue here. We want to make it better for our people. Let's do this, this and this. But we create that in a vacuum and we didn't speak to the people. So we did so many well-intentioned things that we thought was really going to help us as an employer. It just didn't help. So one of the biggest learnings on, on that part of the journey for me, and it's really kind of came to fruition with the blueprint is, if we're trying to do something that's good for our people, let's build it with our people. Let's not build it in isolation. Let's not make it in a vacuum.

• 1:11:51Speaker 01

  So the blueprint, for instance, before we launched it, I did focus groups extensively with cross-sections of the company in America, junior people, senior people, middle managers. I did the same for our retail business, for our production business. I did face-to-face workshops on it. It's like, here's what we're thinking about doing in terms of making things better for you guys. What do you think? This is going to impact you on a day-to-day basis? How do you think this is good to go down the team? But ultimately, how can we make this better? And in the past, the blueprint, I would have just launched it in a vacuum with good intention. We made so many changes to how it works based on the feedback from our team. So we ultimately ended up launching something that was far more impactful, that was far better for our team,

• 1:12:33Speaker 01

  because we built it in a fundamentally different way than we would have built it before, which is just in isolation. And I think that's a first example of us doing that and me doing that as a leader, which I think is a really important evolution of my leadership style within the business.

• 1:12:47Steven Bartlett?

  The, the other thing you've done, which I, I implore all companies to do is as part of your. BrewDog Blueprint. When I went on the website, I saw that you've got that transparency dashboard.

• 1:12:57Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:12:58Steven Bartlett?

  This is very important in the modern world because this puts the power of truth into your hands in terms of reality. So what you've done is you've published on your website, things like your employee satisfaction score, things relating to your carbon emissions and all these things, so that the world can now see what your own team think of being a BrewDog employee. Because what that also does for the team is it builds trust.

• 1:13:21Speaker 01

  It does. And I think it's such an important part of our philosophy. And it just got to a point where there were so many misrepresentations that was like, okay, let's just give them the facts in their purest, most undiluted form. And then people can make up their own mind. So if you look at this transparency dashboard at the moment, the latest score that we've got from people within our business is 3.49 out of 5 as an employer. Now, do we want to be 3.49 out of 5 as employer? No. Is that significantly better than most people outside the company would have? Do you think yes? But what we've committed to do is every 12 months, we're going to do the same survey in the same way and we're going to update people. So we're going to do that at the end of this year and we are going to share those results. So people can see, okay, you've done some things. Are you now better or worse than a 3.49?

• 1:14:06Speaker 01

  And an anonymous survey from your people, and that's a level of transparency we've committed to here. And I think that commitment to transparency isn't something new in our business. In 2014, we launched something called DIY Dog. So with DIY Dog, and we gave away the beer recipe in full for every single beer we'd ever made. So at the time, it was 250 recipes. So it was the keys to our kingdom. It was everything that most companies use to kind of keep away in some secret vault somewhere and like loathe to share with anyone. But that transparency has been kind of hardwired in our DNA for a long time in the transparency dashboard, specifically focusing on culture, people, headcount, employer score is a key evolution of that.

• 1:14:45Steven Bartlett?

  And obviously, if you're asking, if you're doing surveys of your team, people are always going to fear reprisal, which is if I write something bad on this, am I going to get fired or something? Is it anonymous?

• 1:14:55Speaker 01

  It's 100% anonymous and it's managed by an independent third party.

• 1:14:59Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, good.

• 1:14:59Speaker 01

  Which lets us get the purest, most undiluted, fair, objective feedback we can.

• 1:15:05Steven Bartlett?

  So one of the, I'm reading through the BBC reports and I'm looking through, I'm listening to the podcast. I like to do my research. So I watched the documentary. I listened to all six, six and a half parts of the podcast. The bit where my skin really was just, I felt really uncomfortable was when a certain member of the team, I think in an American bar, talked about the interview process for promotion and someone, I think her manager had said to her, had asked her continually, does she have kids? Is she going to get married? When you heard that, that a member of the BrewDog team was being repeatedly questioned on whether they had kids when they were interviewing for promotion, were you as horrified as I was?

• 1:15:45Speaker 01

  I was massively, massively horrified here. I was massively horrified for two reasons. A, that it happened and B, because I know it's my fault. So every single thing that happens in this business is a direct consequence of something I have done. So if something goes wrong anywhere in the business, in a business with 3,000 people, things are going to go wrong all the time in every different country, like all the time. But I can never ever blame anyone but myself because I've either hired that person, set the tone for the culture, instructed that person, communicated with that person, communicated with their manager. So it's all a direct consequence. So when we've got an issue, I can't look at anyone but myself and I've got to take full responsibility for that issue and putting

• 1:16:29Speaker 01

  things in place to fix that issue. So it was hard to hear because it's something that should absolutely never happen, but also hard to hear because no, because if I had done my job better, then it just wouldn't have happened in the first place.

• 1:16:39Steven Bartlett?

  Is that an evolution, that perspective?

• 1:16:42Speaker 01

  That evolution is a perspective as well. Before, if something went wrong, and I mean, this is a steep learning curve. Before, if something went wrong in the company, blame someone else. And by blaming someone else, you just don't address what the issue is and then you scapegoat someone else, which is bad from a culture perspective. When now it's back to the question, okay, what could I have done to ensure that didn't happen? What can I do to avoid that going forward? What can I do to make the team, the culture, the people as strong as I can going forward so we can be the best representation of this company and build it to how we want it to be?

• 1:17:15Steven Bartlett?

  Well, is that, there's, one of the trends that was very obvious in this documentary was because I assume brewery, the brewery industry is male dominated.

• 1:17:24Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:17:25Steven Bartlett?

  Women that get jobs in the industry are at risk of getting swept up in a male culture and being the victims of a male culture in many respects. There was the story in the podcast about someone in a brewery or something doing a masturbation gesture at a female employee. This goes back to a masculine culture issue, kind of the kind of culture you'd expect in a football locker room, but wouldn't ever. Is this the systemic sort of uprooting that you've had to think about? Because 3,000 people around the world, you have to protect all of them.

• 1:18:03Speaker 01

  I do.

• 1:18:04Steven Bartlett?

  You have to protect all of them from each other.

• 1:18:06Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:18:07Steven Bartlett?

  That's not.

• 1:18:11Steven Bartlett?

  How does one go about that? Is that a culture philosophy thing? How do you stop? And how do you, when someone goes to report something like that horrific incident?

• 1:18:20Speaker 01

  So again, we've put in place loads of things. So now we've got an independent ethics hotline, which is independently managed. So there's so many ways now for people to report something they're concerned with. They can speak to their line manager, they can speak to the HR department, or if they want to do it completely anonymously, we've got this independently managed hotline, they can call that hotline, that hotline that then gives the feedback to our directors, to our HR department, but it's completely anonymized. They don't know who that feedback is coming from. And for us, like, we want to build the most diverse, most inclusive business that we can. I think it's fundamentally important that we are as diverse and inclusive as our customer base is as well. We've now got a diversity and inclusion forum within the business with people from all over the business where they discuss things, okay,

• 1:19:04Speaker 01

  we can get better at this, we can get better at that. So it's putting more things in place where we listen to a huge cross section of our team. And whereas before we've been, okay, we're building a thing and the team are helping us build a thing. It's okay, let's build a thing together with our team. Because the person who's on the front lines at our bar in Columbus, Ohio, or our bar in central London, or our bar in Edinburgh, the person who's working in the warehouse in Glasgow, or in the brewery in Australia, their perspective on things is so important. And I think a trap that I fell into was, okay, this is our culture because this is what I say it is. You can't say what a culture is. The culture is. How the people in your team feel and then how they act and you only build that

• 1:19:47Speaker 01

  together. So for me, it's been another kiki learning. Let's build the culture together with our team and that's going to give us the strongest culture that we can. Has the culture always been amazing in the past? No, hands up it hasn't. Can we make a fantastic culture together in the future with our team? I fully believe we can and we're very much focused on that.

• 1:20:05Steven Bartlett?

  You've got two young daughters.

• 1:20:06Speaker 01

  I do.

• 1:20:07Steven Bartlett?

  So when you hear about, you know, when you hear these incidents that have come from women saying that they've experienced someone being misogynistic to them, that must hit closer to home than most.

• 1:20:15Speaker 01

  It absolutely does. So I'm super lucky to have two amazing daughters. They're eight, eight and five.

• 1:20:22Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:20:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. The eldest one is, sometimes makes beer with me at home in the kitchen on a Saturday afternoon, which is.

• 1:20:30Steven Bartlett?

  At five, does she drink it?

• 1:20:31Speaker 01

  No, she doesn't drink it. She smells it and she picks out the hops and she picks out the malt and then she designs a label and she gives it to.

• 1:20:38Steven Bartlett?

  Might be in another documentary, wouldn't it?

• 1:20:40Speaker 01

  So if you're allowed to, allowed to drink it and stuff. But yeah, I mean, it's, it's stuff. I mean, the outside of the business, I mean, my daughter's the most important thing in my life, full stop. And the main focus of my life outside the, the business. And I think being a father has changed my view on a lot of things. I mean, it's not just since myself and Martin became fathers that there suddenly became baby changing facilities and all of our venues and that kind of thing. But on a kind of deeper level, a lot of what we're doing from a sustainability perspective is because I want to be able to look my kids in the eye and know that we did our bit to save our home planet, that this didn't happen in our watch, that we put things on the line here. And then in terms of the culture we're building as a company as well, I want to be able to, for the grownups, speak to our daughters about, okay, we tried to make it amazing for everyone by doing these things. This is the values that

• 1:21:25Speaker 01

  we held true to us. Did we always get it right? No. Was the intention always there to do that? Absolutely. And this is where we got to in that journey.

• 1:21:33Steven Bartlett?

  One of the things you, you said, you know, I fucked up on this particular point was investing in Heineken. And you've explained many times, you know, the thesis behind that, why you did that. But I know that was, I know people were talking and you responded with some things yesterday about that. But I just wanted to kind of confront that. So you've obviously been the antithesis of those big.

• 1:21:51Speaker 01

  Yes, we have.

• 1:21:52Steven Bartlett?

  Beer companies. And then the BBC reported that you'd actually invested.

• 1:21:55Speaker 01

  I did.

• 1:21:56Steven Bartlett?

  They, they said 500 grand, you say 120K.

• 1:21:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:21:59Steven Bartlett?

  Context.

• 1:22:00Speaker 01

  And so I did said I held 500K's worth of shares. I invested 500K, I quickly sold it down. So at the time, they said it was 500K.

• 1:22:07Steven Bartlett?

  Why are you investing in the people you hate?

• 1:22:10Speaker 01

  Keep your friends closer and closer. So at that time, and it's, it's the most stupid thing that I've ever done. If I could like go back and change a single thing, that would be very high on the list just because of how at odds it sits with our values and how we do things at the company. So the intention was to try and do a distribution deal. Heineken felt that we hated them. I then, without thinking about it too much, decided, okay, well, I'm going to buy this. And like, hey, guys, I can't hate you too much because I've got shares in it. So that was the kind of design and concept behind it. And whilst we don't want to be owned by big beer business, we do distribution deals with them. We've done a distribution deal with Asahi in Japan, and we work with other big beer companies

• 1:22:51Speaker 01

  in a distribution basis, but not an ownership basis. I naively felt it would help us get a distribution deal done. We didn't get the distribution deal done. And yeah, definitely one of the most stupid things I've ever done. I would love to go back and take it back, but I did it. I own shares in Heineken, which is kind of like, I don't know, Luke Skywalker owning shares in Darth Vader's latest startup.

• 1:23:14Steven Bartlett?

  Were you, the last question I have on that topic then, on these topics more just generally, is the other thing that the BBC alleged was that you were going to sell your company to Heineken.

• 1:23:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. And no truth in that whatsoever. So we had discussions about distribution, about potential partnerships, but there was never any intention to sell the company. And if we wanted to sell this company, we would have sold it a long time ago. So we have had so many offers.

• 1:23:36Steven Bartlett?

  Why not? Why not sell it? That'd be a big payday.

• 1:23:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, but then the next, the week after, what do you do? How am I going to spend my time? What am I passionate about? Let's start another beer business and then build it. Let's start another company and build it. So like, if we had wanted to sell, we could have sold this thing at a huge valuation, a hundred times over. I could be sitting in a yacht somewhere, sipping margaritas and never have to worry about anything ever again. So if we wanted to sell, we would have sold it. It was never the intention to sell it. It was to see, is there an option, opportunity to work together strategically or in distribution that helps us through the business. But we're fully committed to, we're 15 years in, we're fully committed to the next 15 years and see if we can take this thing. And that's the fun and that's the challenge and that's what we're focused on.

• 1:24:21Steven Bartlett?

  When you had, you don't do many interviews.

• 1:24:22Speaker 01

  I don't.

• 1:24:23Steven Bartlett?

  I think you've probably been a little bit too busy with COVID and everything else going on. So you've not really done any interviews, but you did one in the Sunday Times with Josh Glancy.

• 1:24:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:24:31Steven Bartlett?

  And his sort of conclusive point in that interview was. That he, he thought you were obsessive, someone who clearly struggles to express empathy or read social cues. He's, he's cold eyed, unsettling company and is, is as a determined person, as I recall meeting. And then he goes on to say that, but he doesn't think you are the person that you've been portrayed to be in a negative context.

• 1:24:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:24:53Steven Bartlett?

  Words to that effect. But the bit that I found particularly interesting of all of that was the part about social cues, which you've mentioned earlier in this conversation.

• 1:25:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. So actually, off the back of the time that I spent with, with Josh and looking at that feedback, I started exploring as to whether I am a little bit autistic. And it's still something I'm exploring at the moment, but working with some specialists, I think I might have some kind of light level autism in the mix that would explain some of the social cue thing, some of the mindset thing and some of the awkwardness as well.

• 1:25:30Steven Bartlett?

  Interesting. Thirty nine years old, that's a bit, you know.

• 1:25:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:25:37Speaker 01

  Because of that exact quote.

• 1:25:38Steven Bartlett?

  Really?

• 1:25:39Speaker 01

  Because of that exact quote. And I was like chatting with my doctor and I was like, do you think this meeting? And she's like, I thought that for a while, James, quite possibly. So yeah, I'm working with a specialist at the moment to see if there's a diagnosis there or not. But it's something we're, something we're looking at, but based on that exact quote, which is very spooky that you're editing out just now.

• 1:25:56Steven Bartlett?

  Well, it's because you, you said about social cues at the start of the conversation. And then I'd, I'd seen him say that. And I'm putting two and two together. And generally, you know, when I'm generally, when I was reading about all the BBC stuff and all the, a lot of the sort of accusations and allegations, much of it felt like sometimes you would stare at people and you'd be a bit socially awkward.

• 1:26:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:26:19Steven Bartlett?

  So, and, and, and that can be for a lot of people, you know, I mean, I'm saying this is part of it, that can be quite intimidating.

• 1:26:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:26:26Steven Bartlett?

  And so when you, when I was reading through the feedback about people being fearful and stuff, I'm not saying it was because, but I, and putting all these pieces together, just going, well, empathy, social cues, you know.

• 1:26:37Speaker 01

  I definitely need to do better in empathy, a hundred percent.

• 1:26:42Speaker 01

  It's kind of one of the learnings as well that I've been so focused that I was like, well, don't need any empathy because it just takes up mental capital that needs to be determined, resilient, driving forward, hitting the subjective, going for the next goal. And I think some of the issues we've had in the past has been because of that. And this whole thing is a learning, this whole thing is a journey. I think I've reflected and learned more than I have in my entire life over the last 12 months, which I think we had to do and cite the feedback. And one of the things I'm definitely working on at the moment is how can I be more empathetic as a leader? And I think that'll make me a better leader.

• 1:27:14Steven Bartlett?

  Did you never get that feedback before, before that article came out? And that article came out last year, right?

• 1:27:19Speaker 01

  I think I got it, but I just chose, I did what I did with a lot of feedback, which was chose to ignore it and just keep going. So it's only when you stop and pause and reflect a little bit that you look at feedback in a slightly differently.

• 1:27:32Steven Bartlett?

  All of this is painful.

• 1:27:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:34Steven Bartlett?

  This whole process is painful. This, the, the, the letter that came out from Punks for Purpose, the BBC stuff, all of it's painful. But there is a silver lining. I'm sure because there's always a silver lining. What is the silver lining?

• 1:27:48Speaker 01

  The silver lining is that the kind of last 12 months is a phenomenal opportunity for us as a business, us as an employer, me as a person, me as a leader to get better. And I think we'll look back in a few years' time and as tough as it's been, we'll be grateful that we received that feedback and we took that time to pause, reflect and learn and make changes. We've made more changes in the last 12 months than we've perhaps done in the history of the company. I've made more changes in my own leadership style than I have in, in the kind of history of the company in the last 12 months as well. So I think the silver lining is, as tough as this is, this is an opportunity for us to double down on what we value as a company, for us to work closer with the fantastic team

• 1:28:30Speaker 01

  members that we've got all over the planet and for us to build something together with them where they're incentivized, engaged, rewarded, motivated, played a key part in the decisions and how we're building things as well. And as tough as it's been and as hard as it's been, and it has been, it's been hard.

• 1:28:47Speaker 01

  I think we are better long-term because of that and that's what we're focused on doing.

• 1:28:52Steven Bartlett?

  Anxiety, interesting topic I talk about a lot on here. I've experienced it myself. My anxiety has been worse and hardest to control or diffuse with media related things.

• 1:29:06Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:29:07Steven Bartlett?

  So, yeah. So tell me about your experience with anxiety and when it's been hardest and give me some, give me an honest view of what, when I use the word hard, what that looks like practically for you.

• 1:29:21Speaker 01

  Well, kind of going through the last few years, I've had hypervigilance. I've had anxiety just when you're constantly on alert.

• 1:29:28Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. So you're kind of jammed in kind of fight or flight. And it's just been like, from a business perspective, it's been really tough. From a personal perspective, it's been tough as well. So that's been a, that's been a challenge. And

• 1:29:41Speaker 01

  it just, when you, when you feel like you're under attack and like, we felt like we've been under siege for large parts of the last couple of years. And some of that has been with things which are on your do as well, which just kind of makes those kind of blows kind of land tougher. So you just kind of feel your body kind of convulsing with the cortisol and you just feel yourself getting an edge. And when you're in that state, you've got, I've got to get myself back in even still because I don't make my best decisions. I'm not the best leader at that time. So how can I calm myself down or work in a few breathing exercises?

• 1:30:12Steven Bartlett?

  Breath work, I don't want.

• 1:30:12Speaker 01

  Breath work is really good. So I usually do a daily breath work practice, which I think is really key as well. And I think overall as a society, we're trending towards being more anxious. And I think our relationship with social media, our relationship with technology, which is why monitoring how many minutes I spend on my phone each day is very, very important. But I think the amount of anxiety we're seeing in a society today is so much higher than it would have been 10, 20, 20 years ago. And as a company, going through these challenging times as well, we've put in mental health first aiders who go in a mental health first aid course. We've got a huge amount across the business as well. So.

• 1:30:47Steven Bartlett?

  Ninety, ninety odd.

• 1:30:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, ninety, ninety across the business. So starting to speak about it far more as a business. And I just think with lockdown, with COVID, with everything, like the impact on people's mental health. And I'm glad people are talking about it more. There is a challenge. And I think the more people talk about it, there's less of a stigma. And there's kind of more openness about, okay, these things help with, with the mental health side of things.

• 1:31:08Steven Bartlett?

  Did you used to think, like I did, that CEOs weren't meant to talk about it?

• 1:31:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I mean, that quote that I shared with you, it's like the first rule of CEO psychological meltdown is not to speak about CEO psychological meltdown. Don't let people know it's tough. Don't let people know it's difficult. Suck it up, buttercup and just get on with it, which works for a certain amount of time. It's definitely got shelf life on it as well as a philosophy.

• 1:31:30Steven Bartlett?

  Covid was one of those moments where that really flipped, where in fact, the way that you brought people along with you was by letting, I saw this really big shift in, and letting them know that you were feeling it too. And in fact, one of the most trust building things for teams was to turn to your team and go, listen, this is really tough. And I'm scared and it's difficult for me and I'm feeling it too. And I think that that's a big, that was a critical moment where I learned the importance of transparency with my team. Not just business transparency, but personal transparency and how useful that was in letting them know that we're in this together, I guess as well. So it's nice to hear you say that because to talk about your own struggles with that.

• 1:32:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:32:07Steven Bartlett?

  Have you, have you ever been to therapy or had any sort of medical support?

• 1:32:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, I go to therapy. Yeah.

• 1:32:13Steven Bartlett?

  When did you start?

• 1:32:15Speaker 01

  I actually started when I separated from my ex-wife.

• 1:32:18Steven Bartlett?

  Right.

• 1:32:19Speaker 01

  To kind of help us through that transition, to help us be the best co-parents we could to our two amazing little daughters through that. And I've continued going because I just think it's, it's really useful and just kind of back to being a CEO is lonely. And the tendency is, okay, let's just bottle all this stuff and let's keep going with it. I think I can be a better leader if I've got someone to talk to about those things, a way to work through the difficult challenge and emotions means that I can take the best version of myself to work every single day, be the best leader I can. And I owe it to my team to be, to be the best leader I can be.

• 1:32:53Steven Bartlett?

  What's, what has therapy done for you in terms of, so that's the sounding board component, but is there like practical sort of mechanisms or advice that you've garnered from therapy? Or just an understanding of yourself, I guess, more than anything.

• 1:33:04Speaker 01

  I think it's just an understanding of myself. So I actually did last year, five days of intensive therapy in the, in the woods outside of Nashville.

• 1:33:13Steven Bartlett?

  Last year?

• 1:33:15Speaker 01

  So I was living, I was living in a little hut for, for five days and kind of doing a intensive course. And I think it's just. It's so useful and urge everyone to do that. But the more you can understand how you're put together as a human, and so much of that is like the things that happen in your early life, how that informs the filters you use to see the world, means you can understand your behaviour and means you can avoid default patterns which are not helping you. So I would have default patterns which I would just fall into subconsciously, which didn't help me. So now I understand, okay, I think this way because these things happen. This is how I view the world usually. This is how I can put a better perspective on it. This is how I can then react better in certain

• 1:33:58Speaker 01

  situations as opposed to following default patterns, which maybe didn't help me.

• 1:34:02Steven Bartlett?

  A busy person like you, why would you, what inspired you to go and take five days out of your very focused, very relentless lifestyle and go and sit in a forest with a therapist?

• 1:34:12Speaker 01

  Two very simple reasons. I want to be the best dad that I can to my two amazing little daughters, and I want to be the best leader I can to the amazing people that work in the business. And I felt, okay, the more I can understand myself, the better I can do in those two things. So I did it as much for my daughters and my team as I did it for myself. That's why I did it.

• 1:34:35Steven Bartlett?

  When we look ahead at your future with BrewDog and yourself, lots of grand plans. The business is growing exceptionally quick in the US. There's some pretty startling stats about the meteoric rise of BrewDog across the United States. You're opening this massive, you shut down Las Vegas Strip the other day, craning something in?

• 1:34:52Speaker 01

  Yes, it was the sign for the top of the building.

• 1:34:54Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, that's ridiculous. But the growth in the US has been crazy, crazy, crazy.

• 1:35:02Steven Bartlett?

  What is, I mean, you've told me about where you want to get to in terms of the industry, but like on a practical level, what is next for BrewDog? What should I expect as someone looking in from the outside?

• 1:35:11Speaker 01

  You should expect us to focus. Even more in the three most important things in our business and that is sustainability, that is people and that is beer. So tell me about that sustainability point because you are the first carbon negative beer business in the world. Yes. So we thought we were doing our bit for the planet. We thought we were doing our bit for sustainability and I was fortunate enough to have dinner with Sir David Attenborough. It was just before lockdown. It was in February of 2020 and I was just hit with a blindingly stark realisation, we are not doing nearly enough and we're a part of the problem and the problem is way more severe than I thought the problem was. So after we'd stabilised our business in the middle of a pandemic, we completely pivoted and we thought, okay,

• 1:35:56Speaker 01

  we're going to put everything on the line for what we believe in here. So we found an amazing expert. We worked hand in hand with Professor Mike Berners-Lee, one of the world's best sustainability experts and he's been our lead scientific advisor ever since. And I think it's so important to do that and we would have made so many mistakes in our sustainability journey if we hadn't had his help. But we decided, even though it's the middle of a pandemic, from a sustainability perspective, huge changes needed today. Not in 2040, not in 2050, not in 2030, huge changes needed today. And we wanted to hopefully set a new standard when it comes to sustainability. So we became the world's first carbon negative beer business. That means we take twice as much carbon out of the air every single year that we emit. That includes all the carbon in our supply chain. We publish our

• 1:36:40Speaker 01

  report every six months. It's fully transparent. This is the carbon footprint of our business. This is how it's broken down and this is how we've then helped take that carbon out of the air. We've made huge investments across our business in becoming more sustainable. We recently invested 12 million in a bioenergy facility that came online last week in Ellen and this is amazing. So it takes our wastewater and it turns our wastewater into water we can use again and biomethane, green gas that we can use to power our system. So our system is now fully powered by green gas that comes from our waste, also reduces our water usage. And then we're also able to use that green gas to use in vehicles which transport our beer as well, which we're moving into. So huge investments to reduce our footprint, but we also wanted to take ownership of the problem.

• 1:37:23Speaker 01

  Problem ourselves. So our carbon is our problem. Let's do something ourselves. So we bought nine and a half thousand acres in the Scottish Highlands, a huge chunk of land where we are creating the lost forest. So we're planting millions of trees to create this beautiful native rod leaf woodland and habitat, rewild a huge part of Scotland, just our peatlands, that's going to help take carbon out of the air. And we're causing this carbon to go into the air ourselves. So we wanted to be responsible for taking it out. And it's been a crazy journey over the last couple of years. We've changed everything about our business. We've put our money where our heart is on this one. It's a huge gamble, but we fully believe that the only way we're going to get out of the climate crisis we're in at the moment is businesses. So we think

• 1:38:08Speaker 01

  governments and politicians are incapable of making the change that needs to be made because the time skills they work on is just too long for the pain that we need to take short term. So to get us out of the climate crisis, I think it's the best businesses working hand in hand with scientists to put things in place. And I think when it comes to members of the public as well, they can almost have more of an impact when it comes to sustainability with how they spend their money than how they vote. So it's making sure that our community are engaged and excited and come on the sustainability journey with us. But the three pillars of our business for today and going forward, sustainability, looking after people the best we can, and making the best beers that we can.

• 1:38:44Steven Bartlett?

  One of the allegations obviously was about the lost forest in the BBC report.

• 1:38:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:38:47Steven Bartlett?

  Took some time.

• 1:38:48Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:38:49Steven Bartlett?

  It was, they said that it was taking too long essentially to, it was publicised, but then a couple of years later it hadn't been built yet. So just to give you a chance to respond to that.

• 1:38:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I think that's typical of how disingenuous some of the BBC's claims were. The only, the single reason we hadn't started planting trees is we hadn't received the consent that we needed to start planting trees. So we had to do environmental studies, we had to apply for permission to the Scottish Forestry Commission. We were given that plan and consent last week. We're starting planting in August.

• 1:39:19Steven Bartlett?

  Exciting. You've built a tremendous, tremendous business in terms of scale and product, and your customers love what you're doing. You've built that cult.

• 1:39:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:39:27Steven Bartlett?

  In your customer base. One of the pieces of advice you gave, I believe it was in your book, which I thought was really underrated, was about finance.

• 1:39:38Steven Bartlett?

  And I sit there in the den and I reflect on how I fucked up many times in my own business. And I think, I just wish someone had said that to me when I was 20 years old. Your point about finance, to quote you directly, because I wrote it down. You said, here goes, this is the single most important piece of advice in this book. Understand, an understanding of finance, essentially. Why is that the sing, through all your experience, why did you choose that as the single most important piece of advice? And tell me your journey with finance.

• 1:40:05Speaker 01

  It's the least fun, it's the least interesting, it's perhaps the least sexy bit of your business when you've got a startup. So therefore it's the most likely to be ignored. But for me, finance is the language of business. It's the scorekeeping system of business. So if you can't keep score, how do you know how your business is, is doing? And it's something that so many small business owners, entrepreneurs just ignore. And that is the seed of their downfall. And like everything else, when we set up the business, I mean, we like to think we're punk and that we've got the same DIY approach. So we had to learn the skills we needed to exist outside the system, to be able to beat the system. Learn the skills you need to succeed yourself.

• 1:40:49Speaker 01

  So you can, you can be self-supporting and you don't have to depend on anyone for anything, which is really important when you're a startup. So it was just self-taught, but we had to self-teach ourselves how to generate barcodes, how to do the paperwork for international customs, for shipping beer to America, how to set up an online accounting platform for the, for the business. We had, we had no money at all. Like outsourcing any of these things simply wasn't an option when you've got £200 in the bank account. So for the first eight or nine years of the business, we were teetering on the edge of financial oblivion almost every single day. And my view was, if we're not, then we're not pushing the resources we have hard enough.

• 1:41:32Speaker 01

  Because we've got to be pushing, we've got to be stretching. But it also means you've got to be. Very considered with how you use your money with what you're investing. Can we find a way to do this cheaper, faster, better? Can we do this ourselves? If so, let's do it ourselves and not spend that money.

• 1:41:47Steven Bartlett?

  There's a really important lesson in that, which I also learnt, which was when you're broke, you're forced, especially the social chain was born out of me being broke at my first startup and realising that I could no longer pay for conventional ads in a newspaper. And that I was going to have to think of something else because I was forced to. In your situation, you were forced to learn finance and the fundamentals of business. And you were forced to make your marketing dollar go further with more radical unconventional ideas. And it's funny that that's actually been a tremendous blessing. There's a lesson in that for teams in business about how to break through, disrupt and also how to just develop yourself as an entrepreneur.

• 1:42:24Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And that comes back to a key fundamental part of our approach, which is love a constraint. So most people look at a constraint and see it as a limiting factor. If you do that, you've lost the game before you even start. You've got to look at a constraint as a potentially beautiful catalytic force that allows you to find a better way to do something. So our business has all been about constraints, but our philosophy with a constraint is, okay, well, we can't do this the normal way. How can we find a better way, a new way to do that? And that's where Equity Punks came from. That's where giving away our beer recipes came from. That's where learning the skills that we needed to succeed ourselves and doing so many things in-house came from. It's by looking at a constraint and using that, okay, this constraint is here.

• 1:43:09Speaker 01

  Let's make it beautiful by using it as a tool to force us to think differently, to come at this from a different angle and to hopefully find a better way to do something.

• 1:43:18Steven Bartlett?

  And you've said in your book in multiple times that you don't advise young startups to outsource things to agencies, even if they have the cash.

• 1:43:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:43:27Steven Bartlett?

  Because of that very reason.

• 1:43:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:43:28Steven Bartlett?

  We talk about this a lot in the den, so it's really front of mind for me at the moment because all these businesses are walking into the den and saying, I've got, I want your 50K Steve because I'm going to give it to a marketing agency. And I sit in my chair and go, fuck.

• 1:43:43Speaker 01

  I'm going to keep the money in my pocket, thanks.

• 1:43:44Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah. That's for me, I'm out if you say that. I always give them the advice and tell them why. I go, because when you're super early in the business, and I'm sure this is similar to your rationale, super early in the business, you want to be as close to the data as possible and the insights and the know-how and the knowledge. And what's going to happen when they spend the 50K and it didn't work, they'll blame the product and you. They will never take credit for the dish it show. And of course, they're incentivized to oversell all of these products. But to get your take on that, why do you not outsource things when you're in that early? Even if you had the cash, why shouldn't I outsource things?

• 1:44:18Speaker 01

  So our view was even if we outsource things from early, the partner's never getting to care as much as you care. They're not going to know your business, your customer as much as you do. They're not going to be fully aligned in terms of incentives with what you're trying to do. So also back to that philosophy of would or could another company do this? If you outsource things, you're going to get solutions, you're going to get answers that other companies would do. So the more of that you can do internally, still use partners for execution, for reach, for bits and pieces. But with us, the more that we can do, generate internally, it's going to be our tone of voice. It's going to be our mission. It's going to be our passion. And we think that makes it more authentic. And we think that means it's going to resonate better with customers, which a lot of our marketing has done in the past.

• 1:44:58Steven Bartlett?

  You probably know, we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest asks a question for the next guest.

• 1:45:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:45:04Steven Bartlett?

  This guest, this person has written you a question, which I've not read yet and they don't have great handwriting.

• 1:45:08Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:45:10Steven Bartlett?

  I think that says do. Do you think your younger self would be proud slash look up to you now? Question mark.

• 1:45:20Speaker 01

  Oh, good question. We're going deep. I thought we were like.

• 1:45:22Steven Bartlett?

  What did you expect? Have you listened before?

• 1:45:28Steven Bartlett?

  Do you think your younger self would be proud slash look up to you now?

• 1:45:32Speaker 01

  I think so, yes, I do. I do. And like maybe even more demons when I was younger. So to kind of see that I've been able to, to, to build something and, and achieve something and see that I've got like luck enough to have two fantastic, amazing thought leaders and stuff. So I think my younger self would be, would be happy and proud of what I've done.

• 1:45:54Steven Bartlett?

  Thank you.

• 1:45:57Steven Bartlett?

  It's not easy, not easy coming here.

• 1:46:01Steven Bartlett?

  It's not, is it?

• 1:46:02Speaker 01

  No, it's, yeah, it's intense.

• 1:46:03Steven Bartlett?

  But it is, it is what it is. And thank you for all of that. And I hope you've enjoyed it.