The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - Brewdog Founder: The Untold Story Of One Britain’s Fastest Growing Companies: James Watt

Episode Date: July 4, 2022

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

Quick one. Just wanted to say a big thank you to three people very quickly. First people I want to say thank you to is all of you that listen to the show. Never in my wildest dreams is all I can say. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I'd start a podcast in my kitchen and that it would expand all over the world as it has done. And we've now opened our first studio in America, thanks to my very helpful team led by Jack on the production side of things. So thank you to Jack and the team for building out the new American studio. And thirdly to to Amazon Music, who when they heard that we were expanding to the United States, and I'd be recording a lot more over in the States, they put a massive billboard in Times Square for the show. So thank you so much, Amazon Music. Thank you to our team. And

thank you to all of you that listened to this show. Let's continue. You've had a lot of controversy over the last two years, bullying, lying, unfair dismissals, all of this stuff. What do you say to that? I did push people too far. How fast did BrewDog grow? We have grown on average 87% a year. Fucking hell. 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... This is the worst public health crisis for a generation. I've only ever been in tears once in my job, and I broke 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 being a CEO is a very, very lonely job at times. 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. So without further ado, I'm Stephen Bartlett and this is The Diary of a CEO. I hope nobody's listening. But if you are, then please keep this to yourself. 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 um first thank you for being here it's um you know it's always lovely to hear that people are um guests that we have and also kind of understand the format where I wanted to to start with you is to take you right back because that for me is always the context of 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? Yeah, Gardenstone up in the north east of Scotland. When you look back yourself at the foundational shaping, pivotal events of like those early years that are 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? I think there's a few. So I grew up in a tiny fishing village northeast of Scotland.

My dad was a fisherman. My mum was a school teacher. And being a fisherman is tough. And I just remember like the kind of hard work ethic instilled from my grandparent, who was a 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 mom and my relationship with my mom was never that good. And I think I struggled a lot when I was a kid.

I had quite a severe speech impediment when I was growing up. And this is something I haven't spoken about before. 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. 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 a inadequacy complex when I was a kid as well so kind of mum's standards were quite high so whatever I did wasn't good enough 98% in a test why wasn't 100 when uh so in competition why did I win it

with an even better time so like any achievement wasn't quite good enough so growing up a bit of a loner bit of an outsider bit of a kind of inadequacy complex as well which I think from a business perspective those things combined are good but made it kind of quite tough for me at certain stages of my childhood. On that point of I can relate a lot a lot to a lot of that um especially the the i the thought of feeling a bit like an outsider or feeling somewhat different were you bullied in school 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 grown up i guess speech impediment

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. When you said that 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? For me the best entrepreneurs they've got to see things differently 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 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 come at a business and opportunity or a problem. And I think if you're a bit of an outsider, it maybe helps with that. You mentioned your mum as well. 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 really yeah since you were in your teens yeah 1920 was when I stopped speaking to mum did you ever because sometimes when i think about you know my own parents i with with age i've built a bit of um 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 in psychology but you go well maybe that's why they

were the way they are have you thought about that with your mother yeah i definitely have thought about it and uh 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 and it's been that way for a long time now. Did that have an impact on you that that sort of really tough feedback that you could know you were never enough or that your work was never enough? 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 use the word temporary though because temporary escape from that feeling by doing something that can be measured objectively, like succeeding in business. Use the word temporary though. Because it's always there. It's always there. And I think a chip in your shoulder in terms of like motivation 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 your dad he he he sounds like he was a very um hard-working individual he he was indeed i mean

still to this day he's in his late 60s he's a lobster fisherman which is a kind of tough intense i've seen the early job every single day regardless of the weather in the north atlantic he's like pretty much out in his lobster fishing boat so So, yeah, very focused on work and that work ethic, that determination. 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 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 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 what did you what

did you what did you learn then sort of it practically and actionably what did you learn from was it five years roughly you spent on that boat? Yeah. So you come out of university, you try out as a lawyer, working in laws for two weeks. Yeah. Then you go and join your dad.

Yeah. And eventually you work your way up to being captain on that boat. Yeah. And you're on a trawler in the North Atlantic. Yeah. 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? 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. What did you learn from doing that about life and people?

I think the main lesson that i learned is and it's when 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 really 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 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. And in that example of would I want to be on this on the deck 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? 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 an prisoner of war camp for six years. And it's actually in the book, Good to Great 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 in your hand we're going to get there we're going to achieve this 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 to 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.

And why is that important? Because it means you face the problems and the challenges. 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 um 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 and 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 interesting i might steal that well i stole it as well did i say that out loud i I thought I was thinking it. Yeah, so 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 you spent so you spent five years on this boat yeah which was a really great you know brave thing to do in my in my estimation

you're captain of the boat yeah i spent a better time with captain the boat with my captain in the boat why why did you leave that role? Well, I didn't quite leave it. So Martin, who's my best friend from high school, we go way back. Dickie. Yeah, Martin Dickie. 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. 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 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 we had like old dairy tanks our water tanks were plastic tanks

from a local garden center 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 that with two humans and a dog no experience no capital no business plan nothing but just a huge amount of passion for a 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, I think that we love, into a lowest common denominator commodity product. And we wanted to make fantastic quality beers and open people's eyes to this

diverse spectrum of flavour, taste, quality that they never knew existed and take them on this beer journey with us. And that's what we set out to do in 2007 but the first the first few years were were so so tough what gave you the right to start beer coming nothing at all you can't make i can't make beer how did you go about educating yourself on how to make beer so martin studied how to make beer and distilling at university so martin is a really 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 and selling beer out 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 flavor 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 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 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 a breakthrough to somehow

make that work and that breakthrough for us came in 2008 and you you described that period as being one of the toughest of your life that first year give give me a a detailed flavor of the hardest is there a moment in that period where you account maybe your hardest day? 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 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, it's local, it's full of flavour. Everyone said no. The last person didn't just say no, he tasted it and he just spat it back into the bottle. Really? 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 the 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 uh that was a very tough moment 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 there was no way

we're going to quit why we were no way we were going to quit. Why? We were going to die in a ditch for this thing. We're just so passionate about it. And 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, I 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 wait is that the same beer that the guy spat out same beer the guy spat out really first came first came first the same beer the same same temperature i think so that's interesting so i went down to

went down to chess hunt 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 had four months to figure out a way to do this. So got back, sat down with Myra 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 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 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's 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 the streets we got an appointment there with HSBC and we said to the guys at HSBC ourc our bank bank of scotland have just offered us an amazing finance deal and this bottling line and this fermentation tanks we've got this contract with tesco but if you match this deal we're going to shift all of our bank into you we're going places 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 are they still are they still your bank they are still our bank to this very day and 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 100 by 2009 so that's end of 2009 two years two and a half years wow and so that that that first year where they're selling okay and then the second year where they're selling much better yeah 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 it was it was community so 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 the 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 you're trying to do is essentially impossible you can't you can't do this spoke to a sixth company it says okay we can maybe do it but it's gonna cost 150 000 pounds there's a lot of risks nobody's done this before we decided to do it it cost us 150 000 pounds at a time that we'd 50 000 pounds in our bank account so we gambled the entire future of our business on making this completely unripe 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 as i've been in this business journey because i knew if it doesn't work game over for us a business so many people told us it was a bad idea so many people told us people

are not going 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 there's a silly idea there's too much paperwork people's not getting to send in checks which they had to do back then as well as opposed to with some online payments but those were cumbersome so most people paid by check 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 and the first equity punks was enough of a success to keep us in the game we raised 500,000

pounds from about 600,000 600 investors but since then we've gone on to build a community of 210,000 people and we've raised almost 100 million pounds through equity punks and for me it is 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 your 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 around 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 as we sit here in 2020 one of the biggest words in marketing is community now yeah and you've kind of detailed that i was going to ask you but you've detailed very clearly the value of community um 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 die hard which is increases loyalty it gets them to evangelize as you say when they buy beer they're

basically it's almost like 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 very similar so this was before but it's very similar to what like crowdfunding, equity crowdfunding is today? Was this before this? 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 they come to 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 Juice or Punk IPA 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 in community and we do so much with our community and we have our big AGM in Aberdeen our annual meeting and 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 UK yeah so we do the business things 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 on money raising did you you the bbc released a podcast you might have seen yesterday like a podcast and you know i know you've had a sort of 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 yeah yeah so they said there was a a suggestion that your dad might have been loaning you money yeah and so my dad my dad is wealthy it's not excessively wealthy and not nearly as wealthy as the 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 and then like going going to your your marketing thesis because this is really what's defined um 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 percent that maybe you've 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? 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're closing that gap and we want to close that gap, but we only close that gap by making our market and our communications, we do work so much more effectively than theirs if our marketing 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 and is it going to give me a 10x return versus how my competitor would spend that money 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 challenge challenge brand and the second thing i think is kind of we've got to do that on new platforms we can't fight out on tv or in newspapers because those are where 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.

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 does so there has to be a connection there so does this reinforce what we believe in what we're trying to do as a company because otherwise it's just hollow and it's fake and it's false so how does this reinforce the kind of core beliefs that drive this business which is try to build an alternative business and a huge passion for fantastic beer one of the more extreme things i saw the vladimir thing uh what else have i seen i think to be fair i think i've seen it all because i'm obviously a marketeer so 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 my battleground um the the thing i read about more recently was that you you put in a complaint about your own beer which triggered press we did so this was uh 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 as 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 pipe 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 organization funded by the big beer companies big drinks businesses who've got a vested interest making sure the small ones are not successful how does that work so you make a beer that is really high in avb is that was that the correct term it was yes we made a beer 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 civilization by making an 18% beer. We had it in the sun, binge drinking,

blame this man, with like a cut out of my head in 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 love love fantastic beer so it was to kind of 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 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 in from a marketing perspective is that a good outcome because you were trying to get headline you complained about your own beer yeah you were trying to get headlines so is that job done i think in that one to a certain extent it was it was job done and to kind of show you how

odd things were back 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 awards ceremony in Scotland in 2010 put together by the BII, the British Innkeepers Institute. And we got a heads up before the awards ceremony,

hey guys, you're going to win the award for Scottish Bar Operator of the Year. So you 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 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 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 organized the award ceremony i was 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're

due to give it to you if they gave it to you guys they was going to pull all future sponsorship you're joking 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 digo issued us a formal apology about the whole thing and 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 portman group was one manifestation of it did you take that personally 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 the the other um extreme marketing thing that i saw which was um when i first read i thought this is fucking hilarious is the elvis estate tried to copyright infringe you for calling your USB, which I think is your most popular USB. It is Elvis Juice.

Elvis Juice. They sent you a copyright statement, just sort of like a, basically a notice that you're violating the copyright. Yes. And you responded with some Elvis rhyme. We did.

And on the LinkedIn post that I saw, it said you changed your name to Elvis. Yeah. Then the BBC come out and say that didn't happen. Yeah. What is the truth in this one? Did you change your name to Elvis? Yeah, we did.

And just to go back in the story. So Elvis sent, not Elvis himself, Elvis' 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 and 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 a name. So they said, we didn't change your name by deed poll.

That's not a Scottish thing. In Scotland, you need an official declaration to change your name, which we did. What's that, just signing a piece of paper? You sign an official declaration piece of paper and that counts as a name change in scotland and you don't even have to send it to anybody don't have to send it to anyone's gotten so we met the scottish requirements which is what we said we did but yeah my grandmother was very unhappy and she insisted i

changed my name back to back to james broodogs marketing has been so bold and it's been so standout and in terms of how hard you've in terms of the the return on every dollar you've spent it's it seems to have been a pretty astounding return per dollar spent 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 or 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, even the example you gave there of they're complaining about your own beer with the portmanteau yeah obviously the complaint wasn't real yeah because it was you because it was me what is the line between between like truth in when you're doing these stunts and virality and uh untruth for you and where where do you play are you willing to to do something that is from a

marketing perspective that is not necessarily true like complaining about your own beer if you believe it'll help reach the outcome which is to stick it to the portman group 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 so you were triggered okay 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 when we first started talking about marketing one of the things you said was um we made a lot of mistakes yeah took things too far yeah 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 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 we made in marketing and for international women's day we wanted to highlight highlight the gender pay gap and this was a project that was put together by some of the fantastic women we've got

in our business and we made a beer called pink ipa that we was going to sell 21 cheaper to women to highlight the gender pay gap which was something that we felt passionate about um 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 beard itself was a parody of products which market themselves towards women but then it just looked like another product that market itself to our women and if anyone like 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 just genuine 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 kiki 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 what i got from that was that like you've got to create a marketing campaign where the context is in sort of can't be separated can't be separated exactly because it will be separated if it can be exactly 100 um coming from being a the captain of a boat to being the captain of brewdog quite literally that is your job title that's my job title yeah um what adjustment was needed because on a boat when you're up all night and you there's men there and you know you've got a screw your screen script was it was the give me a snapshot of what the crew were like on

a boat a trawler so a lot of my best friends to this day are the guys that i worked with on the on the fishing boats 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 in an ongoing basis and I mean they're they're they're hard working 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 crew in a fishing boat come together and work hard to get them kind of through a tough time together was kind of really inspiring when it came to like business and leadership kind of later down the line. I can see you being a very good captain on a boat you and I just generally

you're you in the 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 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. No. 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 because 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 and 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 insecurities I I was a bit fucked up. So how did, how do you contend with that? 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

and 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 a thousand people to the team so it's like a thousand amazing well-paying jobs in a recession which are country which 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 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 therefore we need to set the bar incredibly high and push 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 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 businesses 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 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 was 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 interesting that's such an important lesson because you know in the example you gave there on in one hand you're like dragging people and all 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. 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. 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? 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 I've done in the last 12 months, we appointed an amazing independent non-exec chairman in Alan Layton, who's run 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 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 stand up lonely and there's another quote that I love um from Ben Horowitz the author

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 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 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 model where we win together as a company which i think is really powerful and we've always wanted to build a 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 £100 million of my own equity in the business to the team. So it's over the next four years, but that means each salaried team member receives £120,000 worth of equity,

and that's in the valuation today. So if we double in size, then that could be significantly more. And that's about recognising 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 100 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 planet each of our buyers 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 buyers in tokyo in berlin in cleveland in australia you know that okay half of the profit that this mark makes is shared with amazing people that put this experience together so we want to kind of elevate the standard of hospitality elevate the standards 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 that's the thing you know we 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 it and bring other people on but

the second thing you touched on there is um if, you know, we sometimes see us here and I've probably been guilty of this. You said you've been guilty of this. It's like looking at, you know, the team that you've built 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 remuneration regardless of outcome. So the second piece that I've garnered from that of leadership is also to align incentives 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 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 of our team we like to push

hard we're in an industry dominated by companies much bigger than ours so we need to be in 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 invested in our people this way but we've become a better business because 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 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 a lot of successful businesses in the country i'm thinking of the ben francis i'm thinking of the Hules, 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. Yeah. They realize, especially in your case, because this was your first shot at business. This was my first shot, yeah. So you're going to fuck up. Many, many, many times.

I fucked up a lot as well, hugely, over and over again and still today um but they get out of the way so ben francis stepped down as ceo when there was 30 people the founder of huel 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 if you knew that you didn't you had because learning on the job when you got 2 000 people is a high risk it's 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 and why because i think we're 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 really 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 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, what can we do as a team as a company as a collective as a community over the next five to ten 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. 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 numb or like just meh honestly it's 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 five percent of my time thinking okay this is good 95 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 beer brewery 16th most valuable beer brand yeah so in 2007 if I'd gone when you were doing you know you're taking that 20k loan from the bank and I'd gone and seen you in Dickey and I said listen a, a 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, 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? Well, I think there's 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 it 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 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 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. But if I said, how would you feel today? I'm speaking to 2007 James and Dickie. Okay.

And I'm saying, by the way, look at this. This is where you get to in 2022. Yeah. I'm guessing you would assume that on that day in 2022, you would be really content. Yes. But you're clearly not. You're not content, are you?

Because you're saying that, yeah, you're saying you're indifferent. Yeah. If you'd asked me that then, I would, yeah,'m going to like spend half of my time in the office half of my time traveling 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 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 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. One down. 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 um 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 yeah well i mean i guess the closest thing we've had to 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 rare. 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 winning Oscar. Score a winning goal in a world cup final. But like, for me, that was build a unicorn. And then the next day I was just like, okay, let's go. Where do we go from here?

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. Yes. So that was your first big dealing with being a being a cash millionaire and uh a fun a fun story from that so um the money came into myself and martin and uh i had bethany so it was like well into the tens of millions i had bethany my amazing assistant and transferred it from the lawyer's account into my bank account for some reason we there was a typo in the lawyer's account into my bank account. For some reason, there was a typo in the account numbers.

It went to somewhere in Russia. The money was lost for four days at a point in time we thought 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 check in my bank account. Where the fuck is the money? What am I going to do now? I've built a unicorn I've got a huge check in my bank account where the fuck is the money what am

I getting what am I getting now so in the fifth day um the boss of the boss of the boss of the person managed to find 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 uh missing presumed lost presumed never coming back Russia what a place to send it 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 oh my god so now now double triple check every start code that I uh that I send cash to what was that day what was that that like emotionally that's that that was what you're aiming for in many respects in terms of financial freedom what was it like and and maybe it's a theme of people you have on here but often when you get to where you think is

the thing that's going to make you happy a 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 celebration,

a bit of a kind of quietening of the voices of the head for a few days and then go again. When you say the demons, what do you mean? That inadequacy complex, like you're not good enough you're never getting much 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 who put that voice in your head i think a combination of early childhood

potentially partly parents despite being well-intentioned um 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 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. 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 and like okay no more no more sharks james have you ever forgiven your don't think so yeah but i think there's 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 um 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 yeah i just i worry about that a little bit because um yeah why don't you think you've forgiven her uh 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 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 when people talk about forgiveness they they always say that it's a process of like letting a prisoner go and realizing you were the prisoner the whole time um 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 yeah but on some level maybe I want that voice. Interesting. 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? But isn't that what the voice would say? That is what the voice would say. The voice values validation. It's desperately seeking validation. So of course the voice would say, what voice that is what the voice would say 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 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. I think that's a great point. And I love your book, by the way,

and I've actually highlighted a few points in that section. And I think at the moment, ambition are things that can be measured objectively because that objective measurement 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. Makes you able to do all these things. And has that voice but at the same time you're right the voice is like well if you lose me you're gonna lose your edge and puts makes you able to do all these things and has that voice changed over the years with your success at all no not at all it just moves the goal every time really moves the

goalpost achieve it goalpost no change at all in that voice fucking hell no that explains explains a lot to be fair because you've really been helpful with your business so one of the things you announced which you talked about earlier is this this new manifesto for your business called the the brew dog blueprint creating the business of tomorrow and this is kind of the late stage vision for 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 i don't just think over the last two years i think controversies followed us

almost every year since 2008 and much of that you've actually welcomed you've you've tried to get controversy it's been central to your marketing strategy and it's been it's actually from my estimation especially in those earlier served you tremendously well because this made the marketing dollar work a lot harder yeah um the controversy in more recent years starts with this punk's 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 uh 2021 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. 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? I would say that's completely not the case. Firstly, let me speak about how we've been as employers.

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 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 high growth, inexperience on my behalf,

unrealistic expectations, difficulties in COVID. 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. 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 tell it's 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 that 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 what did you think was fair 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 this 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 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 100 100 good and because i was so bought in and so focused on that i did i did push people too far 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 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 we want to become a 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 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 fully hear 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 reason 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. 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 the cheer you on from the sidelines, they support you because their mindset is they think that can be them someday. Whereas in the UK, I think 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 and 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 for as the other bits

of feedback that was fair and genuine I was there of hired us 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 tough because they just all get reported the same way in the media. Fair and genuine feedback then. So one of the things that you actually do at your company

and you were doing during this growth period is doing the old net promoter score thing. One of the things the BBC reported on. In your head office, the score for when people 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%.

Yes. How does one, when you, because that's just a number. Yes. How does one go about getting the context of that number and then improving it, the number? Because if I got that number, I wouldn't know where to bloody start. Yeah. Well, I I mean 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 yeah and I don't think you can change it based on a number and I think the mistake that we maybe made in the past was when we knew we had an issue with our culture we 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 straight 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 that just didn't help. So one of the biggest learnings 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 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 a retail business for a 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 in a day-to-day basis how do you think this is good 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 because we built it in a fundamentally different way than we would have built it before which is just an isolation and I think that's the 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 the the other thing you've done which i implore all companies to do is part as part of your brew dog blueprint when i went on the website i saw that you've got that transparency dashboard yes this is very important in the modern world because this puts the 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 sort of 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. 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 minds 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 an employer. Now, do we want to be 3.49 out of 5 as an employer? No. Is that significantly better than most people outside the company would have you think? Yes. But what we've committed to doing 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 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 and 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 key to our kingdom. It was everything that most companies usually kind of keep away, kind of 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 this transparency dashboard, specifically focusing on culture, people, headcount, employer score is a key evolution of that and obviously if if you're asking if you're doing surveys of your team yeah uh 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 it's 100 anonymous and it's managed by an independent third party oh good

which lets us get the purest most undililuted, fair, objective feedback we can. 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 that where I, my, 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 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 I was 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 the every single thing that happens in this business is a direct consequence of something I have done so 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 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. Is that an evolution, that perspective? That evolution is a perspective as well.

Before, if something went wrong in the company, and I mean, this is a perspective as well before if something went wrong in the car and i mean this is a steep 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. One of the trends that was very obvious in this documentary was because I assume the brewery industry is male-dominated. Yes.

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 would expect in a football locker room but wouldn't ever is this the the systemic sort of uprooting that you've had to to think about because

3 000 people around the world you you have to protect all of them i do you have to protect all of them from each other yeah that's not yeah 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 that horrific incident 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 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 so 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 we can get better at this we can get better 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 a 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 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 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 you've got two young daughters i do 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 it absolutely does so i'm super lucky to have two amazing daughters they're uh eight eight and five oh wow yeah um the eldest one is uh sometimes makes beer with me at home in the kitchen and a saturday afternoon which is that's fine does she drink it she doesn't drink it she smells it and she picks out the hops and she picks out them all and then she designs a label and she gives it to another documentary 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 and 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 and i can a 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 in the line here and then in terms of the culture we're building as a company as well i want to be able to when they've grown up speak to our daughters about okay we try to make it amazing for everyone by doing these things this is the values that 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 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 yeah 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 yes we have beer companies and then the bbc reported that you'd actually invested i did they said 500 grand you say 120k yeah context and so i they said i held 500k's worth of shares i invested 500k i quickly sold it down okay so at the time they said it was 500k why worth of shares. I invested 500k. I quickly sold it down. So at the time they said it was 500k.

Why are you investing in the people you hate? Keep your friends closer. So at that time, and 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 the company so the intention was to try and do a distribution deal

Heineken felt that we hated them and 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 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. 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 you were going to sell your company to Heineken. Yeah. 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. Why not? Why not sell it?

That'd be a big payday. 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 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. was to see is there an option opportunity to work together strategically or in distribution that helps us grow the business but we're fully committed to we're 15 years in we're fully committed to the next 15 years and seeing where we can take this thing and that's the fun and that's the challenge and that's what we're focused on when you had you

don't do many interviews i don't 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 yeah and his sort of conclusive point in that interview was um that he he thought you were obsessive someone who clearly struggles to express empathy or read social click um cues um 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 yeah words to that effect um 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 yeah so actually um 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 interesting 39 years old that's a bit you know yeah because of that exact quote really because of that exact quote and I was like chatting with my doctor and I was like do you think this meeting 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 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 right well it's because you you said about social cues at the start of the conversation and then I'd seen him say that and I'm putting two and two together and generally you know when 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. Yeah, yeah. So, and that can be, for a lot of people, you know, I mean, I'm saying this as part of it, that can be quite intimidating. Yeah. And so 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 i definitely need to do better in empathy a hundred percent and 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 in sight 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. Did you never get that feedback before before that article came out that article came out last year right? 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 different way all of this is painful yeah this whole process is painful this the the the letter that came out from punks with purpose the bbc stuff all of it's painful but um there is a silver lining I'm sure because there's always a silver lining. What is the silver lining? The silver lining is that the 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 we've perhaps done in the history of the company I've made more changes in my own leadership style than I haven't 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 members 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 as hard as it's been and it has been it's been hard i think we are better long term because of that and that's what we're focused on doing anxiety interesting topic i talk about a lot on here i've experienced it myself my my anxiety was this has been worse and hardest to control or diffuse with media related things yes so yeah so tell me about your experience with anxiety and and when it's been hardest and give me some give me an honest view of what when i use the word hard what what that looks like practically for you

well kind of going through the last few years i've had hyper vigilance i've had anxiety just when you're constantly on alert yeah yeah so you're gonna fight or flight jammed it jammed and kind of fight 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 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 the last couple of years um and some of that has been with things which are under you as well which just kind of makes those kind of blows kind of land 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 cool because i don't make my best decisions i'm not the best leader at that time so how can i calm myself down i work in a few breathing exercises breath work i don't want breath work is 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 on a mental health first aid course we've got a huge amount of business as well so 90 90 on it yeah 90 90 across our 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 that 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 did you used to think like i did that ceos weren't meant to talk about it yeah well 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 covid was one of those moments where that really flipped where in fact that the way that you brought people along with you was by letting i 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 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 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. Have you ever been to therapy or had any sort of medical support? Yeah, I go to therapy. Yeah, awesome. When did you start? I actually started when I separated from my ex-wife

to kind of help us through that transition, 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 challenging 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 what's what has therapy done for

you in terms of um 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 because I think it's just an understanding of myself so um I actually did last year five days of intensive therapy in the in the woods outside of Nashville so I was living I was living in a little hut for uh 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 behavior 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 situations as opposed as opposed to falling into default patterns which maybe didn't help me. A busy person like you. Yeah. 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? 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. 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 yeah craning something in yes it was the same for the top of the building okay that's really ridiculous but you the growth in the u.s has been crazy crazy crazy um 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 what should i expect as someone

looking in from the outside 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 and it was just before lockdown it was in February of 2020 and I was just hit with a blindingly stark realization 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 stabilized our business in the middle of a pandemic,

we completely pivoted and we thought, OK, 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 want 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 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 and 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 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 straight in the lost forest so we're planting millions of trees to create this beautiful native broadleaf woodland and habitat rewild a huge part of scotland just to repeat lens 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 in 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 governments and politicians are incapable of making the change it 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. One of the allegations obviously was we can one of the the the allegations obviously was about the lost forest in the bbc report took some time it was yeah they said that it would it was taking too long essentially to it was it was publicized but then a couple years later hadn't been built yet so just to give you a chance to respond to that 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 planning consent last week. We're starting planting in August. Exciting.

You've built a tremendous business in terms of scale and product and your customers love what you're doing. You've built that cult business in terms of scale and product and your customers love what you're doing. You've built that cult 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. 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 um here goes this is the single most important piece of advice in this book

understand an understanding of finance essentially why is that the single through all your experience why did you choose that as the single most important piece of advice and tell me your journey with finance 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 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 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 pounds in the bank account so for the first eight or nine years the business we were teaching

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 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 there's a really important lesson in that which i also learned um 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 realizing that i could no longer pay for conventional ads in a newspaper and 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. 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 a 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 need to succeed ourself and doing so many things in-house came from. It's by looking at a constraint and using that. Okay, this constraint is here.

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. 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. Yeah of that very reason yeah 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 um i've got i want your 50k steve because i'm gonna uh give it to a marketing agency and i sit in my chair and i go fuck i'm gonna keep going to keep the money in my pocket, thanks. 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 shit show and of course they're incentivized to oversell all of these 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 so our view was even if we outsource things from early the partners never get cared 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 you probably know we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest asks a question for the next guests yeah this guest this person has written you a question which i've not read yet and they don't have great handwriting so okay um i think that says do do you think your younger self would be proud slash look up to you now question mark oh good question we're going deep. I thought we were like finished with a deep question. You've listened before. Do you think your younger self would be proud slash look up to you now?

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 build something and achieve something and see that I've been able to to build something and and achieve something and see that I've got like luck enough to have two fantastic amazing little daughters and stuff so I think my younger self would be would be happy and proud of what I've done thank you um it's not easy not easy

coming here it's not is it it's not yeah it's intense but it is it is what it is and thank you for all of that and I hope you've enjoyed it you