How Athletic Brewery became one of fastest growing brands in the world, raised £175 million, launched in all 50 states and gained investment from Lance Armstrong and Blake Mycoskie

45:47and they do it to keep the supermarket happy first before they've even asked whether the consumer wants it then what happens is it goes into the supermarket the consumer doesn't even want it it's like why have you made this shit and then it doesn't sell and then it's but whereas what you guys are doing is you're saying right keep that community going no matter no no even there you're this big bill you're still doing the sampling events keep your ear to the ground which I love listen listen to the team and and do it very slowly slowly slowly and then if it gets that traction then all shit I think for people listening to this is just such it's the right way to do MPD or R &D yeah it's because I think loads of people get it wrong and look even probably my thinking before our conversation was that it's like you just create it and then you know it can still come from the founders I did head but it got to be tested with that core a thousand fans first Yeah, it's usually something that someone on our team is so excited about.

46:48And then they take feedback from their colleagues, iterate to the best version of it. Then we release it. And then we hear what the community thinks about it. And there is a really high bar of our community being super passionate about it for it to enter our core range on the store shelves. So by the time something makes it to a Tesco or a Whole Foods shelf, it is a beer that is one of the most popular in our whole lineup of 55 beers released last year. It has to be like winning awards, be super popular, be really consistent on quality. So there's a really nice bar. It's, yeah, it's a great lesson in just standards as well, especially off of something I've seen.

47:31it's almost like the adding putting the sports lens so it's having just high standards um so as i think lots of brits try and make it in the u.s in terms of either whether it's music sport whatever but i interviewed a guy who's got a brand in the uk called goo uh and which was like a huge huge challenge brand it was like a chocolate pudding um did really really well it got into all supermarkets he sold that and then he launched another brand called uh the coconut collaborative which is coconut yogurt and coconut yogurts um sorry coconut like chocolate pots flying in the uk absolutely fine uk try to launch it in america and for me i think that the brand would fly like the branding is perfect it's the story's great seems as a market just didn't work and they've had to rebrand to something called bond devil to try and hit the american market i don't know how it's going but he basically said the american grocery market did you guys call it grocery like the supermarket yeah is like mental compared to the uk so in the uk it's hard but you can kind of the the road if you want to go back to that is kind of laid out it's like you get some indie beer shops you get some indie restaurants selfridges harrods the kind of the big flagship stores whole foods and then your waitress and you get you get one meeting with a buyer and you get you're in all the stores how does it work in the us i've heard like some i've heard it's really hard i've heard you like yeah what are kind of how do you get your brand into a grocery uh retail over here yeah um i would say comparing the two markets uh just my observations i think the so in the uk there's like big retail chains that can So whether it's on or off premise, it seems like both grocery stores and pubs are both mostly chains.

49:31Like the independent market is a lot smaller. So the retail tier is a lot less scattered in the UK. It's very uniform. But the distributor tier in the UK seems like much more fragmented. In the US, I think it's the opposite where distribution is easier, much easier. It's the retail tier has so much nuance in the US. So there's so many retailers. The independent market is like 50%. So those are just individual stores you've got to be walking into and selling. So, yeah, it's different levels of high touch in both countries, but totally different route to market for sure. So what are the big retailers you've obviously got?

50:15Big boys. Yeah, so in the UK, the ones who've taken a bet on athletic and where it's doing really well are Tesco and Whole Foods. So we're really well available in those. In the U.S., some of our biggest partners are Whole Foods, who I already mentioned, Total Wine, Kroger, Walmart, Publix, Sprouts, Trader Joe's. Where we've really found amazing adoption is in the natural channel grocers, who tend to be really tip of the spear on new products. so it's like Whole Foods, Trader Joe's, Sprouts and then but we are starting to get broader like much better distribution and production so we can start to service the big retailers as well and Walmart's been an incredible partner there as well as Kroger yeah it's I can see how it's confusing because I'm trying to think it's like brands in the UK talk about will often go to like ireland first and then i would like france or potentially germany's a big market but there's this people listen to this one always think how do we crack america can we get into america it's like what i suppose i'm trying to get is like what would you suggest their first steps be or because obviously it's a huge market there are we're so similar but we're so different but it's what would you suggest yeah totally depends if it's food beverage or beverage alcohol um i would say more broad charge for food and beverage yeah for broader cpg um you can get pretty wide distribution um through natural channel grocery by going through like a unify or kihi or something so that'll get you pretty far pretty fast um but then once you want to hit up and down the street every grocery store and really get to scale um it it's i it's a whole mix of models like central warehouse or through food service providers and um so yeah there's a lot of different routes to market so there's just throw out there you got to think about individual cities and what your penetration can be in a certain market because i mean a company could spend all of their time focusing on new york city and have an amazing business model and you spend all of your time and effort on this one geographic area kind of like proof of concept and then hopefully that's an information hub for the rest of the area or the country yeah it's almost distribution density because i think people want distribution uh like in the uk everyone wants loads of distribution but actually your means are quite shallow it's quite shallow because it's but actually getting like this burning hot almost furnace of distribution this density where almost like the starbucks effect of like starbucks i think they they were the first coffee shop to open their next one over the road i think it really means it creates that kind of um virtuous cycle and one thing i want to talk about is is how like america's so paid you at all the states what have been the hardest states to drive the rate of sale or crack, like in terms of getting them on board with the athletic mission first, and then second, like actually driving the sales?

53:41Yeah. Well, it can be hindered by both retailer or distributor adoption. So on the one end, so we have in the distribution tier, we have some distributors who are so passionate about what we do that they just sell it everywhere themselves. or we have other distributors where it's this is available in our catalog for delivery but we never talk about it so our athletic team they would have to talk about it and sell every account in those places right so there's a different level of enthusiasm in distributors plus retailers like some retail chains are incredibly stubborn about evolving their set and they might have their two products and be good and not consider any change even if we're like this is the number one velocity beer in the country like you may want to consider it like yeah the evidence just bounce off their head um so it depends on distributor and retailer adoption in a way but we have seen the trends fairly universal in rate of sale across the country there are all sorts of different things that affect rate of sale in different time periods like weather um outdoorsy places tend to love craft beer so like we over index there some one that we're looking at is where cannabis is legal our sales are really strong is it maybe a compliment uh yeah yeah yeah there are also sorry to catch oh no i was gonna say there's some in the united states if you're talking about uk businesses maybe wanting to come over this way all of the states are independent and so there are some regulatory hurdles from state to state.

55:15And in terms of e-commerce, we know, based on data, that where we do a solid e-commerce business, it drives retail sales. Interesting, right. Because that's great for our listeners as well. I've always thought about, can you map out your hotspots of where your e-commerce business is doing well? Show that to a retail buyer and put us in these stores. And what's been the state that has maybe taken by the most surprise of thinking, oh, we didn't think we'd sell well there and it was absolutely flying? We've got some states that are pretty small states that outsell very large states. Such as? I think our partners in Massachusetts and Washington are doing an incredible job.

56:03So both at the retail and distributor level and then our athletic teammates in those areas have been really passionate too. But there's all different pockets across the country like that. And then there's states that are just the opposite for no apparent reason sometimes. But, yeah. yeah it's uh there'll always be surprising successes i think and it's almost like you know the what you were saying earlier about the path of you'll think something may take you two weeks and it'll take you nine months and you just think so it's 89 months it'll take two weeks i think that is just the nature of the beast is there'll be days when there'll be stakes that you think are actually going to boot off and they don't and then the ones that aren't going to do so well that that do um in terms of the of the partnership piece so so how are you making sure that like like how many not competitors because i think as as we were saying earlier as everyone's growing in the category so it's a it's a net positive but how do you ensure that these distributors are pushing athletic versus other brand and what are you doing to activate those guys and make them be diehard fans for you do you mean um it's something that so a lot of brands do reach out to me and they're like oh how should we go about forming an ambassador team and like what software do you use type thing and like it's not like a software thing it's not like we like turn it on and you can buy an ambassador team.

57:31It was really something that emerged really organically. So I think we walked by Derek, who was one of our first teammates, and me and him were just getting these passionate outreaches from customers. And I felt like I wasn't doing their stories and their interactions justice. And I wanted to talk to them more. I wanted to run races with them. I wanted to hear more about their stories, get their feedback. And we wanted to be much more interactive. but there were hundreds of these people and I that was like one percent of my job that I was doing from like 10 p.m to 1 a.m at night was like interacting with the community and so our thought process was we should make a team in a community and let them interact with each other and make it easy for them to interact with athletic and do fun things in the world with us participate in all our stuff and so we formalized the program and we thought we were just going to accept everyone but it was way too many people and so we actually have to do an application program now and like really have it be the most passionate people um but really it's uh people who want to tell other people about athletic brewing and like help us out do fun things with us in the world and so it's really come about super organically yes you'd never i always thought there's like some sort of like plan behind it or system behind it but i think a lot of these things is is actually the system starts in there or well maybe the gatorade can't when the product's so banging that the the rest kind of falls into place um i want to talk about um how yeah sorry so so so uh jj watt he's who's an investor and for listens he's a american footballer for because i haven't written here he actually just retired oh he's retired okay that's right then um but you've you've frequently as we've been talking referring to um your colleagues or as teammates and something i've picked up on i think that's a really interesting way of viewing business i think there's a lot of parallels between sports and business i'd love to know what jj what has taught you guys is there anything he's taught you about life or business that you kind of let soak into the into the culture here um so we've been really lucky from a very early stage in our company to um have attracted some amazing investors who are just authentically really excited about what we're doing at athletic brewing um and people on our athlete team too like we've some of the most elite athletes like high performing ironman athletes people like jj watt or even like top chefs like david chang like people at the top of their craft we very quickly found out that like a lot of these people don't drink or drink very sparingly off season or whatever when they're off the clock but didn't really talk about they didn't have a forum too but there was a lot of passion there and they got it immediately when we launched um so um like we've had ironman athletes reach out to us and be like i've been drinking your beer for years like could we do some sort of formal sponsorship because i'm just telling everyone about it um so i i think someone like jj watt like um in terms of what i've learned from honestly i've learned that just like he's such a great example in that um like i went down there and i to meet him like i asked him for just a super small window of his time and i expected him to be this big intense football player and he was like the nicest guy in the world uh it was right before the holidays yeah was this sorry just to give start that was probably fall 2018 so super early in the brand life cycle um i walked into their living room and him and his fiance at the time were our maybe just girlfriend at the time were like actually wrapping presents for charity like so they're just like the most down-to-earth nicest people and i really took away from him like the status he's earned he's just like the nicest guy in the world and so humble and um I think other investors, one of our early investors was Blake Mycoskie, the founder of Tom's Shoes.

1:01:54So Tom's Shoes is famous for like buy one and then they give a pair of shoes away to charity. And like shoes are a huge problem, especially in underdeveloped countries, like no access to footwear and clothes. And Tom's Shoes gave away millions of shoes. and Blake really literally wrote the book on kind of like a bigger purpose or triple bottom line business and so we're incredibly lucky that he just cold emailed us and asked about athletic brewing and um but from a super early stage he was his advice was probably much more formative than he thought in our business and like how to really continue like he was inspiring to continue to make our business a force for greater good so and what so so what was like just kind of again dive a little bit deeper into that because i think what you're saying is beautiful a lot of interesting just lessons for for our listeners so so uh blake he he yeah so blake built tom's shoes um and i may be off on the numbers but they like amazing brand give away millions of pairs of shoes to charity so um they're both stylish and very impactful and successful business and i think they sold that business for like 300 million dollars so it was a very commercially uh successful enterprise as well and so he really showed the roadmap of like you can build a very positive economic business and impact business to me but as we were building um there were a lot of nuggets that I teased out in his process of building.

1:03:35One of those, for example, was never lose track of participating in all interviews. He was like, people is everything in your company. And the second you stop interviewing, the second you'll lose control of the culture of your company. And so that was something I really took away from him, but among countless things. Anything else? Because I think there'll be... I love one of my guys always trying to find the nuances. and it's just like just keep going on that path yeah is there anything else he taught you i i'm not sure exactly like he did teach me a lot about time management um but i i think something i picked up from him and other people is like it's as important what you say no to is what you say yes to um so uh there's a stage kind of for saying yes to everything and then there's a stage of unfortunately saying no to a lot of things too so that you can take care of what is important also yeah that's another theme it's like it's the whole steve's jobs which is focus is saying no i think it's focuses it's hard to focus because there's just a boundless infinite opportunities out there um so you said dave uh chang he says i've i know him through uh anthony bourdain so bourdain's one of my like heroes i don't know what what your thoughts on him are but he's just his ability his drive his storytelling just everything he did was just amazing because well how long was bourdain like was the sort of him how was he perceived over here culturally how's he perceived here culturally not like yeah yeah as like in the u.s like i think generally positive um strong storyteller just kind of like you mentioned um kind of fearless in terms of you know what he would approach and how he would approach things which i think garnered a lot of respect you know there was there was a lot of sadness you know when when he left yeah i mean yeah because it was it was that was just an awful awful part but i think his film roadrunner was i think is the master class film yep and dave uh well david chang speaks in that because I think he was a pro golfer and then he canned it all off to be a chef.

1:06:01I know he's an incredible golfer and was very good as a child for sure, yeah. He's a really talented guy. So what's he kind of taught you about building this business or it could be just about craft, it could be about life, it could be about anything and try to kind of get into these one-sentence principles? for me with dave i think not losing sight of um you know the foundation which is being spirited and creative and just throwing spaghetti at the wall all the time just have ideas to generate ideas really one of them will probably be good a lot of them might be bad but just come up with them don't stop and how the fats yeah yes and and how do you that's kind of speedboat thinking in terms of, I think with shitbarners, you get quite stagnant, you drop the anchor.

1:06:47So how do you do that from a, I suppose what I'm trying to tease and tickle out is how you actually do that because a lot of brands, as they get bigger, it's very easy to be a speedboat when you're five employees, 200 much harder. How are you doing it, keeping that magic going as you're getting bigger? I think like on the product side and R &D side, you know, we can apply that every day. what new ingredients are there? Who should we be working with? We shouldn't just look at beer. We should be looking at food and all culinary aspects, health trends, things like that. And so we can do that on the pilot system in our e-commerce platform where we get that direct feedback and interaction with the consumer.

1:07:30But one thing that we've seen on calls with him too is rethinking how you think about things that already exist and how can this be position to a new audience in a different way you know how do you take your your shipliner product and make it nimble with little tweaks like little bold on concepts and is there an example of that um oh i mean he's like such a big celebrity we expected on like our first calls with him for him to we didn't know what to think like you would expect a celebrity to kind of mail it in maybe not show up and like the video goes on and well we met him in person for the first time in new york but like on the first zoom call with him like the video goes on and he's like present has a notepad of ideas and like at different kind of times in the conversations like waving his arms with excitement and like i think it's that passion and showing up yeah and the creativity and and just not being afraid of of reactions you know thinking about the same product in a different way.

1:08:36I can't speak to it too much because we'll see what happens in the future, but how a product shows up in a glass. It can be so simple, but just this one little deviation could really disrupt things. It doesn't care about what people think, too. It's definitely the no-egos mindset, but he could extol the virtues of a microwave for hours, which is something that food snubs would probably look down on. Yeah, he's a G. So there's a brand in the UK called Camden Town Brewery. And there's another brand called Beaver Town. I don't know if you can remember these. But both of those brands have done something really well in terms of what you said about an existing product, i.e.

1:09:21a shitline. Like, how can it show up in a new kind of light? And they actually put this on their Instagram. and as we say is because the pub culture is so big in the uk they've designed their beer cans and everyone nicks them or like steals them from the pub and they literally have got a post i wrote a thing about this on my blog of of how they said yeah enjoy taking the beer glasses from the pub and they're these beautiful beer glasses and the whole kind of piece behind it is that if we can create something so beautiful that people start thinking of well they'll drink the water out of back up and suddenly you start to kind of infiltrate consumer's subconscious and like now it was a thing and like they're actually encouraging people to do it but it's a piece of like kind of magic about how you show up in a new light and these glasses have done that and it's um yeah there's just there's a lot in that i think it's just kind of pulling at it and then back to um back to this teammates things i think one guy i interviewed has got a brand called candy kittens in the uk who are kind of the huge brand and there's this whole thing in um the kind of founders entrepreneurs of you know we're like a family around here it's like a family around here and what he was saying is if it's a family it's almost too kind and it's like it's it's not it's too forgiving whereas if you say we're we're a team and it's a sports thing like how how do you guys play into that if you say you've got family on the left and uh and and team work teammates here like what when you're hiring people like what are you looking for specifically yeah i think um so the word employee has always like never felt right to me like i'm not master of anything and like i work with people i want to help like they are most likely better at what they do than i am so like the word employed has never really sat well with me and team makes a lot of sense because we all are working together going the same direction we win and lose together so that word has always made sense the word family also does not make sense in a business setting as much as people wouldn't want it to be i care incredibly much about our teammates but like at the same time it is a very merit-based culture so like high performers people who work harder will do better and like um so uh i've i think a lot of companies have gone too far into the family realm and gotten themselves in trouble and had to like take a lot of the underperformance or bad acting that comes with that kind of culture also so and then if with the meritocracy piece how do you how do you reward those who put in the more effort like how do they look at people who've always done best at athletic are people who i identify and solve big challenging problems who drive the company forward who are eager for more opportunity um who aren't necessarily asking like oh what's my path like and they put it all at your feet they're like i want to do this big thing can i have permission to do it i'm like go get it uh and yeah so uh but it's also just high performing people who are great teammates get great opportunities so yeah i think it's it's and and then in terms of um i don't know if i just totally no no i think it makes sense you know so i coach my son's soccer team and like i think i learned more about the business there and you know more about their here um but you know every there are lots of positions on a field there are lots of positions on a team and every single one of them is critical and if one of them fails then the whole team is probably going to fail and every single position needs support in order to be successful so just making sure that you have that ecosystem that balance more than anything the communication and the camaraderie and their willingness to communicate.

1:13:51That's just... I'd love to know what sort of some of the lessons you take from here that make your kids' football team better. Because I think it's... I love exploring different inputs. I think if you have different inputs, you have different outputs. So you want to learn from different things because then you get a better result. So actually talking about your kids' football team is really quite a weird input, but may produce so interesting. No, you know, similar to what Bill was saying earlier about celebrating the failures. That's what you need to do on the soccer field, and that's how these kids grow as a team, as humans, and become better people also.

1:14:27It's like, when you miss a shot, when you have a bad pass, it's not like, oh, why'd you do that? It's good try, nice idea, or constructive feedback. Like, maybe we can try this this way next time instead of just tearing people down. And so that's the culture we try to promote i think in here where things happen you know bad things happen we lose product uh machines break and it's just you know how do we work out of this what are we going to learn from this how are we going to grow together and it's you know never you can't wait to a single person or event and you know call that the failure and then completely agree and i think that this that's the kind of interesting nuance between uk and british and british kind of mentality in the us which is way more kind of positive as you said earlier like they're walking with a storm cloud over your head but there's this it's more like like positive reinforcement let's say someone makes a mistake twice or thrice like how do you like discipline that person or not discipline maybe that's the wrong word but as we say if someone makes like fucks up in an american football game or soccer game the coach doesn't sit there going oh don't worry about it everything's gonna be fine mate like they get disciplined do you know what i mean yeah yeah it's at some point it goes into a territory where someone just doesn't care to be better or get things right so that is a problem then at that point you take the steps to coach out and if that's not effective then you got to rethink where that person is in there in the field on the field interesting what i want to go into now is is your your relationship because obviously coming in today it seems like john you're kind of pushing it from behind producing the product and bill you're kind of you're kind of pulling it or dragging it over glass in those early days i think co-founded partnerships can work there's great stories of them working but there's stories where it can be a car crash and at least in brands in the uk that's that's that's it that's it has happened but what has been some of your biggest like arguments or challenges you guys have had personally or not personally but professionally and how do you resolve them as as as co-founders to move in the right direction for athletic i don't know if we've had arguments yeah it's crazy with all the which is we're incredibly lucky and that uh i think we've always been very in sync or complimentary and i right i do it it's kind of worked out perfectly in that neither of us are really an expert in the other person's realm we're both always doing our best to learn it but then so we we've been very complimentary i think uh in hindsight we've been so lucky and we've reflected a lot on that we like it's so lucky to be building a business with a co-founder and now a great team of talented people but to go through it alone it would be an incredibly lonely process and people definitely need a support system and we check in with each other at some point every day even i was living on the west coast last two and a half years and we would inevitably touch base every day and be like how's your day going anything crazy going on any big fires or like i try to catch john on the drive home or something like that um so i think also like that we john said it really well earlier but like we approach every day with the mindset that something's gonna break and if you add a heap of emotion on top of that it's often just like an unproductive fire you're like lobbing into the room that helps me because yeah and it's like well yeah we knew something would happen today that's what happened like what's the road forward like there's no point and like yeah you can take a few minutes or a few hours to feel sorry for yourself about whatever happens and then what's next um so i i would say though like one of the things that i've recommended to co-founders is be really thoughtful about who you're entering business with it's like it's such a big decision and like i would be really wary too if it's two people with the same skills same background going into business together too because like you'll inevitably want to work on the same things and have huge areas of blind spots too so but also i have seen the three and four co-founder situation also go really wrong for totally different reasons because there's like a total morass in decision making and like no one knows who really does anything a lot of responsibilities overlap and so that's difficult also i think yeah and just generally having a relationship based on trust and having culture that we talked about which is permission to fail All those same concepts apply to us.

1:19:36And we've both made mistakes. It's totally cool. And we've taken shots and we've missed. We've taken shots and scored. It's all fine. But we have to be cool about it together, learn about it, move on. I think it's that what you said there is such a gem of wisdom is almost expected to break every day. and it's quite a stoic way of looking at things like it's it take it takes the emotional out of the beasting which is like a sumer power i think as a founder and what this is a question i ask all guests and it goes we talked about the obstacle is the way um by ryan holiday since we're all kind of stoicism we'll go there but um what has been one seemingly insurmountable obstacle on the journey that retrospectively actually paved the way forward and that could be mean anything

1:20:35i i do love that book i've read it like three times yes um even sound bites of what i said like a few minutes ago are actually extracted from that book in a way like things are gonna go wrong feel sorry for yourself give yourself a beat and then move on and solve those challenges um so i'm not what's fault i think one thing that i struggled with the most early on was you know we did this huge fundraising round early on where we found our angel investor round we built this seemingly huge brewery in connecticut the first ever real non-alcoholic beer brewery in the u.s um and we thought it was huge and it would take us a while to grow out of and just coming around the corner on our first summer 10 months later we had already laughably outgrown this building and um we sorry sorry so so you said so you so you built the factory and you thought it was like a huge factory yeah we turned it on in may 2018 we really started selling beer in june 2018 right and as we were coming around the summer of 2019 so just 10 months later and like april we were totally out of capacity and um to the point where like a year before no one on the planet wanted or was talking about non-alcoholic beer and now there was like outcry about this short like ironic shortage of non-alcoholic beer people were meeting our distributors trucks in the parking lot at grocery stores it wasn't even getting to the shelves and like it was this whole like it was really rich in hindsight like uh if we went from getting made fun of to not be able to keep it in stock we doubled the size of that brewery we moved in three huge used tanks in time for that summer and outgrew it again like three months after that so we were in we build and run all our own manufacturing quality and that's a real investment it takes such time to do and we're staring down this summer season with no capacity and seemingly no short timeline solutions in sight so i think that was one of the big biggest challenges we've ever faced what was the darkest day on that been what did you say to yourself you looked in the mirror because there's as you say a lot of people listening to this podcast to realize that everyone goes through some kind of fucking hell at some point yeah i think there was one moment that summer where i i had just finished a great meeting in new york city it was like it was like my first meeting of the day felt great whatever and i was walking across central park to my next meeting i gave john a call and like on the series of two minutes like a bird pooped on me before my next meeting and john was like oh we lost three tanks of beer like we're so out of stock and then we lost like basically we john didn't think the next three batches were gonna dump them all and it was just It's like, oh my goodness.

1:23:35What about you, John? What's been your obstacle that was actually the way? I think one of the hardest challenges was faced early on as we were kind of in product development time. We had sales to fulfill to a major national store and we had product that we wanted to ship out. and everything was fine but we didn't feel a hundred percent confident in it and we decided to eliminate the product hit pause on production and put in some infrastructure in our building which took a better part of four months to put in so it kind of put us just guess what year was that this was 18 yeah late 2018 okay so that's funnier then yeah so we had this we had a great process everything was looking really good but we didn't at that time have a tunnel pastorizer and you know the more we learned about food safety and all the critical control points and the fact that we wanted to grow this brand and also this entire category we knew that we had to be as thoughtful as possible in doing it and so we kind of retrenched hit pause purchased this pasteurizer that was on a showroom floor in germany and waited for it to come before we produced it anymore which was a hard thing to do when we needed to sell some product and yeah what what are the voices in your head in that in in during those those periods and how are you because we talked earlier about taking the emotional bee sting out of thing but when when you're walking through central park and a bird shits in your head and then and then you've got you lose three tanks of beer like what what do you say to yourself because that will really help i think these people listen to this in all three of those situations i don't think we necessarily had the solution in that moment so in the moment john described it was all right we're going to destroy the beer and we're going to think about this and we're going to do the financial modeling can we buy this new equipment um then the bird pooping on me you know i had a big meeting to get to i popped into a store bought a shirt went into a restaurant changed my shirt went to the meeting um in terms of capacity being out um john and i thought about it we considered a lot of routes and we eventually just started getting on planes and knocking on doors of breweries that were under capacity and we found one in san diego eventually um but yeah we there are different solutions to every problem but um everything in the moment always seems insurmountable but if you just hang on a little longer there is always a solution there i love that and in terms of there's a book i love by peter teal zero to one if you read that And one of the first questions he asks everyone I think is going to join his business is, what is one truth you hold that pretty much everyone else would disagree with you on?

1:26:48I think it's quite an interesting question. I'd love to maybe go with you first, John. And what's one truth you hold that most people would disagree with you on? Well, that could be about the way you do things here or maybe your kids football team. Or everyone wants to take it first. well like the founding print unless you add one on you no but like they're like founding assumption of our business basically so we have one about market size and then one about process essentially uh but um one of the big things we were looking at the world differently was because we knew it so inherently in our lives i was like i want alcohol maybe in one specific hour of the week and like don't want it even the next morning the effects of it but i want great beer pretty much all the time like any time any day any hour any meal pairing any social occasion any calling situation and the whole world is looking at non-alcoholic beer as if it was something that as i said before one percent of the population was drinking one percent of the time where it was really 95 of the population would probably drink this in a huge array of situations And so one day there will be a flippening where non-alcoholic adult beverages are consumed more than adult alcoholic beverages, which was 0.3 % of the whole when we started.

1:28:17So I think that was a huge different view of the world. But we also took our process down to first principles also. Don? well nobody had really thought about producing nobody had really thought about producing non-alcoholic beer in any new format or style a because they didn't need to because nobody thought that there was a need or want for it in the world and b because it's hard and it's hard to think about recreating a process with the same ingredients and ending with a better, like the same or better result. So there was a lot of doubt in terms of what we could do, that we could create a product that was better or just as good, if not better than its alcoholic equivalent.

1:29:13So that was a challenge. That was a fun challenge. I think that we nailed it. I think that perfection is a myth and I think most of our team believes that too and we're always very proud of the product that we're putting out and we have really high standards and we won't release anything that isn't exactly as we expect it to be but we do always believe that there is room for improvement and so that kind of ties us back to research and development and it's not always new products but maybe it's the same product better maybe it's working with new ingredients in a different way maybe it's working around the same exact product but making it more sustainable so a lot of research and development you're not actually going to see visibly or experience but you know at the end of the day it should be consistent yes i think i interviewed a mitchison star chef because that's like another one of my massive passions on this podcast and he was basically saying that perfection is is the thing the quote it's like perfection is the enemy of the great or something like that and it's like perfection is actually super egocentric word it's like it's because it's actually it's a mirage perfection so instead he's like look at it from a different perspective and raise your standards from the bottom and have really high standards that you're constantly trying to improve but you're you're not in that kind of ego perfection thing a few more bits i want to explore then we'll wrap this up because I'm absolutely loving those guys.

1:30:40But what's the – in the UK, obviously, it's much smaller, literally geographically, but the challenge of brand foodie community is epic. It's huge. Everyone knows everyone. Everyone helps each other. What's it like over here? Is there like a whole thing in New York or LA? What's the kind of the scene like? um i think in many ways you know we're going towards like a borderless world in some ways um we've had really good collaboration with uk brands we've had really good collaboration with brands in other parts of the us um we've met really interesting colleagues all over the world um you know everything about athletic brewing is meant to be just positive aspirational universal and have customer appeal not tied to geography but just how our brand makes people feel um so the more we travel and meet new people and they grow our community the more we find like the same messages resonate with a lot of people um so people care about health and mindfulness and people care about sustainability so it's like a lot of the things we're talking about a lot of people care about in our community but is there like a uh not necessarily your community but i mean like in terms of in new york are there for example i host supper clubs in london did one last wednesday in and you get loads loads of brands and you just get around the table a few glasses of wine we actually have lucky satan there maybe we'll have that let's see the next but yeah but um um but yeah is there that kind of thing in the in in the states oh absolutely yeah be a regional like the craft beer world has a huge community um of people who share ideas collaborate get better um and you know there's in different cities like bartenders will get together in groups of like 20 or 50 and do bar crawls and like really yeah there or um yeah the chef community so for sure and are there any fat like other challenger brand founders that you think would be good guests on this oh for sure yeah uh yeah definitely think about but i could give you tons of names from the u.s for sure yeah that would be that'd be amazing um and then yeah two more two more things we'll explore so do you guys know daddy mayor the uh he's got what's it called grammar sea tavern yeah yeah we don't know him but we know of him no yeah no of him right so so i was um he's got this thing of like applying slow gentle pressure is his mantra i think it's a really um good mantra of kind of applying pressure but uh in a gentle way so it's almost that constant like need for bet for better but i was listening to him on tim ferris and he talks about there's three types of competitive competitive essentially so you've got muhammad ali which is like you get off on like kind of beating someone or being or then so there's that the second is john mckinroy where you'd like you'd hate to lose and then the third is um almost like a usain bolt which is like the continuous and continuous improvement i'd love to know like what kind of competitiveness are you not not for yourselves personally but like trying to be as a brand because i read on the sign up there it says like be number one i think on one of the signs so and i think people especially in the uk there's a whole thing of don't be competitive it's like a bit uncouth to be competitive in the uk it's with to i don't know a weird nation but i think in america it's actually um champion but yeah what's your perspective on that i we've take we're very collaborative with the industry and we're very active and helping form the adult non-alcoholic beverage association and sharing information with all the startup brands in that ecosystem so definitely trying to take an industry leadership position um i think we're competitive by nature but it's not necessarily at anyone's expense um i'd say in many ways we're competitive with ourselves and we don't want to look to the side and get distracted by anyone because their goals are just different than ours um and their mission's different and so i think we're big believers in positive sum games this is so early in this category um this is gonna be a many billions tens of billions category and there's gonna be plenty of room for people and so it's it's just so early and we don't really think about competitiveness that way what's your take I'd say yeah I mean I agree with Bill I think we've got a hybrid of of those competitive natures though yeah we're constantly we've got internal drive to be the best that we can be and so being number one as we kind of have on our on our wall it's it's not just like the the number one brand it's be the best at compliance be the best at quality be the best at helping grow the category and being supporters of of the movement be the best at making an impact and so you know it's kind of everywhere it's external internal and kind of helps motivate and i think inspire the team and all the all the people that participate in our community yeah i love that we do i mean you know one of my things my and i like to get things done i'd love to see things complete but one of the things I'm most excited about with Athletic is really not seeing that immediate closure or success.

1:36:31I'm really excited about the day when my son turns 21 years old, and it's not really celebrated because it doesn't really matter anymore. And the whole idea of beer with alcohol and beer without alcohol is no longer a thing, and the dialogue has changed, and it'll be something that's written about in anthropology books. but you know it's a very long yes well i mean it's quite i mean you've heard that we we kind of started with dreams and i suppose we're not necessarily ending with dreams but you talked about how you want it to be there's no it's not binary where it's are you boozing are you not boozing it's just like it is what it is where do you think it's going to like what does it look like success look like in you know uh 10 15 20 years time i i think i personally think it's easily going to go there, especially in the US.

1:37:22The European market already has a lot of that culture established. It's normal to have a non-alcoholic beer at lunch, at dinner with your family. Is it easier in Europe than it is in the US, would you say? For sure. Oh, really? In terms of market, some markets over there are 10-17 % of total beer in the US we're looking at. two percent yeah in the right channels yeah so um yeah the european non-alcoholic beer market is something like 7.5 billion dollars where in the u.s it so 7.5 billion in the eu in the u.s it's like 500 million still so it's like one tenth it was like one thirtieth when we got started so that's mad that's mad okay so then final question this i asked this to all guests who've got kids because it's just quite an interesting lens to explore.

1:38:20But what's one piece of advice you could pass on to your kids?

1:38:27Big question. Yeah. So, yeah, I think there's a lot of different things I want my son to take away from my experiences. But I think nothing fulfilling and satisfying is ever easy and comes without work. if something's given to you while you're sitting on a couch great you won't really enjoy that um so i i think it's actually a conan o 'brien quote but i had it on my desktop forever it was like work hard be nice and good things will happen um and like generally just being a good citizen of your family your company the world good things will happen and if you work hard and show up every day you will make an unbelievable amount of progress and like what what are your um i know there's no it's like an always on thing but like how do you like what are your working hours and how do you kind of balance out family time because i think lots of founders struggle with that um part of the equation do you mean yeah i mean there's almost always fires burning when we go home and that's totally fine like it's nice to leave something exciting on the table like it's a good it's a it's kind of a curse about working in an exciting place an exciting category an exciting company is that the to-do list will always be 25 items too long and you gotta pick your top three every day um so i i'm like really intentional with both my home and family life uh I used to be a super early workout and work hard like work all day with my family I'm much more intentional now to like pick those spots like I always wake up early but I love like that hour in the sun in the morning with my son and then I try to unplug for like three hours in the late afternoon early evening to just be present with my family cook dinner do bath bed all that stuff and then work again at night on like a key project or something maybe i've left over so you will actually do like uh yeah i think the whole one another thing i think which is definitely changing and covid's been the kind of the put wind in those sails is this whole idea of hustle and well you've got to hustle but you don't have to hustle from like it's going doing sprints and then easing off sprints then easy off kind of like so having that three-hour gap with your kids and having dinner and then doing more yeah that's changed a lot yeah having moments when your work is like clearly off is important like the phone literally not accessible and i think changing locations is key even if it's just to a different room you have like that's my work room this is my family room or um is very important but yeah i've pretty well defined hours of when while I'm working.

1:41:25And as a result, I'm much more productive because I'm 100 % on when I'm working and I'm 100 % off when I'm not. And it's not just this wish-wash of stressful ambiguity. I love that. And finally, you, John, what's yours, mate, in terms of your piece of wisdom? You passed me a cheap kid. I don't know if you were one kid or two kids. Yeah. So two. I didn't mention my hidden daughter. string me up um yeah no i i don't think i could have said it any better than bill um it was just showing up being good treating people fairly nicely and putting some effort in at the end of the day it's hard to um be proud but you know if you've done the effort if you put in the effort and you have something to show for it even if you have nothing to show for it you can be proud of the effort that you put into it and you know you can rest easy with that um in terms of like communicating you know when you are and aren't working i would definitely try to set those those lines in the sand where you aren't working but i think to some extent when something pops up that's really important and you say i have to step away from my family right now because this is something that involves a human or something real you know i think that impresses upon your family something important that you know you're treating everybody equally um that people are real and everybody needs time when things are important and yeah i love that guys it's been an honor i'm so grateful and love yeah it's been such a banging interview such a sick interview thank you so much thank you thanks for making the trim yeah it's incredible to see you in person and yeah, we'll have to see you on your own turf in the UK next time we're over there.

1:43:18A hundred percent. We'll definitely do that. Thank you so, so much for listening to the podcast. I really, really do appreciate it. If you liked that episode, only if you liked it, please do give it five stars, subscribe, tell all your friends, families, foes, next door, but one, cat, dog, whatever. Please tell everyone about this podcast. It means the world to me and I really want to understand what your pain points are as the new wave of Challenger Food and Drink brands. please do hit me up on LinkedIn, search Dan Pope, and hopefully we can together create a more meaningful and powerful podcast for the next wave of challenger food and drink brands.

1:43:54Thank you so much.