Brewdog: World’s Most Controversial Boss

0:00James, what's your go-to hangover cure? So my go-to hangover cure is very, very specific. So, so many of the effects of hangover is amplified by the dehydration that you get when you're drinking alcohol. So before I go to bed, I drink two pints of water laden with electrolytes and salts. It tastes horrible, but it just made you wake up the next morning like so much fresher. And I had a few of my best buddies for my fishing boat days were down in London with me a few weeks ago. And we had a big night out. We were playing golf the next morning, and I thought everyone was going to be hungover as hell.

0:29So when we got back to my apartment, I made the same cocktail for them. Next morning, everyone was on their A-game. Can you tell us about it? What's in there? How do we make it? Where do we get it? Yeah, so I've got a few that I use from various different companies. The company that I use at the moment is called Relight. So it's just a kind of mixture that you use that you put in your water. And it's got salts. It's got electrolytes. It's got minerals. But it essentially increases hydration in your body. So obviously, you're still going to get some impacts of the hangover. But most of the hangover is amplified by the dehydration.

0:58So if you can take the dehydration out, you can manage the hangover. So really random thing, and I don't know if you know this or can validate it. And I've only ever done it once, which is relevant, which is when I went to Oktoberfest. I went with the guy who's been going for 30 years, and he used to be a general in the army and all this kind of stuff. And he was our chairman in my last company. So his whole thing about, I'll be your chairman, but I've got to take you guys to Oktoberfest. And we're like, that sounds like an incredible deal. Yes. What a punishment. Done. So anyway, he took us to Oktoberfest.

1:21Did you have Lederhosen on? Yes, yes, yes, yes. And he made us do all of it. He was like serious about the whole thing. anyway he told us to take an aspirin and so we took an aspirin before we started drinking and he said basically it relaxes your bladder so one of the things that happens when you start drinking is you actually from dehydration you urinate less during the night and so you anyway there's this whole shtick and his thing was aspirin that's the trick and he was right weirdly before you drink before you start drinking so our formula currently is aspirin pre-drinking drink responsibly and then obviously take Heights because I actually think Heights is pretty anti-hangover yeah vitals by the way yeah get a hold of get a hold of what you're saying and then you'll be fine yeah okay glad we've established that yeah what is the last book that changed your perspective on business I read the Elon Musk autobiography by Walter Isaacson and it was so weird because I usually like start a book and I finish it so so quickly it was oddly painful to read because with every page as a business person as an entrepreneur i felt more and more inadequate so it was like painful reading it because it's like oh my god what am i doing i'm wasting my time i'm not pushing that i'm not working hard enough i'm not ambitious enough and like i think relative to whoever i am quite ambitious but for me it was a painful read and it was an inspiring read but just to kind of read of like how passionate how driven how focused how much attention goes on can i try and achieve something that was bigger than himself so i just kind of doubled down on what i was trying to do it gave me a kind of renewed test of purpose but i found it painful to read because i felt woefully inadequate with every page i turned broodog's obviously a global business now with you know billions of dollars of value and all of this kind of stuff but how close has it come to bankruptcy oh so close so many times and i work with so many startup businesses at the moment as an investor and advisor what they always say to them if you are not on a knife edge constantly you're not pushing your limited capital hard enough if you're comfortable you need to push more and like for the first six years i was delighted when we had enough money to pay the staff at the end of each month and we was almost never able to pay ourselves but if we were sitting in cash i wanted that cash to be working i wanted that to be kind of pushing and kind of growing the business so we teetered on the like on the kind of precipice of oblivion for kind of six plus years but i think that's got to be the way because you've got a limited amount of resources you've got to work those hard so you've got to exist on that edge what's your favorite non-brew dog beer oh amazing question so i just love beer and i love sharing the passion i've got for fantastic beer and like discovering as many beers as i can so there's a beer business in san diego called ale smith they make a beer called speedway stout they do a vietnamese coffee infused one that is absolutely insane i love that beer again from california russian river do an ipa called pliny the elder absolutely mind-blowing for an ipa and then classic from belgium anything from canteen is there any super mainstream beer that you are willing to say i quite like um and it's not that i've got anything in theory against saying that i like it if i did like it i just i don't like them and we exist to give some give people a better option okay fair play i didn't think i was going to get an answer what's your most controversial opinion about the beer industry generally uh my most controversial opinion about the beer industry hmm so it has to do with packaging and i think this is a metaphor for how little the big beer businesses care about beer so if you package beer in a bottle that isn't dark down the beer is going to be damaged so the wavelengths of light that penetrate a green bottle a clear bottle they cause it beer to go off they um cause a beer to skunk so any beer that's not in a dark brown bottle you're wasting your time you're wasting your money that beer is permanently damaged well heineken and green bottles it is indeed wow don't waste your money what's your favorite brew dog marketing campaign ever so i was uh picking up my daughter evie who's uh who's 10 now she was four years old and i got to the nursery gates and her teacher was like james please come here i'm so concerned about your daughter i want to speak to you i'm like oh my god okay and she was like james it's normal for kids to have crazy active imaginations but the stuff that evie tells me on a consistent basis is just way way way out there she told me that last week you were hanging out of a helicopter over the bank of england throwing taxidermy cats with parachutes out of the helicopter i just don't know where she where she gets this nonsense And I was the teacher, yeah, that actually happened last weekend.

6:04You don't read the paper? That's what I did last weekend. I showed her the photo and she was like, oh, oh, oh, I'm sorry. So for that reason, I love that one. It was the campaign was called Death to the Fat Cats. I'm scared of heights. We were hanging out of a helicopter rounded up as a, as a drew dog. But we've done so many. We almost got arrested when we've rejected ourselves naked onto the houses of parliament. we petitioned parliament again to change the law to get a two-third pint glass legalised in the UK we drove a tank through the streets of London to announce our Baron Camden so I love so many of them but yeah, hanging out with a helicopter with the taxidermy cats in the parachute has got to be a highlight What's the biggest risk you think you've taken that's actually paid off?

6:48I think with our business it was just risk after risk after risk and I always said to Martin I always said to the team like this business is going to be one of two things this is going to be a massive global hit or we're going to crash and burn completely but that is totally fine because the space in between is boring before i was running the business i was captain of a fishing boat if i end up back in a fishing boat amazing because i love doing that but i just don't want to be in that space in between i want to take risk after risk after risk i want to put everything in the line for what we believe in i want to take massive gambles and i want to back ourselves to find a way to make these gambles pay off so like the history of our business is almost a history of massive gamble after massive gamble which kind of makes sense for you then eventually opening a store in vegas yes yes yes and on the opening night of uh opening night of vegas with an amazing opening night we gave away a million dollar bar tab to the most intoxicated person on the planet who later had to be escorted from the rembiscences because he had too much beer but it's maybe what happens if you give away a million dollar bar tab.

7:47But one a million dollars? Yeah, in a bar tab, yeah. To be used over five years. That's incredible. Why they got so pissed that night they had to be taken out? It fits. It fits. Why not? But at the end of the night... Are you giving those out anymore? One and done. At the end of the night, it was two o 'clock in the morning, a finance director was there, head of our bar business was there. I said to him, okay, let's go and get $5 ,000 out of the safe. Let's take it to the casino and let's play one hand a blackjack if we lose i'm going to put the money back in the safe myself so the team don't lose that if we win and it all goes to the team in a tip so we go to the casino it takes ages with passports and id to kind of play a hand that big uh we play the hand we get blackjack on the hand we win twelve and a half thousand dollars we take it back and we just give it to the team in cash that's wicked you've got blackjack on the hand lucky fucking hell we're going to go to Vegas with this guy our finance director was like dancing about him um what is the biggest mistakes that you see young entrepreneurs making nowadays so i love investing i love supporting entrepreneurs the biggest mistake and i want to shoot them in the fucking head for this is they haven't started a business and they're talking to me about their exit strategy i feel like shaking them and saying your exit strategy needs to be to die in that seat your exit strategy needs to be you want to be doing this when you're 70 years old because you've built something so fucking amazing that you just don't want to part with it i just hate it when people haven't done anything or just built something small and they're speaking about exit strategy i think it's a completely wrong mindset very true i focus on building something amazing you're right but it's so interesting totally but to an investor the thesis is you need to show them how they'll get their money back so you have to have this this made-up concept that we all know is stupid yeah as in your exit strategy Yeah, you know it's stupid, but then most investors wouldn't want to invest unless they can see what the outcome of that would be, which is dumb.

9:42But even if an entrepreneur wants to stay there, OK, you've got an investor in five years time, replace it with a different investor who's with you for that part of the journey and go again and go again and go again. So I see them making that mistake. The other mistake that I see them making as well is they confuse community with audience and they're massively, massively different things. So I'll ask a company about their community and they'll say, OK, we've got 20 ,000 followers on Instagram. that's an audience that is not a community yeah exactly you need two-way communications you need a shared sense of purpose you need a shared sense of belonging you need a mission you need people like buy in like don't confuse community and audience they're two different things and for me the best companies win because they've got the most engaged audience so focus on audience and focus on dying behind that desk love it do you measure success in a different way now than you used to when you started well when i started i was working on a fishing boat i moved back in with my dad because i couldn't afford to pay myself i lived in my dad's spare room until i was 30 martin lived in his mom's couch until he was 30 and success was building something remarkable building something amazing making a difference making the beard industry better and that's kind of first and foremost what we set out to do and so many times in the journey I always said to the team like I don't care what our numbers are for next year I don't care how much we're going to turn over in two three years time here's what I care about I care about how passionate we are about the beer I care about how much integrity we have behind the process of what we do I care about how we engage our community I care about how we look after our people and if we focus on doing those things well I know that the sales numbers in two three four years time are going to be the best they possibly can be because those are the main drivers and what I don't want to do is make any compromises in those things to hit a number so for me success is how well we can stay and hold true to our principles i almost think any business it's a test to like you've got your principles so many things are going to try and kick you off course and knock you how much can you hold true to those principles in a storm when things are difficult when things are challenging and the best companies do amazing things when they're small and stop doing those things when they scale for me the companies that change the world are the companies that interchange the things they do for themselves so much that they just do them on automatic, on repeat when they scale.

11:59So one of the things I notice a lot on your Instagram especially, but you look a very healthy guy. Yes. So what are your typical like daily healthy habits now? And how are they different to when you were running BrewDog? Like, you know, there's a really interesting, you know, reality sometimes for entrepreneurs who neglect their health while building a big unicorn and then wait for it till later. Who is the James we're meeting now? What are the habits and is it the same as what it used to be the habits were absolutely the same and it's such false economy to neglect that and leave it for later and i've always thought like anyone who's running a business you need to think of yourself as a high performance athlete how you are is going to determine the destiny of your career but also the business how engaged how focused how hard you can work how much you can push it like how you can like bounce back after a two-day trip to japan and have a meet in america and be in your a game and you can only do those things if you look after yourself and I know if I don't make the time to do the things that keep me healthy and focused I'm taking a 7 out of 10 version of James to those important meetings not a 10 out of 10 version of James I know if I don't find the time to exercise and do the other things that's important for me if I work for 10 hours a day I'm going to be working at 60 % effectiveness as opposed to 80 or 90 % effectiveness so for me the opportunity cost of not looking after myself is just so high that I simply have to have to do it there's not so much of a thing as like a typical day but there's things that I have to ensure that I do enough of throughout the day so I've got a checklist so every night before I go to bed I do a few things I always write down the three things I'm most grateful for that day and it's something I get my daughters to do I do as well as well it's such a lovely exercise my daughters by the way I just bought my daughter uh the uh five minute journal for kids the little gratitude thing I'm gonna start with her this weekend it's amazing and it's like such a great way to connect on something that's kind of really important so i always do that and i've got a checklist of things i need to do to keep myself kind of healthy and focused and i aim to have done at least four of them every single day so things in that checklist are exercise so i love exercise love philosophy like any type of exercise i love i love ice baths i think it's the best thing that i do it's always the thing that i want to do least and the thing that I feel best after I've done it.

14:12I can't meditate. I would love to. I just end up sitting with thinking with my eyes closed, but I love doing NSDRs, non-sleep deep breaths, help keep me focused. Calm always kind of defragments my mind. I do sauna a few times a week. I love to read. So I need to make sure that I can read in kind of 30 minute blocks at least four or five times a week. I've also got this exercise that I love doing called scatter focus. So I set a timer for 20 minutes, no devices, no distractions, one blank sheet of A4 paper and whatever's in my head, whatever I want to think about, I scribble down and that is kind of really important for me as well.

14:43Get fresh air, be outside early in the day. So I look to do two walk-in meetings a day. I think it's so unhealthy to be stuck behind a desk all the time. So make sure that I do two walk-in meetings. I've got this kind of checklist and I need to ensure that I've done four of those things each day. And I know if I haven't, then it hasn't been the best version of me for that day. When did you first experience getting a lot of money yourself? Because obviously you've built a very big company, but we all know that typically when building a big company you don't actually make much money from it very early on and often don't for a very long time so when did it first financially change your own life i don't think i've told this story before but it was a simultaneously the best and worst day of my life so um never had any money of any significance or any note until 2017 when we did a deal with a big u.s private equity company and as part of that deal i uh i got 50 million for a small amount of my shares in the company.

15:37Amazing, life-changing, fantastic. The money was transferred. 50 million? Yeah. Yeah, that'll do it. The money was transferred into our lawyer's bank account. TSG were in Scotland that evening. We had some beers to celebrate. We had an event the next day, fine. Money was in our lawyer's bank account. Come Monday, my amazing assistant at the time contacted lawyers, okay, from the client account, here's a set up a new bank account, especially here's the deals for James' new bank account. Here's where the money should go. Confirmed it, bang. Next day, no money. I'm like, uh-oh. Next day, no money.

16:09Bethany, phone the lawyers. What's happened? She phones them up. They've transferred it, James. It should just be a rebanking delay. Next day, no money. We get to the Friday. The money's still not in my bank account. I'm like, what the hell? Like, what's happened here? Spend a weekend panicking in the cold sweat. Get to the Monday. We phone the lawyers again, and we get the bank details that they put in. And my assistant, God bless her, who's lovely and amazing, she was one digit out with the bank details that she gave the lawyers. So we're this two days in like limbo. We're speaking at the bank and the bank's like, God, we verbally confirmed those details.

16:42So 50 million. 50 million. 50 million. 50 million. And I'm thinking, oh my God, I've got to do this 10 years of work all over again. What am I going to do? I'm like back to square. I'm back. It's like hard to describe the feeling of like never had any kind of money of note getting 50 million and the money being sent to wrong bank account and the money being lost. So it's lost. It's lost. We contact the bank and the bank's like, you gave us like, you verbally, there's nothing we can do here but we're trying to help you but just to manage expectations there's no guarantee, we don't know where it is we're going to look into it, we're going to get one of our teams to look into it but the money could be anywhere now and unfortunately if it's landed in a bank account they could have hopped it just to manage expectations the money could be gone and I remember cycling home that night and thinking it's like 10 years of work one false digit like gone so it gets to Can you imagine how horrendous your EA was?

17:34I will tell you both something when you finish the story, which you're going to be like, fucking hell. So we get to the Thursday and the bank's okay. We've managed to track it down. We're in contact with the bank. I'm like, thank goodness. And then by the Friday, they'd managed to get a bank for the other bank that was somewhere in Eastern Europe. So the bank held it. And by the Monday, so 15 days later, it ended up in my bank account. But it's so many points during that 15 days. I'm just going to have to do it again. Fine, I'll do it again. the uh the funny thing is you know earlier i was i have to call my lawyer my i'm getting sent my payment well we're on basically today for selling a company and so i should be getting it now that you've talked about

18:16check those numbers i know check those numbers like did i put it in the right place um so yeah after the episode i'll let you know i couldn't sleep for two weeks that's crazy that is horrendous though yeah so what's the answer to the question what was the question again well oh yeah i mean he got 50 million when they sold to private equity yeah how many years in your life that was that was 10 years in so that was in 2017 up until then had you been paid a lot oh no um so for the first six years the business we didn't pay ourselves at all uh for this kind of few years after that we paid ourselves 450 pounds a month and for the first few years the business i was still working part-time as a north atlantic captain because i couldn't afford to pay myself so i needed some form of income from somewhere so So I think before we did that private equity deal, I was paying myself maybe 60 or 70 ,000 a year.

19:04And what does life look like now? I mean, we're a long way on from that moment as well now, right? Yeah. When was that? 2017. That's 2017. So we're seven years on. Wow. Okay. And so what does life with money look like now different for you? I guess like as a person, like friends, exactly the same. Like all my best friends are people that I used to work with in the fishing boat. I absolutely love them. house that I live up in Scotland is kind of pretty much the same type of house and setup is I've got a really nice apartment in London which which you'll be into so I spent a bit of money in and that and it just means I'm able to like do things and go places I want to means I'm able to invest in things I'm passionate about like my own health the health and wellness of my family and means I'm able to kind of invest in other businesses and try and help them in their journey as well so it's it's it's been massively positive and I'm very grateful to have built a business and being able to take some money off the off the table but i think there's a kind of old saying that kind of money just makes you more of the same of what you were before so if you're an asshole before you're even more of one if you're a kind person before you're even more of one so i don't think it's changed that much and i think that philosophy i had in those kind of two weeks when i thought the money was lost it's like we'll just do it again i think there's like a skill set there's like an ambition so i'm never kind of too bound to money and maybe it's a bit much faith in my own ability or something, but I would back myself to start something again, and build something again, and be able to monetize that again, which means, okay, there's money, but hey, we can make more money if we need to.

20:31Reflecting on your comment about Elon Musk, he's clearly a person where there is no amount of money that makes any difference to him, he's totally just mission-oriented and that's all he cares about, and his mission is big enough and mad enough that it can't be completed. So that ambition level, when you read that book, all the things you said, you do feel inferior, you do feel like you'll never have that natural ambition. And it's kind of psychotic in its own way as well. It's unhealthy in many ways, and you need it to do what he does. Do you feel like, because of the extra level of comfort and ease and reality that money gives you, the space essentially, do you feel like that is counter productive to your ambition levels?

21:18Like can James Watt do another brew dog? Like in theory, yes, but in practice because of how great your lifestyle is now, like does it kind of get in the way? Do those two competing ideologies conflict with each other? Not in any way, shape or form, and there's this lifestyle, but there's like what's inside and what drives you, and those two things are independent and i guess if you're gonna strip it back i think so many entrepreneurs who kind of build something remarkable they're compensating for something they're trying to make up for some trauma they're trying to like overcome some kind of deep-seated feeling of inadequacy or kind of not belonging and that gives them like a focus and a desire and a drive not always but i think for me that was definitely definitely the case and like i had always in my head that like do what i want to do and to feel good at myself i want to build multiple unicorns that was like that was the challenge I set myself so I've got one in the bag and to be honest I never thought I would do something for as long as I did I was CEO for 17 years but I just love the business the people the mission what we were doing but as a CEO as an entrepreneur as a founder like the challenge I've set for myself and what I want to do over the course of my career is build two plus unicorns and that's that's what I'm focused on and for me that is the that is the goal to feel good about my kind of life's body of work what's the next unicorn well it's it's so difficult because like to build a unicorn you need so many things to go in your favor so you need a great company a great plan a great community you need engagement you need to be in the right space at the right time you need a bit of kind of market dynamics to go with you so let's see i've got a few startups at the moment i've got a few other things that i'm working to launch and it depends on a few things but that is a goal for me to try and build kind of two plus unicorn businesses very cool what are some consumer businesses in general because obviously with BrewDog yeah such a knack and such an eye for how to build a giant consumer business so what are some that you think like uh could do that so I am so privileged and honored to be their first investor I'm their lead investor it's the company in my portfolio where I spend the most time at the moment but I am absolutely obsessed with Tallow and Ash yeah they're wicked they are absolutely phenomenal founded by Matt and Kira they're a couple they've just had a baby they're looking shake up laundry detergent and there's so many parallels i see to kind of drew dog back in 2007 a sector dominated by a few behemoths no innovation no passion for the customer everyone too comfortable what's better about it is every household in the uk buys laundry detergents 50 percent of them buy beer margins are really good as well but their packaging their product their naming and how they are building community for me is the gold standard in building community they're 14 months old they've got more followers online than the top five selling uk laundry detergent brands combined and they're doing 30 million return rate of revenue despite only being 14 months old and that is just d2c we've got all the supermarkets really keen to do something with us we've got customers from all over the planet and like how they run their socials how they engage community it is just absolutely textbook and how to build a modern consumer brand by putting the customer first and foremost in what we do.

24:19So for me, that one, 100 % unicorn potential and so excited to be in there from day one with the founders. You've just got engaged. I have just got engaged. Yes. Congratulations. For the second time. For the second time. Which one was better? I'll tell you. Where am I? Georgia is in the other room watching this as we speak. This is actually true. This one was amazing. Yeah, it was last Friday and just been like so much happiness and like love and connection and just like, yeah it's been it's been amazing i think it helps if the first time you propose it's full of bitterness and anger yeah the context is excellent so that's not your only big news recently you have formally stepped back as ceo from brew dog can you tell us about that experience yeah so i was doing the business for 17 and a half years as ceo which is longer than i ever intend to do anything but i just love the business the people the product like the passion the locations it's just such an amazing business to be in so it was it was a tough thing to do but i want to build multiple fantastic businesses over the course of my career and like i love being in build mode it's where i get my energy it's where i get my focus i love creating things that don't exist i love trying to challenge the status quo and take on industry and we've do dog with the best in the world i love it but a good year is now 10 or 15 growth and a bad year is 5 growth so like we've got 4 000 people we make a million cans of beer a day we operate in 60 countries and I love the business to pieces but I think there's people that can run a business of that size and scale better than I can and there's certain elements of it I love it I'm not disappointed about not having to sit in eight hours of back-to-back zoom meetings about 2026 budgets and sales projections anymore so I've got a fantastic team and it's just a business I love being part of but excited about the next chapter for myself incredible when you decided to step down like how does that process work in your in your mind and then in reality I decided to do it before covid wow i decided to do it before covid and i had someone in the team before covid that one of the best people i've ever worked with and i wanted to offer them the opportunity to lead lead the business and i felt then was the right time for me to to move on so that would have been about kind of 13 13 years into the the journey which i felt was an amazing time and then covid happened and i felt there's no way i can do this during covid like ships need captains i need to beat the forefront i need to lead the business through this journey and it took me a few years after covid until i felt the business was in the right place to do it but it was actually something i wanted to do before what was the shape and size of the business pre-covid that you were like okay it's time and then how did you weather covid i mean covid was just so so difficult for us as a as a business and i remember like before the kind of furlough scheme came in yeah we had 1500 people that we were paying but we couldn't open the doors to the bar we had leases that we were paying rent for in 70 locations in the uk but we weren't able to take customers in we didn't know if we'd be able to get our teams in to kind of help us to make the beer i was sleeping in a sleeping bag on the kind of floor of the office and that's by elon musk at least well yeah and it's the only time i've done this i just didn't know if the business would make it i broke down in tears in front of the team because i thought everyone's going to lose their jobs and the business was gonna was gonna fold and the next day i was like okay james let's just get out of panic mode and let's get into action mode let's put a plan in place let's continue making as much beer as we can but let's try and do some good here so we pivoted our distillation business and we made and donated over a million pounds worth of hand sanitizer to the nhs and key frontline workers and we just thought okay we are going to fight our way through this and okay the business might go but if the business goes we are going to fight like hell to kind of try and keep it going but incredibly incredibly difficult for the business.

28:02We lost a lot of money during COVID because we had all this overhead, but no revenue coming against it. And it was just a really, really tough time. Wow. In your journey with BrewDog over 17 years, what are some of the most challenging parts of that journey that you could highlight to listeners? You've obviously talked about, including on Secret Leaders, you talked about the story of BrewDog. I'd love to know for the listeners this time around really key lessons and opportunities so they can dig in what are the moments oh so so many and like why i like working with kind of startups and founders and scale ups at the moment is i can share the successes and things i've done well but i can also like this are the mistakes this is the challenges and hopefully you can learn for the good things and the and the bad things and we've had so many challenging times and i'll kind of highlight a few of them like the first time we took on investment we went from having no money to having money and if I could go back and do anything differently with the company I would go back to that day after we took investment and I still like kick myself for this you feel like okay I've got 100 million pounds now sit in the company bank account I need to put that to work I need to do something with that money and that just ended up with us investing in things that we shouldn't and like as a ceo when you get that much money in your bank account when you haven't had it before you've got a responsibility to kind of instill the same behaviors in the team and i tried to do that but i didn't do it well enough and the team thought well well if i've got that money then it's okay to spend in this and it's okay to hire that pair so overheads go out of control and that kind of discipline and that kind of diligence kind of goes out so i would say if like the entire history of the business where i made the most mistakes was in the aftermath of taking private equity money where I didn't keep us true enough to our principles, where I wasn't focused enough on delivering excellent value for every pound that we spent.

29:54And we hired a whole heap of senior fancy, expensive people and we ended up letting them go because they weren't right for a company. We made a few acquisitions because I felt, okay, we need to work this cash somehow as opposed to have it sitting in the bank account. Those acquisitions turned out to be the wrong choice for us as a company. And we're not the type of company that should make acquisitions. We've tried to open too many locations. Some of those locations didn't work out. And just a kind of series of mistakes of like what not to do when you take private equity money in terms of the company and I think that's when a CEO when a leader needs to fight hardest just kind of stay through to their principles and there's just good to be this kind of tide towards kind of spending and investing and you just need to kind of keep that diligence and keep that strappiness and I think we've got it back now but we lost that strappiness for a while which is definitely one of the kind of biggest mistakes and it led to a whole heap of challenges.

30:41I suppose also culturally right like bringing it back to the core culture is very hard if you've let the the attitude from people slip yeah and like some of the worst examples for me was we had to let go six or seven people for cheating on their expenses and it just like to go from all of a sudden we're all in this together we're trying to build this amazing thing we're trying to change the face of beer to expenses fraud you're like whoa to like theft like people stealing from the business all of a sudden it's just like a kind of very sobering moment and that's like any company with a few thousand people these kind of things are going to happen but it's just like oh this is a long way from two humans and a dog kind of making beard in a in a shed so a lot of challenges a lot of learnings and it kind of takes me back to that kind of core thesis of every company sets out with a set of principles with a way of doing things most companies lose that along the way in the journey the companies that keep that the companies that kind of do and build remarkable things and there was a period where we lost that and just led to challenges that we're probably kind of still working through so if i could go back and do anything differently in the journey the day after the money comes in i would have written a manifesto it's like this is what we've done up until now this is how we're going to do things in the future money or no money it's not going to change anything about what we do so from an inspiration point of view do you follow the jeff bezos kind of amazon strategy with that you know the sort of frugality that runs through the company well two years after we took on the investment money we actually made from jeff bezos it's always day one one of our key principles we call them dogmas we've got 10 dogmas in terms of how we run the company so we kind of incorporated that kind of like infuse it in our dna almost so you went on dragon's den quite early on in your uh run and if i haven't got this wrong you were ready to give up 20 of brew dog for a hundred thousand pounds which would have been the most lucrative deal in dragon's den history can you talk us through why it didn't happen yeah so we were so excited always been a massive fan of anything business like dragons then was like my go-to tv show um and we actually didn't get to pitch the dragons because on the day that we were supposed to we did a screen test with the producers and the producers turned us down so we were ready to go and pitch but we didn't get to go and pitch but we got up at 3 30 that morning we had to go down to manchester we drove down in martins beat up trusty champagne colored voxel vectra this kind of champagne supernova as we called it we're both wearing suits what the hell um at the moment i just own one suit and it's when i was married in the first time um but anyway we got down and we do george has not keen on me wearing that for the second wedding but i think sustainability maybe it's a maybe it's a good thing hi georgia um so yeah we got down and we'd like practice this pitch over and over and over and over again we thought the pitch was amazing and we're doing the final screen test of the producers supposed to see the dragons later that day and the producers after the pitch was like guys we just we just don't see it we just don't think this business is investment worthy so we've got two businesses too many to hear here today so we're not going to put you in front of the the dragons but we were going to give them 20 for a hundred thousand pounds and then they probably negotiate on that so you probably end up giving them 25 or even 30 for a hundred thousand pounds but we didn't we didn't get that far do you remember what stage the business was at at that Yeah, we were probably turned that year was good to turn over maybe eight or nine hundred thousand pounds.

34:02So we were small. The first year we turned over sixty seven thousand pounds. Yeah. And 400, then the next year we turned over just under a million. Wow. I mean, even with that turnover, they let them on. Yeah. That's insane. Yeah. For a beer company as well back then. I know. Yeah, that's wild. But one of the best things that ever happened to us, and for me, like any obstacle, any knockback, any constraint, has to be an opportunity and for me that's what differentiates good companies from absolutely amazing companies you've got to take the knockbacks you've got to take the obstacles and use them to find a new way of doing things to up your level to kind of up your thinking you can't get all kind of doom and gloom about it so it's like okay we're not going to get investment for the dragons we can't pin our hopes on that like we've got to come up with a different way of doing things this was 2009 global financial crisis couldn't get any more money for the banks so we launched something that was unheard of at the time online equity crowdfunding we called it equity punks it's been so key to our business but if we take an investment for the den we wouldn't have been forced to come up with equity for punks which has been so key to what we've done i mean it's a good point i mean besides the beer brew dog has kind of been known as like a genius marketing company and so i suppose was it was it the challenge of the business not going at the speed that you wanted that forced you to say like how do we get into mainstream press yeah exactly so we set out we were absolutely tiny we were in an industry dominated by behemoths and this was before staff beer was cool this was before staff beer was a thing this was before people loved ipas like people drunk industrial lagers sleepy cascales that was it in kind of 2006 2007 so we're up against these global behemoths thousands of times our size who spend tens or hundreds of millions each year in advertising like there's just no way we can compete so it's like okay to compete we're gonna have to do things which are edgy which are provocative which get the name out there which maybe cause a little bit of unrest or upheaval or it's like a bit stunty or a bit but if we don't like i'm back in the fishing boat we don't have a business we get lost in the in the mix here so we had a few tests that we always kind of applied so the first test was if we spend a pound in a thing can we get a 10x return versus our competition because if they're getting the same return market wise as we are then we're never going to close that gap we're going to end up tiny and the second test we used was would or could another company do this thing and if the answer was yes we needed to okay let's not do that let's upper level let's do something that only we can do let's do something that only we're happy to take a risk on that we're happy to gamble on could or would another company sponsor a sports team yes could or would another company throw cats out of a helicopter over the Bank of England?

36:44No. You know, obviously doing marketing stunts has very much been a brew dog thing. Which one of the stunts do you think best exemplifies or was the most audacious and bold that really took you to another level, helped you become a multi-billion dollar brand? Oh, there's been so many of them. So when we made the world's strongest ever beard at 55 % in packages and taxidermy. It was a global news story. That kind of shock and awe. And I think if you want to kind of change people's perceptions, you have to shock them a little bit. You have to kind of get that jolt into them. So that one was absolutely amazing for us.

37:22When we parodied the Russian resident at the time of the Sochi Winter Olympics, which involved me half naked and a horse and a freeze in February today in Scotland, that one felt like it kind of shifted gears for us as a company as well. and just the whole concept of equity punks kind of connecting with community was absolutely massive for us and making a beer at the bottom of the ocean which just looked amazing but at the bottom of the ocean in scotland at that time was 10 degrees celsius perfect for fermenting a lager just getting a tank and kind of driving it through the streets of london absolutely fantastic doing a bad beer amnesty where people could take a can of mainstream beer into any rudo bar and swap it for one of her own beers so we've tried to make sure so stunts yes but if you just do stunts it's noise it's shouting it's not good in the land so we had a very clear playbook okay if we are going to do a stunt it's our risk because any stunt is our risk because otherwise come every company would do stunts and i presume we've had a bunch that didn't work oh we've had a bunch that didn't work which i'll speak about in a second but we said okay if we're just on two things absolutely have to be true we have to somehow find a way to tie this back to the thing that we're passionate about then use this as a platform to speak about what we're passionate about if it's got no link if there's no way to tie it back not good work and secondly is there a community element in there because the community is the thing that differentiates our business so bad beer amnesty community are taking the beer to us throwing a cat out of a helicopter the community are investing in our business so those things had to be true for us to do a stunt and i think that's what made the stunts land and kind of push the business forward and how many you need to talk about having a playbook for stunts so um how many stunts does it take to have a hit Is it one in two?

39:01Is it one in ten? And share some of your bad stunts that went... Well, I guess if they don't go well, we don't hear about them, but... Oh no, you do hear about them, but in a bad way. So in a bad way. So I think with stunts, it's like so on the edge, it's either a hit or a miss. Because what you're doing is so noteworthy, people are going to speak about it. So they're going to speak about it positively, or they're going to speak about it negatively. So it's not like one in ten people hear about... If you're doing a stunt and you're doing it properly, people hear about every stunt. Some of the misses.

39:29and the lesson from some of the misses was is people have got such a short attention span so if they don't get the context and the message in a tiny snapshot that is lost they just see the stunt they're going to attack the stunt so i think it was back in 2018 or 19 for international women's day we wanted to do a beer that highlighted the gender pay gap and do something about that and do something kind of sent money to kind of try and close that gender pay gap so we did a beer where we sold it to women for I think it was 18 % cheaper than we sold it to men which was the gender pay gap at the at the time and we also wanted to parody products which we felt were overtly marketed to women and a bit tacky and a bit stringy because of that so tongue-in-cheek we called this pink IPA and we did it 18 % less and it was tongue-in-cheek and it was supposed to be a parody but people just saw pink IPA and they thought we were the thing that we were parodying So we took a huge hammer in front of it and it was like a project that was led by the women or team where we're given the difference in sales to charities and we're trying to raise awareness to something we're passionate about.

40:33We got hammered for doing something that was supposed to be a parody, but people didn't see that it was a parody. Also, we got hammered when we took a stand against the World Cup in Qatar. I do remember that. That was fantastic. well yeah so we did this advert which was um i think it was like first russia then qatar next up north korea and it just created this massive massive media storm now we were taking a stand for human rights and it was a stand that was super super important for us to take the thing that tripped us up in that one is we had a few distributors in the region we weren't selling beer in qatar at the time but one of those distributors unbeknown to us had sent some beer into the Qatari market.

41:14But any business of any scale, at the moment, if there's a market that we don't sell to, one of our customers somewhere is going to slip it into the black market. So we had beer in Qatar, so we got hammered for having beer in Qatar, even though we didn't know about it, because we did this kind of big advertising campaign. So that was one that those two flipped on us, which should have been positive. It was causes that we were passionate about, but those ones came back to buy us.

41:39Is all PR good PR? No. No. What's some examples of really just horrendous PR that you've had that you just wish would go away? Oh, so much. I mean, we are, I guess, the kind of poster child for Amazing Stunts and Amazing Marketing, but also the kind of poster child for media backlash. I call it tall poppy syndrome. I call it what you want. But we have had such a tough time in the media over the last few weeks and over the last few years. And even this week, I've been like hammered in the media from places like the New York Post, New Zealand Herald, all over the planet for announcing an engagement on LinkedIn.

42:13So it kind of feels like we do a normal thing and we get criticized in the media for it. And there's like such a misconception of our kind of working culture and how we are to work for it. And we put so much time and effort to be the best company we can to work for. Are we perfect? No. Is any company perfect? No. um but we've been like in the sunday times top 100 companies to work for uk uk twice in the last six years we invest in our team we pay a great wage we get benefits but if you look at the public conception of us as an employer like i'm more intense and evil than darth vader and that's kind of media perception which is like so far away from the reality of the situation it's laughable but like we've definitely had like such a tough time in the media for like a number of fronts and it feels like any tiny mistake or even things that's not a mistake just get amplified and like yeah amplify the media and we are so clickbaity as i was done because of the nature of what we do so journalists know if they do a kind of provocative kind of doodog headline then we then kind of turns into clickbait and then it gets clicks and clicks when it rises in media these days so we definitely had a tough time in the media i would say over the last five years how have you handled that because it did always feel unfair to me um i've only gotten to know you in the last year but I've always been super compassionate to you from being a follower on LinkedIn and stuff.

43:30Yeah. Whether that's rightly or wrongly, I look at entrepreneurs always with the rose-tinted goggles on because I know what it's like to be an entrepreneur, how hard it is. And I've interviewed almost 400 and so few do anything with bad intentions. Yeah. So few, like people, like we've made mistakes, but actually almost everyone I've ever met really genuinely just trying to be a great boss, learning, making mistakes, but all good intentions and you especially have got shat on over and over and over again and it just always felt pretty fucking harsh the bbc especially yeah i mean it's been it's been so intense but it's like so laughable because like anyone that knows me anyone that's worked with me directly like knows that that is just so far away from the reality of what we do so like we invest in our people we love developing careers we love helping people achieve things and like we've been a high growth company and we have focused on performance is that an environment for everyone no have we always been perfect no but we've created 4 000 jobs we've built an amazing company we've paid loads of taxes we've put it in the map for exporting have we made a few mistakes along the way yes but no more than any other company going through that same growth cycle it just feels so odd like the uk attitude and the uk media attitude to kind of work success and people who who build things and it's been so frustrating and at times really tough because that kind of media portrayal is just so far away the reality of like who i am and what our business does and how we do things but again you can control things that you can control and there's things that's out with your control so not playing the victim not getting too upset about it and i think the way that we win is continuing to build amazing things not playing the victim and not getting too upset about now but in the moment have you been on a journey with like controlling because you know the first time it happens and maybe even the fifth time it happens surely that's very different to looking back now about it i mean it's it's it's tough i mean there's no denying that it's that it's tough but i think if you're trying to achieve something if you're trying to build something like resilience tenacity are like two of the absolute most important qualities and like at the end of the day this is supposed to be difficult if building an amazing company was easy and those difficulties come in loads of different forms but if it was easy every single person would do it and success wouldn't mean anything so there's so many things it's difficult from sleepless nights just trying to make things work just try to scale a company to logistics challenges or tech challenges or tax chat like and or media challenges but like you know if you're setting out to build something amazing you're going to have these challenges and i think what sets these great people and kind of great leaders apart is everyone faces the same amount of challenges in their lifetime the best companies the best leaders deal with those better than the people that end up not achieving things.

46:05So just need to kind of head down, keep on going, keep building and just kind of tune out the noise. I think one of the things that BrewDog has been so well known for is obviously marketing. And I think that through that, what's the advice you would give to new founders about how to harness PR? Because although you have had a lot of bad PR, which I'm sure we'll talk about more, the thing that I remember you guys for, you were kind of just fucking everywhere. And like beer brands just weren't known. you know like they were just the things that you saw when you went to the pub but you guys became an actual brand so how do you give advice to young entrepreneurs now about creating that buzz amazing question so always two things a everything has to be underpinned by a community if you don't have a passionate engaged community you've got nothing nothing is going to land nothing is going to stick so first and foremost the foundations the cornerstone is community community is not audience you need engagement you need two-way communication you need a shared sense of passion of purpose of mission so get your community started and have your community engaged and build with your community and then secondly unless you do something differently you're just not going to stand out you're going to be an okay to normalish company you've got to find a way to do things differently if that's product if that's innovation if that's marketing if that's comms if that's stunts if it's a blend of those things but unless you do things differently you might as well go back to your day job so community community community and then find ways to do things that your competitors won't do and can't do so when you when you build so much of your um you know your business around the public image of your brand you are particularly vulnerable yes to uh public opinion so how are you nowadays i suppose combating somewhat of the public image you have because obviously like you said you announced your engagement and you got you got a lot of bad press so how do you combat that now because you said you wanted to build another yeah i do and for me it's just have enough channels where I share my perspective, where I share my point of view, where I engage with community directly.

48:05So if people want to know what I'm about, what I think, how I do things, how I build things, there's loads of opportunities for them to find out directly from me, not third, fourth, fifth hand and then twisted by the media. But do you think like the, obviously the bad pressure you got at the time, what do you think caused that? I'm not necessarily saying either side is to blame, but what do you think caused the, I remember the public letter years ago, go now so that's a great example so at that time we had 8 000 former employees 8 000 people former employees had been so we're working hospitality we've got 4 000 employees at the moment hospitality bad turnovers you turn over a staff member every nine months good turnover just turn over a staff member every kind of 14 15 months that's kind of just how it is for people who work in that in that industry so we had a population of 8 000 ex-employees any company with 8 000 ex-employees some are going to be happy some are going to be ambassadors some are just simply not going to be not going to be happy and there's a few things and some will be bad people and one percent of people have mental health problems yes yes and in our case very much yes so the open letter was put together and i can speak about it now because it's a bit after the fact but it was put together by six of our former colleagues before they sent that open letter the average amount of time that they'd left us before they sent it was five years so the six people behind it hadn't worked for us on average for five years some the person who actually sent it hadn't worked for us for seven years so it's like such a time like so how can you comment on your company just now if you hadn't worked for us for that that much time of those six most had gone on to try and do something else in the beer industry and hadn't been successful at a time when we'd kind of gone from strength to strength in the company and some of those people have got well documented mental health issues and stuff as well so i think it was a combination of some jealousy some resentment some kind of bittering lingering anger towards us for things that happened a very long time ago and in the end like less than like 0.5 percent of our former team members signed this letter so i think those odds like any company like you're gonna have 10 of your former employees that absolutely hate you that is just like what happens but the year before that we were sunday times best company to work for in the planet we were paying real living wage we're sharing 10 of our profits with our team i'd just given up my own salary when that came out for two years to help protect jobs through covid because i wanted to keep as much of our team intact as we as we could and it was just so far away from the reality of of working in our business which just made the whole thing like so crazy and then we took such a hammering for it in the media worst place to work ever most toxic boss toxic culture bullying culture i mean there's a small amount of people in any company that don't want to be held accountable that don't want to have to push to achieve something remarkable that just don't fit with how that company does things and that was the case with ours but we were just i guess unlucky and our former employees decided to kind of weaponize it against us in this way and it's just led to all this kind of waves and waves of publicity that's just so far away from the reality of working in their business what's the what was the fallout from the current employees seeing that how did you deal with that i think our current employees kind of felt hurt and offended like the business took so much criticism and like our current employees like felt that criticism like deeply from the public from the kind of media and stuff so i mean the whole thing has been a like blown so much out of proportion for what it is but then the media things that are click baity get clicks it's so far away from the reality of working our business from our team and you can see like before and just after we were in the sunday times best 100 companies to work for in the uk which is based on independent anonymous surveys of our team members it's like there's like 100 thousands of companies in the uk and that's where we were we were ranked so just it was really really difficult and if i could go back and do one thing differently and i think it's always important as a leader like anything that happens good or bad current employee former employee in the company not in the company anything happens the company ultimately it's my responsibility and i think it's such an important mindset shift for a leader so if i was in the uk and if somebody working on a packaging line in america japan did something i wasn't happy with that's not their problem that's my problem i've hired the person that's hired that person i've set the tone i've set the culture i've set everything and the one thing that i would have done differently and i think zappos do this amazingly well as a business is just kind of set expectations when people join the business so i should have been clearer back in those early days back in those high growth days as to what people were joining so they were fully aware it's like you are joining a high growth business yeah that's fine we are growing at 100 plus a year that means things from time to time are going to be intense things from time to time are going to be hectic from time to time we're going to grow quicker than the policies and infrastructures we've got this is not a stable big corporate environment that is the company and i think what happened was people saw their brand saw how cool we were at the time saw all the kind of hype things we were doing and just wanted to join that but they expected to join that with the growth and the opportunities and have calm steady state stable ways of doing business which if you're growing at 100 % year and year and year you simply don't have so you put people into this environment some people love it some people thrive in that environment and some people just don't and the people who didn't decided to weaponize that and turn out against this that's good advice though for fast growth startups is like yeah so what zappos did and again i would just steal this and use it so if i was like next time i'm building a company of scale when people join it's like we are going through a scale period at the moment this is what we do this is how we do things and zappos do this as well like they offer people at the end of their induction five thousand dollars to quit like this might not be the journey this might not be the place for you if you decide that amazing no hard feelings here's five thousand dollars to take up for your time find an amazing opportunity and we'll wish you all the best and for me the thing that we could have done better was just manage expectations of people joining us during that high growth period i mean it's so fascinating because i again you know bbc did that documentary on you and i'm really personally pleased that you sued them for it Can you tell us about that?

54:29Yeah, what was that process like? There's been so many court cases. So again, I haven't spoken about it too much, and I can tell the full story at some point when I'm ready. But at that time, I... When you're legally allowed to? No, I'm legally allowed to now, but I just... Call the time of the world mate! Crack open a new brew dog! Yeah, give us a short version. Yeah, what's the TLDR? You need a hell of a lot of time. So at the time when we were being kind of turned to pieces by the media, I was undergoing some things personally that were like the toughest things that I'd ever underwent and I ended up winning a court case in the highest court of Scotland, the court of session, a landmark court case and I was awarded£750 ,000 worth of damages.

55:07So essentially, and I can tell the full story, which is like a crazy movie plot and Netflix actually want to make a documentary out of it, but I'm not ready for that yet either. But essentially it was people that kind of used to be close to me that weren't anymore that set up fake anonymous draw accounts that looked like actual real people on social media and was sending hundreds of messages a day to every single one of my hundreds of thousand followers with all these kind of crazy claims about me and then at the same time that same person and i didn't know this at time got in touch with me and told me hey i've just received all these messages from you i can help you shut this down but only if you pay me so there's all this kind of fraud and corruption and craziness in the mix so i was like fighting like a media storm in one front and and and all that another front as well and just so grateful to won the court case and kind of put that one to put that one to bed but that was uh that was tough too and all these things you just do i just want to build a fantastic beer business i don't like bitcoin fraud impersonation all this chaos i think that's the thing that gets lost in this that i think is really important for people to hear which is that like again you just want to build a great business yeah and like the rest of it fuck off just give you the space to build that business admit your mistakes all that kind of stuff but this is absurd want to create jobs want to pay taxes want to contribute to the economy want to create a business that manufactures in the uk and exports and like so much of our business is overseas and like the uk economy is struggling at the moment what's the uk need first like economic growth but even more important than that because you don't want displacement is companies in the uk that make things in the uk that employ people in the uk and send those things overseas and that's what we've done so much as a business so brew dog is now valued at uh two billion well who knows in current markets but at peak we've been up about that level yeah so at what point did you become i suppose the establishment that you once were rebelling against and that's one one of the things that's been so difficult on this journey you're gonna make a pop music uh beer no punk oh okay punk pop yeah i might go in popular brand now so well so a few things to unpack in that so the brand has always been far bigger than the business and we've always loved playing the underdog card and one of the things that was so difficult in the journey was that point where we couldn't play the underdog card anymore and like people are more emotional than logical so you can't argue people with logic it makes no sense and it doesn't work at all but our big competitors are still a hundred like hundred times bigger than us we'd play underdog card and everyone would be like what the fuck are you doing playing the underdog card you guys are massive you can't say well no or dan perceps is mashed a bit of sales so that kind of evolution out of that was quite difficult and like that challenge of we're now a bigger company we've got to do things in a slightly different way but we've got to keep that edge that energy that ethos and it's i think it's something like all companies that kind of start out as kind of underdogs or kind of challengers like fighting against when you start becoming even a tiny bit like the establishment like what like what like what it's it's like been such a challenge for us and we've got investors and we're a semi-public company because we've got loads and loads of equity punks and again i think if i was like things that i haven't managed as well as i could have in the journey if i'm being deflective it's a how i manage things when the kind of cash came in from private equity company b it's i didn't manage people's expectations and joining the company as to what it is to work for a company that's grown 100 year on year on year and c that i didn't fight hard enough to avoid us even becoming one or two percent establishment when some of these things inevitably happen when you scale a company and become successful yeah because i think a really interesting thing obviously building a consumer company at the moment and far away from it being household or anything like that but i really relate obviously when we launched it was all about challenger brand dynamics and all the books you read are about how to build a challenger brand um and at some point you know apple's a great example you know their whole entire raison detre was challenger brand to microsoft they overtake microsoft and become the de facto and they have to really change tack and i guess i'm really curious how how you or your marketing team have adapted when so much of the heart and soul of your business is that concept like have you found a way to completely reposition the brand to mainstream culture or are you still in search of I think we're still in search of that but I mean if we take take a step back like what is our foundation what is our mission and our mission has been the same since day one our mission is to make other people as passionate about fantastic beers where we want to put amazing beers into people's glasses and we want to live and die by what's in every single glass what's in every single can and just like hang our hat an amazing quality beer so for us how we gauge success is how many people are enjoying fantastic beers as opposed to beers which are not good and beers this amazing thing it takes people together so scale is like a double-edged sword it means we can't be perhaps as provocative perhaps as much on the edge as we have been at various points in the growth journey but always from day one success was getting our beer into more and more people's hands so at the moment and it's amazing to see the cannon lines going up in Ellen but in Ellen we make and sell about a million cans of beer a day so to see the kind of big cannon line going at 70 ,000 cans is amazing so it's an honor and a privilege to be able to get that much beer into people's hands but it does mean that certain things that we've done and certain things that have been so important in our playbook you just can't do anymore with that scale and i think while staying through to our mission of getting people to be as passionate about the atmosphere as we can i think it's fair to say that we've struggled a little bit with having some of those tools those weapons taken away from us because you can't play those when you're the skill that we are at the moment what brand do you look at now that you're like i'd go work there or at least i'd be on their board because they're just so exciting uh i think it's the best brand there is in the uk at the moment i don't know if you've heard about it it's a cutting edge supplement business called heights i'm a i'm a massive fan i'd love to be on their board okay fair play yeah it's another two thousand dollars to my holiday budget they can't pay pounds yeah i don't get paid to be on this show but i feel like i'm part of an ad you should be paid in magnesium yeah so you've gone from I do genuinely want to know the answer to that question is there a big brand is there a big brand that you think okay I'll put it differently at Brewdog you do have this challenge there are brands that do this super well there are brands with the greatest advertising in the world as global brands so there are still brands that you could really learn from and I know you're not like full-time CEO, et cetera, but are there one or two that you're like, yeah, I absolutely love those brands, even though they're really big and I've got a lot to learn from them and I would love to go and soak up their energy and how they come up with stuff.

1:01:59So, so great question because we've got that challenge state. I mean, it's not an insurmountable challenge and like every journey, there's challenges to unlock the next level and you can't unlock it the same way you did the previous level. So we're facing a challenge at DrewDog at the moment. Like we will find a way to unlock it in terms of our position, our comms, how we engage with our community and that could unlock this kind of crazy level for us so it's definitely not insurmountable in terms of other companies at the moment i mean i just love anyone who is like willing to take a risk so for me ambition is always proportional to risk so if you're trying to do something incredibly ambitious that comes with a huge amount of risk but then also kind of growth is proportional to risk as well so unless you're willing to take a massive risk unless you're willing to put everything on the line for what you believe in you're not really opening yourself up to achieve real success and you're not opening yourself up to kind of like we saw the kind of building review dog as like a game like we've got to get to the next level we get to that next level by taking our risk we're at now level four how do we get to level five there's a risk so just any company that's like willing to take a risk and are so passionate about what they do they're willing to kind of gamble to grow the business their mission is that compelling i'm super supportive of so you've obviously gone in your life so far from like a total upstart to massive business and now you've stepped back yeah when you look at the sectors and the businesses out there right now what are the things that are interesting you what are the spaces you're looking at and thinking someone could build a a brew dog in this space great question and for me i think any space is open to it so i'm almost kind of space agnostic what i'm looking for when i invest it's a couple of things so one it's it's people it's tenacity and resilience which i think is by far the most important quality for any entrepreneur because you're going to get kicks you're going to get knockbacks you're going to get setbacks how you respond to them determine your destiny and secondly from a stand perspective and like not enough people speak about it not enough people like focus on it it's it's community it's like forget advertising forget design forget engagement forget cost per click forget all of that like community how engage your community and how can you find ways to engage your community that your competitors can't and if i tick those boxes regardless of the sector i'm excited about that business interesting and there's that is there like a any sector you've got your eye on because obviously we've got so much going on at the moment you know like ai has quite literally changed everything if you're starting a new business now that probably plays into it like are there sectors you're thinking yeah i could could look at that there's one sector i'm specifically excited about, which is why I've started my own business in that sector, as opposed to invested in it.

1:04:39Yeah. Well, we're going to talk about that now. So, James, tell me a bit more about Social Tip. So, we wanted to build the ultimate tool to help heights be a success in terms of… We're a customer. I know. Amazing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So… I told you, the Ponzi works. He buys heights, I then buy Social Tip, the Ponzi just never ends. My backpack is like overflowing with magnesium. Are you just not taking it? Yes, exactly. That's not the picture you think it is. My house is full of heights. It's fucking annoying. I don't think it does. The drawer's full of this shit. Yeah, exactly. I'm so glad to be on that Pat Filler.

1:05:18Yeah, so my new business is called Social Tip. And it is kind of based on everything I've learned about marketing, about the customer, about engagement over the last decade. And it's also kind of based on where I see marketing going. So Social Tip essentially is on a mission to democratize influence and it helps companies turn their customers and their employees into their influencers. And for us, by far the most important people are customers and employees and their best place to sell the story, tell the mission, sell the dream, explain the passion, showcase the product. Far better place than advertising or influencers, which are just kind of bouncing off people.