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

No two companies are alike. That's why the American Express Corporate Program can help you customize rewards, reporting, and billing options—all designed for your business. Build your program with American Express at americanexpress.com/corporate. Terms apply.

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

I did. I did push people too far.

How fast did BrewDog grow?

We have grown, on average, 87% a year.

F***ing hell.

Everyone told us, "Make your beer cheaper. Change your name. Change your packaging." And we didn't listen to any of that.

How can we get our name out there with no money at all? So we had to do things that were intentionally provocative and sometimes we crossed that edge as well.

The best entrepreneurs have got to find a way to do things differently to how other people are doing things. We've got two very simple tests that we apply to everything that we do. So the first test is...

This is the worst public health crisis for a generation.

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

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

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

James, what is the... you've listened to this podcast before, so you know I have a theme of where I start. I'm trying to frame it as a surprise that I'm going to start with your childhood. First, thank you for being here. It’s always lovely to hear that people who are guests that we have on also understand the format. Where I wanted to start with you is to take you right back, because that for me is always the context of somebody. When you look back at your early years in that small fishing community you grew up in—was it Gardenstown?

Yeah, Gardenstown, up in the Northeast of Scotland.

When you look back yourself at the foundational, shaping, pivotal events of those early years that are responsible for who you became in your life—the first events that you look back and go, "That's the first dot I can connect"—what are those?

I think there are a few. I grew up in a tiny fishing village, northeast of Scotland. My dad was a fisherman, my mom was a school teacher. Being a fisherman is tough. I just remember the hard work ethic instilled from my grandfather, who was also a fisherman, and my dad. They were really hardworking, really honest, "salt of the earth" type characters. But then he was always away, and I’d be at home with my mom. My relationship with my mom was never that good.

I think I struggled a lot when I was a kid. I had quite a severe speech impediment when I was growing up—this is something I haven't spoken about before. That kind of always made me a little bit of an outsider, a little bit of a loner, always felt a bit socially awkward. As I grew up and became a bit older, I had quite severe acne, so again: outsider, loner, socially awkward.

I think it’s a trait that a lot of entrepreneurs have in common; they're a bit socially awkward. I think if you’re less likely to read social cues, then you’re less likely to do the same thing as everyone else, which in business is amazing. Also, I had a bit of an inadequacy complex when I was a kid as well. My mom's standards were quite high, so whatever I did wasn't good enough. 98% in a test? "Why wasn't it 100?" Win a swimming competition? "Why did I win it with an even better time?" Any achievement wasn't quite good enough. So growing up, a bit of a loner, a bit of an outsider, a bit of an inadequacy complex as well, which I think from a business perspective those things combined are good, but made it quite tough for me at certain stages of my childhood.

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

A little bit. I mean, the speech impediment was something that all the kids loved to make fun of, and then the acne that I had that was quite severe in high school was something people liked to make fun of as well. It just makes you feel even more like an outsider when you're growing up, I guess.

Speech impediment?

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

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

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

You mentioned your mom as well.

Yeah, I mean my relationship with my mom was always quite tough. Nothing was ever good enough for mom when I was a kid. We had a few issues later and I haven't spoken to my mom for over 20 years now.

Really? Since you were in your teens?

Yeah, 19, 20 was when I stopped speaking to mom.

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

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

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

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

You use the word "temporary" though.

I do because it's always there. It's always there. I think a chip on your shoulder in terms of motivation is quite a powerful thing to have. But it’s that saying, "Everywhere you go, there you are." It's always there to a certain extent.

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

He was indeed. Still to this day, he’s in his late 60s, he’s a lobster fisherman, which is a tough, intense, gnarly job. Every single day, regardless of the weather in the North Atlantic, he’s pretty much out in his lobster fishing boat. So, yeah, very focused on work, and that work ethic, that determination, I think a bit of resilience as well. I spent actually six years with my dad on the North Atlantic before I set up the business. I studied Law and Economics at university. I got a job in a legal office and I quit after two weeks. I sat there in a cheap suit doing glorified admin and I was like, "This is just not how I want to spend my life. I don't want to stay in this office." I saw myself maybe 40, 50 years in the future retiring and sitting in that same office in a suit and stuff, and I was like, "This is just not for me." So I spent four years studying to do a job for two weeks, I quit and did something completely the opposite. I got a job on the fishing boat. While I was doing that, I went to nautical college part-time, I became a first mate, I became a qualified captain, and I cut my teeth in the high seas in the North Atlantic. I think it taught me so much about resilience, about teamwork, about adversity.

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

Yeah.

So you come out of university, you try it out as a lawyer for two weeks, then you go and join your dad, and eventually you work your way up to being a captain on that boat. And you're in a trawler in the North Atlantic, which is a stupid thing to do, if you're me and you're as big of a coward as I am. Going out on those seas... I've seen the documentaries. Is it like the documentaries?

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

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

I think the main lesson that I learned is—and it's one I've applied to the business as well—you only really see what someone's made of when things are difficult. It's only when things are going wrong—it’s maybe a Force 10 storm, you're trying to get the net back in the boat, it's dangerous, it's gnarly, it's 2:00 in the morning, everyone's been up for 24 hours—it's at those times that you really see what someone's made of. I think that's something you can take to business as well. When everything's going well, it's easy for everyone in your team to look like a superstar. It's only when things are really, really difficult that you see who you can depend on. I've almost got this test that I use when I'm building my management team—and we've got an amazing management team at the moment—but the test is: would I want to be in the deck of a North Atlantic fishing boat at 2:00 in the morning in a storm with everything going wrong with this person by my side? If the answer is yes, it bodes well for how we work together and how we look to build the business together.

In that example, what are the character traits which would make someone in that situation a good person to be with on that deck?

There's something called the "Stockdale Paradox" that I think is really important and ties into this. James Stockdale was an American naval captain who was a prisoner of war camp for six years. It's actually in the book *Good to Great* by Jim Collins, which is a fantastic business book. He's got a philosophy, which is: you've got to confront the brutal facts of your current reality without ever losing faith that you're going to prevail in the end. I think it's just such an important lesson for life and business. You've got to believe that you're going to get there in the end, but that belief can't blind you from tackling the most difficult things about your current reality head-on with resolve, with optimism. You've got to hold that paradox in your hand: "We're going to get there, we're going to achieve this thing, but we've got these huge challenges at the moment. Let's lean into those challenges." I often start my business meetings with my senior team in the very same way: "Okay, let's put the agenda to the side. Let's everyone write down on a piece of paper: what are the three most difficult things you're facing in this business at the moment? And let's discuss those before we discuss anything else."

Why is that important?

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

Interesting. I might steal that.

I stole it as well, so you can steal the thing that I stole.

Did I say that out loud? I was thinking it. No, so, yeah... you're right, because there's always kind of an "elephant in the room" at companies where many individuals in the room will know that there are certain challenges and issues, especially in the leadership team. They'll have the clearest idea of what those are, but sometimes they're quite uncomfortable to talk about, right? They are the things that are least enjoyable to commit brain time and power and resources to. So I guess that's a very smart way.

You spent five years on this boat, which was a really brave thing to do in my estimation. You're Captain of the boat?

Yeah, I spent a bit of time as Captain on the boat with my dad.

Why did you leave that role?

I didn't quite leave it. Martin, who's my best friend from high school—we go way back, we were flatmates at university together—we started making beers at home. In Martin's mom's garage, we would make beer. We started to get into beer when we tasted an American beer called Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. We tasted it and were like, "Wow, we love this." So we would dedicate our weekends to trying to recreate that in Martin's mom's garage. In 2007, we'd always wanted to start a business, so we decided to turn our hobby into a job. We got a £20,000 bank loan. I had £30,000 of life savings, and we decided to set up this business. We set up in a derelict, dystopian industrial unit in Fraserburgh, in a god-forsaken industrial estate. We had no money, so it was beg, barter, bootleg to set this facility up. We had old dairy tanks. Our water tanks were plastic tanks from a local garden center because we had no money to buy stainless steel tanks. We set out on this slightly naive mission to build one of the world's best beer companies with two humans and a dog. No experience, no capital, no business plan, nothing but just a huge amount of passion for fantastic beer, a huge amount of disillusionment at the status quo of the beer market, which was essentially just big, mass-market global mega-corporations who turned beer—a thing that we love—into a lowest common denominator commodity product. We wanted to make fantastic quality beers and open people's eyes to this diverse spectrum of flavor, taste, quality that they never knew existed, and take them on this beery journey with us. That's what we set out to do in 2007. But the first few years were so, so tough.

What gave you the right to start a beer company?

Nothing at all.

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

So Martin studied how to make beer and distilling at university, so Martin has a really solid technical background. He's always taken more of a lead on the beer side of the business, and I've always been more on the business side, the sales side, the marketing side, the expansion side of the business. First couple of years, it was me selling beer at local farmers' markets, selling beer out of the boot of my beat-up Volkswagen Golf. But we couldn't afford to pay ourselves, so I moved back in with my dad, Martin moved back in with his mom. I had to start working on the fishing boat again part-time just because nobody wanted to buy our beer. Everyone told us, "Make your beer cheaper. Make your beer with less flavor. Make your beer with less hops. Change your name. Change your packaging." And we didn't listen to any of that. We were determined that if we were going to fail, let's fail doing something that we love, let's fail doing something that we're insanely passionate about. Let's just keep going and see if we can find a way, find a breakthrough to somehow make that work. That breakthrough for us came in 2008.

And you described that period as being one of the toughest of your life, that first year. Give me a detailed flavor of the hardest... is there a moment in that period where you recount maybe your hardest day?

I think so, yeah. We did everything, the two of us. So it was just the two of us. We did the accounts, we did the sales, we made the beer, we packaged the beer—the whole thing. We filled bottles by hand. So: fill by hand, put on a cap by hand, put on a label by hand. The tanks held about 3,500 bottles of beer, so that took us kind of 20 hours to do. We did that and then straight through the night. The next day, I was like, "Okay, let's go and see if I can sell some of this beer." So I had a few cases in the back of my car—Punk IPA, which is our flagship beer today, was the beer that we were trying to sell back then as well. I visited six or seven different local establishments and gave them my best sales pitch: "It's handmade, it's local, it's full of flavor." Everyone said no. The last person didn't just say no, he tasted it and he just spat it back into the bottle and just gave me the bottle back and essentially told me to get out. I remember just walking to the car and just wondering, "Okay, what the hell am I going to tell the bank?" We've got this loan, we can't pay the loan back, we can't pay the rent on the building. I've been up for almost 30 hours. This is going nowhere. "What can we do to try and get this business to survive?" For me, that was a very tough moment.

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

There was no way we were going to quit.

Why?

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

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

Same beer the guy spat out. Came first.

Really? Came first.

Same beer.

Same temperature?

I think so. It wasn't flat. That's interesting. So I went down to Cheshunt, which is where the Tesco headquarters were at the time, and met the Tesco team. I sat there with my best poker face on as they told me, "James, your beers are fantastic. We want to put these four beers into 500 stores nationwide and we can sell 2,000 cases a week." So I signed a contract to do that without telling them anything at all about the fact this was two guys and one dog filling bottles by hand. There was no way we could meet that order. We had four months to figure out a way to do this. I got back, sat down with Martin, and was like, "Okay, we've got this opportunity, but we need a plan." We decided: okay, we need a bottling machine, that's going to cost us £100,000; we need tanks, that's going to cost us £50,000. So we went to the bank, which was Bank of Scotland who we banked with at that time. This was 2008, so this is when the global economy is going into this huge tailspin. We sat down and were like, "Okay, let's pitch this as hard as we possibly can. This is our chance." We told them about the contract with Tesco, young up-and-coming company. "But we need £100,000 for a bottling machine, £50,000 for tanks." And they just laughed us out of the bank. They were like, "James, Martin, you're not paying your loan back. It's a tough time for banking. There's no way we can give you this money here." So, undeterred, what we did: we went to the bank that was across the street, we got an appointment there with HSBC, and we said to the guys at HSBC, "Our bank, Bank of Scotland, have just offered us an amazing finance deal on this bottling line and these fermentation tanks. We've got this contract with Tesco, but if you match this deal, we are going to shift all of our banking to you. We're going places as a company, we'd love for you to support us." And they gave us the money. So business plan year one and two was "make hoppy American beers and tell lies to banks."

Are they still your bank?

They are still our bank to this very day.

How do they feel about knowing that?

I waited 10 years until I told them the truth. I thought that was a safe amount of time, they're not going to take the money back. We got the bottling machine in, we got the tanks in. The first beers came off the bottling line two weeks before they were due to go into Tesco. We got the beers into Tesco, they sold okay. Year one, year two, they sold a bit better and we were able to start building our business from there. That gave us a foothold. At the end of 2009, I was able to quit being a part-time fisherman and just focus 100% on the business.

By 2009, so that's two and a half years. Wow. And so that first year where they're selling okay, and in the second year where they're selling much better, what was the causal factor of that sales increase that started to get things moving? Was it word of mouth? Was it marketing? Was it...

It was community. So one of the most important things in the history of our business has been community. It got to 2009 and we’d exhausted the money we could get from banks regardless of what we said. We are a capital-intensive business, so we need money for stainless steel tanks to expand, and we were expanding quite quickly at that stage. It was: how can we get money to expand our business? We spoke to some potential investors, but it just didn't feel like the right fit for us as a business. So in 2009, we came up with this concept that we called Equity for Punks. This was crowdfunding before crowdfunding was even a thing. We thought, "Okay, if we can sell some of our business to the people who enjoy the beers that we make, we can hopefully create this whole new business model." We spoke to five legal companies up in Scotland and they all told us what we're trying to do is essentially impossible, "You can't do this." Spoke to a sixth company, they said, "Okay, we can maybe do it, but it's going to cost £150,000, there's a lot of risks, nobody's done this before." We decided to do it. It cost us £150,000 at a time that we had £50,000 in our bank account. So we gambled the entire future of our business on making this completely untried, untested business model that we just came up with called Equity for Punks a success. I was so nervous. The day that we launched Equity Punks, it’s the most nervous I’ve been on this business journey because I knew if it doesn't work, game over for us as a business. So many people told us it was a bad idea. "People are not going to buy shares in a company on the internet. People don't want to invest in a beer company, people just want to buy beer. This is a silly idea, there's too much paperwork, people are not going to send in checks"—which they had to do back then as well, we had some online payments but those were cumbersome, so most people paid by check. But we wanted to do something different. With Equity Punks, what we've been able to do is shorten the distance between ourselves and the people who enjoy the beer that we make. So we don't just have investors; we've got community, we've got advocates, we've got ambassadors, we've got people who believe what we believe, who want us to succeed and who are on this journey with us. The first Equity Punks was enough of a success to keep us in the game. We raised £500,000 from about 600 investors. But since then, we've gone on to build a community of 210,000 people and we've raised almost £100 million through Equity Punks. For me, it is the most special thing about our business. So the largest shareholder in our business is Equity Punks and our team, which I think is really cool. So we are community-owned, we're people-owned. Having that community with us, who then, when they walk into one of our bars, they feel like they're walking into one of their own bars. When they buy our beer off the shelf, they feel it's their own beer because they are part-owner of that company. Completely new business model for a consumer brand in the 21st century, one that takes our consumers with us. That community element is amazing. They're our biggest fans, they're our harshest critics, we get fantastic feedback from them. They help us find new locations, they help us develop new beers. Equity Punks has been key to what we've done.

As we sit here in 2022, one of the biggest words in marketing is "community" now. And you've kind of detailed... I was going to ask you, but you've detailed very clearly the value of community. And the Equity Punks thing—when I read that, I think, "Okay, it's one way to raise money," but there's other ways to raise money. But it's really more about getting greater buy-in from your existing customer base and turning them into advocates and into die-hards, which increases loyalty, it gets them to evangelize. As you say, when they buy beer, they're basically... it's almost like there's a discount on that beer. I know there is actually a discount as well, but there's actually a discount on it because they're enriching themselves. So it's a really interesting, innovative model. Is that similar to what crowdfunding—equity crowdfunding—is today? Was this before this?

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

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

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

When your cat is acting weirder, or your dog is being louder, your turtle moves slower, your cat seems thirstier, or your puppy is acting clumsier... Day or night, if you don't know what's wrong, know where to go. Veg ER for pets. This is Kate. Veg, the better, kinder ER for pets.

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

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

And if I'm thinking about how to drive a better return on marketing and then I think about what you've done, I see: well, we've got to be probably bolder to win share of voice. We've got to try and win headlines in more extreme ways because nobody's going to be writing about you for the fun of it if you're a smaller sort of challenger brand. Then the second thing I think is kind of: we've got to do that on new platforms. We can't fight out on TV or in newspapers because those are where you kind of throw huge amounts of money and you get a 1:1 return. So new platforms and new approaches. And that very much kind of signifies what I've seen from BrewDog: very, very bold.

Very bold and intentionally bold, and especially bold in our early years when we had no budget whatsoever. So the challenge was: how can we get our name out there with no money at all? So we had to do things that were intentionally provocative, that were on the edge and sometimes we crossed that edge as well. But that enabled us to get our name, our message, our business out there with no budget at all. So we have driven a tank through the streets of London. We have thrown taxidermy cats out of a helicopter over the Bank of England. We've put Vladimir Putin in the front of a beer label. So we've done a lot of things: low budget, high impact. But we try to make it that everything we do ties back and is underpinned by what we're passionate about. So there has to be a connection there. So does this reinforce what we believe in, what we're trying to do as a company? Because otherwise it’s just hollow and it's fake and it's false. So: how does this reinforce the core beliefs that drive this business, which is trying to build an alternative business and a huge passion for fantastic beer?

One of the more extreme things—I saw the Vladimir thing—the thing I read about more recently was that you put in a complaint about your own beer?

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

How does that work? So you make a beer that is really high in ABV?

It was. So we made a beer called Tokyo 18%. Now, if you looked at the newspaper headlines in the UK when we launched that beer, you would have thought that I was single-handedly responsible for the downfall of Western civilization by making an 18% beer. We had in *The Sun*: "Binge drinking? Blame this man," with like a cut-out of my head and a bottle of Tokyo. That took a bit of explaining to my very religious grandmother, but that's another story. But everything we did with that beer was we just made a thousand bottles. It was very expensive, it was for connoisseurs, it was for aficionados. We want to elevate the status of beer, and I think the more someone can understand and appreciate something, the less likely they are to abuse it. And we make expensive products for people who love fantastic beer. So it was to kind of make a statement: you've got all these big companies doing very cheap alcohol that's likely to be abused trying to ban products of this company that's looking to elevate the status, increase education and awareness around beer, and lead people to appreciate and enjoy beer in a more elevated way.

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

I think in that one to a certain extent it was job done. To show you how odd things were back then—this was kind of 2009, 2010 when we were starting to get momentum and the beer scene was starting to change, so the big companies had had it their own way for way too long and things were starting to change. There was an awards ceremony in Scotland in 2010 put together by the BII, the British Innkeepers Institute. We'd got a heads-up before the awards ceremony: "Hey guys, you're going to win the award for Scottish Bar Operator of the Year, so you guys better come to the award ceremony." So we went there, we booked a table. They were just about to announce it. I was like halfway up to the stage to get the award and they announced a different company. I was like, "Okay." But then the other company didn't want to take the award because our name was engraved on the trophy. They were like, "Well, we don't want it." So the next day I spoke to the person that organized the award ceremony. I was like, "What happened? You told us we were going to win." And he was like, "Well, Diageo—one of the world's biggest drinks companies—they were the main sponsor. They told me five minutes before we were due to give it to you, if they gave it to you guys, they were going to pull all future sponsorship."

You're joking!

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

Did you take that personally?

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

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

It is, Elvis Juice.

Elvis Juice. They sent you a copyright statement, just sort of like basically a notice that you're violating their copyright. And you responded with some Elvis rhyme. And on the LinkedIn post that I saw, it said you changed your name to Elvis. Then the BBC come out and say that didn't happen. What is the truth in this one? Did you change your name to Elvis?

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

What's that, just signing a piece of paper?

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

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

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

BrewDog's marketing has been so bold and it’s been so standout, and in terms of the return on every dollar you've spent, it seems to have been a pretty astounding return because you've done these big viral activations. A lot of them are like parodies or they're taking the piss out of big corporations or they're sticking it to the man in various ways or going at the incumbents in the industry. Some of them though, they can... even the example you gave there of the complaining about your own beer with the Portman Group, obviously the complaint wasn't real.

Yeah.

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

Yeah, well, I think with that one, it wasn't necessarily untrue because afterwards we said we made this complaint. So it was us who disclosed the fact that we made the complaint, and we disclosed that to just show how ridiculous the system was. If we hadn't said it was us that complained about it, then I would accept that was being a bit dishonest. But the fact that we came out and we said, "Hey, the system fundamentally doesn't work and we wanted to expose that by making this complaint," was what we intended to do there.

When we first started talking about marketing, one of the things you said was: "We made a lot of mistakes. Took things too far." What did you take too far in hindsight now? Now that you're a big global brand and everyone is looking back at all the steps when you weren't so big.

I think the mistakes that we've made in marketing is when we've tried to do something which is on the edge or which is controversial which needs explaining. So if you look at the thing in its totality, then it is potentially a positive thing. But if you only see a snapshot of it, then your takeaway from that could be negative. So I think a lot of the mistakes that we made from a marketing perspective—and we did some amazing things, but we did make some mistakes—was when we got too clever with the concept and the intention behind it, which was genuine, got lost. So a famous example of one mistake that we made in marketing: for International Women's Day, we wanted to highlight the gender pay gap. This was a project that was put together by some of the fantastic women we've got in our business and we made a beer called Pink IPA that we were going to sell 21% cheaper to women to highlight the gender pay gap, which was something that we felt passionate about. And then the proceeds from sales of that beer went to charities which help women and women's pay in the workplace and these kind of things. But then what happened was people just saw "Pink IPA." And it looked like it was the beer itself was a parody of products which market themselves towards women, but then it just looked like another product that markets itself towards women. And if anyone dug into it and understood, "Okay, this is to highlight the gender pay gap and they're doing some good with the money and it's a genuine cause," people just saw the Pink IPA, they saw the image, and came to the conclusion that we're just doing the thing that we were going to fight against. And that was a key learning: people just see a snapshot of a thing. So you need to make sure that all of the message that you want to land is in that snapshot, because a lot of people are not going to dig deeper into what it is.

What I got from that was that you've got to create a marketing campaign where the context can't be separated, because it will be separated if it can be.

Exactly, 100%.

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

That’s my job title, yeah.

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

A lot of my best friends to this day are the guys that I worked with on the fishing boats. But these are an unusual and interesting set of characters as well. It takes a certain type of person to do that type of work and do that type of work on an ongoing basis. I mean, they're hardworking, like to have fun, like to mess about a little bit, but all about the hard work. And especially when things get difficult, like seeing a good crew on a fishing boat come together and work hard to get them through a tough time together was really inspiring when it came to business and leadership later down the line.

I can see you being a very good captain on a boat. And I just generally, you're—in the couple of moments that I've been with you—you're very focused. And you're someone that feels very resilient. And then you add that to the fact that this is your business, and you've said before, I think you said it in your book, that no one will ever love the business like you do. You being so hardworking, so out of balance in your own life as you've described—how do you not then have that expectation on others? Because this is something that I honestly, I struggled with. I struggled with it especially in the early years of my business, understanding that I was a bit f***ed up. And that in fact everyone else was normal and that I needed to understand—it goes back to me saying about the dark side and the cost of my childhood and the insecurities—I was a bit f***ed up. So how did you contend with that?

For the first 10 years of the business, I would say I contended with that very, very badly. There's like a lot of intensity, there's a lot of drive, there's a lot of determination, there's a lot of passion there. And understanding how to lead people, how to take people with me on that journey has definitely evolved over time. I'm now CEO of a business that's got 3,000 people. Before that, I maybe managed a handful of people on a fishing boat, but that is it. So to go from no experience and being a CEO, no experience as being a leader, to managing 3,000 people at this speed and adding this many... this year, well last 18 months cumulatively, we're going to add a thousand people to the team. So it's like a thousand amazing, well-paid jobs in a recession which our country, which our economy needs. So we're expanding all the time. But just how steep that learning curve is to go from not managing anyone to managing 3,000 people with all the stresses and strains of growing a business. I think if I look back and reflect a little bit, we've definitely had challenges and well-documented challenges along the way. We've had periods of such intense growth that we maybe haven't focused enough on our people and our culture during that period. As a leader, I've always just been so focused on building something, on delivering an exceptional value to our customer and making sure every time someone opens one of our beers or visits one of our bars, the experience is amazing. Knowing that if someone is choosing to spend their money with us, they're making a choice to do that versus one of our competitors, therefore we need to set the bar incredibly high and push incredibly high. As a leader, because of that drive, because of that determination, because of that focus, I've definitely pushed some of the team members too far in the past and I think that's been well-documented. But that's came from a place of doing this because we want to build something amazing. It took a bit of time to understand that, okay, they, as amazing as the team are, they don't have the same level of investment in the business as I do. Some of them want to push that hard, some of them just don't. For a while there was just like, "I'm going to run through this wall and I want everyone else to run through the wall as well." Not everyone's going to run through that wall. Again, a big lesson and I've reflected a lot in leadership in the last 12 months is to take people with you, you've got to make them understand the "why" behind what you're doing. My kind of first decade of a leader was: "We're doing this, this is what we're going to do, let's go." And what I've kind of found more recently is if people understand, "Okay, we're doing this, but this is why. This is what it means for you, this is what it means for the business, this is why it's a fantastic thing, this is why it's going to help us achieve objectives where everyone's going to win together." It's much easier to take people with you on that journey, whereas in the first 10 years, I was just like, "Go."

Interesting. That's such an important lesson because you know, in the example you gave there, on one hand, you're dragging people. And all studies show across all industries that when people don't go voluntarily, it's burnout, it's pressure, it's stress, you know. And then what you've said there is leadership is in fact inspiring them to come with you. And when it's voluntary in terms of they know why they're going and they want to go, then all the psychological implications across multiple studies that I've read about are significantly improved. You said you've been on a leadership evolution. So, speaking honestly, what has that evolution been from when you started as a leader and the business starts to explode to the person that sits here in front of me today? What have you had to work on and remove?

It absolutely still is a journey and I absolutely believe that I can get better as a leader. I think one of the most important things that I've done in the last 12 months: we appointed an amazing independent non-exec chairman in Alan Leighton, who's run some fantastic businesses, so much experience, so having someone there who's like a mentor to me. Because if I hang out with my buddies, they want to speak about football and golf and that kind of stuff, they don't want, "Hey, I've got this kind of leadership challenge." They don't care. Which is amazing, but then being a CEO is a very, very lonely job at times. Incredibly lonely. There's another quote that I love from Ben Horowitz, author of one of my favorite business books, and it's: "The first rule of CEO psychological meltdown is not to speak about CEO psychological meltdown." I think people don't realize: being a CEO is fantastic, but it's lonely, it's intense, it's difficult. So having Alan's kind of help and guidance through that journey, I think is really important. I would say in the early years of the business, I managed it like a captain would manage a small team in a fishing boat. Whereas now I'm looking to evolve my leadership style into a CEO of a kind of medium-to-large company, which is a bit less intense, which is maybe a bit less demanding, but which is more about taking our people with us on this journey. So: here's the... we're going to do this and it might be tough, but this is what it means for us as a business, this is why we're doing it. And then also making sure that incentives are very much aligned. Making sure that, "Okay, we want to create a business model where we win together as a company," which I think is really powerful. We've always wanted to build a radically different type of business, a business that rejected how things were done and what "big business as usual" was, and that’s been key. I think if you look at: we're community-owned, we're the world's first carbon-negative beer business, and the new things that we've launched with our people it makes us a fundamentally and radically different business. So we recently launched the blueprint, which is I think the biggest, most important announcement in the history of our business. Firstly, I decided to give almost £100 million of my own equity in the business to the team. So it's over the next four years, but that means each salaried team member receives £120,000 worth of equity, and that's in the valuation today. So if we double in size, then that could be significantly more. And that's about recognizing: we are all in this together, we want to win together, we want to work hard to win together, and it's about incentivizing our team to act like business owners but rewarding them like business owners. The second part of that was we wanted to create a completely new model for how a hospitality business works. So we've got over 100 amazing hospitality venues all over the planet. Each of our bars now share 50% of the profits with the team that work there. So it is a whole new model where if you visit one of our bars in Tokyo, in Berlin, in Cleveland, in Australia, you know that, "Okay, half of the profit that this bar makes is shared with the amazing people that put this experience together." So we want to kind of elevate the standard of hospitality, elevate the standard of kind of careers within hospitality. We've always been a real living wage employer, which has been very important for us, but sharing 50% of the profits with our team, I think helps us attract and retain fantastic people. I think it's something that's going to resonate with our customers. I think it's something that's going to help us elevate the hospitality experience for consumers. And consumers are ultimately the thing which drives our business.

That's the thing. You know, the first point was like inspiring people to come with you as opposed to dragging them. Which again, many CEOs, many leaders fall into the trap of doing that because we are so blinded by our own mission that we forget to communicate it and bring other people along. But the second thing you touched on there is: if you... you know, we sometimes CEOs sit here—and I've probably been guilty of this, you said you've been guilty of this—it's like looking at the team that you've built and maybe questioning at times why they're not moving with the same energy that you are. But they're not incentivized to. They're not going to be a 100 millionaire, gazillionaire if this all works out. They are getting their remuneration regardless of outcome. So the second piece that I've garnered from that of leadership is also to align incentives. And if you want someone to act like an owner, you have to make them an owner. Which seems like common sense, but it’s not so common.

It’s not so common. It took us a while to get there, but that is exactly it. We've got reasonably high expectations of our team. We like to push hard. We're in an industry dominated by companies much bigger than ours, so we need to be on our A-game. We need to push things as a business. But we need to recognize the hard work that hundreds and thousands of people put into our business every single day. They're the people that make the beer, that deliver the beer, that make the magic happen for the customer. I want their incentives to be as aligned as my own. I want them to feel as much ownership as I do, and I want them to share intrinsically in the success of the business. Hopefully by doing this, we can create a new business model that in a few years' time I can then sit down with other CEOs and: "Okay, we've invested in our people this way, but we've become a better business because of it." And then do other businesses then decide to do the same thing? Is it maybe normal in five years' time for every hospitality business to share 50% of the profits with the people at work in their site? And if that happens, then we haven't only made the lives better for the people at work in our business, but we've managed to fundamentally change our industry, which would be really cool.

A lot of successful businesses in the country—I'm thinking of the Ben Francis's, I'm thinking of the Huels, #ad just in case the ASA come for me... a lot of business owners that have gone through extremely high growth and I've sat here with those CEOs of those companies, they get out of the way. They realize, especially in your case because this was your first shot at business, right?

This was my first shot, yeah.

So you're going to f*** up. Like many, many times. I f***ed up a lot as well, hugely, over and over again, and still today. But they get out of the way. Ben Francis stepped down as CEO when there was 30 people, the founder of Huel Julian stepped out of the CEO role and put someone in. Did that ever cross your mind and why didn't you do that sooner? If you knew that you didn't have... because learning on the job when you've got 2,000 people is a high-risk...

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

Why?

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

Really?

Yeah. And for me, what is exciting is: where can we take this from here? We want to build one of the world's best beer companies, we want to build one of the world's best companies overall. I look at companies like Whole Foods, or Tesla, or Google, or Amazon, or Starbucks—that is the scale of the ambition. We want to do what they've done in their industry for beer. So what I'm insanely excited about is: okay, we've given ourselves a platform, we've now got over 3,000 staff, we now make beer in four continents, we've now got over 100 locations, we've got significant sales momentum. Where can we take this from here? I think what we've done so far gives us an opportunity to do something meaningful, to do something impactful, to do something that enriches the lives of our customers, to do something that helps us save the planet and fly the flag for sustainability, something that helps us look after our team members even better, but helps us have a huge impact. What I'm very excited about is: okay, what can we do as a team, as a company, as a collective, as a community over the next 5 to 10 years? That's what I'm focused on, that's why I get out of bed in the morning, and that's what I'm really excited to continue doing with a fantastic management team and team that we've got in the business.

I was startled when you said "indifference." You genuinely, the way that you feel about what you've achieved so far is quite close to indifference? Kind of just numb or like just, "meh"? Honestly?

It's close to indifference. We've done some fantastic things, but overall we are still relatively small in the overall scheme of things. In terms of, if I spend maybe 5% of my time thinking, "Okay, this is good," 95% of it is: okay, in the next 12 months, we can open our fantastic site in Vegas, we can plant millions of trees in the Lost Forest in Scotland, we can reduce our carbon emissions, we can launch some fantastic new beers that our customers are going to love, we can open 50 new locations in India, we can continue investing in our people, we can make the profit-share thing amazing, we can try and make sure that the equity that people have in our team is as valuable as possible, we can continue expanding our German business...

You're the 16th biggest brewery, aren't you?

16th most valuable beer brand, yeah.

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

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

But you... if I said, "How would you feel today?" So back in 2007, speaking to James and Dickie, and I'm saying, "By the way, look at this, this is what where you get to in 2022." You would assume... I'm guessing you would assume that on that day in 2022 you would be really content. But you're clearly not. You're not content, are you? Because you're saying that... yeah, you're saying that you're indifferent.

Yeah. If you'd asked me that then, I would, yeah, "I'm going to spend half of my time in the office, half of my time traveling and then just chill," whereas what I'm doing at the moment is the exact opposite. What I'm focused on is: okay, where do we take this thing from here? Can we make a real difference? Can we create the world's first top 10 beer business for over a century? And that's an exciting challenge.

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

Or down.

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

Yeah, well, I mean I guess the closest thing we've had to finish line is in 2017 we took a big investment in our company, the company was valued at just over a billion. So one of my things was always: let's see if you can build a unicorn. So unicorns are startup companies which get to be valued over a billion—called unicorns because they're so rare, there's so few of them that happen in the UK and especially in Scotland. And I always thought, "Okay, if there was ever something that would make me feel, 'Okay, I've accomplished that thing, I've done that thing, I'm complete, happy, content,' it would be: build a unicorn." That for me was my winning Oscar, scoring a winning goal in a World Cup final. For me, that was build a unicorn. And then the next day I was just like, "Okay, let's go. Where do we go from here?"

That was your first big cash windfall personally, because some money went into the company, some money went to the founders, you sold shares. So that was your first big dealing with being a cash millionaire.

And a fun story from that: so the money came in to myself and Martin, and I had Bethany... it was well into the tens of millions. I had Bethany, my amazing assistant, transfer it from the lawyer's account into my bank account. For some reason, there was a typo in the account numbers. It went to somewhere in Russia. The money was lost for four days at a point in time we thought the money wasn't going to come back. So I went from the euphoria of, "Okay, I've built a unicorn, I've got a huge check in my bank account," to, "Where the f*** is the money? What am I going to do? What am I going to do now?" So on the fifth day, the boss of the boss of the boss managed to find a way to get the money back and we got the money back. But for the five days after the deal, the money was missing, presumed lost, presumed never coming back.

Russia. What a place to send it.

Yeah. The sort code sent it to a bank in St. Petersburg and they were like, "Well, the bank might not even want to send it back." I was like, "Okay." Oh my God. So now, double-triple check every sort code that I send cash to.

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

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

When you say "the demons," what do you mean?

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

Who put that voice in your head?

I think a combination of early childhood, potentially partly parents despite being well-intentioned. There was a story from my childhood where I've been obsessed with sharks my entire life. So my favorite hobby is to go diving with sharks. I'm happiest when I'm under the water with sharks. I recently went to Guadalupe Island off the coast of Mexico, dived with some great white sharks. Being under the water with sharks is my happy place. When I was a kid, I would always tell people when they asked me what I want to be: "I want to be a marine biologist, I want to study sharks." When I was eight or nine years old, my parents told me to go and get my shark book. I was like, "Wow, okay, they're finally interested in something that I love." Pajamas on just before bedtime, went to my bedroom, came through with the shark book. Mother opened up the shark book and went through the four authors in the shark book and was like, "James, look: this person PhD, this person PhD, this person PhD. They've all got PhDs. It's just not something you're going to be able to do. So you need to stop telling people you want to be a marine biologist, you need to stop telling people you're going to study sharks because you just won't manage to get a PhD, so you need to think of something else." And I just remember not saying anything, taking my shark book, and just walking back to my bedroom in tears and: "Okay, no more sharks, James."

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

Don't think so. No. But I think there were a lot of instances like that, and that's where that voice comes from. And the voice is very much part of me. And I think it's helped me push, maybe push too hard at times, but it’s helped me do some fantastic things. But it's always there. After that big deal, it was like, "Okay, you've done that, but now unless you can do this, then that voice starts up again."

I worry about that a little bit, because... yeah. Why don't you think you've forgiven her?

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

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

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

Interesting.

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

But isn't that what the voice would say? Because the voice values validation. It's desperately seeking validation. So of course the voice would say, "What if you lose me? Then you won't be validated anymore." Validation is so important to us. This is a really interesting topic. This was the last chapter in my book and I actually didn't know... I knew what I wanted to try and get to, but I didn't know what the answer was until I started writing. It's this whole idea of: "Feeling if you're enough yet. Do you feel like you're enough yet?" And I thought that the reason why I was ambitious was because I didn't feel like I was enough, so it was this driving force. But in fact, I came to learn that because I didn't feel like I was enough, I had fake ambitions. I wanted a Lamborghini and to impress people. These were never my ambitions. And the closer I got to feeling like I was enough, my ambitions changed. I still had ambitions, I didn't lose ambition, but they became intrinsically driven ambitions, like I want to have a wife and I want to do things like a podcast where it doesn't pay a shit ton of money, it’s not the best financial use of my time, but it’s an intrinsically driven thing. And so maybe your ambitions will change, but you'll be happy with the change.

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

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

No.

Not at all?

It just moves the goalpost every time. Achieve it, goalpost moves. Achieve it, goalpost moves. No change at all in that voice.

F***ing hell.

No.

That explains a lot, to be fair, because you've really went hell-for-leather with your business.

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

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

And much of that you've actually welcomed. You've tried to get controversy. It's been central to your marketing strategy. And it’s actually in my estimation, especially in those early years, served you tremendously well because it's made the marketing dollar work a lot harder. The controversy in more recent years starts with this "Punks with Purpose" letter that was written. 300 of your ex-employees and some of your current employees at the time in 2021 came out with these allegations of bullying, lying, fear, toxic workplace culture, unfair dismissals, all of this stuff. When people hear about the BrewDog Blueprint, they might think it's a knee-jerk response to that and that without that moment where those employees had written that letter about their experience at BrewDog, you wouldn't have gone on the journey and published that new vision for BrewDog. What do you say to that?

I would say that's completely not the case. Firstly, let me speak about how we've been as an employer. I think it is completely fair to say there's been points on the high-growth journey of this company where we could have done more to look after the people. As a first-time CEO leading a company that was expanding super-rapidly in the US, in Germany, in the UK, at times we didn't invest enough in HR, we had unrealistic expectations of our team, and I think a fair amount of feedback in that letter was valid. So we've always wanted to be the best employer we can be. The aspiration has always been to be a fantastic place to work and we've always believed that our long-term destiny is determined by how well we look after the fantastic people in our business. I think that’s been core to our DNA since day one. Have we always lived up to that in the high-growth periods? No, we haven't. And I think we fully accept that. Off the back of that feedback, we did a full independent review of culture, we spoke to over a thousand people inside and outside the company, and we made a whole host of changes: we invested in HR, we put a pay increase in place across the board, we added resource where we felt we were under-resourced as a company, we put in place an independently managed ethics hotline and loads of other things. I think we had a few years where we missed the mark from a people perspective: high growth, inexperience on my behalf, unrealistic expectations, difficulties in COVID. I think we've reset things now. I think we've put some fantastic things in place and then on top of that we've launched the blueprint, which I think helps create a whole new model for business going forward, which is something we're very excited to do.

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

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

What did you think was fair?

I think it's completely fair to say that I at times in the journey have been too intense, that I have been too demanding, that I have set standards for the team which I would set for myself but then for a lot of the team members that is unattainable. I fell into the trap of picking bits and pieces from some of my favorite business leaders' philosophy. So: Jeff Bezos, he’s got a philosophy that standards need to be unreasonably high and unless people think they're unreasonably high, they're not high enough. And I would just pick bits and pieces without kind of taking maybe the whole philosophy and I just pushed for such high standards, unrealistic deadlines, and it was because I was so focused on: let's build a thing, let's create more jobs, let's create more progression opportunities for our team, let's deliver more value for our customers, let's create amazing moments of customer magic. Let's continue building. So the intention was 100% good, and because I was so bought in and so focused on that, I did... I did push people too far.

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

I think for me, there's the difference between, "Okay, this is genuine feedback because people had a valid concern and because people want to help make us a better business," which: fully accept, want to listen to that feedback all day long. With us, there's been unfortunately two things mixed together. So there's been the valid feedback which we listen to, which we accept, which we use to become a bit better business. There's also been people who have been on a mission to inflict as much damage as they can on me and on the business with mistruths, with misrepresentations, with dishonest statements and dishonest claims. I know a lot of these individuals, and unfortunately I can't say too much at the moment because there are two ongoing court cases. But there's been a large amount of criminality involved in this as well and hopefully one day I'm able to speak about it, but some of the things that have happened in the background are completely shocking. It's almost like a movie plot. So you've got the kind of two things mixed up in our case: you've got valid feedback from ex-employees about, "Okay, you could have done better here, you didn't invest enough in HR," that these things were difficult that we fully hear. And on the other side you've got people taking advantage of that moment just to try and inflict damage on me and the company for whatever reason. We've always had haters as a business as well, perhaps more than any other business, and I always felt to have people hate you, you need to be successful doing something that you love. I think there's a big difference here—and you spent some time in the US—between how US people relate to successful business people and how UK people relate to successful business people. I think in the US they cheer you on from the sidelines, they support you because they... their mindset is they think that can be them someday. Whereas in the UK, I think it's maybe a bit more jealous of success and they don't think it's going to be them, so therefore they're jealous of success, which I think is a bit to play there as well. So, yeah, some of the elements of feedback that I felt wasn't coming from a genuine place were some of the kind of hardest to hear, whereas the other bits of feedback that were fair and genuine I was there for all day long, but the disingenuous bits of feedback were tough because they just all get reported the same way in the media.

Fair and genuine feedback then. So one of the things that you actually do at your company—and you were doing during this growth period—doing the old Net Promoter Score thing. One of the things the BBC reported on: in your head office, the score for when people were asked the question "How likely are you to recommend BrewDog as a good place to work?" was minus 54%. And then company-wide, the score was minus 18%. How does one... because that's just a number. How does one go about getting the context of that number and then improving the number? Because if I got that number, I wouldn't know where to bloody start. I mean, I would start with surveys, but it’s a difficult thing to change, right? Because that’s an awful number.

Yeah. And I don't think you can change it based on a number. I think the mistake that we maybe made in the past was when we knew we had an issue with our culture, we tried to fix those issues in a vacuum. So it would be me and a couple of our senior leaders and: "Okay, we know we've got this issue here, we want to make it better for our people, let's do this, this, and this." But we created that in a vacuum and we didn't speak to the people. So we did so many well-intentioned things that we thought were really going to help us as an employer that just didn't help. So one of the biggest learnings on that part of the journey for me—and it really kind of came to fruition with the blueprint—is: if we're trying to do something that's good for our people, let's build it with our people. Let's not build it in isolation, let's not build it in a vacuum. So the blueprint, for instance, before we launched it, I did focus groups extensively with cross-sections of the company: in America, junior people, senior people, middle managers. I did the same for our retail business, for our production business. I did face-to-face workshops on it: "Here's what we're thinking about doing in terms of making things better for you guys. What do you think? This is going to impact you on a day-to-day basis. How do you think this is going to go down the team? But ultimately, how can we make this better?" In the past, the blueprint I would have just launched it in a vacuum with good intention. We made so many changes to how it works based on the feedback from our team, so we ultimately ended up launching something that was far more impactful, that was far better for our team because we built it in a fundamentally different way than we would have built it before, which is just in isolation. I think that's the first example of us doing that and me doing that as a leader, which I think is a really important evolution of my leadership style within the business.

The other thing you've done, which I implore all companies to do, as part of your BrewDog Blueprint—when I went on the website, I saw that you've got that transparency dashboard. This is very important in the modern world because this puts the power of truth into your hands in terms of reality. So what you've done is you've published on your website things like your employee satisfaction score, things relating to your carbon emissions and all these things so that the world can now see what your own team think of being a BrewDog employee. Because what that also does for the team is it builds trust.

It does. And I think it's such an important part of our philosophy. It just got to a point where there were so many misrepresentations that it was like: "Okay, let's just give them the facts in their purest, most undiluted form, and then people can make up their own minds." So if you look at the transparency dashboard at the moment, the latest score that we've got from people within our business is 3.49 out of five as an employer. Now, do we want to be 3.49 out of five as an employer? No. Is that significantly better than most people outside the company would have you think? Yes. But what we've committed to doing is every 12 months, we're going to do the same survey in the same way and we're going to update people. So we're going to do that at the end of this year and we're going to share those results so people can see: "Okay, you've done some things. Are you now better or worse than a 3.49 in an anonymous survey from your people?" And that's a level of transparency we've committed to here. I think that commitment to transparency isn't something new in our business. In 2014, we launched something called DIY Dog. So with DIY Dog, we gave away the beer recipe in full for every single beer we'd ever made. At the time it was 250 recipes. So it was the keys to our kingdom, it was everything that most companies use to kind of keep away in some secret vault somewhere and were loath to share with anyone. But that transparency has been kind of hardwired into our DNA for a long time. And the transparency dashboard specifically focusing on culture, people, headcount, employer score, is a key evolution of that.

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

It's 100% anonymous and it's managed by an independent third party, which lets us get the purest, most undiluted, fair, objective feedback we can.

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

I was massively, massively horrified. And I was massively horrified for two reasons: A, that it happened, and B, because I know it's my fault. So, every single thing that happens in this business is a direct consequence of something I have done. So if something goes wrong anywhere in the business—in a business with 3,000 people, things are going to go wrong all the time, in every different country, like all the time—but I can never, ever blame anyone but myself. Because I've either hired that person, set the tone for the culture, instructed that person, communicated with that person, communicated with their manager... so it's all a direct consequence. So when we've got an issue, I can't look at anyone but myself and I've got to take full responsibility for that issue and putting things in place to fix that issue. So it was tough to hear because it’s something that should absolutely never happen, but also hard to hear because I know if I'd done my job better, then it just wouldn't have happened in the first place.

Is that an evolution? That perspective?

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

There's a trend that was very obvious in this documentary: because I assume the brewery industry is male-dominated...

Yes.

Women that get jobs in the industry are at risk of getting swept up in a male culture and being the victims of a male culture in many respects. There was the story in the podcast about someone in a brewery or something doing a masturbation gesture at a female employee. This goes back to a masculine culture issue. Kind of the kind of culture you'd expect in a football locker room but wouldn't ever... is this the systemic uprooting that you've had to think about? Because 3,000 people around the world, you have to protect all of them. You have to protect all of them from each other. That’s not easy. How does one go about that? Is that a culture philosophy thing? How do you stop... and when someone goes to report something like that horrific incident, what...?

So again, we've put in place loads of things. So now we've got an independent ethics hotline which is independently managed. So there are so many ways now for people to report something they're concerned with. They can speak to their line manager, they can speak to the HR department, or if they want to do it completely anonymously, we've got this independently managed hotline. They can call that hotline, that hotline then gives the feedback to our directors, to our HR department, but it's completely anonymized so they don't know who that feedback's coming from. And for us, we want to build the most diverse, most inclusive business that we can. I think it's fundamentally important that we are as diverse and inclusive as our customer base is as well. We've now got a diversity and inclusion forum within the business with people from all over the business where they discuss things: "Okay, we can get better at this, we can get better at that." So it’s putting more things in place where we listen to a huge cross-section of our team. And whereas before we've been, "Okay, we're building a thing and the team are helping us build a thing," it’s, "Okay, let's build a thing together with our team." Because the person who is on the front lines in our bar in Columbus, Ohio, or our bar in central London, or our bar in Edinburgh, or the person who's working in the warehouse in Glasgow or in the brewery in Australia, their perspective on things is so important. I think a trap that I fell into was: "Okay, this is our culture because this is what I say it is." You can't say what a culture is. The culture is how the people in your team feel and then how they act, and you only build that together. So for me, it’s been another key learning: let's build the culture together with our team and that's going to give us the strongest culture that we can. Has the culture always been amazing in the past? No, hands up, it hasn't. Can we make a fantastic culture together in the future with our team? I fully believe we can and we're very much focused on that.

You've got two young daughters.

I do.

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

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

Oh, wow.

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

That's fine. Does she drink it?

No, she doesn't drink it. She smells it and she picks out the hops and she picks out the malt and then she designs a label and she gives it to some friends who are allowed to drink it and stuff. But yeah, I mean it's... stuff outside of the business... I mean my daughters are the most important thing in my life full stop and the main focus of my life outside the business. I think being a father has changed my view on a lot of things. It’s not just since myself and Martin became fathers that there suddenly became baby changing facilities in all of our venues and that kind of thing. But in a kind of deeper level, a lot of what we're doing from a sustainability perspective is because I want to be able to look my kids in the eye and know that we did our bit to save our home planet, that this didn't happen in our watch, that we put things in the line here. And then in terms of the culture we're building as a company as well, I want to be able to when they've grown up speak to our daughters about, "Okay, we tried to make it amazing for everyone by doing these things. These are the values that we held true to us. Did we always get it right? No, hands up, we didn't. Was the intention always there to do that? Absolutely. And this is where we got to in that journey."

One of the things you said, "I f***ed up on this particular point," was investing in Heineken. And you've explained many times the thesis behind that and why you did that. But I know that was... I know people were talking and you responded with some things yesterday about that. But I just wanted to kind of confront that. So you've obviously been the antithesis of those big beer companies. And then the BBC reported that you'd actually invested. I did. They said £500k, you say £120k. Context?

So I... they said I held £500k worth of shares. I invested £500k, I quickly sold it down. So at the time they said it was £500k.

Why are you investing in the people you hate?

Keep your friends close and enemies closer. No, so, at that time—and it's the most stupid thing that I've ever done. If I could go back and change a single thing, that would be very high in the list just because of how at odds it sits with our values and how we do things as a company. The intention was to try and do a distribution deal. Heineken felt that we hated them. I then, without thinking about it too much, decided, "Okay, well, I'm going to buy this and like, 'Hey guys, I can't hate you too much because I've got shares in you.'" So that was the kind of design and concept behind it. And whilst we don't want to be owned by big beer business, we do distribution deals with them. We've done a distribution deal with Asahi in Japan and we work with other big beer companies in a distribution basis but not an ownership basis. I naively felt it would help us get a distribution deal done. We didn't get the distribution deal done and, yeah, definitely one of the most stupid things I've ever done. I'd love to go back and take it back, but I did it. I owned shares in Heineken, which is kind of like, I don't know, Luke Skywalker owning shares in Darth Vader's latest startup.

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

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

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

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

You don't do many interviews.

I don't.

I think you've probably been a little bit too busy with COVID and everything else going on. So you've not really done any interviews. But you did one in the *Sunday Times* with Josh Glancy. And his sort of conclusive point in that interview was that he thought you were obsessive, someone who clearly struggles to express empathy or read social cues. He called you "cold-eyed, unsettling company," and "is as determined a person as I recall meeting." And then he goes on to say that he doesn't think you are the person that you've been portrayed to be in a negative context. But the bit that I found particularly interesting of all of that was the part about social cues, which you've mentioned earlier in this conversation.

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

Interesting. 39 years old, that’s a bit late...

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

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

Yeah.

And that can be, for a lot of people... I'm saying this is part of it... that can be quite intimidating.

Yeah.

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

I definitely need to do better on empathy, 100%. And it's kind of one of the learnings as well, that I've been so focused that I was like, "Well, don't need any empathy because it just takes up mental capital that needs to be determined, resilient, driving forward, hitting this objective, going for the next goal." And I think some of the issues we've had in the past has been because of that. And this whole thing is a learning, this whole thing is a journey. I think I've reflected and learned more than I have in my entire life over the last 12 months, which I think we had to do in sight of the feedback. And one of the things I'm definitely working on at the moment is: how can I be more empathetic as a leader? And I think that'll make me a better leader long-term.

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

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

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

The silver lining is that the last 12 months is a phenomenal opportunity for us as a business, us as an employer, me as a person, me as a leader, to get better. And I think we'll look back in a few years' time and as tough as it's been, we'll be grateful that we received that feedback and we took that time to pause, reflect, and learn and make changes. We've made more changes in the last 12 months than we've perhaps done in the history of the company. I've made more changes in my own leadership style than I have in the history of the company in the last 12 months as well. So I think the silver lining is as tough as this is, this is an opportunity for us to double down on what we value as a company, for us to work closer with the fantastic team members we've got all over the planet, and for us to build something together with them where they're incentivized, engaged, rewarded, motivated, played a key part in the decisions and how we're building things as well. And as tough as it's been and as hard as it's been—and it has been hard—I think we are better long-term because of it, and that's what we're focused on doing.

Anxiety. Interesting topic, I talk about it a lot on here. I've experienced it myself. My anxiety has been worst and hardest to control or diffuse with media-related things. So tell me about your experience with anxiety and when it's been hardest. And give me a... give me an honest view of what... when I use the word "hard," what that looks like practically for you.

Well, kind of going through the last few years, I've had hypervigilance, I've had anxiety.

What’s that?

Just when you're constantly on alert.

Yeah, like fight or flight.

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

Breathwork, that old one.

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

There's 90-odd mental health...

Yeah, 90 across our business. So starting to speak about it far more as a business and I just think with lockdown, with COVID, with everything, the impact on people's mental health... and I'm glad people are talking about it more. It is a challenge and I think the more people talk about it, there's less of a stigma and there's kind of more openness about, "Okay, these things help with the mental health side of things."

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

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

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

Yeah, I go to therapy.

Awesome. I do. When did you start?

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

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

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

Last year?

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

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

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

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

...craning something in? Yes, it was the sign for the top of the building.

Okay, that's ridiculous. But your growth in the US has been crazy, crazy, crazy. What is... I mean you've told me about where you want to get to in terms of the industry, but like on a practical level, what is next for BrewDog? What should I expect as someone looking in from the outside?

You should expect us to focus even more on the three most important things in our business, and that is sustainability, that is people, and that is beer.

So tell me about that sustainability point, because you are the first carbon-negative beer business in the world.

Yes. So we thought we were doing our bit for the planet, we thought we were doing our bit for sustainability. I was fortunate enough to have dinner with Sir David Attenborough—it was just before lockdown, it was in February of 2020—and I was just hit with a blindingly stark realization: we are not doing nearly enough and we are a part of the problem. And the problem is way more severe than I thought the problem was. So after we'd stabilized our business in the middle of a pandemic, we completely pivoted and we thought, "Okay, we're going to put everything on the line for what we believe in here." So we found an amazing expert, we worked hand-in-hand with Professor Mike Berners-Lee, one of the world's best sustainability experts, and he's been our lead scientific advisor ever since. I think it's so important to do that and we would have made so many mistakes in our sustainability journey if we hadn't had his help. But we decided, even though it's the middle of a pandemic, from a sustainability perspective, huge changes needed today. Not in 2040, not in 2050, not in 2030—huge changes needed today, and we wanted to hopefully set a new standard when it comes to sustainability. So we became the world's first carbon-negative beer business. That means we take twice as much carbon out of the air every single year than we emit. That includes all the carbon in our supply chain. We publish a report every six months—it's fully transparent—this is the carbon footprint of our business, this is how it's broken down, and this is how we've then helped take that carbon out of the air. We've made huge investments across our business in becoming more sustainable. We recently invested 12 million in a bioenergy facility that came online last week in Ellon. And this is amazing—so it takes our waste water and it turns our waste water into water we can use again and biomethane, green gas that we can use to power our system. So our system is now fully powered by green gas that comes from our waste. Also reduces our water usage. And then we're also able to use that green gas to use in vehicles which transport our beer as well, which we're moving into. So, huge investments to reduce our footprint, but we also wanted to take ownership of the problem ourselves. So: our carbon is our problem, let's do something ourselves. So we bought 9,500 acres in the Scottish Highlands—a huge chunk of land where we are creating the Lost Forest. So we are planting millions of trees to create this beautiful native broadleaf woodland and habitat, rewilding a huge part of Scotland, restoring peatlands that’s going to help take carbon out of the air. And we are causing this carbon to go into the air ourselves, so we wanted to be responsible for taking it out. And it's been a crazy journey over the last couple of years. We've changed everything about our business. We've put our money where our heart is on this one. It’s a huge gamble, but we fully believe that the only way we're going to get out of the climate crisis we're in at the moment is businesses. So we think governments and politicians are incapable of making the change that needs to be made because the time scales they work on is just too long for the pain that we need to take short-term. So to get us out of the climate crisis, I think it's the best businesses working hand-in-hand with scientists to put things in place. And I think when it comes to members of the public as well, they can almost have more of an impact when it comes to sustainability with how they spend their money than how they vote. So it’s making sure that our community are engaged and excited and come on this sustainability journey with us. But the three pillars of our business for today and going forward: sustainability, looking after our people best we can, and making the best beers that we can.

One of the allegations obviously was about the Lost Forest in the BBC report—that it took some time. They said that it was taking too long essentially, to be... it was publicized, but then a couple of years later hadn't been built yet. So just to give you a chance to respond to that.

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

Exciting. You've built a tremendous... tremendous business in terms of scale and product and your customers love what you do and you've built that cult in your customer base. One of the pieces of advice you gave, I believe it was in your book, which I thought was really underrated was about finance. And I sit here in the den and I reflect on how I f***ed up many times in my own business and I think I just wish someone had said that to me when I was 20 years old. Your point about finance—to quote you directly because I wrote it down—you said, "Here goes, this is the single most important piece of advice in this book: an understanding of finance essentially." Why is that the single most important piece of advice, and tell me your journey with finance?

It's the least fun, it's the least interesting, it's perhaps the least sexy bit of your business when you've got a startup. So therefore, it's the most likely to be ignored. But for me, finance is the language of business. It's the score-keeping system of business. So if you can't keep score, how do you know how your business is doing? And it's something that so many small business owners, entrepreneurs just ignore and that is the seed of their downfall. And like everything else when we set up the business... I mean, we like to think we're punk in that we've got the same DIY approach, so we had to learn the skills we needed to exist outside the system to be able to beat the system. Learn the skills you need to succeed yourself so you can be self-supportive and you don't have to depend on anyone for anything, which is really important when you're a startup. So it was just self-taught, but we had to self-teach ourselves how to generate barcodes, how to do the paperwork for international customs for shipping beer to America, how to set up an online accounting platform for the business. We had no... we had no money at all. So outsourcing any of these things simply wasn't an option when you've got £200 in the bank account. So for the first eight or nine years of the business, we were teetering on the edge of financial oblivion almost every single day. And my view was: if we're not, then we're not pushing the resources we have hard enough. Because we've got to be pushing and we've got to be stretching. But it also means you've got to be very considered with how you use your money, with what you're investing: can we find a way to do this cheaper, faster, better? Can we do this ourselves? If so, let's do it ourselves and not spend that money.

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

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

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

Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah.

This person has written you a question—which I have not read yet and they don't have great handwriting—so...

Okay.

I think that says "Do." Do you think your younger self would be proud/look up to you now?

Ooh, good question. We're going deep. I thought we were finished with the deep questions!

No! You've listened before.

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

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

Thank you. Not easy. Not easy coming in here and doing this.

No, it's not, is it?

No, it’s intense.

But it is what it is.

And thank you for all of that. And I hope you've enjoyed it.

I have. Thank you.

No two companies are alike. That's why the American Express Corporate Program can help you customize rewards, reporting, and billing options—all designed for your business. Build your program with American Express at americanexpress.com/corporate. Terms apply.

When your cat is acting weirder, or your dog is being louder, your turtle moves slower, your cat seems thirstier, or your puppy is acting clumsier... Day or night, if you don't know what's wrong, know where to go. Veg ER for pets. This is Kate. Veg, the better, kinder ER for pets.