Last week I posted this article outlining my 10 biggest mistakes as BrewDog’s CEO: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/my-10-biggest-mistakes-brewdogs-ceo-james-watt?trk=public_post_promoted-post

I received so much positive feedback on the post and I also received loads of requests to share the 10 best decisions I have made as BrewDog’s CEO as a counterpoint.

Before we start, I just wanted to say that whilst I am happy to own the mistakes 100%, these decisions owe so much to our amazing team and the fantastic people who work in our business, and I see them all very much as team successes and collective achievements.

1) Real Living Wage

In 2014 we became a Real Living Wage employer, and we have proudly been so ever since. My happiest ever BrewDog memory was announcing this move, live on stage at our 2014 AGM with thousands of our Equity Punk investors in attendance. Investing in our amazing people is core to what we believe in, and we fully believe that our long term destiny will be determined by how well we look after our team.

2) The Unicorn Fund

Our Unicorn Fund was inspired by a Sam Walton Quote. ‘Share your profits with all your associates and together you will all perform beyond your wildest expectations.’ With the BrewDog Unicorn Fund we take 10% of our profits and share them evenly amongst our entire team. This incentivizes our team to act like business owners and rewards them like business owners.

As part of the Unicorn Fund, we also practice Open Book Management and we share the full P&L account with all of our team members, every month. This was everyone knows exactly how the business is performing.

3) Becoming Carbon Negative

We are officially the world’s first carbon negative brewery and we remove twice as much carbon from the air each year as we emit. This means every time someone drinks a BrewDog beer, our world gets less carbon. We also believe that our carbon is our own problem, so we are fixing it ourselves with our very own 2,000+ acre BrewDog Forest in the Scottish highlands.

We are facing an existential climate crisis and we want to do all we can to help save our home planet. Becoming carbon negative, and having Professor Mike Berners-Lee lead us through the process as our lead independent scientific advisor is the single most important thing we have ever done as a business.

You can read more about our sustainability plans here: www.brewdog.com/uk/tomorrow

4) Launching Equity For Punks

We are an alternative small business, part owned by a community of over 175,000 Equity Punks from all over the planet. Our Equity Punks are the heart and soul of our BrewDog. Our business model has always been to try and shorten the distance between ourselves and the people who enjoy our beers, Equity for Punks, is the ultimate incarnation of that philosophy.

When we launched Equity For Punks in 2009 we pioneered a whole new generation of business model and inadvertently kickstarted the crowd funding revolution. But it was anything but straightforward to do at the time. The first 7 legal companies we spoke to told us that what we were trying to do was impossible. Undeterred we persevered regardless. Equity Punks 1, launches in 2009, cost us £100,000 to set up, at a time we only had £40,000 in the bank. We gambled our entire future on this completely untried and untested idea.

Thankfully, it worked out.

5) Employee Of The Month

In 2016 our packaging manager, Graeme Wallace, who has been with us since pretty much day 1, was really annoyed at people saying we were not punk enough anymore.

Consequently, he decided to print ‘Mother Fucker Day’ on the bottom of a run of 200,000 Punk IPA cans. Our big customers such as Tesco & Sainsbury’s were none too pleased and we had to recall every single one of the 200,000 cans at a huge cost to our business.

Most companies would probably have fired Graeme Wallace. But, at BrewDog, we made him employee of the month.

6) Video Blogs

In 2010 we started filming and editing our own video blogs with a digital camera I bought in our local Argos. The videos we made ended up being seen by millions of people online and attracted the attention of some US TV executives based in LA.

A couple of years later we ended up with our very own TV show called BrewDogs. We have now shot 4 seasons of the show and it is the longest running beer TV show in history! Bizarrely, just before we launched season 1, we had to argue with the US production company for 2 months because they wanted to use subtitles as they believed that Americans would not understand our Scottish accents. Here is what we get up to on our show:

7) Columbus, Ohio

We, somewhat bullishly, decided we should build a brewery in America. I then spent 5 days in the USA looking at potential locations. I spent a day each in Philly, Boston, Charleston, Columbus & Chicago. I was in Columbus for less than 24 hours but I loved the city, the energy, the vibe and the people.

I got back to Scotland and I told Martin: ‘I know you have never been to Columbus, I know I have only been there for a day, I know we have done zero diligence or any feasibility work whatsoever and it is going to cost us £30m that we do not have or have any idea how we are going to get, but we should definitely build this thing.’ He agreed. We definitely did not overthink it.

Luckily it worked out, and our Columbus brewery & beer hotel was named in TIME magazine’s best 100 places on planet earth last year!

8) Hand Sanitiser

One of our core values is to show that business can be a force for good. Within days of the Covid-19 pandemic hitting the UK we decided to start using our BrewDog Distillery to make hand sanitiser due to help combat the huge shortages our country was facing.

We pivoted overnight and within 7 days we shipped our first batch of BrewDog sanitiser to our local hospital in Aberdeen. We continue to make medical grade sanitiser and to date we have made and donated over 500,000 bottles (worth over £2m) to the NHS, health care charities & key frontline workers.

9) Hello, my name is Vladimir

As a company we like to wear our heart of our sleeve and take a stand for the issues that we are passionate about. In 2014 we made a beer that was a protest against legislation in Russia that prevents people from living their true lives and discriminated against the LGBT community. And for the release we recreated the infamous photo of Putin on a horse.

Our core beliefs are freedom of expression, freedom of speech and a dogged passion for doing what we love. The beer hit the headlines globally and we are donated 50% of the proceeds from this beer to charitable organisations that support like-minded individuals wishing to express themselves freely and without prejudice.

10) DIY Dog

At BrewDog, in the spirit of radical transparency, we give away the recipe, for every single beer we ever make. This is the keys to our kingdom, and our most important intellectual property. They type of information most companies keep locked away and closely guarded. But we are not most companies.

We want to give back to the home brewing community and we want to share what we do with the wider beer community too. We have always loved the sharing of knowledge, expertise and passion in the craft beer community and we wanted to take that spirit of collaboration and transparency to the next level. You can download all of our recipes here: https://www.brewdog.com/blog/diy-dog

Onward

As a company we are determined to change the world of beer for the better and show that business can be a force for good. We are community owned, fiercely independent and we are always willing to take big risks and put everything on the line for what we believe in.

The first 13 years have been a pretty crazy ride. Here is to the next 13.

Hold Fast,

James