we had virtually no overhead. I didn’t have a brewing facility; I went to other breweries and paid them to brew the beer for me. I didn’t have any employees; I did all the sales and marketing myself. I didn’t have any distribution; I went out and sold it out of the trunk of my car. So, in a way, it was very low risk. If it didn’t work, I could have gone back to BCG and gotten a job. But it did work. And it was a slow build. I started in 1984, and by 1989, I had three employees—two part-time—and we were doing about $200,000 in revenue. So it was a very slow build. But it wasn’t a “gazillion or zero” thing. We grew one distributor at a time, one account at a time. We were very fortunate that the beer was good, people liked it, and they kept buying it. What advice do you have for aspiring entrepreneurs? I think the most important thing is to love what you do. If you’re not passionate about what you’re doing, it’s really hard to be successful. The second thing is to have a long-term perspective. Most businesses that start don’t start out making a lot of money. They start out losing money, and they require patience and persistence. You have to be willing to stick with it. You have to be willing to pivot when things aren’t working, but you also have to be willing to stick with it and not give up. And then the third thing is to have a very high standard for what you’re doing. I think a lot of businesses fail because they compromise on quality, they compromise on service, they compromise on their mission, they compromise on their branding. And I think it’s really important to set a very high standard for yourself and then stick to it. That’s what’s going to differentiate you from everybody else. And the last thing I would say is, just be willing to work hard. I’ve never met anybody who was really successful who didn’t work really hard. It’s just a fact of life. You have to be willing to put in the hours, put in the effort, and make the sacrifices to be successful.
