YouSaid · the spoken record

Bill Shufelt

lines on the record: 90
first: 2024-11-18
most recent: 2024-11-18
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Bill Schufeldt, co founder of Athletic Brewing Company. By the way, not long ago, Athletic Brewing became the first official non-alcoholic beer of one of the biggest soccer teams in the world. Arsenal, in England's Premier League, and even though English soccer fans are known to consume a bit too much beer, apparently non-alcoholic beer consumption is up nearly 40% in the country, especially on game days”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's unbelievable. As I get farther into the journey, I keep going back to the book The Alchemist. And when you're on your life's mission, the universe conspires to help you. And this has been such a lucky fortuitous journey. And like, there hasn't been a moment where I've been like, I shouldn't have done this. I think finding John is a co-founder has been one of the most important things of the whole journey because we've seen some of the craziest stuff I could possibly imagine in the last seven years and not once have we raised our voices with each other. It's always just like running at these challenges, tackling them together, and doing the hardest things and doing them right has been really intellectually challenging and fun and I realized that you actually can love what you do as an adult.”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When you, I mean, when you think about the journey you took and where you got to now, you've got a company that's now valued at $800 million and growing, West Coast facility, East Coast facility, everything that happened. I mean, meeting John and him agreeing to work with you and where you are now, how much of where you are do you attribute to the work and the skill, and what do you attribute, where does luck come into this story?”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I've almost no doubt around that. It is so humans are not drinking alcohol. 99% of the time they're awake. And I see people interact with our beer at all different times, all different occasions. And like the occasion base is enormous for non-alcoholic beverages and very restricted for alcohol. So we're confident that we're sitting on the term disruption is thrown around so often. Alcohol being in adult beverages is a 5,000 plus year trend. And I think time is such an overlooked variable where the force of compounding over time is just so powerful. So more and more people will keep coming around to it.”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I think it's awesome. Like 10 years ago when I used to go to a bar, restaurant, or anywhere, there was nothing. And now you can open a menu and brands are permissioned to put their biggest name brand into the category. So there's flagships of all kinds of beer brands, all kinds of spirits, all kinds of wine brands are getting there. So like Bill the consumer absolutely loves that. And I think about this in a very positive some way.”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, Athletic is top 10 crappers, number one biggest non-alcoholic beer brews. But even though it feels like we've come a long way, we are so early in this seismic tide shift that's happening. Non-alcoholic beer overall is still only 1.5% of beer, which overall has grown 5x since we started. But in most channels, it's grown well over 10x, and there's certain channels and national retailers where non-alcoholic beer is now over 10% of all beer.”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, 2020 was such an interesting time for so many reasons. And it's a miracle we survived as a business. We made the biggest financial investment we've ever made on March 17th, 2020. John and I committed to purchasing a brewery 3,000 miles away in San Diego. When a lot of our competitions stood still, like big corporates, we very safely with respect to our teammates were able to move really fast. We were well financed. We had a lot of business momentum. From March 2020 to two years later, we went from about 26 teammates to 120 teammates to 220 teammates the year after, spanning the two breweries. By the time 2022 was over, we'd built a brewery on the east coast that was 50 times as big as that original brewery as well.”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so we had built this e-commerce business over this time where, so like beer had never been available on the internet essentially before. And we started to list these beers every Monday at 5 p.m. And so our customer base that was slowly growing national started to expect us to have a new beer that was like new to non-algal beer style available online nationally at 5 p.m. on Mondays. We were selling out these beers in like 30 seconds. It was like a concert going online on Ticketmaster.”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Problem at all, yeah. So we opened the doors with four teammates at Athletic Brewing. So we hired 20 more people in 2019. We built the Salesforce all over New England. At this time, we also had a couple incredible investors join our team, and we raised a Series A in March 2019. John did an incredible job scaling the manufacturing and supply chain in-house. If you go back to then the non-alcoholic beer category had been nothing but lagers and all of a sudden there's this craft brewing Connecticut that's launching with a full flavor lineup of IPAs, Golden Alex, Stouts, And every week I would mention something that John, I'd say, you know, it's so hot out. Should we make like a great fruit stand summer beer? And John would like literally stop at the farmer's market and make a blackberry Berliner Weiss or a Raspberry Sour.”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so the summer of 2018 started to go pretty well at the end of the summer, and we hit January and it went vertical. And all of a sudden our distributors, as we came around the corner towards our first full summer on the market in 2019, we went from nobody talking to us, everybody making fun of us in 2018 to the biggest shortage of non-alcoholic beer in 2019. Staring down to summer where we are just very clearly out of stock. So for that summer 2019, we brought in a wave of bigger tanks and doubled our capacity. And we outgrew that three months later. And so we're at a stock again after three months and doubling our capacity. And then we started to look further and further afield for a new brewery that we could grow into.”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For key retailers, I wanted to make sure it kept our, like there were days where I'd have 12 athletic six packs in my cart going back to a car that already has 56 packs in it. Yeah.”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like everything else in the athletic store, it was the boulder was at a standstill at first and we had to get it rolling. There were definitely times where on Sunday I would roll through a bunch of stores and clear out the shelf to make sure there were reorders the coming week.”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yep. So we launched retail in June of 2018, and Whole Foods and Total Wine were some of the first retailers to take us out to a statewide footprint in Connecticut.”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think those days were almost more formative to me than the really good days because if only one or two people is approaching you every 20 or 30 minutes and you have a bad interaction or you don't really get your point across or your pitch falls flat, you learn to iterate really quickly if you don't have many opportunities. And the second I could get a beer in someone's hand very often within a minute they would go from making fun of me to just rattling off occasions where they could see themselves drinking it and where can I buy it and I really got to know our customers face to face also in that time.”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was set up at these 75 athletic events, and there were some events where waves of people would come through and there'd be some passionate people who stood around the table. But there were a lot of days and probably more than I'd like to admit that no one would talk to me for hours.”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yep. And that first summer to my wife's chagrin, I sampled at 75 athletic events. I was waking up at 3 a.m. on Saturday and Sunday and driving and setting up the tent. And my thought was targeting these races and these populations was if I can get the healthiest people in every community the most aspirational people to drink our beer, that's going to filter out from there. It went from at these sampling events, I would get nothing but made fun of too. And I can tell you more about that. Yep.”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I did a mix of grocery samplings, store samplings, everything, but I found in those moments I was really only interacting with like 20 people and like a pretty low hit rate. And I just started to think about my life and where would I like to see a beer? And I'd Can I show up? I'm going to run your race, but can I bring a cooler of a bunch of beer and hand him out? And so many people were like, I've been organizing this race for 20 years. It finishes out of high school. We can have beer, and I've been dyed that beer at it for 20 years.”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So in December 2017, I was sampling a local Whole Foods beer manager, and they said, you should really go down to the Brooklyn store and meet the forager who has like a bit more decision-making authority. And so the next day I drove to Brooklyn, tracked down the forager. It turned out to be her last day. And she gave me like a few minutes of her time, and we sampled the beer. She said, This is incredible. Our customers would love this. She was like, you've got to go to regional next week. And so she made me appointment for the following week with Chris and Justin at the Whole Foods Regional Office in New Jersey. And that meeting went well. And that was our biggest breakthrough, I'd say early on, where they committed basically on the spot to a statewide launch in Connecticut.”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Weeks and weeks. And there were days where I would get like five no's in a row. And then at that next place, or I would walk back out to the parking lot and grab someone and say, I'm having a really tough day. Do you mind following me in and having some fun with this? And I'd have people come up behind me as I was sampling the owner and pretend they overheard and be like, did you say 50 calories? like a great tasting beer in 50 calories i gotta try that and like have him like literally reach over my shoulder and try it and Even though I was having fun with it, I had to survey work to know people in that area really wanted it. So I had confidence that if we got on the shelf, it was going to sell.”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's like a generational unlock of new occasions and new populations. And people basically met that with like, yeah, sure. Okay, like prove it. And I would go out and talk to dozens of retailers. And I got a lot of no's, but I got a lot of enthusiastic yeses also. And over time, I built up 300 commitments in the state of Connecticut.”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mostly got that from the distributor tier and bartenders where they thought it would be a one-for-one cannibalization But non alcoholic beer, I was telling them, is something that people are still going to drink their beer or their cocktail like one night a week when they go out to dinner or do something fun. But this is a beer people are going to drink seven nights a week at home. They're going to drink at different hours of the day. We're going to have totally new consumers coming into the category and shopping the beer shelf for the first time.”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Needed to convince beer distributors that they needed this product, and it's going to be a big part of their future. And so John and I would hand bottle beer in his parents' garage. And at this time in the winter in Connecticut, it's... 30 40 degrees and our hands are absolutely freezing doing this so we spend the morning doing that and then i'd hit the road with fresh beer for the afternoon and would go all over the state of connecticut and i would just sample the owners or the bartenders or the attendants and overall the feedback was i'd say very negative”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so November, December 2017, we're deciding the beer is tasting really good. And we soft circle May 2018 as our launch so that we're on market for the summer of 2018. So we've got to do all our construction and tank installations at the facility in four months, get that up and running. And then on the outside world is when I need to start going to market, convincing retailers, convincing distributors. And I had some preliminary conversations with distributors, and there really wasn't any interest in the industry.”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I have a huge amount of respect for the recovery world, but I also never wanted to market to those communities because I don't want to tempt anyone into bars who may be vulnerable or susceptible that we just wanted to lift it up as like a place of positivity to make moderation cool and accessible. And that was something John actually said, we are never going to market with this beer and I'm not signing on with you if you're going to force me to market with a bad beer if we can't make it indistinguishable from full strength alcoholic beer.”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And did you think of this? I'm assuming you also didn't want this to be like, you know, perceived as like an AA brand or a teetotaler brand, but maybe not even like a non-alcoholic brand, but a brand that people might just have regular beer, wine, a couple times a week, but this is what you would have on a weeknight.”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But we chose that name athletic because we are building in a category that had never had any positivity to it. And I wanted it to be something that was aspirational, positive, that people could hold in their hand for the first time and be really proud of what they were holding active lifestyle tones, which really came out of my lifestyle. But also I wanted to be a really recognizable word with a hard sound in it that like, you know, you could really hear in a loud bar restaurant. And I think this checked all those boxes.”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We did. The name Athletic was a huge decision. I went through hundreds of names, Latin names, geographic names, silly names, totally made up words. I really liked the number eight at one point, so it was going to be like liberate and like all these words that could have theoretically ended in eight. I thank goodness our legal counsel, whether they were trademarked or not, I think he might have been shooting down a lot of just bad names looking out for me.”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And this was in 2017 still. So like a ways before the craziest eras of fundraising for sure. And as we're exiting 2017, all of a sudden the beer was tasting really good. Like John had really started to dial in all these like 10 changes to the brewing process. We ended up. Ultimately making to come up with our process. And then so the beer was tasting great. And I was like, let's start construction. And we're underway in construction. John moved the homebrewing kits to his parents' garage about 40 miles up the street. And we started bottling the beer in his parents' garage.”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was, so it was basically, it had a toggle if we never got off the ground. I was trying to ensure investors would get their money back. But if it did get off the ground, it would toggle to $5 million.”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which very small progress towards our goal, but like an amazing turn in momentum for me. And I walked out of that dinner with like just like, I felt like I was walking on air. And over the next six months, a lot of people had said no were like, you know, I'm still not interested. It's not fit for me. But you got to talk to this guy. I was talking to someone and I just mentioned your idea. And like, I know you don't know him, but we do a phone call with them. I ended up doing 120 investor meetings, 66 individuals supported us in the Angel round. And that group of investors has been some of our best ambassadors, our believers. Have given us great leads over the years, have been through us throughout the whole roller coaster.”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A turning point came, and it wasn't like I got a huge commitment, but a college friend set up a dinner with four of his local friends in Brooklyn, and they all just let me talk about the idea for a couple hours. And I was so enthusiastic. And all five guys committed $5,000 each.”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and I had already committed to the lease, to the brewing equipment with my life savings. But before I made the next wave of investments, did I really want to take outside capital and do this? And my wife basically immediately and without blinking was like, get off the floor. That's absolutely silly. You just have a totally different ambition and you've got to keep at it.”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. And then There was just less than no momentum. And I remember at one point lying on our kitchen floor and telling my wife, like, you know, like I'll definitely pick up John's salary for the next couple years, but maybe I should get back to finance sooner than later.”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I wanted to do it in a very capital intensive way. I didn't have a product to share. And so there wasn't much to really sink their teeth into besides this 100-page white paper I had and a ball of enthusiasm. And I found myself three months into those meetings and had less than 10% of what I was looking to do raised.”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“General colleagues, friends, and family, and then networking from there. And so I had this confidence coming from the financial world that everyone from my former life was just going to invest in the concept and I'd be off and running with funding. But Angel investing, you know, people write very small checks to pre-revenue companies. And I know there's very high probability of loss. Lot of people who I expected to invest and invest, I'd go out to a dinner with five to ten people and I'd be really optimistic and get five to ten no's. There was no momentum in the category. So I was basically raising money in a category that didn't exist, had no money.”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so picture two guys who barely know each other at all for nine hours a day in a warehouse. I hide my laptop off to the side. John had the boots on and was like mostly doing the brewing, which I thought I knew and I really didn't know anything about And John and I were building something very proprietary that we couldn't talk to anyone on the outside about. So John and I could stand together in a warehouse and talk about what's really important. We talked about our families. We talked about what life we wanted out of our career. In that time, we built a really thoughtful employee handbook that I still sit down with every teammate who starts to this day with. You know, we have a chance to really get the culture right and everything. So we had a lot of time on our hands.”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. So I had found us a location for that first brewery. It was an 8,000 square foot warehouse in Stratford, Connecticut. And I'd bought a three-bale brewing system, which John immediately saw. He's like, leave that wrapped up in plastic over there. He's like, I've got my homebrew set here. And we're going to just go through the scientific method. We're going to change one degree of temperature in one tank on one day until we get the reactions we like in that one tank. And then we're going to go to the next one. And there are all these variables we wanted to control for just on the Brewhouse side, even before you get to fermentation. And he's like, we are going to do such small tweaks along the whole way. And it's going to be hundreds of trials. So we set off doing that.”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think John genuinely loved the craft beer world. He said his dad drank non-alkalt beer from time to time in his house, so it was fairly destigmatized. But what he articulates so well is that he envisions a world in the future where his kids are turning 21 and it's just not a big deal if you're drinking or not. You can get a great beer on either side of the menu, alcohol or non-alcohol. Over a series of probably 10 or 20 more touch points, I convinced him to move his family across the country. And so We met in June 2017 in person and he moved up to Connecticut around mid-August 2017.”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“like this. It seems like a wide open area, a potential to have a positive impact. And the riffing he did in that email was basically when I read it, I was like, someone sees what I'm talking about. And it was amazing.”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so I basically pick up the phone with John and I'm like, I'm going to break some news, but please hang with me for five minutes. Don't hang up. And please just don't say no until Monday. Don't tell me no on the spot. And he's like, yeah, let go. I'd love to hear about it. And he lets me just riff for five or ten minutes. And I think he was just like overall shocked that it's not alcoholic beer. But he's like, okay, I'll get back to you on Monday. And he ended up getting back to me that Sunday morning. So two or three days later on Sunday morning. And the email basically says I was immediately going to say now when I was just being nice. But dot, dot, dot, dot. Brilliant. And he's like, I totally see it. He's like, it sounds like such a fun innovation challenge. I've been looking for a challenge.”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yep. He was looking for the right long-term opportunity. He liked the idea of moving to Connecticut. John had actually grown up here, even though he was in New Mexico. But he wanted to hear more about the concept. And in his resume also, he had won in some very prestigious medals. And so I immediately knew I was talking to the most talented person I probably talked to in the whole process.”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And like the basic line is when you're on your life's mission, the universe conspires to help you. And I kept looking, kept posting job ads, kept doing conversations. And eventually one letter came in that was very different from all the others I'd received.”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I started going to brewing conferences in person and I still couldn't get anyone to talk to me at these brewing conferences. I would go up to people left and right all day, which was exhausting and trying to get their attention and very nice people largely, but most of them would say, I just can't get interest in that. Like, no one's ever asked for that. You should probably do yourself a favor and really can reconsider this. And I remember going back to the hotel at night at a particular conference in DC that had probably over 10,000 craft brewers at it. And I just flopped on the bed and called my wife. I was like, I really, really tried today, but like absolutely no one was interested in talking about this with me.”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My brother, my whole family, really, my brother and my sister were like sounding boards. I used to always call them my commute about the idea. And like, he's like, let's find an area where there's an unbelievable amount of brewers. And he's like, let's go do something outdoors. And so we went all the way to the Pacific Northwest. We saw probably 15 breweries packed in around that and flew home on the Red Eye on Sunday night. And even though I was exhausted, I had this unbelievable rejuvenation. I was like, you know what? If no one wants to make this beer for us, I'm going to eventually find the right person to team up with and I'm going to build it ourselves. Where we're going to actually build a brewery.”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which I was shocked. The conversations were incredibly disheartening. There were a lot of 30 second conversations, one-minute conversations. You know, I'd been used to these really busy trading floors with unlimited stimuli throughout my day to like days that were very quiet with my own thoughts and my own office. And I'd have like... Two to five phone calls throughout the day at most planned, and for them to end in thirty seconds had been incredibly negative and discouraging was really disheartening, and I remember reaching out to my brother and I was like, I feel like I'm standing at the end of an alley and there's literally no pass out of this corner I'm in. I could have cried on the phone and he's like”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mostly either nonanser or we don't do pre-revenue or we don't do non-alcoholic beer was the most common. I also at the time was talking to dozens of brewers at this point. I had job ads on all different message boards from pro brewer to the brewers association. I joined the guild. And so I very quickly realized absolutely no one is responding to this non-alcoholic beer job ad.”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It totally depends on if it's a local tap room model or whatever, but I would say in broader CPG and beverage, an enormous”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I went from a world where I had 200 really talented brokers covering me. And anytime I rang the phone, wrote an email, I would get a very quick and very helpful response. And it was an always-on, like I would wake up in the morning every day and there would be 200 emails that I would scan through to catch up. It was a very weird feeling to roll out of bed and I would instinctively grab my phone and open my email and there would be just nothing there. So it was eerily quiet and I started trying to network to brewers. I find a bunch of brewing conferences I'm going to attend over the next six months. And I also started looking at contract brewers.”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And my wife had kind of mapped out a three year budget. We were dialing back our lifestyle in a major way, and I had a certain amount I was going to invest in the company itself too. A significant portion of our savings in that book. Right. Yeah.”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right now, I literally have the chills and something just came over me as I said that out loud. But she was basically, if we are talking about this idea in 20 years and either someone else has done it or you haven't done it, she's like, I don't want to know you. I don't want to talk about this the rest of our life and have you not do it. She's like, I want you to walk in on the first day of the year and quit your job.”
2024-11-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Athletic Brewing Company: Bill Shufelt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT