Add This Concept To Your Brewery Plan
Super Fun Personal Finance
After I sold my share of our restaurants (IL Vicino, Scalo, Pranzo) to my partners in 1999, I took a sabbatical or mini-retirement at 42. We moved out to the Bay Area where my wife Sandy went to the 2 year Iyengar Yoga Teacher training, and I bought a little sail boat and worked part time at a boat hardware store in Sausalito. It was sweet, and I had the time to start working on my bucket list.
While we were there I took a personal finance course at the local college. I had already memorized the book Your Money or Your Life by Joe Dominguez and Vicky Robbins, and was well aware of the steps to get out of debt and become financially independent without making a fortune. But the class was interesting because the first thing the teacher had us do was to write down on a piece of paper four or five things that mattered the most to us in life. I’ll get to why this was so mind-blowing.
If you are reading this, you are either thinking about opening a brewery, planning on opening a brewery, or already have one open. I want to ask you to do something.
On a piece of paper, write down four or five things that are the most important things in your life
Most will write something like
Family
Friends
Learning
Financial Security
God
Health
And so on, not necessarily in that order. I’m not asking a lot and be honest in what you write. No one will see this except you.
Have you done it? OK put the piece of paper away.
You know why the brewing business interests you. You have a love of the craft, you want to be your own boss, you like the feeling of accomplishment holding a beautiful golden pint of beer with a thick head of nice dry foam with tight bubbles; something that you created with your own skills.
An idea of running your own business and actually running your own business don’t always line up. You may find that you are working longer hours than you had thought, or that you are not getting the kind of physical exercise you used to in your corporate job where you only worked 40 hours per week. You may be eating off your own menu everyday, and thereby gaining weight, or you may be drinking too much of your own product.
My point is, as you develop your brewery, or maybe you are already operating it, you should refer to the above list and see if it aligns with your values. If not, what can you do to make it so?
What would it take in your business to be able to have dinner with the family at least most nights of the week? What about going to the kids play or basketball game. What about going to the gym, going for a run or walk?
You see you have to make a plan right at the beginning to follow through if you want to be true to the things that matter most.
But Tom, the dishwasher didn’t show up, the glycol chiller failed, I can’t afford managers as sales aren’t where we expected them to be. Yes, these are legitimate concerns. Let me offer three pieces of excellent advice. Two of them I didn’t make up.
I know I keep mentioning this, but you absolutely have to run your brewery with a business system. The business system will take care of 90% of these concerns. It involves the system that runs your business (checklists, training, accounting). To implement the system is much less painful than opening your brewery in the first place. Show me one successful business that doesn’t have one. I’ll wait.
Use four quadrant time management. This is from Steven R. Covey’s excellent book, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. When you look at the quadrants you know you should eliminate Q4. You are always going to have Q1, but by working to eliminate Q3 and move the time you spend in Q2, it will naturally lessen Q1. Thereby giving you more time for the things that are the most important to you
This is the big rock theory. It goes something like this. A professor puts a large jar on the desk and fills it with rocks. She asks her students, “Is it full?” They answer “Yes”. Then she adds a lot of smaller rocks and asks the same question. Half the students say yes. Now she pours in sand. “Full?” she asks. “No” they reply and she then adds water, filling the jar. The moral? You have to put the big rocks in first. If you put the little ones or the water in first, you can’t fit the big ones.
What are your big rocks in this brewery project? Pull out your piece of paper and look at it again. Maybe now you want to amend it a bit, but basically those are your big rocks.
This is what is mind blowing. My first reaction when confronted with my list later in that class was “but I want to….” Instead the teacher asked me to look back at the list. She said, “I thought those were the most important things?” In other words if you can’t align what you really want to do with what you wrote on your list, then you have to ask yourself if the list is really honest. If it is, then continue please.
Now when you plan your week, maybe in your calendar you have written out the most important things to you. You schedule into the week something for each thing on your list. The Childs game, run 4 times during the week, a date night with your wife or husband. Church, or some volunteer activity.
These are big rocks and if you include them, you will have a much more balanced and happy life. No guarantees. But you will be better equipped emotionally when that glycol chiller fails (which it will). You will have so much good will banked with your spouse, that he or she will understand that you need to run into the brewery for a couple hours because someone didn’t show up.
I know it sounds like I’m preaching, but these are the things that have helped me. Don’t throw away that piece of paper. As you continue with your brewery, look back at it and remind yourself what you feel is important. Your friends and family will be better off for it, and I would bet your brewery will be too.
