We need your help
First of all, we wanted to take a moment to thank all of you. You’ve been with us through thick and thin and have been a major contributor to what’s been accomplished - we couldn’t have made it this far without you. What you’re about to read here we hope provides answers to the questions some of you have been approaching us with.
For the last 4 1/2 years we’ve been on a full-blown sprint. This started hours after the shelter-in-place announcement (SIP) when we decided we would pay our staff their full wages including subsidizing tips and commission through the shutdown. We did this despite estimating we would lose 95% of our revenue overnight. We worked around the clock during SIP planning out whether we could make it through all the way, meaning not just paying everyone through SIP but actually saving everyone's jobs. Most businesses in our industry started letting staff go immediately, do we follow suit? Or do we ask staff what they wanted to do and let them carry the torch? Would it even be possible? It would turn out it was possible to save everyone’s jobs, but with the slimmest of possibilities and with the added challenge of additional recovery time. It would be a tough road to take and would staff even be up for it? (Yes they were!) …and thus we embarked on this journey that we’re still on today.
Achieve At All Costs
The idea was simple, the execution was not. The directive was to achieve at all costs and everyone’s jobs literally depended on it. The faster we ran the better because to save jobs we had to outpace the road that was falling away behind us. The idea was to bring financial stability to our staff and use the business to absorb the ups and downs. During this very difficult time, they had enough to worry about on both a personal and professional level, we wanted to at least ease their worries about pay. For our high achieving group that did everything they were asked and more, we felt this was an easy decision. This way the team was intact and there was the added bonus of keeping everyone out of any publicly assisted funds. We were all collectively doing our part to take some strain off the system.
We started having conversations about what people’s superpowers were and we focused on their hidden talents to close the gap. We moved people through various jobs, making sure everyone had their hours, and training as we went, which meant everyone wore more hats. We cycled money as quickly as possible, moving it from one place to another. Once it recognized profit we whisked it away to fund something else. When other breweries laid low on seasonal events and releases we went hard, and all of you showed up! The speed of growth would determine whether we would achieve our goal. Any issues we couldn’t immediately solve or any infrastructure that wasn’t built along the way (processes, procedures, software systems, even being able to afford hiring support staff, etc), we left all that behind and we’d circle back around later. In all, anything that hindered our ability to run as fast as we could we let it go for now.
Early on in 2021 we knew this might end up being a 4-year campaign, the initial estimate we communicated was 1.5-2 years restrictions and 1.5-2 years recovery. So March 2024 would’ve been 4 years and is the worst case scenario according to that timeline.
In only 2 years time the size of Epidemic Ales more than doubled and we reached a high of 23 staff. We had successfully saved all jobs with no cuts in hours. Financially we had to create jobs in order to save jobs, we were spending more on staff pay than we were supposed to so we had to fund that in some way. We continued to pay our staff their full wages for a year and 3 months after SIP ended, including subsidizing tips and commissions, otherwise the pay would’ve been far short of what it typically was. It was only after we were sure things had settled down enough did we return staff to their normal pay rates.
For our customers, we’ve maintained our price conscious strategy. All of these efforts with staff and with you as customers, have been to establish some consistency and predictability in a world that had suddenly become anything but.
Nothing Comes For Free
In the food and beverage industry, what our staff were able to accomplish is almost unheard of. So what secret did we discover? Why has our story been different? The truth is - there is no secret. If it were as easy as finding something somebody missed, and saying let’s do it, everyone would’ve done it. In reality, all we did was manage resources differently, we weighed risk against opportunity and we used up the brewery’s ability to grow as a way to fund this initiative. So rather than a rocky up and down like what most staff in our industry experienced, we smoothed everything out. The business took the hit early with the expectation of a longer recovery period. The rest was up to staff, just old-fashioned hard work.
This strategy overall created its own set of challenges because Nothing Comes For Free. There’s an inherent cost to growing quickly. We’ve all heard about it too often where a company forces growth in order to landgrab or to maximize profit. We, however, forced growth to save jobs.
Around March 2022 we entered the part of the 4-year plan we considered the recovery phase, lasting 2 years. In these years we would circle back around and pick up all the things we missed during our sprint. We had the same team, similar strategy, similar ask, just different individual goals this time around. We had to refine, we had to do what we already did but better, we had to pick the “high-hanging fruit” because we’d already picked all the low ones.
We opened to the public in 2016 so for more than half of our existence, we’ve veered off into this alternate reality. Since we were spreading out over 4 years how the financial hit would happen, we couldn’t decide to do half of it and not the remaining half. Kind of like spreading out payments with a loan. And taking a loan has additional costs, just like what we did had additional costs. We had essentially taken a loan out on the business itself and were thus forced to make our way back from that.
All of our staff have had many achievements. We always tell them what they’ve achieved they keep forever, and nobody can ever take that away from them. However, for the issues we bypassed along the way we were now forced to address them, it was no longer optional. We had sprinted so fast some things were misaligned and we needed everything to catch up to where the business now was.
The fallout of this sprint was we had created a culture of celebrating wins but overlooking failures and losses. The achieve-at-all-cost strategy had inadvertently created the possibility there would be false expectations of our workplace culture. While achievements should be recognized and highlighted, they can’t offset the issues we needed to solve on our way to full recovery. Achievements certainly earn additional considerations, but it never means freedom from responsibility. If you hired somebody to fix your dishwasher, a job well done maybe meant they got to fix your fridge too and if issues came up, there could be extra considerations given based on their prior work. But the excellent work on the dishwasher won’t ever offset the need for the same excellent work needed on the fridge.
For most it was easy to accept this culture shift. For some, it would prove to be difficult to switch gears to a culture where failures and losses needed to be addressed, studied, and debriefed as necessary building blocks to success. We had a few instances of having to explain that achievements had to stay separate from issues being addressed, and also that improvements to past achievements didn’t mean the achievement itself wasn’t just as important as it always has been. And ultimately, because we are needing to address something, it didn’t mean someone wasn’t just as accomplished overall. In the end, a sustained period of fixing issues will always eventually take its toll. Unfortunately, during this recovery period we missed major milestones and suffered several setbacks, including some devastating equipment replacements.
This long-term campaign has been very tough on staff already, it’s 4 1/2 years but it’s felt like a lifetime. We now find ourselves with a new challenge of restarting our recovery phase. Our first recovery wasn’t a complete bust, we did make it through and we’re still here, but we now must recalibrate.
Onward
We were celebrated for our disaster response and our tenacity in protecting our most important asset – our staff. We need your help now to make it all the way through.
Our 2nd attempt at recovery will for now be similar to the 1st. We have quite a full slate of events coming up, there are TWO Friday the 13th days this year, on Sept 13th and December 13th. We have THREE beer releases for Oktoberfest. There’s also our Veteran’s Day beer, and then there are some surprise releases including one for the holidays as well as the taproom getting decorated as usual, and gift boxes!
We’re adding to our already full lineup of taproom activities. We recently added Bingo Night on Tuesdays and currently have Paint Nights, Tie Dye Classes, Trivia, Karaoke, Singo, Comedy Night.
And a quick reminder that we also ship beer to all California addresses, and merchandise anywhere domestically.
Please come support us, come support our staff that have carried the torch the entire way and those that carry it now even though they weren’t the ones to light it. It’s difficult to put into words what the last few years have been like, we all need your help!
Our Taproom Team: (Top picture) Angela, Nicole, Rachel, Monet, Brittany, Shawnee, Amelia, Megan, Corinne, Miguel.
Bottom picture: Jess and Eden.
Our Brew Team: Nick and Mitchell
Our Sales Team: Jordan and Dez
Our Finance Specialist: Frances (and Owner Erin)
Our Owners: Erin, Brian, Holly
Thank you for Reading. We sincerely appreciate your support. Cheers.
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