The Management Skills You Don't Have

Then there are the people problems that no amount of payroll software can solve:

• The employee who's always ten minutes late
• The personality clash between your brewer and your bar manager
• The member of staff who drinks too much of the product
• The difficult conversation about performance
• The grievance procedure you've never written because you didn't know you needed one

Most brewery founders are makers. They're good at building things — recipes, systems, brands. What they're not good at is managing people, because managing people is an entirely different discipline and most of them have never had to do it. In your old career, if you were a developer or a consultant, you probably worked fairly independently. You had a boss, not direct reports. You were accountable for your own output, not someone else's.

Now you're responsible for making sure other people do their jobs properly, show up on time, don't cut corners, don't upset customers, and don't create legal liabilities for your business. And you have to do all of this while simultaneously brewing beer, running the finances, and trying not to go under.