Hack To Start - Episode 22 - Steve Beauchesne, Co-Founder & Chief Tasting Officer, Beau's

You can find the full episode here: http://hacktostart.com/steve-beauchesne/

Hack To Start is a podcast focused on interesting people and the innovative ways their achieve success.

This is the twenty-second episode of Hack To Start.

Your hosts, Franco Varriano (https://twitter.com/FrancoVarriano) and Tyler Copeland (https://twitter.com/TylerCopeland), speak with Steve Beauchesne (https://twitter.com/BeausAllNatural), the co-founder and chief tasting officer at Beau's All Natural Brewing Company.

Steve has been an entrepreneur since he was a kid. He started his own record label before opening Beau's Brewery with his dad. He shares the challenges of starting a craft brewery, how culture and values have been the foundation of their brand, and how borrowing marketing tactics from the music industry has turned Beau's beer into a smash hit.

You can find the full episode here: http://hacktostart.com/steve-beauchesne/

Transcript

2. Episode 22: STEVE BEAUCHESNE
3. LISTEN HERE WWW.HACKTOSTART.COM
4. In This Episode: 1. HOW BEAU'S BEGAN 2. HOW MUSIC INSPIRED BEAU'S MARKETING 3. HOW VALUES BUILD THE BEAU'S BRAND 4. AND MORE!
5. 1 [How Beau's Began]
6. "Somewhere in the conversation, it was my dad actually that said, 'You're always coming home with one crazy beer or another, what if we opened up a craft brewery in Eastern Ontario?'"
7. "As soon as we had a beer people could drink and try, friends and family who were a little more reluctant to put money in came to see the opportunity better and better. [...] We were able to have just enough to get off the ground."
8. "In the starting days, we couldn't actually drink our own beer because we didn't have it in bottles, and we didn't have a way to get it out of kegs, and we were always sold out. The only way to get it was to go out to a bar."
9. 2 [How Music Inspired Beau's Marketing]
10. "I quite often joke that we've taken the marketing model for an independent record label and applied it to beer."
11. "So we created Fe-BREW-ary, where we release a different beer every week during the month [...] We're able to dramatically increase our sales that month."
12. "[On Oktoberfest] That first year we were expecting maybe 500 people to show up. It turned out 5,000 people showed up at the gate that day."
13. 3 [How Values Build The Beau's Brand]
14. "We really believe in supporting the community that we serve. Last year we donated to over 100 different charities. [...] This year, our Oktoberfest alone raised over $95k for charity."
15. "Our feeling is that you can always teach someone skills, but you can't teach them to embrace the culture. So you're better off hiring someone that already has the same values that the company does."
16. "We've had a lot of fun with our collaborations. It's a wonderful way to keep learning about different techniques, but more than that, it's a very inspirational project to do."
17. WWW.HACKTOSTART.COM
18. @HACKTOSTART HEY[AT]HACKTOSTART.COM