How Cigar City Brewing Got Oskar Blues To Triple Their Acquisition Offer

Transcript

John Warrillow:                I think it was Bob Dylan who originally said, “If you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose.” I think that’s true for a lot of startups, right? When you start your business, really you’re not risking all that much because your business is worthless anyways. Yeah, you take big risks with your business, you make strategy changes, but you’re not really risking that much because your business isn’t really worth much yet.

John Warrillow:                But as you grow and you start to build a successful company, you’re actually risking that company every day that you run it. Every day that you have all that equity in your own hands, you’re all in, your chips are all on the table. My next guest, Joey Redner, started to feel a little queasy about that. He was building Cigar City Brewery. Again, a very successful business originally started off trying to brew a thousand barrels, ultimately got to 55,000 barrels.

John Warrillow:                But all that growth required him to continue to guarantee the debt in the business. He took on debt from his father. He took on an SBA loan and eventually he just threw his hands up in the air and said, “I’m not comfortable taking on any more debt.” That’s exactly when he was approached by Oskar Blues, another successful craft brewery and he decided to sell his business. I think it’s a decision that a lot of us could take a lot of solace in and a lot of lessons from. So to hear his get inside his head and hear his rationale for selling, here’s Joey Redner.

John Warrillow:                Joey Redner, welcome to Built To Sell Radio.

Joey Redner:                      Thank you for having me.

John Warrillow:                So you own Cigar City Brewing and having just been down to Tampa, I actually know your company because you guys brew an amazing beer.

Joey Redner:                      Thank you.

John Warrillow:                So tell me how you got into this business.

Joey Redner:                      I got into the beer business just really out of necessity. Tampa, Florida really as a whole and Tampa, the part of Florida I live in just didn’t really have a lot of local beer. I came up here thinking I didn’t like beer that first time being a young guy having a beer. I took a sip of the mass produced lager and scratched my head and said, “This can’t be what everyone’s getting all excited about.” It just was a style of beer I didn’t personally enjoy. So it just kind of put in a mentality in me that anytime I saw a new beer I knew I didn’t like the beers that I already had. So I would just try a new one.

Joey Redner:                      Then slowly I started discovering that there were beers that I liked a lot, but they were just very hard to get. The distribution was inconsistent and out of hunting for them and learning about which styles I liked, I discovered, Oh you can actually make beer. That makes the access to the beer a little more steady if you make it yourself. So that’s really where it grew out of the need. I just kept waiting. I knew a city the size of Tampa with our population when you looked around at the rest of the country, there was, four or five, six breweries in the city that size and we had none that we’re actually distributing. We had brewpubs but most of the beer was staying inside those four walls. So I just kept waiting for someone else to do it, waiting, waiting, waiting and no one did. So I just decided that I thought I could make a run of it.

John Warrillow:                It’s funny because if you go to a store these days, I mean, I don’t know, half the shelf must be craft beer, but back 10, 20 years ago it was, Bush, Bud, Miller Genuine Draft. That was it. Right. But now it’s really taken off. So you saw this. Now take us to the next step. So you actually started, I mean, did you know anything about brewing? Did you actually start brewing batches and stuff? Like how did that happen?

Joey Redner:                      I started brewing as a home brewer and I was a pretty undisciplined home brewer. I was more interested in the end result than I was at perfecting the process. So when I decided to open the brewery, I knew that I needed to get someone that had real commercial experience and that really geeked out about the process of getting to B from A. I was more concerned with getting to B. I hired a brewer who had experience but also saw the world the way that I did and had the same outlook about what he wanted to see in a craft beer. So that was a very early partnership. In fact, my brewer was our only employee, because I wasn’t paying myself for the first year. He really did… I remember during the interview we talked about beer for about five minutes when we talked about music and our lives growing up for about three hours. So that’s really where the thick came in is that we kind of could see the world. We’re very different people, but we had a lot of the same interests.

John Warrillow:                How did you compensate that first employee? It was just cash or did you give him some shares?

Joey Redner:                      I gave him some profit sharing. So a pretty paltry salary to begin with, but he really was chomping at the bit to be a head brewer. He had been a head brewer in the past. Again at the time, and it was kind of hard to apply your trade in the beer industry in the Southeast. There just wasn’t a lot of breweries that you could work at. So he was just very eager to be a head brewer again. So he took it, he took, again, a fairly modest salary. Then we did profit sharing, which effectively amounted to, I believe 3% net profit sharing. Which didn’t amount to much in the first year or two, but started to get pretty lucrative towards the end for him.

John Warrillow:                So talk to us about the next evolution. So you’ve got the brewmaster, I mean how are you financing the business? I’m assuming it’s a pretty capital intensive business as it grows.

Joey Redner:                      It’s very capital intensive. Originally it was personal and family money. I’m pretty frugal so I always try to see, if you tell me the price, I just always assumed that it can be done cheaper. So I tried to add a lot of value that way. Just I tried to be my own contractor and be my own sourcer and installer for equipment where I could. Did a lot of that. We got, let’s see, I think my original budget was in the neighborhood of 850K, which is a pretty tight budget for building out a brewery from scratch. I came in I think 150K under budget. Then we operated off of that for probably a solid year before we started seeing enough growth that we needed to go for more capital. About, I think it was probably about two and a half, three years in, I took out a SBA loan, which I was very hesitant to do.

Joey Redner:                      I’m just very debt averse, which is not a good, it’s not a good mentality in the brewing industry. As you said, it is extremely capital intensive, but I did take the loan out. I was very ambivalent about doing it, but I saw that we were growing at such a pace that the cash flowing that I was trying to do and I didn’t do a lot of cash flowing. When money came in, I buy a new tank, but eventually you max out your system and can’t just buy more tanks. You’ve got to get a new brewhouse. That next leap up is usually so high that it’s not something you can do in a cashflow manner, in a timely way. That would have taken me two or three years to pile up enough cash to really build out the next phase so I went and borrowed the money.

Joey Redner:                      I felt miserable about it the whole time that I had that debt on there. I’m just a little bit different that way. I just am very anti debt. That was one of the reasons that played into my ultimate desire to sell the controlling interest was that I just knew that the debt cycle was never going to stop. The chips were going to just keep being more and more and more that had to get put on the table for growth.

John Warrillow:                So the 850 grand that you started off with to build out the first tranche, if you will, or the first iteration. You said friends and family. So was that debt? Where they lending you the money? Did they take equity in the business?

Joey Redner:                      It was a loan and I satisfied it with equity.

John Warrillow:                When did you choose to satisfy it with equity?

Joey Redner:                      That was my choice. I could have just paid it back. My dad was basically the main money guy behind it and I could’ve just paid him back. But I felt like he took a huge gamble to loan me the money. There’s nothing in my background that said that you’d look at me and go, yeah, that guy’s definitely going to start a successful brewery. So I just felt like he took this amazing gamble on me and I wanted him to get some reward out of it, so I converted it into equity rather than pay him back.

John Warrillow:                How did you value the business back then for the purposes of converting it into equity?

Joey Redner:                      I forget the exact process. We just looked at what we were doing in cashflow and came up with a value that was definitely much lower than what breweries started being valued for a couple of years later. But we were both happy with, with the valuation. I was happy, he was happy. But I forget the back metrics.

John Warrillow:                Got it. I’m assuming you gave your dad the option to be paid out for the loan or take equity and he chose the equity?

Joey Redner:                      He actually gave me the option. I went to him and said, “Do you want equity as opposed to being paid back?” Again, he left it up to me and I said, “Well, this is what I’d like to do.”

John Warrillow:                Got it. So the SBA loan, I mean, what was that process like going out and getting an SBA loan? I mean, I realize it was a theme that said who you are as a person, but I mean, mechanically, was it an arduous process? Was it relatively easy?

Joey Redner:                      It was just the typical red tape and going through all of the paperwork. It wasn’t difficult, but it was arduous. I guess, as you said. It’s just a lot of redundant paperwork and fingerprinting and dotting all the I’s and crossing all the T’s. So, while it wasn’t difficult, it was a little bit time consuming

John Warrillow:                For people who don’t know Cigar City, give us a sense of how big the company got before you sold it. Your number of employees or sort of scope.

Joey Redner:                      So yeah, we were right around 70 employees when we actually sold. About 70 to 75 and I say that because we were in such a state of flux. We were hiring in big chunks to kind of back fill things that we’d already needed and just hadn’t hired for yet. In the brewing world, we tend to speak in barrels, barrels of production. So if you’ve ever seen the big half barrel kegs they’re called half barrels because they’re for 15.5 gallons. A barrel is 31 gallons. So for every barrel you produce, you’ve effectively made two large kegs. We did a little less than a thousand barrels in our first year and we did over 55,000 in the year that we completed the transaction and about 65,000 this year. Now that we have the capacity being in the new Oskar Blues group, we’re targeting 90 to 100,000 barrels of production for this year.

John Warrillow:                So phenomenal growth. What period of time was that from the first year to the year you sold? How many years was that?

Joey Redner:                      So that was a 2009 and we only actually were brewing for eight months out of 2009. That was a thousand barrels we did in our first year. Then we completed the transaction in ’16. So it was effectively just a little over six years to go from under a thousand barrels to over 55,000 barrels. Which put us in the top 50 of craft breweries, production-wise in the US in just about 15 years.

John Warrillow:                Yeah, I would think so. How did you grow that quickly? I mean, what was, if, as you look back now, what was the secret to growing so fast?

Joey Redner:                      Well, a lot of it was, any brewery that has success, there’s got to be good liquid dairy. There has to be some passionate about why you make what you make. That’s a given. It has to be there. I think another thing was timing. The market was so underserved in Florida, just almost laughably underserved. Craft beer, nationwide was trending towards 10% and I think it was around 2% in Florida. It was 2% not because the people weren’t drinking. They literally just didn’t have the same kind of access to it. So, timing was a big part of it.

Joey Redner:                      Then I think just, I was very into the craft beer scene in my area. I had been writing a beer column for a local paper I had worked for another brewery doing sales. So I knew a lot of people in the industry and from an influencer standpoint, not only was I in that position personally, but I knew a lot of people were. People knew that we were making beer for the right reasons, that we were trying to build a scene and try to just improve what locally produced beer was in our area. So I think that all sort of culminated in us being embraced pretty heavily, pretty early on. Any business that grows that fast, there’s going to be a lot of growing pains and we certainly had them. But our hearts, were always in the right places even if our head wasn’t.

Joey Redner:                      So those main factors, just the timing, the quality of what we were making and the passion behind it, we were very fortunate to win a lot of fairly prestigious beer competition’s pretty early in our career. That definitely put a spotlight on us. Then just in the local community people knew that I really was very personally invested in what craft beer was going to be in the Tampa Bay area. Then our employees, the vast majority of them were working there out of love of beer as opposed to, Hey, I just took that job because I needed the money.

John Warrillow:                So at what point did you decide to sell a controlling interest? Maybe talk about what the trigger was that made you think through that?

Joey Redner:                      It was, I never actually like put a shingle out and said we’re for sale. In our industry growth is pretty coveted and we were growing, pretty well. So, people came knocking and wanting to have conversations and I’m the kind of guy that I’ll almost always talk to you. So, I started talking to people and kind of getting a general feel for what other people in the industry thought about us and where we sat. My personal decision to sell it really probably came emotionally about four or five years in and it was just, I set out to kind of start a little craft brewery and kind of improve the scene in my area. I didn’t really set out to start a very large brewery.

Joey Redner:                      It really wasn’t in my thinking. It wasn’t in my business plan. I thought in year five we’d be, if we were lucky, 5,000 to 10,000 barrels and we were 10 times that. It’s just a very different business running a very large brewery versus running a small. Then my personal dislike of debt played in pretty heavily as well. As I was looking at the landscape, I was faced with, well I haven’t even played off this first SBA loan and I need to go borrow another 20 million to build the brewery that it would take just to supply the demand. The demand wasn’t pie in the sky. It was did not ship orders in hand. We brewed X amount of beer, but we had orders for exponentially more than that.

Joey Redner:                      So I knew what it would take to build a brewery that can actually meet those orders. While it was probably a safe bet, I just personally couldn’t get my head around being that far in debt. I felt like, I put my chips on the table, I won the bet and then the dealer is saying, “Well not only do you have to leave your winnings on the table, but you have to leave your original bet on the table. Oh, and by the way, you have to match both of those things.” I just felt like my success was actually leading me to sort of being more enslaved instead of more free. Because while, Hey I won, I built this thing, it’s successful, it’s doing well, the market forces are telling me that I have to go in more debt. It just didn’t make sense to me.

Joey Redner:                      So that’s emotionally kind of what got me there was I wanted to be free. I wanted to be in a situation where if the business doesn’t do well, I’m not beholden to write a check to someone to pay back the equipment that I bought, hoping the business would do well. That’s really what pushed me ultimately in the direction of selling. Because what I value, my concept of freedom is not owing any one money. That was a big, big part of it. Then obviously the fact that the brewery had just gotten so far out of the scope of what my skillset was, what my passion was. Quite frankly, I felt like I wasn’t in my role as CEO with my experience and background, I wasn’t able to really give it everything it needed to get to the next level.

Joey Redner:                      I’m not the kind of person that goes, it’s my baby. I built it, I own it. I’ve always believed that if you make something and then it makes contact with the world, it’s really not yours anymore. Whether that be a product, a poem, a book, it takes on a different meaning to other people. Cigar City started to mean something different to its customers than it did to me. I just had to, just like a child that you’ve raised up and like put out into the world, you just got to let it go and be what it’s going to be. I felt like in some ways I was holding it back. So that’s really what got me there was those several factors in conjunction.

John Warrillow:                Well said indeed. I love the candor and I think, it’s not something we hear a lot, to be honest, on the show. It’s really interesting to hear your perspective on always being at the poker table, always having to leave all your chips on the table and having to kind of re up. That’s a fascinating kind of analogy. So take us through the next step. So you’re getting these offers, obviously one peaked your curiosity. What was it about the fireman approach, that Fireman Capitals, I guess the private equity company you ultimately sold to? Maybe talk a little bit about how that came about.

Joey Redner:                      So, Fireman Capital, there’s money behind a group of breweries now, but Oskar Blues is kind of, they’re the lead they’re the oldest, the largest. So that’s really where my eyes were. This was a brewery that I’d always admired, Oskar Blues. I’d always been impressed with how they did things. They were kind of irreverent, but they got shit done. If they announced that they were going to do a new brewery, it was usually after the thing was almost done. I just liked that. They partied hard, but they worked hard and they made things happen. So that was attractive to me.

Joey Redner:                      They were also just the first craft brewery in the United States to can exclusively. Well to can and to can exclusively. That just took massive moxy to do that because at the time people don’t see it now because craft beer in a can is everywhere. It’s becoming the more popular vessel and that there’s a reason for that. It’s actually better for the hoppy beers. But at the time that Oskar Blues did it, beer in a can was still very declasse. It was, that was what cheap beer came in. You didn’t put good beer in cans because it wouldn’t sell. Oscar Blue said, “No bull crap. It’s better, it’s easy to carry around. It’s better for an outdoor, active lifestyle because it’s easier to pack it in and pack it out. You’re still carrying the bottles after you drink the beer, you’re still having to lug those out if you’d been on a mountain bike running deep, deep in the woods or you’re camping.

Joey Redner:                      Cans can compress down into a small bag and it just all around it protected the beer better. It’s a better vessel. But because of what people felt the customer would think about it, nobody in craft industry was doing it and Oscar did. It actually gave me the courage to do it with my brewery.

Joey Redner:                      I switched from bottles to cans because I saw that they were able to do it. Just their arc, that was a big thing for me, their arc. They started in ’96. I didn’t start until 2009. So just as a consumer, before I ever owned a brewery, I got to watch their brewery and see how they did things. I was just very impressed with Dale, the owner of Oskar Blues and how they approached making beer and also selling and marketing beer. That was really the big pull. I wanted to work with someone like that, that they kind of came where I came from but had gone further than I had gone. That was one of the big factors why that’s the group that I wanted to work with.

John Warrillow:                That’s helpful. So who made the first move? Did Dale approach you and say, “Hey, can we buy you guys?”

Joey Redner:                      They had approached us, we had been talking with some other people and there was some interest with some other transactions. I actually would’ve been okay with selling the minority control. But my father was pretty adamant that we either owned it together or he wanted completely out. So I had to respect his wishes. So I had to arrange the transaction in such a way he would get the highest offer that anyone else would have offered for his shares. So that kind of put a wrinkle in things, but I was able to get to that point. So Oscar initially kind of gave us a lower offer and then we engaged with someone else and then later in the game they kind of came back to us and said, “Look, we’ve looked at it, we’re willing to go that extra mile.”

Joey Redner:                      So it got my dad to the number that he would’ve gotten anyway. I was kind of free to sort of on my side of the equity take which ever structure worked best for me. So I ended up rolling a lot of equity into the new entity because like I said, I still love craft beer. I still want to be around it. I still want to be in it. I stayed on at Cigar City, I’m still the CEO, but I’ve got support now that I didn’t have before. On that side of things, my life has definitely vastly improved. But as far as how the transaction went down, they initially approached us and it was really over probably a year, year and a half period that we kind of got to a final offer and do due diligence and actually close the transaction.

John Warrillow:                So how much did Oscar come up on a percentage terms from the first offer to this second?

Joey Redner:                      Quite a lot. Probably almost three times from their initial offer.

John Warrillow:                Wow.

Joey Redner:                      But this was over a several month period and some dynamics had changed. We had also grown quite a bit from their first offer to their last offer. Which I think maybe gave them the security to see that, okay these guys are still doing well. It’s the growth is still there and maybe they were a little bit gun shy about whether to go with sustainable in the interim, from when the first offer to the second offer, we’d still had really good growth.

John Warrillow:                Got it. So I’d love to understand that the structure a little bit more. So your dad wanted out and so they basically paid him cash for his shares?

Joey Redner:                      Yeah, he was redeemed out with cash.

John Warrillow:                How did the investment workout for him in the end?

Joey Redner:                      Extremely well. I can’t get into specific numbers, but extremely well. The problem is I can’t even give you a ballpark because based on initial investments, you’ve sort of figured out, and I’ve promised that I would never publicly say the sales price, but he did extremely well.

John Warrillow:                Savvy old dog. That’s great. Well that’s good. It’s nice to be able to pay. I mean, kidding aside, how did that feel to be able to get that check for your dad after he’d sort of invested in you?

Joey Redner:                      It was weird because my father, he really didn’t want me to sell. He saw it as, he wasn’t active, he was passive and he could just sort of sit back and be proud of it and enjoy it. But he didn’t really have the stress of running it. He wasn’t a personal guarantee on any of the debt. So from his point of view, he would’ve much preferred that I hold onto it and continue to run it. I couldn’t quite get him into the head space that I was in. That like, it’s not pleasant for me. It’s very stressful. I didn’t get into this industry to kind of go in the direction I’m going with the tools that I have. I never really got him to that place.

Joey Redner:                      He really didn’t understand why I would be willing to walk away. I think in some ways it was more his baby than it was my baby. But again, that’s just how I view the world. You create something, you put it out into the world, it stops being yours. But my father is a little more old school. He still very much like it is ours. We do own it, we control it. I couldn’t get him to see it as that’s true. But it controls us back. It controls what we can and can’t do. It controls whether or not I met a bunch of vet or not. I never really got him there but yeah, I think when he received that check, I mean it certainly doesn’t… It certainly isn’t something that you don’t have that moment where we’ve talked a little bit about that. My dad, he’s a fairly wealthy man, but that is a kind of check that even an extremely wealthy man is going to raise an eyebrow over.

John Warrillow:                Fantastic. So talk to me about the deal structure you excepted. I think a lot of the entrepreneurs listening to show are curious about selling to a private equity group, rolling their shares into a group versus taking cash. Maybe just talk a little bit about what the mechanics of that and how you got your head around the idea of rolling your equity into it.

Joey Redner:                      Yeah. Well I did take a lot of cash. That was important to me. I built it. I wanted to kind of have the security, the swim to shore money. To know that if I can no longer own it and control it, then I’ve got a nest egg. Then I rolled the other equity, because I still really believe in not just what Cigar City Brewing was doing, but the other breweries in the group. Oskar Blues is the big one, but Perrin out of Michigan, Squatters and Wasatch out of Utah, they’re in the group as well. I feel like when you look at those breweries collectively, there’s a lot of upside. They’re all making really good beer. They all have really interesting things separately. But what you can do with the breweries combined and just also the diversity of being in many different regions.

Joey Redner:                      Oskar Blues is out of Colorado, but they have a brewery in North Carolina and in Austin, Texas. Squatters and Wasatch are in Utah. Then as I said, Perrin is in Michigan and you have us down in Florida. We haven’t kind of got the whole country covered, but we’ve got a nice sort of regional base. We’re still looking at other opportunities to add breweries into the platform. That’s what was attractive to me is that I could go forward as part of a team that has a lot of combined knowledge. There are some things that Oskar Blues has taught us that it never occurred to me to try those things in that way. On the business side of things, they’ve just been doing it a lot longer. They’re a lot sharper, but vice versa, we were doing some things in our brewery that were new to them.

Joey Redner:                      So the internal knowledge share has been really rewarding to me. We’ve been able to do things that just never would have occurred to us to even try in the past and get really good results from. So that was one of the big attractors for me in rolling equity was to still be a part of it. To try to have the comfort of knowing that in my personal life everything’s taken care of, but I can still gamble, I can still sit at the table and I still got chips on it and if I play the game well, I can still benefit.

John Warrillow:                Got it. So I want to get into, and I know before we hit record, we talked a little bit about the fact that the actual sale price is confidential. So obviously we won’t talk about the actual sale price or you can’t. But I would be fascinated to know on the deal mechanics, you were acquired obviously for a multiple on your EBITDA. Let’s just for round numbers and for illustrative purposes or for an example, let’s imagine that’s a 10 times EBITDA. Do you then when you roll your equity into the larger group, are you basically valuing their group at the same multiple of EBITDA that you sold your company?

Joey Redner:                      No. I forget the actual mechanism, but it’s sort of a blend. Yeah, you are paying sort of what you paid for yourself, but then it’s sort of a blend of all the other things. Every transaction that went into Oskar Blues holdings, it was sort of valued different. So there’s just the evaluation for the full company. So my attorneys basically look at that valuation and we agree on it. So my X equity, it will be worth X percentage and again, while I don’t remember the exact mechanisms within that, I was happy with the evaluation and what I was paying to buy into the group.

John Warrillow:                What have you done with the money, the cash that you took out? I know that you said personal freedom is really important to you and being debt free. Have you done anything unique or interesting with the cash portion of your proceeds?

Joey Redner:                      The typical things, I bought a very nice house on the water here in Tampa Bay. I bought some nice presents for the wife. But the vast majority of the money I’ve invested sort of traditionally, because like I said, I’m still, my main role is still CEO of Cigar City Brewing. So I don’t really have time to be active in anything else. So the vast majority of my money is basically under management.

Joey Redner:                      I did start a family foundation with a large chunk because there’s some things that are important to me that I’d like to give back if I could. So started a family foundation. I’ve taken a few trips, nothing really extravagant yet. I took a little bit of time off just to kind of unwind. Anyone whose sold a business, understands that the process can be pretty draining. I have some specific health issues that kind of made it worse for me. Just the stress level, when my body creates adrenaline, it doesn’t dump it very well. It’s a genetic S and P snip called MTHFR. If you spell that out, it looks like a motherfucker and it can be one.

John Warrillow:                I was just going to say, it doesn’t look very good.

Joey Redner:                      It’s a genetic thing that affects your metal pathways. My adrenal glands can get burned out really easy. So I went through it a year and a half of a fairly stressful situation. So I took some time off just to kind of decompress from that. It is an all encompassing, very stressful situation to go through selling a business. So that was a big luxury I afforded myself was to just do nothing for a little while.

John Warrillow:                What advice would you have for an entrepreneur going through their first sale?

Joey Redner:                      I would say everybody’s different. I kind of sabotaged myself because instead of continuing to workout and eat well through the process, I kind of let that go. That actually sort of eroded my health base, I think. Everyone’s different. Some people are blessed with good health and their robust. Then that, to someone like that, I would just say, continued to work the process and just show up and do all the things that you’ve always done. But if the stress is getting to you, it’s important to sort of maintain all the things that you had done prior to help you with stress. So if exercise helps you with stress, exercise. Make sure that you’re still doing that. Make sure that you’re eating well.

Joey Redner:                      Again, if you’re not there physically and mentally, things are going to fall by the wayside. It’s just the nature of managing. If you aren’t healthy and well fed and well rested, you’re not going to function at your peak.

Joey Redner:                      Then as far as, make sure you get good advice. If you’re having attorneys help you or a banker help you make sure they’ve done those specific types of transactions before. In my industry it’s federally regulated, so there’s extra wrinkles there in joining forces with other breweries, it kind of changes the taxes that every brewery pays. So there’s just little things that might be specific to your industry that you have to pay extra close attention to. So just like anything else, just like you would in your business, hire smarter. Make sure that the people that are advising you know way more about it than you do, but that they still have that teacher’s heart. That they’re not there to be smarter than you, they’re there to get you as smart as Tim.

John Warrillow:                I’ve never heard that expression that teacher’s heart, but it makes good sense. What a fascinating story, Joey. I really appreciate you sharing it with this. Where do people find out about you and the company? What URLs can we go to?

Joey Redner:                      You can check out the brewery@cigarcitybrewing.com. I don’t have a personal email, but I don’t know, maybe find me on Facebook.

John Warrillow:                Joey Redner, thanks for joining us.

Joey Redner:                      All right. Thank you for having me.