The No B.S. Story of Starting and Growing a Craft Brewery

Speaker 1:
Some of the most epic things ever accomplished began with the phrase, "Hold my beer and watch this." So chill those ice cubes, pop that cork, or crack open that can because we're about to share an amazing story. Welcome to the Forward Drinking Podcast. Here's your host, John Hutchings.

John Hutchings:
Hello, everybody. Welcome to the Forward Drinking Podcast. I'm your host, John Hutchings, and I'm the President and co-owner of Fall River Brewing. Here's why I started this podcast. Over the last 10 years of building Fall River Brewing Company, I've developed a desire to share the experiences and wisdom that have been passed on to me by those that have come before me and those who have accomplished amazing things that I have not. It's because of what I've learned from these encounters that I was able to transition from employee to entrepreneur. I feel a constant drive to share this journey with others. My goal is to inspire you to realize that you are capable of accomplishing truly amazing things and to provide you with the tools to help you succeed just like others equipped me. And we'll be doing this all along the way while enjoying a beverage.

Here's what you can expect from the Forward Drinking Podcast. You'll hear true stories from people who have accomplished great feats in business and in life. You'll learn the lessons that power their successes, and we'll see how you can apply them to your situation. You don't need a Harvard MBA to be successful in business and in life. And lastly, you'll get a good dose of humor and raw emotion to keep it lively. Alcohol always helps with this one.

In this episode, I'll be sharing the raw, no bullshit story of the journey, challenges, and details of starting and growing Fall River Brewing Company. So buckle those chin straps because we're about to embark on a great adventure. Here with me today is Tim Rayl. Tim is the Chief Marketing Officer for Fall River Brewing and owner/operator of his own successful business. I've asked Tim to lead this interview to help me share my story with you. Tim, welcome to the show.

Tim Rayl:
The maiden voyage. I think we're going to burn the ships.

John Hutchings:
Sink or swim, baby. We'll figure it out. I have trust in us.

Tim Rayl:
Absolutely. Absolutely. It's going to be great. So, you have something for us to drink here?

John Hutchings:
I do. One of my favorite parts of the show. Today, we're going to be drinking Hex IPA. It's a flagship beer for Fall River Brewing Company, Hex short for Hexagenia, named after the largest genus of mayfly that hatches every year on the Fall River where I'm from. And we chose the Hex mayfly because it was just the thing that really attracted me to this brand and always reminds me of my childhood growing up in the Fall River Valley. Yeah, just where we started, so let's crack one.

Tim Rayl:
Hey.

John Hutchings:
Ooh. Cheers.

Tim Rayl:
Cheers.

John Hutchings:
It's good. There's going to be a few burps.

Tim Rayl:
Oh, that's very nice.

John Hutchings:
That's all right. It's authentic.

Tim Rayl:
Yes.

John Hutchings:
All right.

Tim Rayl:
Fall River, what a beautiful part of Northern California.

John Hutchings:
Yes.

Tim Rayl:
And what was it like growing up there? Not really a major  metropolis or anything, is it?

John Hutchings:
No. In fact, every place other than Fall River is the big city. As an example, one word to describe Fall River, Mayberry. A small town, you come in, it's got the census or whatever, the population is a town of 600. If you look at the overall outlying area of the Fall River Valley, it's probably maybe a total of 1,500.

Tim Rayl:
Wow.

John Hutchings:
Growing up as a kid, when we went down to Redding, which was the big city, because it was like 90,000 people back then, that was like going to San Francisco to us. To give you an idea, that's the size of it. But overall, I couldn't have asked for a better place to grow up. I loved it. It allowed me a lot of opportunities and I'm very thankful for that, being able to play three sports. You talk to people that talk about playing sports growing up as a kid. I played football, basketball, and I high school rodeod. A lot of people are like, "Rodeo is a high school sport?" Yeah. I used to high school rodeo.

And then, also was super active in Future Farmers of America. It's the largest youth leadership organization in the world, and super active in that. And that probably single-handedly played one of the largest roles in helping me later on down the road through public speaking and that type of stuff. Super thankful that I had that opportunity.

Tim Rayl:
I imagine too, you probably knew everybody and everybody that was related to everybody.

John Hutchings:
Yeah.

Tim Rayl:
Probably didn't get away with too much.

John Hutchings:
No, no. I could take somebody from out of town, we could go down to the local grocery store, we could walk every aisle, and I'd name every single person. We knew everybody in the whole town. And yeah, you didn't get away with much growing up there, which was a good and a bad thing, but I would say mostly a good thing. We joke about family trees look like totem poles and whatnot. That's a joke. Just kidding. But I love my hometown, for sure.

Tim Rayl:
Oh, that sounds awesome. I know when we were chatting before the show, you had talked about there was a real pivotal moment that happened in your life early on that really sparked you and set you on a path. Can you talk me through that?

John Hutchings:
Yeah. I was selected between my junior and senior year of high school, I was selected to go to a thing called Boys State.

Tim Rayl:
Boys State.

John Hutchings:
Boys State.

Tim Rayl:
Okay.

John Hutchings:
Yeah.

Tim Rayl:
Tell us what's that?

John Hutchings:
Yeah, so basically the whole point was that they selected... It was supposed to be a selection of the top student or students depending upon the size of the school. Our school at that time maybe had 150, 200 kids, and they were selecting the top students to go down and basically spend a week at Sac State University. But we actually got to basically run a mock government of California for a week, which included being a day in the Capitol, acting as a state senator or whatnot. It was super cool. But it was, I think, done by the... What was it?

Tim Rayl:
American Legion-

John Hutchings:
American Legion. [inaudible] Foreign Legion. American Legion. And they selected... At that time, I honestly think I got selected because I was the best public speaker. It was an extemporaneous speaking thing along with answering questions. Definitely wasn't the smartest kid in terms of my grades to be selected for that reason. But yeah, we got shipped down there and it was my first time being around kids from other schools where I was like, "Holy crap." These are the best kids of, say, a private school in the Bay Area. And these are kids graduating with 1600 on their SATs, 5.0 GPAs, full rides to every major university in the United States. Their whole lives are laid out for them already. And then there's me wondering if I could even go to a university.

It was the first time that I was like, "Holy shit. These are the people I'm going to be competing against in life if I'm going to be a job person." Which at the time I didn't know any better, and I was like, "Damn. This is a wake-up call that I'm going to have to learn... That we're going to have to start working a little harder and learning how to fight." Not in the sense that throwing hands, but in the sense of-

Tim Rayl:
We don't talk about fight club.

John Hutchings:
That's right. We don't talk about fight club. In the sense in that... No, it's going to take an uphill battle of me figuring out my path and my way and how I'm going to get what I want out of life, is it was very much communicated down there that that was what you had to be and you had to do in order to be successful. And they were already, at this age, 17, 18 years old, these kids are comparing each other out. Who's going to be the most successful based upon what school they're going to, what their GPA was. And I'm like, "Oh man, I'm in trouble." Sign up to be the town dogcatcher.

Tim Rayl:
Geez, man, that sounds like a real reality check. So what did you do? How did you respond?

John Hutchings:
Immediately after that, I immediately said "I got to start taking all this serious." And I'd been cruising through school at that time. Lack of better words, taking the easy way out, taking the easiest classes because I knew it would guarantee me an A. If I could get the result, why do things that were going to push me to have to work harder? And I actually shifted gears at that time. I really started getting studious and going, "Hey, I need to try to play catch up on these things that I allowed to fall behind." Actually started going into school early and especially in my math classes where I'd fallen really far behind and meeting with them... My math teacher at that time, a couple hours before school, almost daily to try to get caught up, but was still way far behind. And that transitioned with me into college. But yeah, it was that first foray where I was like, "Hey, we're going to have to start figuring out how to get tough here or we're going to have a rough life ahead of us."

Tim Rayl:
Sounds like you got a benefit of your small town upbringing with a math teacher that showed some dedication by showing up that early to meet with you.

John Hutchings:
Absolutely.

Tim Rayl:
And help you out there. Where did that lead?

John Hutchings:
I ended up being fortunate enough to be able to get into Chico State University. And it was one of my things that I wanted to make sure I graduated in four years. My parents very much worked hard to not only help us, but also teach us from the time we were young kids about the importance of saving for a college education. We were going to have to fund it ourselves for the most part. And I wanted to make sure I graduated in four years, didn't accumulate a bunch of debt, but the biggest thing was just getting into school and making sure that I tried to do the best I could.

I transitioned that from, like I said, with my math classes to where it was like, if I had, on an average day, two or three hours of classes a day, I was spending six to eight hours a day at tutor labs trying to get caught up. And it was the same type of thing. A lot of these kids in these tutor labs are like, "Hey, you really shouldn't be here. You should be going to a community college. You should be going back and playing some catch up and then maybe coming back." And I was like, "Nope, nope. We're going to bust our asses and figure out how to get through this."

I ended up still graduating pretty high within my class at Chico State, but I figured it out at that point in time. I was like, "A lot of these people maybe were just going to classes and getting A's," I was like, "That's not going to be me. I'm going to have to work 3, 4, 5 times harder than these guys. Or it's not going to happen. Just going to be average at best."

Tim Rayl:
But you did it.

John Hutchings:
Yeah, I did it. And that was just again a learning and a reckoning at that point that I was going to have to, in a lot of ways, work harder than others, which may seem not fair, but that's life.

Tim Rayl:
So you had to build a hard work ethic.

John Hutchings:
Exactly.

Tim Rayl:
And that led you into building.

John Hutchings:
Exactly. I ended up graduating with a degree in construction management. One thing that really came out when I was in college is that I was definitely, I would say, in a lot of ways a lost soul. I didn't know what I wanted to do. Been that way my whole life where I just... As a kid, I wanted to be a fighter pilot. I thought Maverick was cool. But no, growing up in the reality of it, I had no idea what I wanted to do. And my brother had gone to school for construction management at Chico State, younger brother. I'll just follow what he's doing. He seems to have his shit figured out. So I'll do what he's doing, I'll get a CM degree. Just ended up doing what he was doing and followed in his footsteps.

Tim Rayl:
Okay, yeah. So where did you start?

John Hutchings:
So I graduated in 2004. I got out in four years, four years of fun, four years of hard work. But I started at the same company my brother started at. It's a company called Granite Construction Company. I worked with some absolutely amazing people there. And I will say that's another place that really shaped the experiences and the learning shaped a lot of who I am still today. But great place, large company, corporate environment at the time. I don't know where they're at, I haven't followed them in a while. But at the time, new company was like 8 billion a year in revenue. Publicly traded on the stock market. Offices nationwide, mostly centralized in the West Coast, was the majority of where they operated, but big company.

What was cool, I didn't understand at the time, is that they gave a lot of us youngsters, a lot of free rein to do pretty crazy stuff at 22, 23 years old to cut you loose to run multimillion dollar jobs, provide you with a safety net in case you screw up really big, to give you that opportunity. It was almost like you got to run your own small business at that time and overinflate your head a little bit, make you feel like you're hot shit, you're better than you really are. As a result of that, I started to get frustrated.

Tim Rayl:
Frustrated how?

John Hutchings:
Feeling like you're 23 and you think you should be further along than you are, not realizing that patience is a virtue and we got a long way to go in our careers and still a lot more to learn. By the time I was 25, 24, 25, I started looking for another job and ended up leaving Granite Construction to go to work for a competitor company that was a lot smaller, but still large. Couple guys that were from Granite that start of their own company called Sierra Nevada Construction. Those guys also taught me another hell of a lesson. And that was where I really learned what it was like to work your ass off. It was an eye-opener. And of course, in all my wisdom, I did it right at the start of the 2008 financial crisis.

Tim Rayl:
Awesome timing.

John Hutchings:
Just brilliant.

Tim Rayl:
Right place, right time.

John Hutchings:
Yeah. Really smart.

Tim Rayl:
So you started at Sierra Nevada, right in the teeth of the housing crisis. What happened in your life? What's transpired now? Are you still in California or did you [inaudible]?

John Hutchings:
Yeah, at the time that... And I apologize, back up there. When I graduated, I went to work at Granite and that was in... Actually, it was... Started in Sacramento. I ended up transferring to the Nevada branch. And that was really where I started my professional career in construction. That was actually within Reno, Nevada, where I transitioned from Granite Construction Company into Sierra Nevada Construction Company, there in the same city competitor companies and working for those guys. People didn't realize how good times were until times went bad. And it was definitely an eyeopener of how quick things can go from good to bad. But also as I've learned, you got to realize it all swings the other way from bad to good. But in this point in my career, it was like, "Wow, what an eyeopener to see things go from good to bad and a big hurry."

Tim Rayl:
So how good were they at that time for you?

John Hutchings:
My reason for switching was is that... Again, you start to get a big head thinking that you're in your early twenties and you're running multi-million dollar jobs and the company's making good money and "Oh, I should be getting paid all this money and I'm so important and I'm so special," not realizing that there's a bigger picture. But these guys were offering some pretty big bonuses for young guys. You could get up to a $50,000 bonus for a 23-year-old kid for projects performed well. I didn't get to enjoy any of that because within the first three, four months of 2008, it was like, "Hey, everybody, just be thankful that we've all got jobs, things are going to hell in a hand basket in a hurry."

It ended up being that at the end of that year, I lost my job. Was the first one to be let go and that sucked.

Tim Rayl:
Putting it mildly.

John Hutchings:
Yeah. Something that stuck with me for a while, new guy in the totem pole, but just also knowing I was the first one to be let go and I was like, "Son of a bitch, I don't ever want to feel what this feels like ever again. I don't ever want anybody to be in control of my life." Nothing against those guys. They had to do what they had to do. I can't even imagine being in their position. Because they had a lot of really good employees there that were like family and they had to let a large portion of their staff go to save the company. It was just economic thing, nothing they did wrong. But I was the first guy to get whacked and that stuck with me for a long time to really shape as well as where I am now.

Tim Rayl:
So how did you deal with that?

John Hutchings:
As we would say in Forward Drinking, Tim, I did a lot of drinking there shortly after. I was out of work for nine months.

Tim Rayl:
Nine months?

John Hutchings:
Nine months. That was a gut kick. It's one thing when you... And when I talked about this earlier, I alluded to 23, 24 years old, you think you're hot shit, you got the world by the tail. We're so great at what we do, blah, blah, blah. How could anything go wrong? To go from that to sitting in on my ass for a few months because I felt like a... "Whatever, I'm going to take a few months off and just relax for a little bit." Which was stupid. And then it was like reality setting. "I got to get a job." And I'd made some really poor decisions in terms of personal finances, which was the next major bummer thing, was having to deal with that.

But you go stand in line at the Walmart distribution center in the Tahoe-Reno Industrial complex and try to get a job stacking boxes as a somebody who was a project engineer and they won't hire you. That's an eye-opening, humble pie eating experience.

Tim Rayl:
Humbling is the word I was... Yes.

John Hutchings:
All good things. I'm glad I went through it because it humbled me big time. And it also gave me a chance to really fix a lot of the things that I had screwed up. As I alluded to earlier, I'd allow myself to get into really bad financial debt, bought a house I couldn't afford because I felt I earned it and brand-new pickup and all these toys and boats and all sorts of shit that I just... Was stupid. I didn't need and I couldn't afford and I shouldn't have done that. That was the first time in my life that I realized the importance of having a mentor in your life. It was through that mentor that I was able to build a plan and a playbook to try to get myself out of this. Again, one of the low dark points of my life, but probably looking back, I'm so glad it happened to me, it sucked, but I was glad it happened to me because it just taught me so many lessons that I wouldn't have learned had I not gone through it.

Tim Rayl:
So you found a mentor somehow. How did that come about?

John Hutchings:
During the period of time that I was off and a little bit before that had happened, really good friend of mine, I call him my older, older brother, his name's Mike. His older brother was actually involved, high level person in a multi-level marketing business. And I know people are like, "Oh my God, you just said the bad word, the MLM word." I don't know what names they used to try to describe what it is, but pyramid scheme business, I guess. It's not. But there were some... I got introduced to his brother and those were some incredibly sharp people. I took a lot of shit for being involved in that. I got teased horrendously by friends, teased by family, you name it.

Call it divine intervention at that time or whatever it was that I was able to have this person come into my life that actually took an honest care into my wellbeing and spent a lot of time mentoring me. You think about what's a life coach or a mentor or whatever, I never really knew what that was. And having somebody teach you about how to be smart in your personal finances, having somebody teach you about business tactics and things that you don't learn, we weren't learning in our jobs about how to set up companies or how to run them. We knew how to run a construction job, but how to set up and run a company for profitability, how to motivate people, how to just get absolutely dirt rolled day in and day out and pick yourself back up. They required readings we had to do and all sorts of stuff.

At the time, the MLM business didn't pan out. We did pretty good at it for a little while, but it wasn't anything that was like, "Oh, I made it big in multi-level marketing." But it was another one of those things where I look back upon the experience and what I learned and I was like, "Holy crap." And that was really when my life started to take shape, really started to take shape where I was broken down all the way to the bottom and then through that starting to be built back up. And that's something I'm really, really thankful I got to have happen in a very bad way.

Tim Rayl:
And it sounds like the right person came into your life at the right time. They helped you map out a plan to get out of what, honestly, that kind of debt and those types of experiences. It crushes some people.

John Hutchings:
Yeah.

Tim Rayl:
So it sounds like that person helped you navigate through what those things were.

John Hutchings:
Absolutely. It's something to be said about... Like I said, about having a mentor, being able to build a roadmap and being able to stick to it. He said, "This isn't going to be easy. You're the one that got yourself into this mess. I'm going to lay the roadmap for you, but you're going to be the one to get yourself out of it." And I talked about it with my parents who at the time didn't understand, they agree with me now that it was a godsend that I was able to get this help. But I said, "This is what I'm going to do and we're going to take all the stuff that I can't afford and we're going to give it back to the people that I bought it from and we're going to start saving money and we're going to get rid of all this high interest credit card debt and all these stupid things that I had done. And we're going to basically start over from scratch." And I-

Tim Rayl:
So how'd you start over? Sorry to interrupt you.

John Hutchings:
No, I ended up having to move back home in 2009 with my parents and start over again. Because I lost everything. Lost my house, lost that vehicle. I liquidated everything I could liquidate into cash. I liquidated into cash. I'd say 90% of it went to paying off all the stupid things that I had, the debts against me. We cleaned everything up, but I was left with nothing and it was a rebuild-myself-from-scratch type of a deal. I was fortunate enough that at the time I'd just started dating what would be my future wife, which was a tough time to have to go through that. Thank God she was very gracious at that time with me. But yeah, I moved back home with my parents at the time.

I was lucky that my brother had just started working with a family company, family construction company, and they needed some help and I was like, "I just need a job. I don't care what it is, I'll do whatever." Moved back home. 2009, started working with them and started trying to rebuild myself again. But definitely knew, I was like, "We're never going to make those mistakes again. And I'm never going to allow myself to be in a position again to where I am no longer in control of what's going to happen in my life."

Tim Rayl:
I think this is a good opportunity to take a quick break. I think we might need to refill our Hexes. Everybody who's listening, please do stick around because once we come back, John's going to take us through the founding of Fall River Brewing Company.

Speaker 2:
Inspired by the unspoiled nature of the Fall River Valley, our craft beer community is always open to adventure. It's the spirit of innovation and exploration to move us forward. We push through tough times, step beyond our boundaries and expand our horizons at every opportunity. Our beers have scaled mountains, floated downstream, been fireside, and a part of all the little moments that make up a life well lived. From small beginnings to big ideas, it's our passion for craft beer and the community that we have created to keep the heart of Fall River, whoa, brewing. Whether it's the crack of a can, the rush of a tap, or the clink of a glass these are the sounds that pull us forward toward connection. Connecting to nature, connecting with friends, and connecting the memories you make with Fall River beers.

Fall River Brewing Company is proud to sponsor the Forward Drinking Podcast. We hope these stories motivate you to think creatively, take risk, and put a plan into motion. Fall River Brewing Company, Redding, California. Please enjoy responsibly.

Tim Rayl:
Hey everybody. We're back with John Hutchings, president and co-founder of Fall River Brewing Company.

John Hutchings:
Hello, hello.

Tim Rayl:
Hey, hey. Before the break you were telling us about one of the lowest points of your life. You started working for a plan to recover, that included moving home with mom and dad in the Fall river.

John Hutchings:
Living in a van down by the river.

Tim Rayl:
You were telling me you wanted to be a motivational speaker.

John Hutchings:
I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night.

Tim Rayl:
Hey, hey, all right. So you moved back home to Fall River, you're working in the family construction business and it's at this point you decided "I want to start a business."

John Hutchings:
Yeah.

Tim Rayl:
Okay. That seems like good timing to me.

John Hutchings:
Actually looking back, if I could give any... Not that I'm an advice guy, but listen up whippersnappers. If I could give any advice, probably the best times to do these things are when you don't have a lot to lose. At that point in time, I didn't have anything to lose. When you're at rock bottom, there's not really much down you can go.

Tim Rayl:
Just keep on looking up.

John Hutchings:
Exactly. But yeah, I'd been back home for... Shoot, I don't know, four or five months at the time, I think it was August or so, I had moved back with my mom and dad, started working with my brother and my cousin and my uncle. Was so thankful that I was able to start getting something going again. I had a job that I had inherited from another employee that was working at the company, it was an older employee that had been there for a long time. It was a VA job down in Redding. The project was... It had come off the rails and by the time we as a company had figured out how bad a shape this project was in... And this was... At this time, the economic crisis was still full blown. Still 2009, 2010 stuff was still in the shits.

I inherited this VA job from this guy. They're like, "Hey, we just found out we're badly out of pocket on this job." And it was bad. Everybody was struggling the industry at that time. And we were working like hell, family business as well. I didn't want to be unemployed again. I didn't want to see family go through hell from all of this. I made it really personal on this job. I was stressed out from all holy hell taking over this job. It was like, "You already set up for failure, just stop the bleeding. Try to have us fail as little as possible on this thing."

So I had been down working on this project for almost a year and stressed to just the hilt. And I end up listening to the radio that day in my work truck, and I hear this TV, or not TV, it was a radio ad and it was like, "NorCal Brewing Solutions now open in Redding."And I'm like, "Whoa." Immediately I was like, "Man, for years I've been talking about how I wanted to learn how to brew beer." I just wanted to say I did it, not necessarily a thing that was like I had planned on. It was just I wanted to do it. My wife can attest to this because it drives her crazy. I'm the hobby type guy. Too many frigging hobbies. I'm like, "Dude, I want to just say once that I brew a batch beer."

So I heard that radio commercial and I drove straight over to NorCal Brewing Solutions. I walked in, I met Victor and Jay, the owners at the time, and I was like, "Hey, I want to learn how to brew beer." And they're like, "Oh, well you should buy this home brew kit. It's a five gallon bucket with some dry yeast and liquid malt extract and a little [inaudible] and some instructions." I'm like, "Oh cool." So I buy this thing and I go home and literally walk through the door and I'm hiding from my wife that I bought it. I don't want her to be like, "Oh, just another stupid ass hobby you're getting into." And I literally just couldn't take it anymore. I was like a kid before Christmas. I'm like, "Hey, I bought this home brew kit and I really want to try it out tonight." It was a Wednesday or something. I shouldn't be staying up late. She's like, "Whatever. I don't care. Do what you want."

She's always been the type to go to bed early, get up early type of person. So she goes to bed at eight o'clock and I'm like... Bolt out the garage, get the instructions out, I'm reading everything about it and it's like... It tells you to set aside five to six hours to do this. I realize I have to have something to boil. So I'd gotten a turkey fryer that I'd never used. So I'd break out the turkey fryer, get it all set up like, "Oh yeah, I can do this in the turkey fryer." Follow the directions, I get this thing going. I get into the boil phase and I had one of those lawn chairs that you can recline.

And I'm out here in the garage. It's a garage... A house that my wife and I are renting from a friend who's hooking us up. Cheap rent, tiny garage. And I'm out in this garage and it's like a layer of steam and I'm leaned back and I was drinking a beer. I took a picture of it. It's been on my Facebook and it pops up every year at the same time. And I actually wrote the caption, said, "I think I can make a living doing this" or something like that. It was like a joke, "Backbreaking work, ha ha ha." And I'm wearing black sweatpants and cowboy boots and it's one in the morning on a Wednesday and I'm freaking brewing beer.

I was hooked from that exact moment. I was like, "This is so much freaking fun." And I was like, "I just want to keep learning everything I can, [inaudible] learn about brew beer." That's all I'd think about in my off time. It was such a stress reliever. It was like instantaneously hooked like a drug addiction.

Tim Rayl:
Sparked you.

John Hutchings:
Yeah, it did.

Tim Rayl:
That's cool. So then what happened?

John Hutchings:
Time moved on and I want to say that was in the fall of 2000... Late fall like 2010 going into 2011. And I ended up having a lot of time off between Christmas and New Years. The company we were working for was really good about, "Hey, take a week off or 10 days or whatever, everybody." Shut the whole company down. "Recharge your batteries." So I was home brewing the whole time. Just locked in the garage. And my wife and I had had a discussion not too far earlier than that where we had both written out bucket lists and at the top was like, we both said we wanted to own our own business together. We didn't know what it was.

I had this wild ass idea. Went in and told her, I was like, "Hey, what do you think we should maybe looking to starting a brewery?" And she's like, "How the hell do you start a brewery? What do you know about brewing beer? You've been brewing beer for two months." I'm like, "I know, but I freaking love it. I think I can figure it out." She's like, "I don't think we can do that." And we kept talking about it. She wasn't saying no. It was like, "I'm interested and I just wanted..." She's a very detailed person and I'm like, "Let's just freaking dive in. We'll figure it out." I convinced her. I said, "Hey, how about we start off? I've been reading about these breweries that it sounds so cool. One's called Healdsburg Beer Company," which is still around, owned by a guy named Kevin McGee, who now owns Anderson Valley Brewing Company. There's another one in Bellevue, Washington called Foggy Noggin Brewing Company, which I thought the name was-

Tim Rayl:
Love that name.

John Hutchings:
Awesome, right?

Tim Rayl:
That's [inaudible].

John Hutchings:
And these guys were really popular because they were one of two... What was called nano breweries in the United States, that they were legally set up to brew and sell beer out of their garages in their house. And I was like, "What if we did that? How cool would that be? We'll be one of these destination places where you're one of these select few people to get this handmade beer." And I was like, "It'll be a chance for us to try this out. And I think it's something we can fund on our own without betting the farm. What do you think?" And I shit you not, she's like, "Go for it." I'm like, "Holy crap. Awesome."

And I just read this book by Sam from Dogfish Head called Brewing Up a Business, and he talked about starting Dogfish Head on this thing called the Sabco BrewMagic. And I jumped online and they had them for sale. And Amanda and I had some savings just enough to be able to buy that Sabco BrewMagic and a little extra to get going. I ordered that thing the next week and started getting some help with some attorneys and Fall River Brewing Company was born.

Tim Rayl:
Holy smokes.

John Hutchings:
In a garage.

Tim Rayl:
In a garage from-

John Hutchings:
In Fall River.

Tim Rayl:
From a couple months of home brewing to BrewMagic in the garage brewing beer with a legally operating brewery.

John Hutchings:
It took some time to get all the legalities and stuff figured out. But yeah, we definitely were brewing like crazy and making the switch from brewing with extract kits to all grain brewing and watching YouTube videos and reading books. It was just like crazy uphill learning curve. It was so fun. Everything I've done in business, that was by far the most fun part. Just crazy fun times of brewing nonstop around the clock all the time.

Tim Rayl:
That's awesome. So then how did you go from brewing beer in the garage at two in the morning in your sweats and cowboy boots to having a craft brewery that produced roughly 250,000 cases this year?

John Hutchings:
Quite a jump. At the time, we're brewing beer out of the garage. We got everything permitted. I would recommend if you're going to start a brewery, for everybody that's listening to this that maybe is interested in that, don't start one on your garage. It's a bad idea. We were operating that way for about six months and I was loving every minute of it. We had two accounts in Fall River that we distributed our beer to, and it was like Fall River, town of 600. It's like you go into Crumbs restaurant, you're a rockstar because everybody's drinking your beer at the one location that has it on tap in a restaurant. And then it was served next door at the bar where we had two taps there at the Buckhorn Saloon.

It was fun, but the reality of it was is that it wasn't making money. It was losing money. We didn't have money to put into it, so it needed to make money. And while I was having a blast, it was a massive time parasite and it was actually starting to affect my ability to get my job done at work, which is not cool. You need to be giving people your all when you're at work, not working on things when you're at work for yourself. And it was just really starting to affect things there.

Tim Rayl:
Wait, so you were still working full-time?

John Hutchings:
Yeah.

Tim Rayl:
Okay.

John Hutchings:
Yep.

Tim Rayl:
And then brewing beer in your-

John Hutchings:
Yep. Nights and weekends. Yeah, we would usually try to get one to two brews done during the week, which would include staying up till two, three o'clock in the morning. And then weekends were double brew days, Saturday double brew days, Sunday, which were 12, 13-hour days both days. And that was every weekend with a couple during the week for six straight months. And I remember it, it was exactly... It was Super Bowl Sunday, Niners were in the Super Bowl. I was so excited. And I kept running from the brewery in the garage back into the house to check the score and running back. And my buddy Brent was over who's one of our taproom managers here at the brewery. And we were both brewing and running back in and checking the score. I just remember that day I was like, "This isn't going to last. We've got to figure out what the next step is. We can't keep doing this. What's the endgame?"

After the game was over and Brent left, I sat down with Amanda and I was like, "Hey, I think today I've realized I either need to get your blessing as my partner in this to say, 'Are we going to do the all in? Are we going to bet the farm?' Or do we need to say 'This was a fun hobby while it lasted and we pissed a bunch of money down the drain, but I had a good time.'" Not so much her. "And I need to get back into focusing on my work and being a good employee and moving forward with that." We slept on it for a couple nights and she's like, "I support you in doing it because I think if you don't, you're never going to forgive yourself."

And I kept telling myself that over and over again, that that was selfishly me wanting what I thought was best for me. And she agreed. She's like, "I think you'll never forgive yourself. And I'll always wonder what could have been." At that point in time we're like, "All right, let's write a business plan and let's try to start a legit business and let's go into this full force."

Tim Rayl:
So you wrote a business plan. How long did that take you?

John Hutchings:
I would say it was always a work in progress. I had the main business plan written in three or four months, but I kept adjusting it as time was going on. Business plans, I bought a book on writing business plans and I'd listened to all these YouTube videos and podcasts and stuff just trying to figure it out. I think it's important to write a business plan, but I will say this, one of my most favorite quotes from a guy I love is an author, Jocko Willink, who [inaudible] a Navy Seal writes these books, Extreme Ownership and Dichotomy of Leadership. He says "The best plan goes to shit after the first shot's fired." And I think the most important thing to take from that is you can plan all you want, but how you react to things when you're in the moment is probably more important. I agree, you need a plan.

But we planned like hell. We planned like hell, I stayed up till three, four o'clock in the morning all the time writing this business plan. And once we got into it, some of it was kind of accurate, like production costs, but for the most of it was like throw it out the window. Nothing was right.

Tim Rayl:
It's definitely hard. It's a crystal ball kind of business. Nobody's crystal ball is all that good.

John Hutchings:
Right.

Tim Rayl:
You wrote a plan for a reason though. What was that?

John Hutchings:
Yeah. I needed to be able to write a business plan so that I could figure out what size of business we needed to make in order to make it financially feasible. And that was the most important part, is I learned very quickly the margins and craft beer are not what people think they are. Compared to normal macro beer craft beer margins are large, but the thing with macro beer is macro beer sells a shit ton worldwide.

Tim Rayl:
And when you say macro beer, you're talking about?

John Hutchings:
Coors, Bud, Heineken, these massive producers. And so just looking at that, looking at the margins, I was like, "Okay, we're going to need to go bigger than some of the places where I visited these small breweries." I was like, "It's going to have to be bigger than that." And so we did a good job figuring out the initial what's it going to cost to buy that equipment? What do we think it's going to cost to install it? But there was a lot of other things above and beyond that when you just don't know what you don't know. And so the main thing with writing that business plan was to be able to get the funding so that we could get started. And that was the main reason behind that, which did a pretty good job getting at least the initial construction costs and the cost of the equipment, did pretty good at that.

Tim Rayl:
Right. And so it sounds like from our initial conversations, you were saying that you were able to partner and that gave you some initial startup working capital and it got you the co-signers you needed for getting the collateral on a loan.

John Hutchings:
Correct. A lot of folks, and we'll talk about this later on in the podcast, is really important to this, but a lot of folks ask about what's the most important part of starting a business, or what maybe is the hardest part of starting the business? And that was the thing I was struggling with the most. That was the thing that was holding me back was where does the funding come from? And so I made the choice of approaching my cousins, both of which owners of the construction company, one of which that I was working with in the construction company and said, "Hey, would you guys take a look at this business plan? Is this something you want to partner with us on?" Because knowing that we had no collateral, we had no ability to get funding, we needed startup capital as well as we were going to apply for an SBA 7(a) loan to be able to get the mass portion of the loan to be able to buy the equipment and stuff.

They joined forces with us. So basically we sold 50% of the equity of the company as offset for that in order to get the funding. And then from there, we were able to fast track and move forward.

Tim Rayl:
So you were able to get the startup capital, you got your loan, what did you do with it?

John Hutchings:
Craft brewing was just starting to catch a buzz at that time.

Tim Rayl:
Oh, no pun intended.

John Hutchings:
No pun intended.

Tim Rayl:
Come on now.

John Hutchings:
People were getting drunk on [inaudible]. We had heard some rumors that there were some other people that were looking at starting breweries in the area. That one of the things that I'd sold on this was like, "We don't have a brewery in this area." And a lot of economic development stuff that was saying "Breweries bring a lot of economic development to cities," at the time it was a big deal. And so we fast tracked. We just tore into it as fast as we could with getting the brewery built, getting our funding, or excuse me, getting all of our paperwork done.

Went out and actually hired help. So it wasn't just me going at this with putting out crappy beer and trying to get going and have people give me the grace that, oh, eventually we'll be drinking good product, but it's local. We went out and actually hired a professional brewer to help us get started as our one employee and we hit the ground running. And it was June... Or excuse me, 4th of July 2013 we brewed our first batch of beer at the airplane hangar that was next to the construction yard where we opened the brewery in, like I said, a construction yard by Burney Falls State Park. Shasta County required [inaudible] industrial property, and there's not a lot of that.

Tim Rayl:
Garage doesn't count anymore.

John Hutchings:
Garage doesn't count anymore. So we got her going, and that was the day that everything began, July 4th 2013.

Tim Rayl:
Okay. That's a monumental day. Not only for our country, but also for you.

John Hutchings:
That's right.

Tim Rayl:
The person and the business.

John Hutchings:
Freedom, baby.

Tim Rayl:
Then since that time, what has happened with Fall River Brewing Company along the way?

John Hutchings:
2013, we got going, we ended up signing a couple of distributors. We ended up building a taproom in Redding that was huge. Without that taproom, the business would've never survived. We needed that retail margin to keep the business alive. And 2014, we signed two more distributors, one in Susanville, one in Chico. 2015 economy was still just the shits. It was in the tank. At that point in time was when I ended up approaching our partners at that time about buying them out. And we'd had some discussions about just things were tough and we'd had some discussions about, "Hey, we need to figure out what we can do to try to get them their money back, get them off the co-signing for that big ass loan, and allow them to be in a position to be able to focus on their main mothership business."

That then embarked me on another mission of trying to figure out how to buy them out. Once we got past that, I was able to move from there. We got through that whole buyout process, and it was 2017. We're like "We've got to figure out what we've got to do to get this business moved." Things were starting to look up, and that was good, but we needed to position ourselves to be in a city at that point in time. And so that was when we ended up looking into moving the business to Redding.

Tim Rayl:
So you moved... Well, actually, excuse me, 2016 was a pretty good year?

John Hutchings:
Yeah, yeah.

Tim Rayl:
The airplane hanger running at max capacity. You guys were brewing beer left and right. It was selling, making money. Some money, right? But you were scaling beyond where you could go?

John Hutchings:
Absolutely. We'd hit a glass ceiling for sure.

Tim Rayl:
Take us through that decision point. What did that look like for you?

John Hutchings:
Yeah, so it was-

Tim Rayl:
Because you've got a crossroads. You're like, "Hey, can we sit here and make money and be happy with this?"

John Hutchings:
Yeah. When we initially set out to build this business, one thing that my wife and I had spoken about was like, "What's the endgame for it?" And for us, it was like, we need to be able to build a company that people can work at for a lifetime. They can create a career out of it and they can retire from it. 2013, 2014 and 2015 were some rough years. I'm appreciative that my cousins helped us get through those because it was tough. It was tough. Just like I alluded to before, as things can swing from good to bad really, really fast, buddy of mine was always telling me that when I was going through tough times, vice versa, things can also swing from bad to good just as fast.

2016, it was this transition. People knew who our brand was all of a sudden. Our taproom was packed on a regular basis. We were able to get our debt load to where the revenue and the profitability was way bigger than what our debt load was. We weren't bleeding to death under that anymore. And we were actually every month positively. The bank account was growing at a nice, good, steady rate. And it was fun. For two years, I would tell you, man, I feel like I'm king shit. Mark Cuban over here. For a small business. I was like... We just started running into things that we didn't plan for when businesses grow. I think the biggest thing we made a mistake was I planned for how do we hedge our bets if everything goes wrong, and what would be the best to make sure that we're not going to completely just get out over our skis. And I didn't plan for what happens if everything really goes right.

And so we hit a glass ceiling right off the bat. I'm like, "Okay, a bunch of things." We've got wastewater issues we've got to deal with now that we didn't plan for, that we were creating a huge problem with that. Things you don't think about. Need to be on a city wastewater treatment system, and we need a bigger facility. We need to be able to have offices. During that whole time, if I had to have a conference call, I used to go out and sit in my truck.

Tim Rayl:
Love that. That's awesome.

John Hutchings:
That was my office. So we ended up finding a property working with Haedrich & Company real estate. And through some friends, the Jensens that owned Reading Distributing Company, they showed us the current building we're operating in right now. They said, "Hey, what do you think about moving your headquarters here?" And I remember I went and walked to the building, it was 42,000 square feet. I'm like, "Holy shit, our current facility's 2,500 square feet."

Tim Rayl:
So just a small, small increase in square footage.

John Hutchings:
And I'm like, "I don't know how we can pull this off." I don't know, it's where there's a will, there's a way. I sat down and started writing another business plan again and spent a lot of time working with a community bank that we'd spent a lot of time, Cornerstone Community Bank developing a great relationship with. And one thing I can say about traditional financing, and if you can find a bank who's willing to believe in you, willing to listen to your story, willing to look past the numbers and look at the person, it's an amazing funding source. And we spent a year with my business plan going back and forth with them to go, "How can we pull this off?"

And through working with them, we were able to qualify it for and get an SBA 504 loan, which was huge because what that did is it allowed me to purchase the property, which I was like, "I don't know how we can purchase this property." And all of the upgrades and assets, which we bought some hot rod assets to go with, and it was super cool. And we were able to amortize that all over 25 years. So what that does is it makes the payments affordable. It's like buying a house instead of your typical SBA 7(a) that's over 10 years where payments are $80,000 a month. Well, now we can do this and we can have payments that are 15, $20,000 a month and we're making way more than that so we can actually pull that off. And so we did it and it was a two-year project from purchasing the property to build out an operation, but we were able to pull that off.

Tim Rayl:
And just so we have an idea, not just the square footage, but from a brewing capacity standpoint, I think you were telling me that the airplane hangar system was a 15 barrel system?

John Hutchings:
That's correct, yeah.

Tim Rayl:
And your facility here on Eastside Road in Redding is?

John Hutchings:
It's a 30 barrel system, but it's a fully automated system from Aegir Brewing Company, and it's our... Aegir Brewing Systems, excuse me. And it's equipped with a Meura mash filter. So they actually worked with Mira, who's a humongous brewery builder out of Belgium. They're the ones that build the mash filters for Heineken, Rodenbach. We're talking massive brewing facilities. And they were able to scale it down for craft brewers to offer these hot rod Ferrari systems for craft brewers to be able to brew a shit ton of beer in a very efficient way. And to give you an example, 12 hours of us brewing in Burney, we could yield 30 barrels of beer into a fermenter versus that same 12 hours in Redding, we yield 120. Roughly four times the output.

Tim Rayl:
It sounds like you really did take that lesson to heart of flipping the question on its head of how do we hedge our downside? To how do we plan for this going really, really well?

John Hutchings:
Exactly.

Tim Rayl:
So then when did you open the Eastside Road facility?

John Hutchings:
So we opened in June of 2018. It was one of the most exciting points of my life and one of the biggest beginnings of probably the lowest low point of my life. We opened in June of 2018, we brewed our first batch of beer. And I just remember thinking like "Wow, I've been looking... For two years. I've been staring at AutoCAD drawings and stuff that started as sketches to AutoCAD drawings to watching construction." And it was like we got it over the finish line. We watched the machine run. It was awesome. There was a little bit of hiccups here and there, but it was awesome. We brewed our first batch of beer. And for a second it was like, "All right, we made it. We've got this big badass facility. Watch out world. Here we come."

And within 30 days of us opening, it was like the reality set in. It was like, "Holy shit, I think we might've overdid it a little bit." And it was a struggle. We had the Carr Fire that hit during that year really devastated the local economy combined with project went massively over budget. Typical. But it went massively over budget. I had to come up with an extra million dollars to finish the project that we didn't have, which Cornerstone Community Bank, God bless them, jumped in to bail us out with that one.

So everything changes on your business plan, and now debt payments are 10,000 more a month than what you had planned on, and you're moving forward with that. I've been working for about that time, and we still had the Burney facility going. We were transitioning, shutting it down. Some employees in Burney, some employees down in Redding. Some employees were trying to move people from the East Coast. Our brewer at the time, Colton was moving his brother from the East Coast back to the West Coast for a week, week and a half. And I'd been working at that time for a... I remember exactly vividly, it was 31 days straight. I was exhausted. And I'm not trying to be a baby. I know a lot of people that have worked a hell of a lot harder than 31 days straight.

Tim Rayl:
And you're not talking about eight hour a day?

John Hutchings:
No, we're 31 days straight. 14, 15-hour days. There was at one point in time when we were getting the actual brewing started and I was by myself where I went about 31, 32 hours straight before I went home and slept for four or five hours and then got up and did it again just because we had to, we were in deep shit. I had a day I remember vividly, it was a Sunday and it was at the start of my... This was my low point and pushing forward low point where things just weren't going well. And it was like 120 degrees in the brewery. I was just beyond exhausted. And for the first time in all my time of doing this in brewing, I was like... I started feeling this feeling, "I don't know if I want to do this anymore." And I was like, "Holy shit, you can't say you don't want to do this anymore. We just invested $5 million into a facility we've been running for a little over a month."

I just could feel the desire to want to quit creeping in. And it was just overwhelming me. And I finally, for a split second, I was like, "Eff it. I'm going to go sit down on the brewer's lounge or brewer's office, try to get cooled off. I think I'm done." For a moment I quit and I sat down in the chair in there and was just feeling sorry for myself. Did the worst thing. I opened up my phone, started scrolling through Instagram. Big time waster.

Tim Rayl:
The death scroll.

John Hutchings:
The death scroll. Didn't really give a shit. I was like, "Yeah, I've already made up my mind. I'm done. Just whatever's going to happen is going to happen."

Tim Rayl:
I don't mean to interrupt your story, but just to make sure that we understand how low you were, you were preparing the business?

John Hutchings:
Yeah, yeah. Things were just not going well. We knew things were in bad shape. We were wondering at that point whether we should even start preparing the business to start filing for bankruptcy. I'd always had, up to this point, there had never... We'd gone through a lot of bad up to this point. We glossed over a lot of that because... But I've always had the it sucks and this is really bad, but it was always like, "I know we're going to figure this out" because I just wanted it so bad. So it was like... Sometimes you sell yourself a line of shit just because you want to hear it so you can keep going. And for the first time it was like I wasn't selling myself a line of shit anymore. Because I just knew. I was like, "This is overwhelming and I've worked so hard and I'm so tired and I just want an out.

Because I had a breaking point and I opened up my phone and I don't know, call it divine intervention, whatever. It's always been one of those things that's been very hard for me to talk about with people. But I made sure to rehearse this today so I wouldn't be a bawling, blubbering baby going through it. But I opened up my phone, I think it was like Alpha Motivation or something that I'd scrolled onto, and it was a motivational talk by Eric Thomas. And the topic was called How Bad Do You Want It? And I just locked into it, like "What's this?" And it starts going, it's like telling a story. I'll try to paraphrase as best I can, but it's like this kid talks to this business guru about wanting to be successful and he tells the kid to meet him out at the beach at 4:30 in the morning and makes him wait out in the ocean. I'm really paraphrasing, but I recommend people listen to it because it is pretty inspiring.

Tim Rayl:
We're going to put the link to the video in the show notes.

John Hutchings:
Awesome. Long story short, he just grabs this kid by the back of his head and he just rams his head under the water in the ocean and the kid's clawing and scratching and fighting. He holds him under until he thinks the kid's about to drown, lifts his head back up, crams his head back under. Then the kid's just about to drown and he lifts his head back up and he asks him, what did you want more than anything when your head was under the water? And the kid's like, "I just wanted to breathe." And he's like, "Exactly. So when you learn how to look at your business and your success as bad as you want to breathe, you'll be successful." [inaudible] it just hit me in that moment. I was like, "Oh my God." Just started bawling. I was like, "You effing baby. How dare you? We've come way too far."

I ended up just... Looking at that moment, it just turned everything around, as weird as that may sound. It was weird. I went from feeling sorry for myself to just feel the rage all in one moment. And I was like, "Dude, I'm not going to let this go. And I want to know what it feels like to see something through. Even if this isn't going to make it." Because at that time I was like, "I have no idea how we're going to pull this off. We are so effed." I was like, "I want to know what it feels like to ride this to the bitter end, and I'm going to do it. I'll go with the ship all the way down."

And so I ended up staying that day and finishing out that shift. And it was a long day, a 14, 15-hour day. But I came home and talked to my wife about it and shared that with her. And that stuck with me. And I think that in that moment I learned... You read books by David Goggins, it talks about when you think that you're hitting the breaking point, you're really only 40% there. I learned in that moment, I was like, "Yeah, we can go a lot further." And it's that... Probably one of the things that had taught me that I think that plays a really big role in success. And I know that played a huge role on why we were able to pull it off. That was a pretty pivotal moment for me.

But it was a rough rest of the year and a rough 2019 after that.

Tim Rayl:
What happened in 2019?

John Hutchings:
We made it through the rest of the year. We had meetings with our folks that are involved in this business, some of the greatest people ever that are involved in this business with us. And we told them, "It's probably looking likely we're going to have to get the... Prepare to file, get the company ready to file for bankruptcy." I was devastated. I just felt so beaten down. Right after we made that announcement to some of our shareholders, a week later I found out my wife was pregnant. I'm like, "Oh my God, here we go again. We're going to lose everything as we're bringing a child into this world." But we just kept fighting through it.

We got to it as our annual 12 Beers of Christmas celebration. And it's normally a time of year that we do a lot of retail really fast, and you get a lot of really good cash flow. I had an idea that maybe we should borrow a draft trailer from Redding Distributing Company. And I was like... The Eastside Road location wasn't really set up for having guests in it. I thought, "Maybe people would think it's cool to come in here and drink, an old cobweb infested warehouse and look at this shiny stainless shit." We threw it out and a bunch of us took turns bartending, and that little bit of extra cash flow got us over the hump. And I was like, "Holy crap. I think I know a way to save the company."

And my wife and I had a little bit of money left over from the sale of our house, and one of the wise decisions we made was when we moved down to Redding, we didn't take all that money and just parlay it to buying another house. At the time, we probably could have bought a pretty nice house, but we held onto it and we used all that to build a tasting room down here, and that single-handedly saved the company.

Tim Rayl:
So you have two retail outlets then?

John Hutchings:
We do now. Yeah.

Tim Rayl:
So that extra cash flow got you over the hump. What's happened since? We all know that there was a pandemic. I hear that was great for a lot of retail establishments.

John Hutchings:
Yeah, yeah.

Tim Rayl:
Wow.

John Hutchings:
Yeah, facetiously-

Tim Rayl:
[inaudible] noted, right?

John Hutchings:
Exactly. Yes. No, we got through 2019 and we survived. And in 2020 we thought, "I think we're poised now. We got the ship righted, I think we're going to be all right." And then March hit and it was pandemic and we're shutting all the retail down. Our retail was like, we're the big money, not necessarily big money, but the good margins to help make sure that we can pay our bills every month because wholesale ebbs and flows. And they're like, "We're shutting your retail down." And I'm like, "Oh my God, here we go again." Had to lay off a bunch of employees, which sucked. And lo and behold, it was just the same thing again. We're like, "We can piss down our leg and sit back and just allow what's going to happen happen, or we can try to figure out how to get around this."

And so at the time, we had just picked up a new distributor, had bought out a very large distributor here on the West Coast called Reyes Golden Brands, and they said, "Hey." They reached out to us, said, "Hey, all these breweries just shut down, just stopped working." We were cleared as a food facility to not have to shut down during this time. And they asked, "Did you guys shut down?" I'm like, "Hell no. We're not shutting down. We're going for it. I don't know what we're going to do, but we're not shutting down." And it actually turned a huge negative into a positive, that they're like, "How much beer can you give us?" "We'll give you as much as you want."

And we would maybe shipping... A pallet of beer's like 80 cases. We were shipping maybe 20 pallets a month at that time. And within a period of month or two we're shipping 80 pallets a month, and then a period of another month or two we're shipping over a hundred pallets a month. And it was just like, "Holy crap." Now, granted, the margins are different on that. So it wasn't like we were getting rich off of it, but it was enough that we could pay our bills and we were functioning okay.

Tim Rayl:
It sustained, yeah.

John Hutchings:
We could sustain. But the best thing that came out of that was that we had all these territories that had no idea that our beer existed. Nobody even looked at us. And all of a sudden it was like that little purple canned Numb Numb juice was everywhere. The distributor loved it, and we got a foothold in all these markets that we didn't have a foothold. And that really, really changed the course of our company from that point forward that we weren't just this little [inaudible] company that was up in Redding and Chico. Now we were down on the Bay Area and further south and the product was being sold and was doing well.

Tim Rayl:
That's outstanding. And so tell us about Numb Numb Juice.

John Hutchings:
Numb Numb Juice. Just to pivot. You look at our company, we have a trout and a fly on the can, and then you come into the company and we're brewing beer. And there's like nineties gangster rap playing followed by new age mumble rap that's then followed by Cody Johnson, red dirt country and Tyler Childers. Dude, we're a hodgepodge here. And it's just who we are. We started to pivot. We're like, "We are an outdoor brand, we're outdoor people, but we're also a broad spectrum of people." And people talk about our brand and it's like, what do you think your brand is? And I'm like, "Umami." If it was a flavor, it'd be umami, which is all the flavors. Art deco.

But that was our first pivot where we started a pivot toward something that was different than what we normally do. I think for more urban areas it appealed really well in that we can be these people from the mountains and whatnot and be these outdoor folks. But it's like, it's not about that, it's just about the overall Open To Adventure™, Mr. Tim Rayl. The creator of that. And it fits. So that that's who we are.

Tim Rayl:
So 2021 finished how?

John Hutchings:
We were still riding that high of all the wholesale movement, retail accounts opened back up, our retail places opened back up, and we finished out with the best year we've had in company history. It was amazing. We needed that win. And it felt good. It felt really good. And then of course, 2022, we [inaudible] now have entered the age of hyperinflation. But what's good about it though is while we've navigated these things is we fought through all those things and we built a strong enough company with a good enough foundation at this point in time that we know we're resilient, we can weather some storms. I'm feeling very bright about what's in our future. Very, very, very confident.

Tim Rayl:
That's fantastic. And just to circle back, what a great feeling too, to know that you have a foundation that can take some gale-force winds and sustain and survive. And to know that you've got that adaptability.

John Hutchings:
Yep. Yeah, we can all say that we've been battle tested, for sure.

Tim Rayl:
Just reflecting back on our conversation today, John, at virtually every step where there's been big growth or big challenge or whatever, it's been coupled with a substantial investment. How do you pull that off?

John Hutchings:
One of my exciting reasons of why I wanted to start this podcast. Being able to pull off funding, I think is one of the hardest parts about starting a business in my opinion. Now, people may vary on what they think is the hardest part about starting a business. They may say it's coming up with the people, it's developing the culture, et cetera. And I want to hear those stories and we're going to share those with you. But for me, what was always the holdback and what I've been asked by so many people is how do you get funded to do this? Where does the money come from?

There's a million ways to skin a cat. And what I mean by that is you can do it in a bunch of ways. For us, it was mostly done through traditional financing. To bridge the gap to get to where you could get traditional financing, we took the road to start with, in the beginning we started with partners. Banks don't loan to people who don't have collateral. We had none. And so we sold equity in the company in the beginning in order to be able to get not only the startup capital, but as well as the ability to have that collateral to become bankable.

And then from there for people that want to go down this road, because I'm going to speak from my experiences, and I think they're good experiences because when you learn how to become bankable and you learn how to work with your... Hopefully a community bank, maybe you can work with the large ones too. You have a pretty much unlimited supply of money at your fingertips. And depending upon what's going on with interest rates and whatnot, it's the cheapest way, in my opinion, to get money without having to give up the farm.

So you look at a lot of these folks that go through selling equity as their primary form of getting money into the company well. Every time there needs to be a cash infusion, you sell more equity. If you're not one of the ones that has the money to keep doing the cash infusion, every time a cash infusion comes, you as maybe the starter of the company now owns less of the company because you are not contributing to buy more equity. And you can have a lot of these situations where you start off as a 51% majority, and after three cash infusions, you're now 5% owner to people that are just money backers.

Tim Rayl:
And that dilution is brutal.

John Hutchings:
It is. And a lot of folks get really pissed off about that because they think they got sold a bad bag of goods and they don't understand, why don't I own the company anymore, why I'm not majority? And it's like, "You weren't the one putting all the money in. You're not the one taking the risk." So you have to understand those things. And so if you're banking with going through a bank, you can get that funding and not have to give up all of your equity. And that was why we chose mostly that route. And we were able to get the banknotes and stuff tied to my wife and I only so that we could say that nobody else is posting their assets as collateral. We went that route for that reason.

Tim Rayl:
That makes sense. And so you used an SBA 7(a) loan initially, right? And then you used an SBA 504.

John Hutchings:
Correct.

Tim Rayl:
Walk us through the differences on those two.

John Hutchings:
Absolutely. So SBA 7(a) is going to be your traditional small business loan through SBA. So how that works, the same thing with a 504, is that the government's going to assume a certain portion of the risk in that loan. And so they're going to assume the risk of maybe 40% of that loan. And so what it does is it incentivizes the bank to loan to small businesses because they're only taking on 50% of the risk of that loan. And then they typically require a certain percentage that has to be put down by the actual note holder, typically 10%. And so with a 7(a), those loans are typically amortized over 10 years. That's the amount of time you have the payback, the principle plus interest, whereas an SBA 504 is more done for economic development, larger projects. Typically involves a purchase of real estate with a development aspect.

And so we were able to utilize that to buy the property and then develop this property, since it had been sitting vacant for almost 20 years, we were able to develop this property and put it back into use, and they amortize those over 25 years. So a lot of folks that want to get into starting businesses and they're asking about funding, "I don't know how to do it. I don't want to put a bunch of money into a building I don't own. And then when I do that, I'm paying, actually paying rent on the increased value of the building that I put all the money into and it just doesn't make sense, but I don't have the money to buy the building, yada, yada." I'm like, "Wait a minute. There's a way."

First, you got to have a relationship with your banker to be able to do this, but you can go and look at an SBA 504 and you can actually get all the funding you need, acquire the real estate. So you own that asset and now you're owning all of the money you're putting into that asset is now going back to you instead of somebody else's portfolio. And then they can amortize that over 25 years, which hopefully... If you can't make it the payments stroke over a 25-year period, you're probably way over your skis, you need to back it off. That was huge for us, was learning that.

Tim Rayl:
A lot to dig into here. A lot of small businesses fail. If you look at the numbers, it depends on where you look at. One in three within the first year. What made you successful where many others don't succeed?

John Hutchings:
There's a lot of things. Obviously, proper prior planning. But honestly, I think it really comes down to, and what I see for a lot of it is just what are you willing to give up in order to be successful? How far are you willing to go? In my opinion, and I think a lot of people get into this not realizing the commitment that you're going to have to put in to make it work. And for everybody that's something you've got to figure out yourself. One thing I hate the most about talking to people who ask, and I don't get this a lot because it's not like I'm some big business mogul, but I've had a lot of people ask, "How the hell did you do it?" And it's like, "What's your priority level for being successful?" [inaudible] "Oh, if I was a one out of ten, I'd be a ten."I'm like "Really? More important than your wife? It's more important to your kids?" Oh, absolutely not. It's like, "Then it's not that important to you."

And I'm not saying that it needs to be more important than your wife and kids. I'm just saying that priority has to be there. So what are you willing to give up? And the statement, when I talk to people who I give advice to, if they're asking about trying to do something and I go, "What about this? What about that?" They go, "Oh yeah, I will, but." It's like right there, if that word, I will but, comes out of their mouth, I'm like, "More than likely you're going to fall into that statistic of being a failure because you're not committed to the end game."

Outside of that, I made mention before about mentors. I think that's another huge one. You need to find many mentors in your life. Mentors in business, mentors in your personal life. I remember from my Amway days and the MLM, the guy was telling me, a wise man has many counselors. You think, "Oh, that guy's got all the answers." And you figure out they have five people that counsel them. It's true. And I think having a lot of mentors in your life will help you navigate how hard this is because it's... I make no mistake to anybody. There might be the people that got in and got rich quick overnight and it was a walk in the park. It has been nothing short of an absolute dog fight for us, and it will probably remain that way. But I think that's what separates people that make it versus those that don't.

Tim Rayl:
Would you do it any other way?

John Hutchings:
No, I wouldn't.

Tim Rayl:
So you love the fight, you're scrappy.

John Hutchings:
It is what it is. Through all the things that I've talked about that were shitty, that when I went through them, I was like, "I'd do anything to make this go away." It's like when in doubt, zoom out, step back and look at it and give it some time. And I'm like, "Yeah, that shitty thing that happened to me is one of the greatest things that ever happened in my life." It shaped me for who I am. It taught me some of the best lessons you learn, and you learn from failure. And if I changed any part of it, I wouldn't be here. So you have to take the good with the bad.

Tim Rayl:
So what lies ahead for you?

John Hutchings:
We're going to keep rolling with this company and we're so excited to see where it's going to be in the next 3, 5, 10 years. But as far as entrepreneurship, I think we're just now getting into a position where we're starting to pivot and look at starting some other businesses and other ideas and throwing ourselves into the fray again. But I'm really excited for what the future holds. And I'm really, really excited to hear these other people come onto this podcast and share their stories and talk about the wisdom and the journey and the struggles. It's exciting.

Tim Rayl:
It's going to be so great. Well, John, thank you very much for being so open about your experiences and this incredible journey that you and Amanda and the Fall River Brewing team are on. And also thanks for the Hex, still one of my favorite beers. I look forward to enjoying many more of those. To everybody out there, thank you very much for listening and I'm going to turn it over to your regular official host to close this out.

John Hutchings:
Absolutely. I hope you enjoyed our first episode. More than anything, I hope you got a chance to get a glimpse of who I am. For those that don't know me, what we're doing, we have a social media site set up for this. Please go on if you enjoyed what you heard today, like and follow and subscribe to our podcast. Help us get this thing going. Our goal is to change lives. That's why we're doing this. If I can motivate and inspire one person, all of one. Hopefully we do that. Buckle in because we've got some more episodes coming up. We're excited for our next one that we'll be recording here very soon, and it's a great story that I can't wait to share with you. Until the next one, cheers.

Speaker 1:
Thanks for listening to the Forward Drinking Podcast, hosted by John Hutchings. Has this episode motivated you to create your own amazing story? Then please subscribe and leave a rating and review on your favorite podcast app. You can also follow the Forward Drinking Podcast on Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok @ForwardDrinkingPodcast. Thanks again for listening. Until next time.