The founder of Dogfish Head Craft Brewery shares a typical work day -- answering e-mails, having laid-back meetings, and of course, sharing a few beers
In 1995, Sam Calagione founded a small brewpub, with the modest goal of exposing his customers' palates to something other than the pale lagers churned out by big, industrial breweries. Last year, his company, Dogfish Head Craft Brewery, brought in $28 million in revenue, producing 74,600 barrels' worth of eccentric beers -- including Aprihop, brewed with apricots and whole-leaf hops, and Raison D'Etre, a mahogany ale made with raisins and Belgian yeast. Calagione, 40, manages 106 employees in his 103,000-square-foot brewery in Milton, Delaware. He is an engaged entrepreneur with a rebellious streak and an aversion to top-down management. On a typical day, you might find him answering customer service e-mails, proselytizing about the virtues of craft beer, buying pints for strangers, and brainstorming ideas for Dogfish Head's next brew.
About half of the time, I work in the office. On those days, I get up at dawn and work out until 7:30. I'll go for a bike ride or, since I live near the beach, go rowing or surfing. I do a lot of my best abstract thinking in that hour. Then I come home, shower, take the kids to school, pick up coffee, get to the brewery around 8:30, and start checking my e-mail.
I get an average of 100 e-mails a day that need answering. I've given out my personal e-mail address a lot, and we also put the company e-mail address on all our packaging. If something comes into the general inbox addressed to me, I try to answer it. Replying to so many e-mails can be soul killing, but it's also an amazing barometer of the health and position of your company. When customers contact you of their own volition, that means you get brutal honesty, good or bad. One of the worst things is knowing that I can't answer all of those e-mails to the extent that people wish I could. If someone e-mails me and says, "Hey, I read your book, Brewing Up a Business. I really want to start my own business, and I'd love to talk with you," it's gotten to the point where I have to say, "Hey, sorry, I'm overwhelmed, but if you can give me two specific questions, I'll do my best to get you a few sentences back." There's also this looming knowledge that three or four e-mails will just slip through the cracks every day. That really gets to me. It might have been some guy with an awesome idea that I didn't get back to or some person who said, "I had the first beer from you that I didn't like, and it really bummed me out." I didn't answer that e-mail, and as far as that guy knows, it's because I'm an asshole.
Usually, I don't stop for lunch. I'll just run out to Subway and get a small meatball sub and a lemonade. Or I'll grab an everything bagel with butter or cream cheese and tomato and an Orangina with my morning coffee. I eat pretty much the same thing every day.
At the office, I spend a lot of my time in meetings. To keep that from being oppressive, we all swear like truck drivers. The F-bomb is probably the most used adjective in meetings. We're completely politically incorrect. Some of the women are the worst offenders. We have only one conference room, so often we'll just pull up chairs to one another's desks to have a meeting. Or we go out to the production floor and make a desk out of a pallet of beer.
We have our production and marketing meetings early in the week, when my wife, Mariah, who's also Dogfish Head's vice president and director of marketing, is in the office. Our management meeting is the longest, from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. every Monday. The managers update one another on what each department has coming down the pipeline so we don't get blind-sided. It was a big step for us to move to thinking more strategically. The first half of our 14-year history was management by crisis, and I'm totally to blame for that as the leader.
In meetings, I try consciously to never sit at the head of the table, in recognition of the fact that on an operational level, other people are doing a lot of the heavy lifting. Likewise, my cubicle is no bigger than anyone else's in the company. I don't shut my computer off at night. There have been a few times when I've called from the road to ask whoever picked up the phone at the brewery to pull up some info from my computer, but leaving my inbox open is more of a symbolic gesture. You've got to practice what you preach when it comes to openness and accessibility. If people want to check my e-mails, I don't care. I'm not trying to run the CIA here; I'm trying to run a fun company where people aren't working for me. The people who do the best at our company are working for themselves.
Nick Benz, our chief operating officer, has done a great job of helping me take that philosophy of openness that we've always had and put our money where our mouth is. Everybody at Dogfish gets bonuses based on the financial health of the company. The biggest factor is EBITDA, but each department has its own goals. It's amazing how a bonus will motivate someone to say, "The glue machine on the labeler is pumping out more than we need. Let's tweak that."
About every other week in the fall and spring, I'm on the road from Tuesday to Friday doing beer evangelism. Dogfish Head is sold in 27 states, but I'm in the big East Coast cities such as New York, Boston, Philly, and D.C. more frequently. I'll set up a bunch of events. I'll meet with the distributors. I'll talk with the sales force. In the evenings, I'll do either a promotional event at a bar or a beer dinner at a fancy restaurant. It's usually five courses, and we're pairing a beer with the food, showing that beer is every bit as compatible as wine. My wife is awesome at getting the beer geeks to come out. She'll put up the information on Dogfish.com, Twitter, Facebook -- all that stuff. When I bring one of our experimental beers, the hard-core beer geeks at the event post comments about it on sites like RateBeer.com or BeerAdvocate.com. Nowadays, they're typing while they have dinner; it's online by the time dessert comes around.
