Building the Brewery Ep. 1

Born Into Small Business

Every time I meet someone new and the inevitable “What do you do?” question comes up, I watch their face change the second “I say I own a brewery.”

“Man,” they say, usually with a wistful sigh. “You’re living the dream. I’ve always wanted to do something like that. That must be fun as hell.”

Nine times out of ten, this comment comes from the corporate types. Guys and girls who have spent their entire adult lives inside the warm, fluorescent embrace of a highly structured setting. They’ve got org charts, HR departments, quarterly reviews, and a defined lane. To them, owning a craft brewery looks like the ultimate escape hatch. It looks like freedom. They picture me standing over a kettle, smelling the hops, high-fiving regulars in a packed taproom, all while hammering IPA’s and counting cash.

And look, I get it. Having the autonomy to steer your own ship is incredible. I wouldn’t trade it… at least at the moment. There have been times I would trade it in a heartbeat, but I digress. In reality, there is a massive, gaping chasm between the idea of small business ownership and the cold, hard, unvarnished reality of it. There is an entire universe of friction, chaos, and psychological toll that the guy working a 9-to-5 never sees.

It’s probably for that exact reason that I never actually dreamed of owning a business. I understood at a young age that when you work in an office and the roof leaks you put in a ticket to building maintenance. When it’s your small business, you get your ass on the roof and figure out what is going on, and I hate heights.

Despite having done this for over a decade now—and by all measurable accounts, being pretty okay at it—this was never my childhood manifestation. If you would have pulled me aside as a kid and told me I’d grow up to run my own company, I would have told you that you were completely out of your mind. No chance. Not in a million years. Not interested. Despite getting my MBA later in life, as an undergrad, business would have ranked lowest on my interest scale.

Why? Because I didn’t grow up watching business ownership on television or reading about it in magazines. I grew up inside of it. I saw the gears grind, and I saw what it took out of the people who ran it. While it is an admirable and necessary profession, it takes a different breed.

Daycare at the Five and Dime

The story doesn’t start with beer. It starts with hardware and five-and-dime department stores in Northern Michigan.

The year before I was born, in 1978, my grandfather, started the family business in Charlevoix. JDE, Inc., which stood for Janette and Donald Enterprises, named after my grandparents. Grandpa was a company man through and through. From the time he was a teenager, he worked for the Schultz Brothers Department Store chain (Schultz Bros. Co.). He started at the absolute bottom—a stock boy throwing boxes—and methodically worked his way up the ranks as the company grew. He became a store manager, then moved into the corporate structure, which eventually required relocating the family to the Chicago area where Schultz Bros. headquartered as many as 51 stores across Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa, and Michigan from Lake Zurich, Illinois.

That move was the catalyst for everything. It was at Lake Zurich High School in the Northwest Suburbs of Chicago where my parents met. Around that same time, my grandfather and the family started taking vacations up north, falling hard for that distinct, crisp, Northern Michigan vibe.

When my dad got out of the Army, and eventually my uncle out of the Marines, they were recruited into the family business. They went to work for Grandpa. In 1978, they pulled the trigger and opened that first store in Charlevoix, Michigan.

Originally, the business stayed close to Grandpa’s corporate roots. They opened a Ben Franklin store, which was essentially an old-school, small-town five-and-dime. Later, they adapted, modifying the footprint by franchising with True Value Hardware. At its peak, the family operation grew to three stores in Northern Lower Michigan: Charlevoix, East Jordan, and Mancelona.

I was born shortly after that first Charlevoix store opened. And because it was a true, all-hands-on-deck family enterprise, that store became my daycare many days. Eventually my Uncle Dale would take over Charlevoix and my parents took the East Jordan location relocating us there in 1987.

Think about that dynamic for a second. My mom and dad were there. My aunt and uncle were there. My grandparents were there. If you needed a family member, you didn’t call the house; you walked down the aisle to the plumbing section or the checkout counter.

When you grow up in an ecosystem like that, you absorb lessons through your pores before you’re even old enough to understand what a profit margin is. The first and most brutal lesson you learn is a fundamental truth about small business economics:

When an entire extended family relies on a single retail business to put food on the table, the business doesn’t just come first—it consumes everything else out of absolute necessity.

The business is a living, breathing, hungry animal that demands to be fed 24/7/365. Long, lazy family vacations? Forget it. Regular, uninterrupted days off? A myth. The idea of sitting down for a family dinner without a business emergency cutting it short? Possible but often interrupted.

Then there are the interpersonal logistics. When you put that many family members under one roof, under that kind of intense financial pressure, friction isn’t a possibility; it’s a guarantee. Regular kerfuffles are just part of the ambient noise. When the stress and the pressure of the margins came to a head, people took it out on each other. Not because they didn’t love each other, but because frankly, within the walls of a small business, there nowhere else for that pressure to go. It’s a closed loop.

It was life. And it was exactly why none of us wanted anything to do with it long-term. Not me, not my sister, not a single one of my cousins. We looked at the sheer grind of it and unanimously opted out of becoming the third generation. We wanted clean, predictable, regular lives.

Or so we thought.

Jumping in Dumpsters

My introduction to the labor force started early. I worked here and there in the store from as far back as my memory stretches.

My after-school entertainment was often such fun tasks as being sent out back to jump up and down inside the cardboard dumpster so we could compress the empty boxes and fit more in. I did the mindless, dusty tasks in the back room that a child can do. Occasionally I would help a customer find something if Mom or Dad was busy. By the time I was 13 or 14 I was mixing paint and doing more meaningful tasks albeit, like the boss’s kid, pretty uninspired.

Looking back, that was an masterclass in human psychology. You learn very quickly how to deal with cranky people, demanding people, and downright rude people. Not lessons that are taught but absorbed through osmosis of watching and listening.

See, running a small-town hardware store is entirely different from running almost any other kind of retail. People don’t wander into a local hardware store on a Tuesday afternoon just to browse and see what looks interesting. This isn’t Lowe’s or Home Depot where you push a giant cart around looking at patio furniture.

When someone walks through the door of a small-town hardware store, they are almost always in the middle of a domestic crisis. They are frantic. It’s: “I need this exact compression fitting right now because there is currently water leaking into my basement and my wife is freaking out.”

They are stressed, their pocketbook is taking an unexpected hit, and you are the only thing standing between them and a ruined house or a delayed project. You learn to absorb their anxiety, de-escalate their panic, and find the part.

But the real fun of running a hardware store in a town of 2,000 people—like my hometown of East Jordan—is that anonymity does not exist. Every person you come in contact with knows your parents. A drive across town in Dad’s Suburban yielded waves from about 80% of the oncoming cars.

Everyone knew where we lived. We lived right in town on a prominent corner. Everyone knew it was Dan’s house. And because they knew it was Dan’s house, they knew exactly where the keys to the True Value were kept when an emergency popped up.

If a pipe burst at 9:30 PM on a Sunday, or a water heater blew up at 7:00 AM on a holiday, people didn’t wait for business hours. They walked right up to our front porch, knocked on the door, and said, “Hey man, I’m in a brutal bind. Is there, any way you can run down and let me in to get this part?”

My dad’s reaction to this was fairly predictable. Internally, he would stomp around the house. He would be visibly pissed off. He’d be deeply annoyed that his personal space, his family time, and his boundary lines were being invaded simply because someone else failed to plan ahead. He’d vent in the kitchen, grab his keys, and walk out the door.

But the moment he stepped onto that porch and faced the neighbor in need? The transformation happened. He would he would put on a genuine happy face, look the guy in the eye, and say, “Let’s go take care of it.” And he did. Every single time.

The Ultimate Boss

That right there is where I learned perhaps the most critical lesson of entrepreneurship. It’s a lesson that most corporate dropouts learn the hard way, usually about six months after quitting their jobs.

When you start a business, you think you’re doing it to “be your own boss.” You think you’re escaping accountability to another person.

The reality? You don’t have fewer bosses when you own a business. You have thousands of them. Your customer is the boss.

And when you live in a tight-knit community, and your name is on the sign, you take care of those people. Period. It doesn’t matter if it’s a massive inconvenience to your evening. It doesn’t matter if you’re barely making a nickel on the transaction. It doesn’t matter if you’re exhausted.

Small businesses aren’t just commercial entities; they are stewards of their communities. The owners who understand that—the ones who realize that service requires a level of self-sacrifice—are the ones who build deep, generational trust. They are the ones who build a brand that people will protect when the economy turns south. The ones who don’t have that attitude? They don’t make it. They flame out, blaming the market, when the reality is they just didn’t want to put on the happy face to hide the never ending grind. Not saying it’s healthy, it just is what it is.

But when you’re 12, 15, or 17 years old, you don’t possess that kind of high-level perspective. You don’t see “community stewardship.” You’re just as annoyed as your dad is that someone is knocking on the front door while you’re trying to watch TV.

To a teenager, it just felt like an endless gauntlet of stuff. If it wasn’t a customer at the door, it was some other out of the blue thing. And as for flexibility, forget it. Your freshman basketball game starts at 4:00pm? Hope you make it to varsity kid. That’s the only way you are going to see both parents in the stands.

You quickly realize that a small business owner wears a thousand different hats, and none of them can be hung up until tomorrow. Things never break when you’re standing there holding a wrench during business hours. They break when you’re finally sitting on the couch, or when you’re out of town, or when it’s 10°F outside. It is relentless, and it is inherently annoying.

I watched that play out many days of my youth. The lesson was crystal clear, and among many other reasons the reasoning was clear: I have no interest in doing this to myself.

Life’s Tough, Wear a Cup

Yet, for all the frustration and the lack of boundaries, there was a massive, undeniable positive to growing up in that environment.

You see firsthand that the people who work hard survive.

All those things you don’t want to do? All those annoying, inconvenient, exhausting tasks that pop up at the worst possible moments? That is literally the job. That is the differentiator.

The world will always, always have a place for people who are simply willing to get it done. No matter what time of day it is, no matter what plans they had before the phone rang, and no matter how tired they are. A relentless work ethic always has been, and always will be, the great equalizer for anyone who chooses to strike out on their own and survive in the free market.

It was completely subliminal to me at the time. I thought I was just surviving a “different” childhood in a family business. But that environment was quietly etching a blueprint into my brain. It was hardcoding a grit that would become the absolute bedrock of everything I did later in life in a number of different careers. It helped me navigate varied workplaces, it helped me navigate the curveballs life throws at you, and ultimately, it became the exact trait I had to call upon when we decided to risk everything and brew the first batch at Brewery 4 Two 4.

Life is tough. Wear a cup.

I think I headed south to college with the cup in my bag. I just didn’t have a clue where to put it yet.

We’ll pick up right there in Episode 2.