A.B.S. #2 - Monday Motivation #1 - How I Found My Investors
Today I recorded myself on my phone for 15 minutes talking about the process I went through to obtaining and maintaining my now Investors. Here I will write the backstory of how I was able to be able to obtain and develop good routines and maintain investors.
As I have always done, I start from the bottom, learn my job, work my way up. Marine Corps was the best one for that ;].
After graduating college and finishing my 6 year commitment with the Marine Corps Reserves, I obtained a "good" job making $30/hr doing construction management. My whole family is in the construction industry so it made the most sense for me to get in to that industry after college too. I quit that job after 3.5 months, was completely miserable and said fuck this, happiness is worth more to me than the money.
After like 5 days of just drinking and video games I said fuck this. I've already done so much in my young life but now real life starts, now the real competition starts. What did I tell myself I loved?? BEER! That's right, and ask any of my friends growing up, they'd agree.
I started homebrewing a week later, something I was always curious about as I couldn't even tell you the ingredients in beer...
I liked homebrewing so much, after 3 batches of extract kits, I jumped in to the harder version of brewing, all-grain brewing. I enrolled myself in Siebel Institute of Technology.
Working full time at a winery, part time at a brewery as an assistant brewer, raising a puppy wolfdog, doing my brewing course, and learning how to operate my first little business... Needless to say I didn't get great sleep for a long time haha
It taught me so much about life waking up at 4:30am to take care of my puppy, walk her, and then stay up and start working on my business and brewing course before driving 45 minutes to go to work.
I quit that job and started as a taproom manager of a small brewery in a town 25 minutes north of where I used to live in Sonoma County, CA. After 2 months of working as taproom manager I inherited the job of Head Brewer and thus started brewing AND selling all the beer. I opened and closed the doors of that brewery every day for a year and took a lot out of me, BUT I also became extremely sociable through the job so I'm thankful for that at least.
I then went to go to Europe, first time out of the US. I started this traveling beer blog for that beerscapade of ~4 months. I was featured in Brew Your Own magazine, Sept. 2018 edition
After coming back from my adventures, I decided I wanted to start a brewery and taproom in Spain. I wrote a 36 page business plan and started posting ALL over Facebook brewing groups after developing good relationships within the group posting on and off throughout the last 2 years homebrewing, going live, Probrewer.com , and any other entrepreneur or investor websites that I could find through Google.
I made a friend while running that brewery who just so happend to be the first employee at the new Stone Brewing facility in Napa, CA. I went to work with them there for 6 months as a bartender.
For the first 3 months after all the postings, I had "bites" from potential investors in One Life Brewing but nothing more after a few emails back and forth until finally. I get an email and we continue talking, phone calls back and forth many times, developing relationships between these two guy's I've never met.
They end up actually being the first guys to invest in me and payed for me to go out to Andorra for 1 week, I said I'll go for three weeks. I flew back in to Barcelona, went to my first MASH Beerfest hosted by the brewery I helped brew beer at my first few days outside of the US, Edge Brewing. Made great friends and connections there. I took a bus up 4 hours to the Pyrenees Mountains to Andorra. I spent 5 days there and decided it wasn't a good place to start a brewery. Next step then was Spain.
I go back to Napa and am somehow allowed to go back to work with Stone a little less time then originally.
Things were going well with my investors to send me out to the Philippines and so I told my friend and manager, and whole team, I'm leaving to move to the Philippines...
I stayed with my unhealthy and negative family back home in Tracy, Lathrop, and Pleasanton California for a month and a half. I had to leave so I booked a one way ticket to Delhi, India....
2 weeks earlier I made the last minute decision to take another leap of faith. Go start a brewery in Spain, but first, get another thing checked off my bucket list. To go to the birthplace of Yoga, in India, and receive my 200hr yoga teacher certification.
So that's exactly what I did. I met a cute girl there, we dated. Then I moved to Barcelona after the yoga course, then a week in Ibiza with my Spanish chick I was kinda dating. This whole time I was working on another little business named Keglet, a pressurized growler with tap system, and was in connection with my investors the whole time about the plans.
I make my way to Barcelona for 2 months in an 8 bedroom flat, I had my own small room. Now my investors see that I'm not playing around, I moved there to start a brewing business.
We decided that it was the easiest way for me to receive my visa to live and work in visa on minimal investment was through the DAFT program through The Netherlands. I then moved there and one of my investors basically held my hand through the 3-4 month long visa process but it really wasn't toooo bad.
They invested a decent amount of money to help me start One Life Brewing based out of the Netherlands and am now pursuing to start a brewery and taproom in The Netherlands and am continuing to work with them until hopefully forever, as I think of them more as friends almost now.
I continue to document my life via my Instagram (@Abrewersstory) Stories as I develop my own brewery and taproom to show others whats possible and try to help others do whatever it is they want to do along the journey of life
STEP'S TO OBTAINING INVESTORS:
#1 - Prove yourself:
- Start a podcast/blog/vlog/instagram/ whatever documenting your capabilities in character and skilled trade.
- Have so much experience in skilled trade
- Have an already existing business that's going well financially with financials to back it up
#2 - Build a Relationship:
- Execute on task's. You may be asked to take the first step in getting it is what you're asking for which may be moving to a new city to start a business
- Make an effort to physically meet each other
- Get Money Involved. This is the only way to really know if people are real or not
#3 - Maintain Communication:
- You should be talking roughly at least once a week. Constant communication is what makes things run more efficient.
- Communication is the lifeblood of the potential business. Doing business is basically just good mutual communication between people.
- Document you getting shit done via social media. It proves to the investors your serious and here's the proof by you documenting it somehow.
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Thank You so much for the support! If you found some value out of this blog post please like, comment, share, all the above
Cheers,
Ty Stevenson
@abrewersstory
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