BrewDog CEO James Watt On Ways To Turbocharge Your Startup

BrewDog’s James Watt, who founded the now global craft brewery along with Martin Dickie, is a born entrepreneur, who is as serious about the business of brewing as he is about beer.

And he recently took to LinkedIn with some motivating takes on starting a business.

Although BrewDog began as a Scottish garage brewery in 2007, it has grown into an international drinks maker that employs over 2,000 team members and has over 100 bars all over the planet.

Because we like him (many don’t), and are always impressed by his unflinching self-appraisal, his sturdy writing and encouraging vision, we have reposted his article in full…

5 Rules To Turbocharge Your Start Up

1) It Is Supposed To Be Difficult.

Changing the world is not supposed to be easy. This is always going to be incredibly difficult. Any start up always faces are facing numerous obstacles.

Any ambitious start up always looks to challenge the status quo, and shift power dynamics – what logically follows is that ambitious start-ups face tremendous resistance from those who already hold that power.

Being a pioneer, a disruptor, and a game-changer was never meant to be easy. If it were, then everyone would do it, rendering success worthless.

2) The Hard Things Create The Value.

It is always your biggest challenges that hold the biggest potential. It is always the hard thing (and start-ups face a lot of hard things) that create the value, that build the magic and ultimately will make your venture successful.

You simply have to lean into our biggest challenges, and our hardest problems as solving those problems together is what is going to help make your fledging business that you and your team want it to be.

3) Risk Matches Opportunity.

What any ambitious start up is trying to do is inherently risky. There is risk at every corner. Some of it you can control, but some of the risk factors will be out with our hands. This is all ok though – as risk is always directly proportional to ambition (and thus opportunity).

Any audacious ambition always comes with a healthy dose of risk. You need to embrace that risk whilst knowing that if we get it right, you can build one of the best companies of this generation.

 4) Be Flexible Or Be Dead.

You and your team have to be able to pivot on a six pence, flexibility and adaptability needs to be your modus operandi.

I love this quote from Darwin: ‘It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.’

By being highly adaptable to change you can steal a march on the giants in your industry.

5) Love Constraints.

Any start up, by its very nature faces a non-stop conveyer belt on constraints. Most start-ups fail, the ones that stick around long enough to have a shot at changing the world are the ones who can reframe the constraints they face as beautiful catalytic forces that, with the right attitude, are the keys to unlock a higher level of thinking.

The more you can embrace and love constraints, the more successful your start-up will be.

Good luck to all the start-ups of 2024 (the year of our dog).

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(All image credits BrewDog / James Watt)