Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Todd Space. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Hi Todd, thanks for joining us today. Alright, let’s jump into one of the most exciting parts of starting a new firm – how did you get your first client who was not a friend or family?
When you’re creating an educational program from scratch when there are few models of what they should look like is a super interesting, exciting and daunting task. In the US there were basically 3 ways to get educated to be a professional brewer (when I developed MBA back in 2014) – go to a UC Davis and major in “fermentation science”, go to Siebel, or work in a brewery and get OJT from (hopefully) an amazing head brewer. Since I wasn’t designing curriculum for a University, I had an open canvas with which to design the scope and sequence for MBA’s “brewing program”. I decided on a 3 month full-time brewer training program and run 3 of them a year with about 8 students per term. My reasoning was that if you are serious about becoming a professional brewer, you would drop everything and jump into the program and leave after 3 months of training with a position in a brewery anywhere in the US. Spoiler – whew, was I wrong!
I had quit my day job and was “all-in” to get the program running by September of 2016. The curriculum was tight, the logistics were solid and the professors were trained – I just needed students. Marketing dollars were out in the social media avenues spreading the word, all breweries and craft beer bars were flyer’d, and every craft beer server was incentivized to send people my way. Then I got my first bite! Dominick Peri, one of the owners of Prosperity Brewing, called me wanting to send his head brewer, Cameron, through the program. Cameron was an amazing homebrewer and Dom wanted him to get next level training before they opened. One down, seven to go! I was hosting open house events at different breweries around Miami to get those seven spots filled when I learned something super important – South Floridians with the desire to receive brewer training at this level wanted to keep their day jobs and couldn’t commit to the three months! As September neared, I realized I had to get busy to redesign MBA’s program to accommodate more people!
It was tough to tell Dom and Cameron they needed to hold off until January, but that I needed to redesign the calendar and rewrite the curriculum to fit a “night’s and weekends” model. While restructuring the content, I also threw more marketing dollars at this new format – lo and behold, I got fourteen sign ups for the inaugural “Full Program” – MBA’s first venture into training brewers in South Florida. Sadly, Cameron could not join that program as he figured Prosperity would be open by November and he would be too busy to make the classes work in his schedule – but I still call him my first ever MBA student!
One truly humbling side note – many of the students from that first year are thriving in the craft beer industry and some are now professors for MBA!
Todd, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
In 2014 I had that moment in life where I asked myself (for the third time) – what do I want to be when I grow up? The answer was to brew in the craft beer industry. While looking for an education program to get training to meet this goal, I realized how few training programs there were for brewers. That’s when I hunkered down and used my skills as a Science teacher to design a brewer training program – Master Brewer Academy (MBA) – for South Florida.
MBA offers professional brewer training in person and online, and we also offer consultation services for people interested in opening their own breweries. We are fortunate in that we work closely with each and every brewery and brewer in South Florida, and many in the Tampa area and Orlando, so although we don’t claim to have all the answers, we definitely know who does!
We are so proud of our graduates who go on to work in the industry or start their own breweries. It turns out we’ve had a ton of interest in our training from South and Central America as well as South Florida! It’s an honor to know we can travel to the DR, Peru, Honduras, Guatemala, Colombia…among others, and visit our alumni, share a pint and learn about all they are doing to share their love of craft beer in their countries!
Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?
When MBA started, as is true for most start-ups, all of the social media work was done by me! Every class was documented and immediately shared through facebook, tagging all the local breweries and brewers; we were slowly building our audience post by post. Once we had a solid following, I then began to put money into getting more posts to more people – in the beginning this was rather easy to do. As the platforms added more functionality to their ads and boosts, I realized I needed to reach out for support in doing this – it started to get overwhelming! That’s when I hired MBA’s first employee – CJ! CJ has been the behind-the-scenes force in getting MBA out there to the masses. My advice to anyone starting out today is to allot money to a talented social media manager who understands your brand and vision.
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
One of the features of MBA that I am most proud of is the many new types of training we have been able to offer through the years. After two years of offering the nights and weekends full program, we started developing new ways to diversify our content delivery so we could be resilient in the event something like a pandemic knocking our full program into a pit (which it totally did). Luckily, one of the new ideas was a 2-week online class, which kept us above water from 2020 until this year. And now that travel options are returning, this year we’ll be back to offering our 2-week intensive – this runs full-time – and the income should buffer the losses we’ve seen from having fewer full program participants.
Contact Info:
- Website: masterbreweracademy.com
- Instagram: @masterbreweracademy
- Facebook: @masterbreweracademy