We were lucky to catch up with Bill Eddins recently and have shared our conversation below.
Bill, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Let’s kick things off with your mission – what is it and what’s the story behind why it’s your mission?
I’m a professional musician. My job is to fly around the world and wave my arms in front of orchestras, and weirdly enough people pay me to do that. Then COVID hit and I found myself without work for the first time, so I ended up Doordashing. Smack dab in the middle of that I found myself in my third set of riots. I had done Miami, ’89, L.A., ’92, and suddenly the George Floyd riots in Minneapolis.
About a month later I was taking a shower on a beautiful June day, and I was getting madder than hell. On a beautiful day like that I wanted to be out on my patio brewing beer, so half my brain was annoyed that I wasn’t. The other half – dwelling on living through that 3rd set of riots and wondering why we don’t do things to improve our society more often in this country? Being a musician, my biggest pet peeve is when there’s a 3 cent deficit the first thing on the chopping block is music education, despite the well-documented positive impact this has on kids. But no, we simply can’t support something like music education, can we?
By this time I was madder than hell, and suddenly the idea of beer & music melded in my brain. I got out of the shower and wrote an email to my brew buddy that said – “let’s form a for-profit brewery dedicated to music, and use our profits to fund music education for underprivileged kids in the Twin Cities Metro area?”
Fast forward to today, we’ve been open for almost 3 years, it’s been a struggle, but we’re still open and planning on growing. It’s been a ride.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
I was a homebrewer for years before thinking about opening MetroNOME. But for some 35 years I’ve been a professional conductor/pianist working in the classical music industry.
The whole idea behind MetroNOME is that we’re creating a community of people who believe in our mission, and that mission and community powers our image and growth. MetroNOME features live music all the time, either professionals or students. We foster an open environment with great beer, and we host classical, jazz, rock, punk, funk, world, rockabilly, and any other music we can think of. It’s all for the best of causes – making sure that any child who wants to study music has that opportunity regardless of their socio-economic background.
How did you put together the initial capital you needed to start your business?
Our mission is the best thing we have. The idea of melding beer and music to provide funding for music education has had an immediate impact. When we were first starting out my partner and I were homebrewers. When the MetroNOME idea came into being our initial business plan was to create and hone a few good recipes, find someone to brew them, and go into distribution immediately. There’s more to it but that’s the gist of it.
In order to hone those recipes, tho’, we needed to upgrade our homebrew equipment. In early November, 2020, we decided to host a small fundraising ask on Facebook, hoping to raise $2K. We thought if we were lucky it would take a week. So, one Saturday afternoon I just threw an ask up on Facebook, then went out to do my DoorDash shift. About 2 hours later my partner texted me: “Are you watching this?” I wasn’t, I was delivering food, but I hopped on Facebook and, wow, we had blown through our $2K ask. People were throwing money at us to try this idea, not even expecting a return on investment. We decided to raise the ask to $7K. We blew through that by Monday noon. We shut the damn thing down when we hit $10K because we honestly didn’t know what to do with all the extra money!
The rest, as they say, is history. The Moral – if you have a compelling story, people will help you.
Has your business ever had a near-death moment? Would you mind sharing the story?
BEWARE OF BANKS. They are NOT in it for you, they are in it for shareholders. And, if you don’t have the Most Conventional Business Model Known to Humankind the bank will not understand it. Our bank essentially reneged on future funding (even though that had been the plan all along) and tried to force us onto a business model that we were not built for. Being idiots, we didn’t fire the bank immediately. We should have.
The bank is supposed to work for you, not the other way around.
Contact Info:
- Website: http://www.metronomebrewery.com
- Instagram: @metronomebrewery
- Facebook: MetronomeBrewery
Image Credits
Bill Eddins