We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Bailey Spaulding. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Bailey below.

Alright, Bailey thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Let’s start with the decision of whether to donate a percentage of sales to an organization or cause – we’d love to hear the backstory of how you thought through this.

We’ve donated a percentage of our taproom sales to a different local nonprofit every month since Jackalope opened, over twelve years ago. We structure it by pairing one of our beers with the nonprofit and donating 20% of our taproom proceeds of that beer for the month to the organization. It’s been a great way for us to not only contribute financially, but also to learn about some amazing things that people are doing in our community, and hopefully bring some awareness to them via our taproom customers.. We’ve donated over $100,000 to nonprofits from this program alone, and have partnered with a wide range of groups.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I’m the Co-Founder and CEO of Jackalope Brewing Company, in Nashville, Tennessee. I first moved to Nashville to attend Vanderbilt Law School, where I was most interested in environmental law. It was then that I started homebrewing and quickly fell in love with brewing beer. I love how it’s a mixture of art and science with thousands of years of history behind it. I spent most of law school thinking about what kind of brewery I wanted to open, so when I graduated I decided to take the leap! Jackalope opened in 2011 and has been a delightful puzzle ever since. I’m most proud of how the team at Jackalope uses our passion for brewing beer to be a larger part of our community. Over the years we’ve brewed hundreds of different beers, have cleaned up tons (literally) of litter through our monthly neighborhood cleaning program, and became one of the first small brewers in the country to engage in CO2 recapture, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Have you ever had to pivot?

When we were first opening in 2011, we learned that our brewing equipment was going to be 6 months late in arriving. At that point we had all of our permitting and were about to start paying rent, so we really needed to generate some income at Jackalope. Our solution was to purchase a glorified homebrew system that brewed one keg at a time, just so that we could get something going! We brewed every day and made enough beer for our taproom to be open on Fridays from 4-8pm. That was it! Sometimes we’d run out of beer early. At that time I was brewing all the beer with Steve, my friend who was interested in helping us get started, and who quickly became my business partner. We brewed 160 times on that system over the course of six months. It was definitely not what we had planned on, but allowed us to really hone our brews and learn more about running a brewery before we were fully up and running. And was a really powerful lesson in the importance of adapting, which I think is one of the key skills for any small business owner.

How did you put together the initial capital you needed to start your business?

Craft breweries are capital intensive businesses (there’s a lot of stainless steel to buy!) so we knew we’d need to raise money to get it off the ground. The first step to raising money is writing a thought-out business plan that tells the story of your vision and why people should want to invest in it. Rather than taking on a singular angel investor, we had a relatively low minimum investment, and started by approaching friends and family, which is of course a little intimidating. Putting so much passion into a plan and then showing it to someone with the hopes that they’ll fund it is a strange feeling but got easier over time! We raised about 75% of our initial capital through those equity investments, and then about 25% through a business loan.

In retrospect, we probably should have raised twice as much money as we did, which I think is how most start-ups feel. But again, it made us become more comfortable being a lean and creative business.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.jackalopebrew.com
• Instagram: @jackalopebrew
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/JackalopeBrewingCo
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/jackalope-brewing-company
• Twitter: @jackalopebrew
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIz5HRQl6AFs4SPpbvy0CbA
• Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/jackalope-brewing-company-the-ranch-nashville