Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Dana Pellerin. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Alright, Dana thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Coming up with the idea is so exciting, but then comes the hard part – executing. Too often the media ignores the execution part and goes from idea to success, skipping over the nitty, gritty details of executing in the early days. We think that’s a disservice both to the entrepreneurs who built something amazing as well as the public who isn’t getting a realistic picture of what it takes to succeed. So, we’d really appreciate if you could open up about your execution story – how did you go from idea to execution?

After visiting England for work, and falling in love with their pub culture and beer, I returned to the US and realized nobody made beer like the English. So I decided to start making beer at home as a hobby. I did this for about 10 years, learning the craft and perfecting recipes. On the weekends, I would gather friends to share what I’d made and the question eventually came up; why aren’t you selling this? So at the end of 2018, myself and two partners decided to form a business and open a brewery.

The first challenge was that none of us had any experience whatsoever in hospitality. My partners and I are motorcyclists and travelers, and so we’d been to literally hundreds of breweries and bars across the world, so we knew what we liked, but we didn’t know what the business looked like on the back end. There was a gentleman named Tom Hennesey, based in Colorado, who I was familiar with. He owned several breweries and was a popular speaker and author. I found out that he also did consulting so I called him up and we set a date for us to come to Colorado and look at his operations. My partners and I hopped on our motorcycles and made the trek. We spent a week immersed in Tom’s business, learning everything about running a brew pub.

This was the best choice we made for our business. Not only did it give us insight into all the back end systems and processes, but it also realigned our vision. We were not going to just opening a brewery, we were going to open a brewery/restaurant. That was a big turning point for us, not only because it’s a lot more work, but we would eventually learn that it would mean the difference between success and failure as the beer industry would shift.

We spent the next year nailing down our menu and scouting locations. It was very important for us to find the right space. We knew that the feel of our space was going to be its selling point. We wanted a place where the community would come to gather and celebrate their lives. We wanted to be the center of the neighborhood, like the pubs I had seen in England. We eventually found a 95 year old agricultural pump factory building that had been converted into business spaces. It was located in a newer part of our downtown and surrounded by newer apartment buildings. The old office space for the factory sat right on the corner of the building, It had a ton of character, and huge windows to let in lots of light. And because the neighborhood was still being revitalized, the rent was right and we had plenty of free street parking. We signed a lease at the end of 2019 and got to work.

We funded the business with a combination of our own money, and money borrowed from friends and family. We started a website and social media channels and started selling shirts and advance memberships. We sourced our brewing equipment from overseas and started construction… and then Covid hit. City services were thrown into turmoil which slowed the permitting processes to a halt as the city and county pivoted to online permitting. Trade workers were very suddenly very hard to find. Our architect suffered a personal loss and couldn’t work, which meant we had nobody to make the changes to the plans the city would ask for. Our project had ground to a halt, and for the next year we paid rent on a building that was pretty much sitting empty.

Despite these setbacks, we did what we could to move the project forward and we would find that relationships are key in any endeavor. Through some contacts we had made, we were referred to an architect who agreed to meet with us to revise our plans, and he actually did the changes for free! Another friend of ours had recently taken a position in the city government and was able to help guide us through the chaos of the permitting processes. Lastly, we reached out to skilled friends who we knew through our day jobs and charity work we had done, and ended up doing all the carpentry work ourselves in sort of a community barn raising fashion. The process was agonizingly slow, and expensive, but we got our space built out.

In January of 2022, we got our final inspection. We called friends and family over that night to celebrate in the space, and the very next day we opened the doors for business.

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.

South of Shaw Beer Company is owned by three friends who met through their jobs and through charity work. We’ve been riding motorcycles together for years before we opened the business together. Two of us have spend our lives working in IT for large corporations, and our third partner has worked in construction and real estate.

Our vision for South of Shaw Beer Company has always been to focus on bringing people together. Sure, beer and pizza are awesome, but great pubs are about bringing people together in a safe, inviting environment, where they can share their lives together. We take this extremely seriously and we’ve been meticulous about what our environment feels and looks like when you walk in. What do you see, how do the surfaces feel, what does it sound like? This is why are no screens anywhere in the space and no miscellaneous signage. Instead we’ve installed interesting kinetic art pieces and bring in new art from local artists every month to give people something pleasant to see and talk about.

We also take part in many community fundraisers and events both inside and outside our pub, and we donate hundreds of gift baskets a year to various fundraisers throughout the city.

The thing that we are most proud of though is the relationships we’ve seen formed at our little pub. Perfect strangers are connecting with each other and forming lasting friendships and that’s what being a pub is all about.

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

We didn’t have a lot of background in social media before starting ours. My goal with all of our socials is to be honest and authentic in our presentation and always focus on who we are and what we offer. We’re not interested in being “influencers” or “going viral”, my goal is to put butts in seats, right here in Fresno. So we focus on showing what it’s actually like in our little pub. It’s people having fun, eating great food, and drinking great beer, and meeting other great people.

Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?

The thing that surprised us is how well our food has been received. I don’t believe in doing anything as an afterthought. So when we decided on offering pizza along with our beer, I knew I couldn’t just cheap out and do frozen or premade products. It had to be really high quality. So we became experts at hand making pizza the same way they do in Italy; Mixing the dough by hand from raw ingredients, doing a 24 hour rise, and then hand stretching the pizzas at the time of order. We spend a lot to get the best Italian flour and the best cheese, and we have specialized ovens to give us an authentic bake. As a result, our reputation as a pizza restaurant has become as powerful as our reputation as a brewery.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.southofshawbeer.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/southofshawbeer/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SouthOfShawBeer
• Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/south-of-shaw-beer-company-fresno

Image Credits

Blue Corvus Photography