We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Derek Law. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Derek below.
Alright, Derek thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Do you have any thoughts about how to create a more inclusive workplace?
We want everyone to not only feel comfortable at Slackers Brewing Co., but safe as well. Being on the edge of NW Austin we have guests with all sorts of affiliations and views and we wouldn’t want it any other way. Our taproom, marketing, and hiring practices all go towards creating a space that folks feel free to come and be themselves. A home away from home. One of the biggest challenges for myself was being from a privileged gender and race, I can sometimes be naive and blind to the struggles of others. Accepting that was the most helpful thing I could do to start improving our space and myself. I lean on others much smarter than me to make this place what it is. In the first year I started seeing our clientele take shape and felt such joy at the diverse group it has become. People that would normally fight in the anonymity of the internet share beer and conversation here and remember what it feels like to be human again.
Derek, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
Slackers Brewing Co. has come into being after 2+ decades of an idea taking shape in my head. As a young musician in my 20s, Slackers was a bar with great local bands in my head. I wanted a place with good acoustics and equipment to let up and coming musicians play and be heard. In my 30s I began the journey into homebrewing and found my true passion. I have always loved the idea of creating something to share and beer just fit so well with that. It brought such joy to watch my friends pop open a homebrew, take a sip, and say something along the lines of “This isn’t terrible. Doesn’t taste like homebrew”. For a young homebrewer, that’s one of the best compliments you can get. I loved watching people get excited about the different flavors I would experiment with ranging from Ghost Peppers with a porter and crawfish in a Kölsch. In my 30s and early 40s my family formed and Slackers as an idea became a community center that served the people with live music, delicious food, craft beer and coffee, local wine, food and drinks for the kids, and games for people of all ages. After years of being a software developer, the opportunity arose to actually bring this dream into reality. With the support and help of my wife and family, friends, and the community we opened Slackers Brewing Co. in November of 2021. Since opening nearly 2 years ago, the place continues to change and grow to fit our growing community. We have an indoor kids play area, mother’s room, backyard shaded patio, foosball and a stage. We do comedy, trivia, vinyl nights, smash bros tournaments, and live music each week. It brings us such joy to see the same familiar faces week to week.
How do you keep your team’s morale high?
Having the privilege of working in may different industries at all different levels, I was able to learn what styles of management I loved and those that I did not. I’ve worked third shift factory work, retail, bar and restaurants, freelance software development, and over a decade of corporate work as a software engineer. Despite the difference of all these industries, there were common threads that helped me develop my style of managing. Like most things, I am far from done learning and improving but feel I get some things right. Autonomy, trust, and transparency help no matter what industry I am in. Hiring hard and trusting who I hired allows me to give the employees autonomy and leaves me to work on my job, not on theirs. Along with freeing up my own time, it gives them the feeling of ownership making them more passionate and more likely to stick around through the harder times. I have been so lucky to have such an amazing staff, many of which who have been there since the beginning. After a year or so I noticed a bit of apathy and realized I had not been clearing the way to let them grow and make suggestions and changes to improve our business. Since then we have seen great changes in the taproom and how we go about our processes. It feels like a completely reinvigorated place over just a few months of our leads making changes they feel will improve the business.
Can you open up about a time when you had a really close call with the business?
Every day in the first couple of years of this business has felt like a do or die moment. I have had to find more quarters in the couch than I thought could exist. Pulling savings, working multiple jobs, and finding ways to grow the business while having a declining working capital all to just survive. The one thing that never changed was my resolute to never miss a payroll. I pride myself on paying our bills on time or early with our vendors, but if it comes down to it, I will push all of our funds to payroll to ensure our staff gets paid. I cannot imagine a bigger morale crusher than our employees waking up on payday to see their bank account the same as the day before. I feel I know my staff well and with few exceptions they count on this income to pay rent, groceries, and support their families. I will move heaven and earth before missing a payroll. It came close once and my gut hurt that entire week until finally at the last minute, I was able to ensure they got paid. It put us in a hard spot, but we recovered from that and never lost any morale from the staff which is priceless. Since that day, I have held on purchases, even ones that feel necessary until I knew there was enough for payroll ahead of time.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://slackersbrewing.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/slackersbrew/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/slackersbrewingco/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/slackers-brewing-co/