We recently connected with Ryan Balicki and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Ryan thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

Our brewery was born around friendship, and good beer. My partner was a home brewer, that brewed beer for a joint bday party we had every year. After drinking many of his home brews, the conversation about opening a brewery started. That conversation turn into trying to find the perfect spot, then building our business plan around that spot. From there there were years of hard work, changes in locations, changes in partners, but in the end we persevered through it all, and Copper Hop was born.

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.

My background has always been in sales and marketing. My first job at 14 year old was selling satellite systems door to door, so you can say I got my start early. From there I went into the cell phone business, then banking, then real estate. I held many manager positions from Sales and Marketing manager, to Director of Sales and COO (admittedly not my best fit). In the end all of those positions help me to learn what I needed to open and run my own business.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

We opened 3 months before Covid hit, and that was a tough pill to swallow. Not being able to open your doors, but still having all the bills do, was a stressful time. That being said, what we were forced to do during Covid, the way we had to pivot so many things in order to keep our business going, put us in a stronger position today. That is what resilience is, being faced with an obstacle, and instead of making excuses as to why that obstacle is too big to overcome, making a game plan on what needs to be done in order to get to the other side. If you’ve ever been to Copper Hop between 12/2019, and now, I’m sure you’ve noticed what we did during Covid to help get us there.

Can you open up about how you funded your business?

Opening a business isn’t cheap or easy, and during our start up we had many obstacles when it came to funding. Initially we tried for SBA loans, but the SBA isn’t very fond on lending to start ups, especially in our industry. In order to get our business funded, we emptied our life savings, took out loans against our houses and 401k’s and were even forced to play the “open a credit card with 0% interest for 12-18 months” game. In the end we got as creative as we could, and it paid off.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.thecopperhop.com
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/copperhopbrewing
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CopperHopBrewing

Image Credits
Copper Hop Brewing