Chapter One
THE UNCONVENTIONAL BEGINNINGS OF AN ENTREPRENEUR
My dad backed our red pickup truck beneath the second-story window of my dormitory bedroom. My friends in the next dorm room initiated a grand send-off by blasting Frank Sinatra's "That's Life" out their windows as we threw green garbage bags filled with clothes, cassettes, and books into the back of the truck below. I received this rousing tribute partly in acknowledgment of my proud Italian-American heritage, but mostly because I had just been kicked out of prep school a mere 2 months before graduation. My father drove me home in silence. When we reached the driveway of our house, he said simply, "Sammy, sometimes you're a tough kid to love."
I was so disappointed in myself at that moment. Yes, I was disappointed because I had let my father, my biggest supporter in the world, down to a cosmic degree. But I was mostly disappointed in myself because I had just lost the connection to the place where I had learned who I was and who I wanted to be. The place where, I would later realize, I decided to be an entrepreneur. For better or worse, I figured out who I was and who I wanted to be while I was attending Northfield Mt. Hermon School-the high school started by the world-renowned evangelist, D.L. Moody. The school I never graduated from.
Not that I didn't deserve to be kicked out. The administrators there finally sealed my fate under the blurry and all-encompassing "Accumulation of Offenses" section of the student handbook. I can recount a number of said offenses accumulated in my 3 years there, and I think I should recount them again now. Looking back, I believe these offenses were indicative of the entrepreneurial fire I had burning within me.
I came right out of the gate with a willingness to embrace risk. I set the record for the earliest point in the school year when a student was placed on disciplinary probation. I had grown up in the town next to the school, and I wanted to show my two best friends the beauty of my new school as well as the beauty of the girls at my new school.
We snuck out my parents' station wagon in the middle of the night and headed to campus. Just three sophisticated 16-year-olds, smoking cigars and listening to Journey. We approached the school in a covert fashion that we thought would surely allow us to elude campus security. Instead of using the road, we drove up the football field, through the quad, and straight into a motion-detecting light. Not into the shaft of light, mind you, but into the pole that was holding the light itself. It detected our motion. We were greeted by a dorm parent who soon invited campus security to the party, and the rest was history.
My next year marked the second phase of my delinquent entrepreneurial development in which I exhibited ambition and an ability to organize coworkers toward a common objective. Our objective at this juncture-not getting kicked out.
In my junior year, I was not permitted to attend the prom. So another junior classmate and I designed a foolproof plan. We would act as chaperones for a bunch of senior friends who would be attending the prom. We decided to do this in style: A Winnebago was rented, beers were procured, bow ties were straightened. We headed off to the prom but never reached our destination as much beer drinking, pool hopping, and roof surfing ensued. While going down the highway at 60 miles per hour sitting Indian style on top of a Winnebago seemed like a good idea at the time, I can see now that it probably was not. The local authorities felt similarly, and we received a two-cruiser escort back to campus.
They had us now. I believe that was the actual phrase used by the teacher who the authorities handed us over to. We were all separated into different rooms so as not to corroborate our stories as we awaited our morning tribunal. The Winnebago was locked safely on campus, nearly overflowing with the various and sundry contraband. But this is where it turns into a story of uncommon valor and the creation of a united front committed to reaching a shared goal: beating the man. Walkie-talkies were employed, as were bicycles, and door-opening coat hangers. We even used the sheets-tied-together-to-rappel-out-the-window motif celebrated in nearly every prison-break movie.
The following morning we were called to meet outside the Winnebago. There was a short, self-congratulatory speech by the teacher that mostly revolved around our foolishness for actually thinking we could get away with it. The door swung open and revealed ... nothing but a very clean and contraband-free recreation vehicle. We were set free for lack of evidence. In the middle of the night we had successfully executed Project- Break-Back-In-and-Throw-It-All-Out. We even made sure there was a vase of fresh-cut flowers on the dining table in the camper.
By senior year my entrepreneurial spirit knew no bounds. After the Winnebago incident, the powers that be decided to keep an eye on me. They said I could come back but only on the grounds that I live on campus in a dormitory. They didn't realize that my friends had formed a juvenile-delinquent all-star team by signing up to live in the same dorm. We each had diverse talents but shared a common love of partying and rule breaking. This would be the setting of my first endeavor into the beer business. I would visit my parents on the weekends, borrow the car, and cruise liquor stores for sympathetic, western Massachusetts, libertarian hippies willing to buy me beer as I waited in the shadows. I would return to school and parcel out the booty. There would always be an extra six-pack in it for me-the businessman. This proceeded throughout the year without a hitch. Yes, our beer-addled behavior sometimes raised suspicion. Like when a faculty member opened the door to the recreation room only to find us playing two-on-two Ping-Pong wearing nothing but tube socks and ski goggles. But my luck couldn't last, and I tempted fate. The businessman got caught and was put out of business.
YOUR CALLING: FINDING YOUR PASSION
There are a number of reasons why my time at Northfield Mt. Hermon was so crucial to my development as a creative person. The most important is that it was the place where I met and began to date my future wife, Mariah. At that time, aside from reading and writing, being with Mariah was one of the only things I was good at. I actually met Mariah's mom, Rachel, first. She was friends with my favorite teacher, Bill Batty, and was at his house visiting his family for the weekend. Some friends and I were there that evening hanging out with Bill and his son John, who was a classmate of ours. Mariah's mom made brownies for us that I was sure were the best I had ever tasted. She told me her daughter had just started her first term at NMH, and I told her that if her daughter could cook anything like her mom I was going to marry her someday. Within a couple of months I was dating Mariah, and we've been together ever since.
We began dating when we were all of 16 years old, so we've pretty much grown up together. Our personalities evolved to complement one another's strengths and weaknesses. We attended different colleges in different parts of the country, spent separate semesters abroad in Australia, and still worked hard to see each other every chance we got. So much time and distance apart is not easy on a relationship, but through it all I got my first taste of how, if you want something bad enough and are willing to do anything necessary to make it happen, you can make it happen. This lesson has served me well in love and in life. Mariah was always the first person I went to for support and advice on the challenges we faced in the early years at Dogfish Head. She became my true partner in the company in our third year in business, and we've worked side by side to grow Dogfish Head since then. She is much more focused and practical than I am and has been as equally committed to guiding Dogfish Head toward where we are today as I have. There are a million reasons why I love Mariah, one of which is that she is undoubtedly the only person in the world who has higher expectations of me than I have of myself. She is never surprised when we achieve great things; she would expect nothing less. I sensed that the first time I met her at NMH, and even more so after I was kindly asked to leave the school. In those first few weeks apart, our relationship became more difficult but also more rewarding as I saw she was willing to stand by me.
What sounds like a sad ending to a high school career was actually a pretty revelatory beginning. As I mentioned, getting kicked out of high school was one of the worst things to happen to me because it was where I learned who I was. On the day I got kicked out I also came to recognize the person I wanted to be. I wanted to create. I wanted to make something that was a reflection of myself. At first I wanted to be a writer, and I went off to college as an English major with the hopes of doing just that. Yes, I'm one of the elite fraternity of people in the country who graduated from college without ever actually receiving a high school degree.... We aren't exactly Mensa.
RECOGNIZING YOUR STRENGTHS
Because beer has always played an important role in my life, I continued to hone my creativity with and passion for beer while at college. I designed an all-weather, thrift-store reclining chair that actually contained a covert compartment that held a keg. When security showed up to bust a party, we'd sit on the chair and ask, "Keg, what keg?" I proudly contributed toward the invention of a drinking game called Biff that involved squeegees, milk crates, a Ping-Pong ball, and four contestants dressed only in tube socks and ski goggles (if it ain't broke, don't fix it). I graduated from college and realized I was more passionate about beer than a career in writing. So I started making my own beer and decided I wanted to open a brewery.
As an entrepreneur-as a person-you have to ask yourself what is your defining inmost thought. And then you have to do everything you can to express this belief to the people around you. I learned to love to read and write and express my creativity at Northfield Mt. Hermon. My inmost thought when I was first enrolled at Northfield Mt. Hermon was: "Rebel against authority in order to express yourself." This is pretty much the same defining instinct that drives me today, but I've been fortunate enough to find a constructive outlet for this angst. I've created a company that subverts the definition of beer put forth by the "authorities" at Budweiser and Coors.
If you did not earn a business degree or follow a clear and common path to create your business, you know there is no prescribed method to ensure success. I'm sure that majoring in business or getting an MBA gives you more tools and familiarity with the mechanics of business. But tools are useless unless you are able to use them. You could have the best set of tools in the world but if you are not ready and capable of working with them they are useless to you. If you believe in your idea enough to make it happen, it must be a powerful idea. The way you harness the power of that idea is to believe you are the only person capable of making that idea a reality. Once you have this mind-set, you will see that the tools are not what builds a strong company-it's the builder.
Opening a brewery-opening any business-seems like an impossible feat from a distance. But it starts with a faith in yourself-a belief that just because something hasn't been done before doesn't mean it shouldn't be done at all. If anything, the more impossible your business idea seems to the world at large, the more opportunity there might be for you to succeed. Thomas Edison didn't invent the lightbulb from scratch, but he was the first to imagine an entire country illuminated and powered by electricity. He set to work not just to create a durable lightbulb but to create an entire industry while naysayers around him predicted his failure. If you are going into business, the core of your strength lies in your ability to picture a world in which your idea makes a difference. However big or small that difference may be, however many people's lives your idea ends up affecting, you need to recognize and celebrate your opportunity to make a difference. The lightbulb that went off above Edison's head was not so much an actual physical lightbulb as it was a vision of a world in which he could make a difference.
TAKING RISKS: BEING A BUSINESS PIONEER
One of my earliest and fondest childhood memories is being shot in the back with a real arrow by my father as I rode a horse. He loaded the car with me, a camera, a bow, an arrow, and some ridiculous, kiddie Western clothes he bought on a business trip to Texas. We drove to a farm that didn't belong to anyone we knew but had a very old horse that he felt confident wouldn't run away if he placed me on its back. He stuffed a flat piece of lumber under my shirt and jammed an arrow through the shirt into the wood. He placed me on a horse and "shot" me as I was doing my best wounded-cowboy impression. He was putting together a slide show for a group of fellow oral surgeons. He planned to end his lecture about a new, unorthodox tooth-implant system he had created with that picture of me on a horse with an arrow in my back. The message revolved around the perception of risk that comes with trying something new. The pioneers were the ones who risked their lives in order to create a new community in a new land. All small businesspeople are pioneers, and their companies are the hearts of their communities.
Of course there is risk that comes with being a pioneer, but the risk is minimized if the community is built on an impressive set of values; impressive in that they make an impression on the lives of the people who come in contact with them. These values start at home and shouldn't be separate from your professional values if you are going to succeed. I think I sensed this idea emanating from my father even then, at the moment he was shooting me with an arrow.
The only predictable thing in the world of business is that the future cannot be predicted. Going into business is about embracing the unknown. You recognize very quickly that there is no safety net to catch your fall. While you cannot recover what could be lost by taking those risks, even many failed entrepreneurs agree that those risks are well worth taking. You have to believe in yourself and the integrity of your idea to really make a go of it. Business integrity is a combination of your values and work ethic and the value of your product or service to potential customers. To connect your values with your product takes education.
Continues...
Excerpted from Brewing Up a Businessby Sam Calagione Copyright © 2006 by Sam Calagione. Excerpted by permission.
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