Yesterday I made an announcement that I didn’t really want to make. I announced that we were closing the Tap Room at Hasseman Brewing in Coshocton. You can read that update here. While I am disappointed with the lack of traffic and support, I am very proud of what we have done with that business. We have created a great product. We have learned a lot. And we have created a small team of people that are really passionate about the journey. In addition, nothing really cool happens without taking a risk. Sometimes risks work. Sometimes they don’t. It’s life. But I think what is important in situations like this is, what do I learn from them? As I said in the blog post, we are not closing. We are changing. We will be selling bottles, kegs and are even exploring the idea of doing Private Label beers (I am really excited about that). As you might expect, there will be more updates on this as we move forward. But what does this have to do with you? Simple. At some point in our lives, we will all have a project that doesn’t work. It is frustrating and humbling when it happens. It’s depressing even. It’s easy to want to crawl into the fetal position and just hide. It’s natural. But it’s not productive. So what do you do when it doesn’t work? Honestly Assess: When something doesn’t go as planned it’s easy (and natural) to look for someone or something to blame. But that’s emotion. It’s important to look at what worked (we got better and more consistent making beer) and what did not (we did not have traffic to the Tap Room). Make A Decision On What’s Next: Once you have that, you can look at the options of what is next. We could have closed completely. But based on what we felt our strengths were, we felt we could keep it going in a more productive way. Execute: Then do. Obviously we are just beginning this stage. I don’t pretend to have that all figured out. Heck…it’s even more obvious that I don’t have it all figured out. But the world lacks people who execute. In my experience, good things happen when people take action. If you want updates on what we do next with Hasseman Brewing, you can sign up here. But if you want to keep up with all of the content we are creating at Hasseman Marketing, sign up for our VIP newsletter here!
