Call Paul

Episode 2: Dave at Wayward Distillery

Paul: Hello beautiful listeners, this is Paul Jarvis and you’re listening to Call Paul, business as unusual. This show explores how small business owners are facing the reality of living through our first pandemic. This pandemic has exposed just how fragile our economy, businesses and supply chains really are. Within days of various shelter-in-place orders, thousands of companies had to lay off their staff or shut down completely. But, at the same time, this has also exposed some real heroes and businesses that put people over profit, ingenuity over routine and showed just how quickly small and caring companies can pivot towards a common goal.

Dave: We've got four-liter jugs and 20-liter pails and a Jerry rigged bottling line. Everything is just kind of a little chaotic

Paul: This is Dave from Wayward Distillery. They’re known for making spirits out of local honey and they operate a few hours north of where I live on the Left Coast of Canada. Dave is the perfect example of how some small businesses would rather go out of business doing the right thing than stay in business doing the wrong thing. That’s why Wayward was one of the first distilleries to make hand sanitizer, and they gave it away to first responders before they were even allowed to sell it to the public.

Dave: It is a completely different environment here than it has been over the last five years. Our workforce is now just me and Laura. Laura's our head distiller and we now make and bottle sanitizer so there's packaging all over the place. We have batches of sanitizer that's popped up right in the middle of our production floor as we push our rum barrels aside, we push our spirit tanks to the back.

Dave: We've really streamlined the whole process here to do one thing, and that is to make, package and distribute hand sanitizer. So normally, you could come into our distillery, into the production side, but we've closed off the facilities so people can't come into where we're working because we need to be exceptionally cognizant of health here. We are a distribution point for sanitizer. Like we can't get sick.

Paul: I just want to get a sense first of how you started and what made you want to open the distillery, and then we'll shift to now doing something totally different in the realm of hand sanitizer. So can you talk to me a bit about what made you initially want to go and open a distillery?

Dave: Oh my gosh, it's an amusement park for adults. No, a significant part of my choice, of my drive to start the distillery comes from my previous job, from my life in the Canadian Armed forces. One of the things that the military does is helps us plan for our second life. You know, the average military career is 20 to 25 years, and most people join when they're 19 or 20. So retirement at 40 or 45 is a very real thing. So I wanted to start Wayward. I wanted to start my distillery after I left the military with a pension when I was in my early 40s, it was going to be my retirement job, if that makes sense. And things changed, about six years ago, the province of BC created a craft distiller designation. So they acknowledged that if you are small, independent, you use BC ingredients, you make and ferment and distill your own alcohol onsite so you don't buy commercial alcohol like the big guys do then we get a significant markup advantage. And I decided to leave the military early to start my business. I wanted to be the first to do it in this whole new world. So yeah, I left the military early without a pension and started Wayward and it has been an adventure ever since.

Paul: Nice, and I think on the consumer side too, it's great that there are so many craft brewery. Like we live on the same island. There are so many that you can go to visit and check out and see how things are made.

Dave: Totally. People are buying beer made by people that live in their community and they're going to their community hub, their third place, and they are supporting their local communities. And that shift is happening all over the place. It happened in wine a while ago. It would happen in beer. It happened in food, going to the farmer's market and getting local eggs and local vegetables to go home and make a meal and knowing that your money is staying in the community.

Paul: Yeah, I think it's also great for food security. There was a time when the island produced more than half of the food that we ate and that's not the case anymore. But I see that shift of people starting to be a lot more interested in growing food and supporting local and buying their alcohol, bringing their growlers into the shop, getting them refilled.

Dave: My motivation to start an alcohol business was I'm fascinated by alcohol. I traveled the world trying local regional spirits and beers and I'm into it. But, every drop of spirits at Wayward is made from honey instead of grain or potato or other food. And our bees pollinate human crop in British Columbia. So every bottle of vodka is two-and-a-half pounds of honey and that's hundreds of thousands of flowers that have been pollinated. That's thousands of pounds of apples that have been made through every drop of our spirit. So just you mentioned food security and I got very excited because that is another huge part of why I built Wayward the way it is, how we operate, and you know, like how we go day-to-day.

Paul: So why do more distilleries not do that?

Dave: It costs 10 times as much to make a honey-based spirit than a grain-based spirit. So you think of like, just think of buying two pounds of farmer's market honey versus buying two pounds of wheat flour, right? So we were the first in the country to make spirits out of honey. And back then there were eight people on the planet that I could find that were doing it. Yeah, it was a shot in the dark, but we really wanted to make a positive difference. So you think of an acre of corn or an acre of potatoes that you are converting into alcohol. So you're condensing it and you're fermenting it and distilling it and bottling it and selling it. That's a lot of food that you're removing from our food chain.

Paul: So then if there was only eight or so people doing it, it's not something you can Google. How did you learn this craft?

Dave: I use that term a lot. You couldn't just check the Wikipedia on how to make vodka from honey. So I just applied the scientific method. I'd try something. If it worked, I did more of it. If it didn't work, I try to see what I could do different. We are making an old world style Mead where it's quick fermentation, maybe two weeks. The Mead is living like it's turbid. It has yeast in it, it's still self-carbonating. It's a really fun Mead that we make.

Paul: Okay. So then six years later, there's been a shift to hand sanitizer. Talk about this and the decision to first start making hand sanitizer and what that kind of look like for the business.

Dave: Yeah. So after years and years and years of making spirits, we had an expectation of what a March would look like. We go from December, which is our best month of the year to January, which is our worst month of the year. And the transition between the two is like December 31st is busy. January 1st we're closed, January 2nd, no one's buying alcohol. So March is normally our transition period where the Christmas money has gone and spring money starts coming in. So we start ramping our production back up. We start seeing an increase in business normally in March. So we were prepared for that.

Paul: Yeah. And that didn’t happen.

Dave: Yeah. No. And it happened, it was like a small hole in a dam where it drifts a little bit and then that water makes the hole bigger and that makes the hole bigger. Like we went from, "What's happening," to, "It's concerning," to, "Holy fuck," to, "We're shut down." Our conversations internally were, okay, how do we survive this? What can we do to meet our customers? Because we have fans, we have customers, we just need to meet them where they've gone and they're changing their behavior. Well our conversations originally were just survival and then, hand sanitizer. We learned through the government that like contact spreading, community spreading of COVID is happening and the best way to stop that is washing your hands. And if you can't wash your hands, use a hand sanitizer. It became quickly apparent that while we're concerned about our business, why we are shutting down, while I'm laying off everyone, like we were in the negative. And we were in the red in our bank account. And at the exact same time we started to see shortages of sanitizer and I have alcohol, like I'm not selling it right now. No one's buying it. It's sitting here. And I thought, "You know, we'll make a little bit of hand sanitizer. People seem to want it. Maybe that'll drive some interest in Wayward." It's just throwing things at the wall. So I made a little post, put it out that we're thinking of making hand sanitizer. And the response I got was overwhelming and gut-wrenching. It was every local fire department, the RCMP, the Victoria Police Department, transition centers, the John Howard Society, the Coalition to End Homelessness. It wasn't customers who were like, "Oh, I want a bottle of hand sanitizer." It was essential services and it scared me that they didn't have it. It's totally like it shocked me. So we made the decision to make as much as possible and donate it to the people at the frontlines who were starving for it.

Paul: Yeah, because their supply chain is affected as well for all those sorts of things.

Dave: Yeah. So it was essential services and frontline workers that were just out of it. So we scrambled, and scrambled. I went and found some bottles and I needed to put a label on it. So just like a local company, Sure Copy, they donated the labels for it. Industrial paints and plastics donated us a whole bunch of bottles just so we could get it out to everyone as quickly as we could. And that happened before we had permission to make it. It was just us stepping into really to fill a need and do something.

Paul: Yeah, no, that's I mean, personally, thank you for that. My wife is a first responder, so I appreciate you looking after them because they don't have a choice. Say if somebody needs help, they go, that's what they do. So how long can you continue to do things the way that you're doing them?

Dave: Every liter of hand sanitizer I put out, I lost $18 on or more. It was ridiculous. I make honey-based spirits, some of the most expensive alcohol you can make in British Columbia or you can just make. So it was not, is not, in no way sustainable. But what we did is so we donated it to people who needed it. And then we started selling a small amount as we got approval from Health Canada. It was a hard week. It was a hard week where we had no hope of ever getting money for this, but we had no choice. Like I mentioned, military for 15 years in the company we have over 50 years of military service. We had no option, we had to do this. It was our duty. So it was our moral and ethical duty to assist our brothers and sisters out there who are in need. So we did it. We just fucking did it. And as we were doing it, the province said, "Okay, distilleries, you can make hand sanitizer." So then we have, in a very quick period maybe, well in about a week, we transitioned from making and distributing hand sanitizer guerrilla style to going through the authorizations, getting our site licensed, getting our drug and advocation number, getting our formula approved, getting excise approval, which is a huge tax on alcohol, $13 a liter about. We went through all those levels of bureaucracy, and at the end of it we were authorized to sell hand sanitizer, make and sell. Yeah. So what we've been doing is we've been selling hand sanitizer so that we can afford to donate hand sanitizer.

Paul: Do you think your military training has prepared you for this? Like the resilience of being in the military has helped you be able to just continue to roll with these punches from different directions?

Dave: I think that every one of us is a collection of all the skills and all the challenges we've faced before us. And I do not think that military service put me at a disadvantage. So we were a sum of all the things that we know and learn and resiliency and just putting your head down and getting it done. I think that definitely helped. And also triage, being able to look at the problems that we were facing and figure out what we could deal with, what we had influence on and what we didn't. That's not saying that I didn't pull up to my company and cry in my car as I have to tell my employees that I can't fucking pay them, but they're all laid off. Like that definitely happened. But yeah, working through it, it definitely helped.

Paul: Are you hopeful about it continuing, being able to keep up with the demand that there is?

Dave: Yeah. I feel positive. I feel positive for our country. I feel positive that eventually the big guys will step in. We've heard that, you know, the big four alcohol producers are going to start making sanitizer, but as of today, they haven't made a drop. They're waiting for government funding before they produce sanitizer. And they're the ones that are going to get the big sanitizer contracts from the government as well. So I'm hopeful that individual human beings are going to get what they need to protect themselves. I know that's going to happen. I know that the large guys are going to secure their supply chain and buy in bulk and it's going to happen. I'm not as positive for the outlook on all of the craft distillers that stepped in and made sanitizer for our hospitals before the big guys would even consider it. We're going to get left behind in this transition, I'm sure of it.

Paul: Yeah. I mean that is probably true, but I just think that, and I don't even think you'll all need to say anything about it. I just think it'll be ingrained in all of our minds what people did for other people and that will ... For as many companies as that can come out of this as possible, I think people will remember that and there will be, what I can only assume, is even more of a surge towards buying and supporting local businesses like the one that you're running.

Dave: I think that'd be great. It'd be absolutely great.

Paul: The speed at which businesses like yours have been adapting and being able to do things has been probably one of the more hopeful things that I've seen happening in the world right now where people are just seeing a need and filling it. And yeah, I just honestly, dude, I think that that is amazing.

Dave: It was peaceful and brought clarity to my life in a time of chaos to realize that we didn't have a choice. Either COVID was going to go away in three weeks or we were going to shut down. And once I wrapped my head around that, that there's no way to save the company doing what I used to do, then all the resources that I'm sitting on, what am I going to do with them? I'm going to do some good and I'm going to just make this happen. And once I made that decision, it was just peace.

Paul: In the beginning of this pandemic, I was very nervous about how long it’d take to get back to normal with business and the economy. It created a great deal of stress and made it hard for me to concentrate. Now I’m thinking that I’m not so sure I want things to go back to “normal”. Let me explain: normal, for the most part with the global economy and big business was kind of a burning dumpster fire. It’s been ruining our planet and burning through finite resources, putting profit over people, and creating a vast chasm of a divide between those at the top and everyone else. When you ask a person, generally, what they feel holds the most value for in their lives, most say things like: connection, family, friendship, community, etc. But if you look at how the world worked, it was money, power, fame, success, greed, etc that dominated. So what if we worked to better align ourselves, our actions, and our companies, to be closer to what we actually say is important?

There are however businesses like Wayward Distillery that do align with what we hold as valuable. So, maybe once this is all over, these will be the types of business we collectively support and buy from even more than we had done in the past. We’ve prioritized gaining power over other people for too long. Maybe this pandemic can show us that there’s more power in being connected to and helping all people instead. Like what Dave felt called to do with his business. He felt as if he didn’t have an option, he had to do what was right. That’s the type of business I personally want to see bounce back stronger than ever, as soon as possible.

While you can’t visit Dave’s distillery right now and sample a flight of his gin or vodka, you can still order from them on their website at https://waywarddistillery.com/. Their hand sanitizer is also available on their website too, and has probably the nicest hand sanitizer label I’ve ever seen.

Call Paul is produced by Ruth Eddy and is a Mailchimp Original Podcast. Subscribe now on your favourite podcast platform, so you can get new episodes every Thursday. To learn more about my thoughts on business and living online, you can hop on my newsletter at sundaydispatches.com. Oh, and, we want to hear from you too about how your business is adapting and shining. Send us an email with a voice memo attachment to callpaul at mailchimp dot com (callpaul@mailchimp.com).