Community is a core principle to Caleb. So much so, he built his business around the idea of people connecting. His first step wasn’t writing a business plan – he began with a passion for economic development and a love of craft beer.
Learn how Caleb not only realized a dream, but also built the model for how a business can thrive in a local community.
Who are you and what business did you start?
I am Caleb Pollard, I’m mostly a lifelong Nebraska and I’ve lived here nearly all of my 44 years.
My family lives in Ord, Nebraska; a small community in the north-central sandhills of about 2000 people.
Ord is where I started my brewery, Scratchtown Brewing Company, with my business partners in 2012. We started off with a desire to be a taproom-focused brewery. We had a vision to be events-driven and really, really focused on what we call positive transformation through fermentation within our community.
What was your background? How did you come up with the idea?
I went to the University of Nebraska, where I was an International Sustainable Development Major. It was a self-created major. I went through the class bulletin of all the programs, found an obscure Arts and Sciences program, and tracked down a professor to underwrite my application for the program.
I got approved and basically created my own major.
So, if you can point to my college days, I probably wasn’t the best student – but I might have been one of the most resourceful students on campus.
Don’t ask for permission
Right out of college, I had a couple of brief stints in the private sector that taught me a lot about sales, marketing, and this idea of being self-driven. When I was doing sales, there wasn’t a roadmap for me on how to move forward. There wasn’t much on how to make a sale, outside of some basic sales training.
It was really self-led; self-started.
And that started in me, essentially a catalytic effect. It made me realize that if you wanted to simply get by in life, you could sit back and take it as it comes. But if you wanted to do more, strive for more, and make a bigger difference, you really had to step forward yourself.
You had to self-teach and self-lead yourself to whatever objective you wanted to accomplish – whether it was sales or later on in my life, the startup of Scratchtown Brewing Company.
So I’ve never been somebody that has asked permission. Asking in my job, asking permission to get involved in my community, or asking permission to really do anything outside of a desire, you know, to work between the lines, of course.
The sales company I worked for was a dot com that eventually dot bombed, but it was a pretty formative experience for me in terms of building skills that were transferable. After that, I decided to get back to what I was really interested in – economic development – and it took my wife and I to Ord, Nebraska.
The uniqueness of craft beer
In college, I started getting really interested in fermentation food preservation and was introduced to the craft breweries in Lincoln.
I was really enamored with, I mean, I like beer. Beers is a fun beverage.
Craft beer was at the intersection of science, art, and business. And then I really liked the ‘rootedness’ of it.
The importance of it being a local market was attractive. In contrast to these multinational conglomerates that are faceless and unbeholden to the roots of their community.
So I started home brewing and learning the art of fermentation on my own time.
And as my wife and I established our careers, we started traveling the United States, seeking out places where there were hot spots of fermentation – whether it was wineries, distilleries, or more importantly to us, breweries.
And it just, it sparked a desire in me to say, “hey, if somebody can do this here, wherever I choose to spend, you know, a big chunk or the rest of my life, would I be able to do that there?”
And so as I continued my development career, we would continue to travel to places like Kansas City or smaller places like Northern California or Moab, Utah, or Sedona, Arizona. I left saying “Whoa, there’s these, small, remote communities that have these vibrant, local economies.” And always central, which is again, that positive transformation through fermentation concept.
And I told my wife at some point in time, I’d love to do this in Ord.
And then when I kind of called out to the universe – that desire.
And that’s one thing when entrepreneurs ask the question: what should we do to get started?
It has to start with some sort of dream. And then you have to, in my opinion, provoke, promote, and nurture that dream. Stoke that desire and curiosity to see that dream flourish.
It takes a vision, I think, for any entrepreneur to be able to take that dream and imagine what that endpoint looks like – and then you work backward, right?
Changing the World, in your own backyard.
For me, it started with a desire to make a difference. I’m a big believer that if you’re gonna change the world, you start in your own backyard.
I mean, literally.
You make a much bigger difference by making efforts to change in your own community and ignore whatever the national or international media is talking about. I just have no interest in being anxious about things I can’t control, but I am very, very interested in things I can control and the contributions in which I can make.
I think that entrepreneurship and business are a force of good, if done correctly.
And so we started exploring that. In Ord, I met my business partner, Mike Klimek, and he had an extensive background in brewing.
And we started hanging out, and then, you know, it goes back to that dream.
It’s just starting to set an undying, unwavering desire to pursue this dream. Because I always say the alternative is a life of regret – even if you fail.
And I don’t think failure is really a thing, if you look at it on a time scale long enough. You know, failure is a lesson.
And so we started asking the question, instead of, what if this fails – What if this works? What if this succeeds?
What if this actually takes off?
What were your first steps to starting the business and creating your product?
Our first step was research. You know, so you’ve got the dream, you’ve got the passion, you’ve got the fire, but what you really need is affirmation through information to pursue those goals.
And so we started looking into the data, and all the data was telling us that we were crazy. That it wouldn’t work out here, that our operation was too small to work.
But we felt differently about that because we had additional data. The data we had suggested that we had capture potential in this area because of our recreational lakes and the tourism traffic to the Nebraska Sandhills.
And if you fast forward to today, that bet was a hundred percent – we were right about that.
That helped compel us, and our key stakeholders (which were our wives) to assure ourselves that:
- We were taking a reasonable risk.
- If this did fail, we were young enough to make a recovery for retirement. It wouldn’t destroy us financially.
Because of my role in economic development, I knew of additional supportive programs for new businesses. My business partner was on city council and he also had quite a bit of land development experience.
So we leaned on the partnership and the expertise of the individuals involved in the partnership.
“Use the Force, Luke.”
The other thing we did – and were pretty relentless about – was building a really solid, what I would call, Jedi Council.
You need people around you who can advise and help you, even in an informal manner, as you build your business concept.
They can be someone you can bounce ideas off of. They keep you between the lines on things like tax and regulatory compliance because that’s a big deal in our industry.
We dove into the minutia of legal and regulatory mandates to make sure, when we got the mothership built, we would get off on the right foot.
There were also business startup classes being offered by our local economic development office, which at that time I was running.
So I just signed myself and my business partner up.
I went to class at night for six weeks to learn how to write a business plan, do financial forecasting, and basically put on paper our concepts and objectives.
Understand your WHY
But most importantly, what I learned from that process was two shortfalls a lot of new business owners make when they start.
- Not defining your guiding principles. The principles that will guide your business when you make major decisions.
- Establishing goals.
If you don’t do those two things you will find creeping in your business, especially as your business ages. Creeping away from your goals and creeping away from those overriding objectives that define why you started your business.
When 2020 hit and we got COVID, it was like a kick in the face – not just in our industry – but as a wake-up to the fact that we had crept away from our beginning goals and principles- the things that define us as a company. We found we had crept away from what made us happy.
And those things can evolve – but if you don’t set those things at the beginning and ask yourself, who are we? – you’ll creep away from what makes you happy. Knowing thyself is such an important aspect of being in business.
Everyone knows being a business owner is super duper hard, and it can be super duper stressful.
There will be burnout no matter what.
If you don’t have a core guiding set of principles and goals in which you hold yourself accountable to, you will burn out. You’ll quit when you get to hard decisions.
Be patient
This leg work of the business took us time.
Sometimes I consult other people who are getting a business started, and they get frustrated in the first 12-18 months of that whole, concept, and startup phase.
I remind them it took us three years to get going.
That’s the same kind of mindset I tell people when it comes to failure – if your scope and your view are long enough, failure is not necessarily a failure. But only if you learn from it and take a long enough view.
And that’s the same with starting up a business. You’re going to have hiccups and failures in those early days.
How did you validate the market? How did you know there was a need?
Homebrew Tests
If you can prototype your concept, whatever it is, in a place where you can fail early, fail often, and learn the trade before you actually launch – it’s a huge advantage.
And that’s what we did. Mike and I started home brewing weekly.
We got together and we started making beer. We were just giving out beer constantly and asking for honest feedback.
We were going to different beer gatherings, like home brew clubs around the central part of the state. We just wanted to kind of rub elbows, talk to them, share beer, and get their feedback. We knew they would be much more honest with us than our neighbors and friends who just wanted us to chase the dream and stoke the fire with kind words.
Mike started sending his beer into competitions that had legitimate professionals reviewing the beer. So we were getting really, really good data back on our product, and that data was incredibly, overwhelmingly positive.
Curveballs.
And then, at the end of the day, you have to decide – when is it time to launch?
You have to find a good enough time because it’s never gonna be perfect. We had two huge curveballs that happened right before we launched.
Right before we were getting ready to launch the business, Mike and Julie found out they were pregnant with their third child, and that was totally unexpected, right?
So we’re getting ready to start a business, and all of a sudden you introduce a baby to the scenario. Well, that makes things really, really hard. It added a layer of difficulty.
But we worked through that. There were another couple of issues that came up; like the bank wouldn’t lend us the money for a couple of buildings that we wanted to buy. And we were despondent, because we had to have real estate to do this.
We received a different perspective from an outside voice, to say, “Why don’t, instead of renovating a building downtown, you build?”
We reworked our proposal, and we went back and we got the green light. We bought some bare ground here downtown, and we built our facility there.
And that’s one of the things, too, I think that’s really important is, if you want this to work, this business, you have to practice resiliency, because you’re gonna hit road roadblocks.
You’re gonna hit stops. You’re gonna have distractions.
You’re gonna have voices in your head. They’re gonna tell you – you’re crazy, you’re stupid.
You’re throwing away your safety and security and blah, blah, blah.
But the good thing was that several of us had already been laid off in prior jobs. We already knew that there is no such thing as safety or security.
It is absolutely a complete misnomer – that people think that a nine-to-five is some sort of safety or security because you have benefits and a regular wage. We all knew those things could disappear overnight, without so much as a thank you.
We felt strongly that one of the safest and most secure bets was to invest in us, and we leaned in hard there. That’s what eventually got us to the point of go.
What was it like, when you opened for the first time?
We did a soft launch that ended up in a big party. In small towns, word travels fast.
It was incredibly euphoric. I remember I was testifying on a bill at the State Legislature in Lincoln that morning, and happened to be able to get my liquor license the same day that they issued it, and then drive it back the two and a half hours to Ord.
And on the way back, I was like, in tears. I was so euphoric.
We had worked so hard, it took us three years to get to this point, and we’re gonna launch when I get home.
Like, we literally can click on the open light. We’re open, we can launch.
And then I was like, oh my God.
Dread and fear and self-doubt set in immediately.
“You’ve never done this before.”
“You don’t know what you’re doing.”
“You’ve put yourself in line for bankruptcy.”
“This is going to fail. You are stupid.”
“You you have thrown away the best years of your life.”
“What are you doing?”
The good news was, I didn’t have time to lean into that because I had to open up shop and serve customers.
As soon as we got back, the open light comes on, and people go crazy. The taproom is packed. I don’t have time to worry about the feelings. I just lean into what I’m doing.
It was such a mix of emotions – at the end of the night, after we tallied up the till, we sat down, drank a beer, and reflected.
It was like, “Okay, we’re talented people, we’re curious minds. We can learn.”
“We’re gonna figure this out.”
I think the one serious thing that has kept me from going insane and having a complete mental breakdown through these last twelve years is knowing that I have a great team I can depend on. We’re still together after twelve years of being in business.
Did you ever have any Oh Crap Moments?
One of the things that I’ve learned is, it’s really, really, really easy to get wrapped up in a Superman mentality.
That you can do everything yourself, and that you can make a difference by yourself.
That is absolutely a false assumption.
I encourage new business owners to build a trusted group of people that they can lean on when times get tough because you are not isolated, you are not alone.
To admit defeat is strength. I see so many business owners struggle by themselves. They aren’t honest or real with themselves, these things do take a toll on you. And if you don’t take care of them or get in front of them, they will eat you alive.
It did to me.
I almost had a complete mental breakdown in 2020 because of Covid and its impact on my business. It was hugely negative. Hugely negative. We almost lost everything.
We could not be open to the public. I took a picture of my wife and I on the day we shut our doors. I wanted to picture what I thought was going to be the end of my business. I was terrified. I was like, “it’s all over.“
I have that picture saved in my favorites, because I want to remember what it feels like to this day, where I was in my life that day, and it was not a good place. We were able to salvage things, rebuild, and we’ve come out stronger on this end.
I’m grateful for that experience. I wasn’t then – but I am now.
I’ll tell you what, man, it’s even more rewarding to get through something like that and rebuild back up – than it is to start up in the first place.
What were some of the biggest lessons you’ve learned along the pathway of building? What would you tell new business builders?
Humility is important.
You’ll ride that roller coaster that is both the boom and bust cycle of your business. Keeping a level head is going to be important for your mental well-being.
How has the business changed your life? Both positive and negative?
My business partners and I can look back after ten years and, with certainty, say that we’ve reached every goal we sought to achieve. That’s like the ultimate validation of what we’ve done.
We’re in the business of fun. We get to do a lot of fun things. And people respond to that.
Part of our desire was to look at fixing a problem within our community. I kept hearing there were no third spaces for people to get together in Ord.
So we leaned into that and created that time to be together. I mean, we’ve probably put on over a thousand events in ten years.
I’m not joking, I bet we average a hundred hundred events a year that either we support, we participate in, or we host. It’s little stuff like book club readings, and run club, or it’s something like Pints and Poses with our local Yoga studio.
Build in a small town
There’s a unique value proposition being in a small town – there’s such a canvas on which you can paint your dreams, and then go out and actually achieve them.
I hear naysayers complain that small towns have nothing to do, and it’s boring and it sucks here.
And to me, I look at that completely in the opposite way. As I look, wow, look at all the opportunities to go out and actually do something about that.
And then you can make money doing it! Our events are probably the most lucrative thing that we do on a case-by-case basis from a financial reward standpoint.
It’s also what makes living out here so enjoyable. There’s just supreme satisfaction when you’re sitting in downtown…
it’s a beautiful night,
there’s music fill in the air,
and there’s a real togetherness.
We live in a time of isolation, loneliness and separation.
I am practicing the old-school values of togetherness, of community, of patronage, of neighborliness, of connection, of true connection. The real stuff that, I think, people are so desperate to find.
I mean, shoot man, that’s a pretty fun place to be.
After ten years and looking at what all you’ve created, that’s pretty cool.
What are some of your favorite books, classes, or resources that have helped you?
I read a ton, and I prefer hardcopy over digital. It’s a preference thing, I do listen to podcasts and audiobooks when I drive or work out.
Three books that I recommend include:
Other resources are the people you surround yourself with. I can’t emphasize enough the importance of that personal Jedi Council- people you can turn to when you need insight, even when it’s hard to hear.
Where can we find out more about your business?
Breakdown
In this section, Humble Starts provides a summary of the main lessons from Caleb’s story. Hopefully, you can apply them on your own journey towards enterprise building.
Learnings from Caleb:
1. Begin with a desire.
Caleb started the journey towards his business by starting with a deep desire. He felt a connection to the concept of community and desired an opportunity to create that through business. Craft Beer was the perfect vehicle to achieve this mission.
Start with your why. It’s the wheels that make your business go.
2. Take your time.
This is never fast – and Caleb’s business is a testament to that.
Building something meaningful is going to take time, and patience is a skill well used. Building a business is hard, and you need to put the legwork in before you start.
3. Owning a business is an emotional endeavor.
Caleb has had a roller coaster of an entrepreneurship journey. From the euphoric feeling of opening the doors for the first time, to the fear of thinking he closed them for the last time during Covid.
Entrepreneurship is a dynamic, challenging, sometimes heavy, but always worthy pursuit. A 9-5 is a false sense of security, and the pathway of entrepreneurship is an emotional ride. But that just makes the ride much more satisfying at the end.
