When Marcus Powers left his government job as a water attorney, he never imagined that their small venture would grow to employ over 60 people.
His journey from reluctant entrepreneur to successful brewery owner reveals the unexpected turns that happen when you take a risk—even when it means setting up a folding table in your basement and going to work.
Who are you and what business did you start?
My name is Marcus Powers. I started Zipline Brewing Company in 2012 with two other business partners. I have been in the business for 12 years.
What was your background? How did you come up with the idea?
Like a lot of stories, it’s a very non-traditional path to where I ended up.
I went to law school, got my degree, and focused particularly on natural resources and water. I was a water attorney for the attorney general’s office, defending Nebraska’s river systems and ensuring that basins were properly allocated.
Hydrogeology is what we worked with. It was like a pairing of engineers, water managers, hydrogeologists, mathematicians, modeling basins, and figuring out how hundred-year-old water laws fit modern science.
But somewhere in there, I got bored. I needed an additional hobby. A friend of mine had a degree in brewing from Oregon State, so I started thinking about how I could brew at a higher level than just using the homebrew book from the store. I studied and got better and better at the craft of brewing.
But I didn’t pursue it as a business opportunity, more so as like really intense hobby.
But I did get the attention of my two future business partners. We were on a softball team, and few of us on the team were brewers – we would always bring a little bit of beer for post-game.
One of my future business partners at Zipline tried my beer and said, “This guy is really, really good at this.” He wondered if there was a chance that I would talk to him, as he was putting together a business plan with another guy on the team.
So, the three of us and our three wives got together and started talking broadly if this was something we would ever want to do – start a brewery.
I left that meeting thinking, “Yeah, it’s interesting, but I’ve got a career path that I specifically went to school for; I’m in exactly the career I want to be in.”
So, it didn’t make sense for me to take a risk at that point.
And so, I kind of kept doing what I was doing.
A couple of months later, one of the guys randomly contacted me. He said, “Hey, I’m going to this conference in Chicago about starting a brewery with my other business partner, James.”
And I’m like,” Oh, you’re still doing that?”
He said, “No, I’ve told myself I’m going to go to this conference specifically to convince myself it’s a bad idea.”
And I was like, “Yeah, good luck.”
When he got back, he had absolutely drank the Kool-Aid. He started convincing me that there was an opportunity for growth. This is a ground-floor moment, and we have a great plan in place.
“You really need to come back to the table and meet with us.”
I started meeting with the two of them and helping them think about things. At that point, I started getting the bug—I was getting excited about it—but I still had my foot in my other career.
Eventually, there was one last meeting. I went to the meeting, and it was my last chance to jump in or not. And I walked away.
My wife was three months pregnant, and I remember thinking like, “This isn’t the time to take this risk.”
I got home, it was late, and she was waiting for me. She asked, “How’d it go?”
I explained that this was my last chance, but I basically told them I didn’t think it was going to work.
And she’s like, “I don’t know how you don’t do this.”
These sound like great people with a great plan. And you’re always going to wonder what if. Luckily, she had some full-time benefits at her job, so I could get rid of mine.
And we were like, okay, I’m going to do it.
I remember having this jumping-off-the-cliff feeling. Like, okay, here we go.
I put in my notice and worked for about a month at my job to finish it out. The last day of my job was January 31st, 2012. I remember that I was wearing a suit because I was an attorney.
The next morning, February 1st, I didn’t have an office or anywhere to go because we didn’t have a building yet. I remember setting up a folding table in the basement of my house and making a workstation. My first thought was, how am I going to stay busy?
I ended up being extremely busy for the next five months building that thing. It was amazing—I had not worked that hard in my other job, and the amount of time it took was insane.
How did you go about validating the business idea? How did you know there was a need?
We had the Brewers Association, our national association for craft brewers. They had great resources, and we were able to pull sales data, brewery cycle data, and a lot of good employee data, like salary data. We really leveraged what we could get from the association to build our business plan, make financial projections and plan estimates early on.
That was part of the truth testing. And I always remember my business partner, Tom, had boiled it down to something really simple: pints of beer. To succeed, we need to sell, let’s say, a hundred thousand pints of beer. In Nebraska, there’s this many adults, and there’s this many of drinking age percent – we just need each of these people to have one beer, and we’ll be successful. Can we do that?
That made it a little easier to grasp from an actionable standpoint. It’s funny because we ended up passing that standard in the first year. I think we broke through our three-year goal in the first year and hit our five-year goal within the first two and a half years. It also turns out that some of those early truth tests were not accurate. Our costs were higher than we expected, but our revenue was higher, too.
What was the process of raising the capital needed?
I was lucky in that most of our capital was privately raised by my two business partners.
We had largely private equity coming in from our own side. We also brought in some banknotes. We had a good local bank that sat down with us and talked through the business plan. They kind of put our feet to the fire on a few assumptions and then agreed to work with us. In a rough estimate, we would be like two-thirds private equity and one-third capital from the bank loaned to start out with.
It was a good experience with the small bank. I was talking to the bank owner, explaining that I was going to Colorado for a couple of days to shadow a larger brewery. He said, “Hey, I’ve got a family member in Texas who runs this pretty successful brewery in Fort Worth. I can call them, and you can go down there for as long as you want.”
So, I went to Fort Worth for two weeks because of the connection, which I thought was cool.
What does your business do uniquely in the market? How did you grow?
I think, above everything else, we focused on quality. We always looked at three pillars in our industry (this probably applies to a lot of industries). It was pricing, marketing, and quality.
But you’re like, okay, there are some strategies where we might get our pricing wrong. We may be too high or too low on the shelf. But as long as our marketing and liquids are good, we’ll be fine.
At the same time, our marketing might not be great, but if our pricing is competitive and our liquids are good, we’ll be fine.
But no matter how good our pricing is, and no matter how good our marketing is, if our quality is poor, we’re never going to succeed. We absolutely rooted ourselves in the principle that we had to make the greatest beer – beer that we could make in the market and be competitive with a national level of quality.
For 10 years, I heard the compliment over and over again about our commitment to that. That’s why people would return as customers.
What were some of the biggest lessons you’ve learned along the pathway of building? What would you tell new business builders?
You know, obviously, it’s almost cliche to say, but find great people. I think that beyond finding great people, you must find people who are better than you at doing things that you need in the business. And then empower them to run.
Because it’s all too common as an owner, you want to have control over everything.
You start to micromanage and really constrain the ability of the organization to grow. The reality is that you just can’t, you don’t have the time in the day, to manage all aspects of the organization at a minute level. You have to be able to let it go.
You need people you can trust who are really good at what they do. That’s the philosophy we leaned on when we built Zipline over 12 years ago.
Did you hire people right away? Or did the business grow for a while before you did?
Kind of funny – our business plan didn’t have us putting a hire in until six months in. And about three months in, I was pleading with my business partners to make a hire.
And they were like, “Why?”
And you’re staring at the budget, and you’re like, how do we make this work?
But I was trying to explain that you don’t understand that there’s an opportunity for growth in front of us that we can’t unlock because I’m trying to do too many things. I’m trying to make the product, market it, and sell it.
If all my time is only spent making the product, we’re not opening new markets or coming up with new R&D ideas—we’re not really growing. We’re just kind of keeping pace with this baseline demand.
When we made our first hire of somebody in production, you could feel the lift in the sales we were able to achieve.
For the first couple of years, that’s what it was – it was just hiring and training, hiring and training. We grew really fast because we got people in the right places to empower us to go. Later, we learned that we needed to lean up in certain areas, but that was a different phase.
Did you ever have any, Oh Crap, Moments? Maybe you thought the business wasn’t going to make it?
Not after the first like year. I mean, definitely, in the first year, there were some pauses. And I definitely had some confidence issues.
During that first year, I remember making the analogy to my wife: Imagine you are going to make dinner for a group of people. And you’re self-conscious about how well you’ve prepared the food—are people going to like it? Now, imagine doing that on the scale of millions when you’re making something that lots of people are going to consume.
It’s inevitable that there are many who are just not going to like it.
It might give you horrible public feedback in a forum like Google or something. Overcoming that was hard for me in the first six months, but I never thought that we weren’t going to make it after that.
The most impactful lesson I learned was not to overreact to problems in the moment like a fire drill. We always call this a fire drill culture, where it’s like, ‘Oh, this piece of equipment is broken? The sky is falling.’ Early on, everybody was stressed out. I—and through me—members of our team would treat it as a massive emergency that really disrupted our lives.
The reality is if that piece of equipment is broken for a couple of days, we’re fine.
Over time, we learned proactive planning and worked to get to a point where we were past the level of panic when we had problems. We would methodically address those with SLPs, and I think that was part of the maturity of growing.
I think a lot of why I chose the career I’m in now is based on those lessons.
Working for the government was great. There were great people there, there were a lot of good benefits and assurance of, you know, a certain salary.
The business is highly uncertain, and you don’t know what your earnings will be. You really set the tone and are in charge of creating the culture and business trajectory.
For me, I really wanted to work in an area where I could drive my own business. However, I learned that growing an organization to as many employees as we had at Zipline (which was getting upwards of 60 over time) for me was difficult.
I love the people, but managing a large number of people requires a different level of daily commitment. Working in an independent business with a small, lean team is really appealing to me. That’s kind of why I made the move and sold the business.
Our business evolved, and we grew fast over the first eight to ten years.
At that time, my business partners and I were each at different stages of life. We found that we wanted to pursue other opportunities. Particularly for me, who worked full-time in the business, I wanted to find a way to capture other dreams and exciting opportunities. So, we ended up selling the majority ownership about three and a half years ago and then fully selling the rest of the business last year.
When you reflect on building your enterprise, how has it changed your life? Positive or negative?
You know, there’s a lot of positive things.
It gave me the confidence to do a lot of different things. There’s such a wide array of skill sets that are employed when you’re running a business. And when you are thrown in the fire you realize nobody’s going to answer these questions or solve these problems. I have to either find the answer or find somebody who knows the answer.
I think that process has really helped me grow as a leader. Beyond that, developing relationships both inside and outside the company, particularly in our industry, which is a really close-knit industry, was fulfilling. So, I think those things were great.
You know, if anything, there were some hours given in the early years that would be, I’d say, the pain that I traded, a little bit of the blood that was traded for the growth. Certainly, You could talk to my wife about that sort of phase of the business. We have little kids – that was a strain. I would say that was the drawback early on.
What are some of your favorite books, classes or resources that have helped you?
That’s a good question. I took a negotiation class in law school because I didn’t have a traditional business path.
I just kind of fell backward into business. My dad was an entrepreneur. And so I always, in my heart, wanted to start my own business, but I didn’t really know what it was or how it would ever happen.
So, I didn’t come in with a high level of reading experience in business books or classes.
But I took this negotiation class, and it was phenomenal. Above all, it taught me problem-solving and how to find win-win scenarios.
And I used it so often – whether that was working internally from an HR perspective and working through a dispute or negotiating supply chain contracts, distributor contracts, sponsorship agreements, or anything we ended up working through.
I took that class in law school because it sounded interesting, but I didn’t know I would employ it. It ended up being one of the more important skill sets that I employed throughout our time at Zipline. So, that’s one.
Where can we learn more about your business?
Breakdown
In this section, Humble Starts provides a summary of the main lessons from Marissa’s story. Hopefully, you can apply them on your own journey towards enterprise building.
1. Build a community, then your business.
Marissa contributes much of her success to the community that she has built. As she has grown, her community has grown with her. From day one, instead of just thinking about sales, she thought about how her brand could be focused on her customer. She focused on growing a community first, and then the consistent sales came.Little Movements has built a moat of loyal customers because Marissa built a community. This is a huge advantage for a business, especially a consumer brand.
Action Step: Instead of thinking of business ideas first, brainstorm a community that you want to serve. Try to write down 10 communities that you would enjoy serving as a business.
2. Scratch your own itch.
Marissa got started by trying to solve a problem that she had. This gave her immediate credibility and knowledge of how to build a successful product and brand. She’s an everyday user of the product, and building a business in a strong interest of hers. Building around a market that you are a part of, and solving a problem that you experience every day is a shortcut to a sustainable business.
Action Step: Make a list of ‘things that bother you.’ Keep the list with you throughout the day, and keep asking yourself what bothers you or is a pain point. Try to get to a list of 50 things and then evaluate for potential business ideas.
3. Start small, and then let it snowball.
Marissa didn’t start with a website, a professional photographer, or a big retail front. She started with what she had – her Facebook page and an iPhone.Starting small and cheap keeps things low-risk and manageable. As you grow, you can take more risks. There is nothing wrong or embarrasing with starting small – it’s the best way to do it!
