James Watt | What it Took to Create a Unicorn Business with BrewDog Founder
Disruptors
Rob Moore
4.8 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 28 April 2025
⏱️ 74 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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Rob talks to James Watt, who founded beer empire BrewDog, now valued at £1.8 billion. He shares the journey of BrewDog and reveals the high stakes gambles, near bankruptcies and disruptive thinking that propelled its success. Beyond beer, Watt passionately discusses the UK's economic challenges, his new ventures, and the unconventional leadership approaches that helped him build a unicorn business.
James Watt REVEALS:
- Why he gave 20% of his equity to BrewDog employees & created a pay cap
- BrewDog's growth strategy
- Being on the edge of financial ruin for over years, including not being able to pay himself
- Why after 17.5 years as CEO, he stepped away to pursue new ventures
- How he manages his productivity through extreme focus
- Why community building is essential for business success
- Why millionaires are leaving the UK
BEST MOMENTS
"For me, if we weren't teetering on the edge of financial oblivion, I wasn't working every single penny of cash that I had hard enough because I had to open new markets. I had to try and find a way to employ new salespeople. I had to find a way to open new locations."
"Would or could another beer company sponsor a sports team? Yes. Okay. We're not gonna do that. Would or could another beer company spend 200,000 pounds taking out these adverts? Yes. We're not gonna do that."
"At a certain point in time, your company is gonna do things that are so stupid you'd never thought you'd be associated with such incompetence. But to make matters worse, if you're CEO, it's all your fault."
"These are the job traders, the wealth traders, the people who pay a disproportionate percentage of taxes; twice as many millionaires are leaving the UK than at any point in time. And it's not just a millionaire, it's like their future innovation."
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ABOUT THE HOST
Rob Moore is an author of 9 business books, 5 UK bestsellers, holds 3 world records for public speaking, entrepreneur, property investor, and property educator. Author of the global bestseller “Life Leverage” Host of UK’s No.1 business podcast “The Disruptive Entrepreneur”
“If you don't risk anything, you risk everything”
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Please standing up. Please stand up, please stand up, please stand up, please stand up. |
| 0:05.0 | And welcome to the stage, the most disruptive entrepreneur, founder of Brudon, Mr. James Ward. Did you hear one person shouting, Brue Dog? |
| 0:29.6 | Right, take a seat, everyone. Thanks for coming. |
| 0:33.6 | James, in 20 years Brue Dog have achieved a lot. |
| 0:36.6 | Could you list the achievements, the disruptive achievements of Broodog in the last two decades? |
| 0:43.3 | I can indeed firstly. Hi everyone, how's it going? |
| 0:45.3 | Good. Okay, I'm so happy to be here and tell you a little bit more about the business, the journey, what we've done. |
| 0:53.3 | But I think more importantly, the kind of mindset that kind of underpins how we've approached business and how |
| 0:58.6 | I look at things going forward as well. So yeah, the business that I set up was in 2007. I set |
| 1:05.2 | up with my best friend Martin. Before that, we were making beer in Martin's mom's garage so we have gone on to hit a peak |
| 1:12.4 | valuation of 1.8 billion we sell our beer in 75 countries we make and sell about 1.2 |
| 1:19.2 | million cans of beer every single day we've built the 13th most valuable beer brand on the planet |
| 1:26.1 | we've got 137 hospitality locations all over the planet, |
| 1:31.0 | including Berlin, Tokyo, Sydney, Las Vegas, some amazing sites in London. We've got some beer hotels. |
| 1:38.4 | We've got 4,000 fantastic team members. And it was all done a mission to make other people's fantastic |
| 1:45.3 | as passionate about fantastic beard as we are so that's the business in the nutshell |
| 1:49.7 | fuck this I'm going what a CV what a CV now I want to come back to the Broodog story, the disruption |
| 2:04.7 | later, but I need to ask you, because I know you become a bit more political. Are we going through |
| 2:11.0 | the death of the UK right now? I am so, so concerned about what's happening. And I think people |
| 2:16.1 | who work in business have been kind of saying this for months, if not years. |
| 2:20.5 | And I think we've just got the perfect storm of public services becoming worse and worse. |
| 2:26.6 | Waiting lists at hospitals have never been longer. |
... |
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