Business in Vancouver's "How I Did It" feature asks business leaders to explain in their own words how they achieved a business goal in the face of significant entrepreneurial challenges. In this week's issue, Matt Phillips talks about financing his Victoria craft brewery, Phillips Brewing Co., with credit cards to become one of the largest and most popular craft breweries in B.C.
"I had a degree in microbiology, which covers a huge chunk of what brewing is. I wanted to become a brewer and the hotbed for beer was British Columbia, so I came out here. I was able to get a job at Whistler Brewing Co. They had a really good training program. In 1999, I got a job at Spinnakers in Victoria – Canada's oldest brew pub.
"The only way that I would be able to have true creative control over the beers that we were making was if I was the owner of a craft brewery.
"In 2001, I had saved a little bit of money, and I had a good credit record, so I put together a business plan and shopped around to a couple of banks. I universally got 'you've got to be kidding' from them. I ended up getting credit card applications as I'd walk out and applied for lots of credit cards and used that as the fuel to get my brewery started.
"Much like today, where breweries are opening almost every week, the mid-'90s had a similar kind of feel, and in the late '90s a lot of them closed, so there was a lot of used equipment on the market. Brewing equipment was no problem to find, [but] packaging equipment was really tough to find. So I ended up building my own bottling machine.
"The first location was 1,300 square feet on the second floor of an industrial warehouse complex, and I was sleeping in the brewery. That's where I lived for a couple of years. I really wasn't supposed to be. I came out of the gates with three beers. [The first batch] was about 800 bottles. We [now] brew, in a week, more than we brewed in a year back then.
"I would routinely load up a rented one-ton truck, take it over on the last ferry of the night, park it in front of the liquor distribution branch's warehouse and spend most of the night labelling so that I could deliver it first thing in the morning and get back on the next ferry so I could go brew again.
"In 2003, it was really tough sledding – tight on cash, not growing all that quickly. I was questioning whether it was worth continuing.
"One of the things I used to do in those early days is rent a five-ton truck and drive down to the glass plant in Portland and fill up with glass.
"I used to wander around, and I found this cache of stubbies in the back corner. I thought, 'I'm going to give it one more shot; I'm going to do a beer that makes sense for stubbies and see what happens.' We introduced Phoenix Lager and that was what allowed me to hire my first two employees.
"And that was the turning point. We now have 18 beers that we do year-round."
