- Hey, welcome to the next edition
of Xero Small Business Insight.
Today, we're at Tumut
River Brewing Company
with Nala, the beautiful dog.
Can't wait to get inside
and find out all about
this amazing business
in regional New South Wales.
So really excited to be here
today with Tim from Tumut,
did I get that right?
- You did very well, yes.
- Tumut River Brewing Company,
enjoying an Australian ale.
Tim, great to meet you.
- Yeah, thanks, mate.
It's great to have you guys here.
- It's fantastic to be here
in the beautiful Riverina.
So mate, the viewers would love to know
a little bit about your business.
How did you get into brewing?
- Yeah, well, so the
getting into brewing thing
was a bit of a long process.
So I basically started out as a member
of the Chamber of Commerce
for our local region
and through that experience
I noticed there was a number
of areas that were lacking,
I guess, let's call it that.
And I decided that it was my job
to open up a tourist attraction
that would be open seven days a week,
every day of the year,
and would provide some kind
of food and beverage for them.
And so that was the initial thought,
was how do I do that?
And so I fell in love with
the Junee Licorice Factory,
'cause, to me, that was the kind of place,
it produced on-site,
it had a fantastic experience
if you wanted to dine in there,
it had entertainment on the weekends.
The whole thing was,
it was a reason to visit Junee
and you could go there and leave Junee
and feel completed satisfied
that you had a great visit.
So I was hunting for the next thing
that I could do for Tumut
and that is where home
brewing came in, I guess.
- [Trent] Were you
already brewing before that?
Were you brewing at home?
- I actually wasn't.
So I fell in love with
the Beechworth brewery.
I went there and went,
this is what Tumut needs.
And I came home and my best mate, Simon,
convinced me to learn how to brew.
If I was gonna open a brewery
I needed to know how to brew and then--
- I would have thought
that's a good starting point.
- That became an obsession,
it became insane,
and we fell in love with it
and I was brewing multiple batches a week.
I had over a thousand
liters of beer in my shed
when I moved house.
- Wow.
You must have a big shed.
- Yes, it was chockers.
And it was just all with,
every time I made a new batch of beer,
it was so exciting that
I drank two bottles
and I'd start a new recipe
and try the next thing
and see what the next hop would do
or what the next hop or malt could change.
And so that became an obsession of its own
and, of course, it came
together to form the brewery.
- Fantastic, that's a great story.
You're obviously doing very well
'cause I did have a look on TripAdvisor
before we came to visit you
and you're the number one
tourist attraction in the region.
- Yes, which I wasn't aware of.
I knew we were doing very well,
we've been very lucky with our reviews
and we've had some great feedback
and obviously we keep
trying to improve on that,
but yeah, I wasn't aware
that we were number one now.
- Wow, it's quite obvious, actually,
the beer's fantastic.
So I'm not surprised at all.
So definitely recommend
getting into one.
- Thank you.
- I did a little bit of research, as well,
just on the microbrewery industry
and I was amazed to find,
I think, every week a new
one opens across Australia,
is that correct?
- Yeah, every four
days, they're up to now.
- So it's a pretty competitive market.
- It's a huge industry too.
And you've gotta remember,
at the moment, independent
craft beer's only 3%
of the Australian market so it's a tiny--
- But I think it's at 1% of
all of GDP or something for--
- Yeah, and it's--
- It's amazing.
It's a massive market.
- And it's also 64% of the
employees in the industry.
The nature of a small brewery
is that we're super inefficient.
So we're making handcrafted product
rather than making mass produced product
so we're employing more people,
we're making a better
product, in my opinion,
and we're catering to a
whole different audience
that you just don't get
from the traditional beer industry.
And, so yeah, it's a really
positive thing for any region,
that there is one,
and that market share is
growing astronomically.
So while, yes, we're getting
one new one every four days,
we're also increasing our market share
dramatically every week
and so it's gonna be something
that's gonna continue to grow
and it's gonna give, hopefully,
I have this fantasy
that every region will have their own beer
and you'd be able to
go to every little town
and experience a beer that tastes
just like what that town can produce.
- So it shows the personality
of the town, almost,
in the beer.
- Yeah, exactly.
And I mean, we've got the most,
we've got the best water in the country
so we've got a distinct advantage
so we're gonna keep running
with that (chuckles).
- (chuckles) Fair enough, fair enough.
Look, one of the things
that I did wanna talk to
you a little bit as well,
we were talking a little bit about
your use of Xero and technology earlier,
so how does technology
help you as a business,
as a regional small business?
- Well, as all self-employed people,
I have heaps of spare time
and I don't have to do
very much work at all.
- [Trent] Yeah,
would have thought so.
- So yeah, so I don't really
have to worry about that.
I can do anything I want.
No, no, obviously I'm strapped for time
and anything that can
make me more efficient,
anything that can make it faster,
anything that can allow me to
work from an alternative site,
like up until just recently,
I was on the road three days a week
trying to sell the product.
So I could access Xero from my phone,
I could access my reports
from my accounting,
sorry, my point of sale
software that's tied in
from the phone.
I could see how many
pizzas they sold today
when I was in Merimbula
trying to sell beer.
- So you've got realtime
insight wherever you are.
- Yeah, yeah, and payroll.
Oh my God, payroll, I love it so much.
- You love payroll?
- I hate parting with the money
but I love that my time clock
software ties in with Xero,
Xero works out all the tax,
it works out all my salaries
and my accrued leave,
and I just basically
click a couple of buttons
and the next thing you
know everybody's paid.
- How many employees do you have?
Just out of interest.
- We have about 15.
Depending on the time of year,
we're looking at anything
from six to 12 full-time equivalents.
So again, obviously in the
winter it's a bit quieter here,
in the summer it picks up.
But yeah, so to have those,
that stuff just tied into the system,
me being able to click a couple of buttons
and just see it drain my
account, it's amazing.
(both chuckle)
- And are you across what
Single Touch Payroll is?
Are you ready for that?
- Yes, yeah, I've just gone through
the process of setting it up,
which was very easy
but it's just always nerveracking to know
that the ATO can see even
more about my business.
- They could always see it,
you've just made it a little bit easier
and hopefully it'll remove some friction
out of your business, as well, for you.
- That's exactly right.
- So in terms of, where's
the business going?
So, you've got a great
regional presence here,
you're the number one
tourist attraction in town,
where do you go from here?
- So, look, we've spent the last six years
building our reputation as a brewery.
So we've won a large number of awards
for the quality of our products,
including, we got number 97
in the Hottest 100 Independent
Craft Beers this year.
- [Trent] What's
the bestselling product
that you actually have?
- [Tim] The bestselling
product's the Ginja Ninja.
- [Trent] I haven't
tried that one yet
but I'm sure I'll do it before I leave.
- [Tim] I'll make sure you do.
- [Trent] Good,
looking forward to it.
- That's our alcoholic ginger beer.
But yeah, so obviously, as
we've built that reputation
and we've built a brand,
we're now focusing on
increasing production
and so our next expansion plans
hopefully will come in the
next 12 months to two years
and that will be another
$5 million investment,
so if there's an investors out there
who wanna throw some money
and tell 'em to come and talk to me.
- [Trent] Nothing
like a bit of a plug.
- (chuckles) That's right.
But that will allow us
to max out our production
at 1.8 million liters
and that will allow us to hopefully,
more or less, saturate our direct region.
- How many liters are
you doing at the moment?
Just out of interest.
- We're doing around the 200,000.
So again, it's obviously--
- So that's a big expansion,
that's 9x, based off
my basic calculations.
- It's huge.
And it will be,
for us it will be a complete game changer.
It will give us the capacity
to do so much more here
and it will allow us
to just get that product
to all those places,
and obviously a big part of
that's marketing, as well,
so there'll be,
obviously, there's a
budget associated with that
to allow us to really promote the brewery
and get people knowing that it's here.
And I think we've done a good job already
but you can never have enough
people know who you are.
- As a small business
owner, it's not easy,
and a favorite part of my job
is going out to meet small businesses
and I get to meet the very successful ones
and I get to meet some that are
doing it maybe a bit harder.
What's the hard stuff about
being a small business?
What are the things that you've found
or the learnings you've gone through?
- Yeah, look, for us,
our biggest challenge
has been legislation.
Especially being the alcohol industry,
that's a whole nother level
of pain that comes on.
We've been battling for
six years with our council
to try and open our doors fully
and when I say that, of course,
I mean there's certain
aspects of our business
that we have not been
able to have approved
and we're still fighting to
try and get approved now.
- Wouldn't that be a no-brainer?
Given you're the number one,
you're number one on
TripAdvisor for this region,
you would think that that
would be a no-brainer.
- Look, we also,
we're the number one tourism driver
in our council's
Destination Management Plan,
we're one of the top 10 tourism drivers
for the Riverina's Destination
Management Plan (chuckles),
so I would have assumed as much,
but unfortunately, logic doesn't always
have a lot of place in legislation.
So our council's been extremely positive
and tried to help us through it
but whether or not they're
just not creative enough
or whether there is actually
real roadblocks in front of us,
I couldn't tell you.
But it has been an
ongoing challenge for us.
So that's definitely been one
of our biggest hindrances.
And that, of course,
that's slowed down the
process of our business.
So things like, you make projections
and plans on how you're gonna,
when your renovations
are gonna be complete,
when you're using Xero of course,
on how we project our cashflow,
and when we're gonna have these things to,
when they're gonna be opened
and when they're gonna happen
and all those delays and those setbacks,
they change your performance
which then, of course, kills
basically your progress.
And so we ended up a lot further behind
with a lot more finance
than we originally planned
and we've had to fight through that since
and we're continuing to fight through it.
I read a quote once which was,
entrepreneurialism is just
effectively the person
who can sustain the most
pain for the longest.
(both chuckle)
- I like that quote, I
might steal that as my own.
That's a really good quote.
- (chuckles) I was just
like, it's so true.
Like if you can stay and you can persist,
then you'll probably succeed.
But it's so much easier a lot of the time
just to walk away
because it's just so hard
and it's not getting
any easier for anybody.
- Yeah, I mean, look, one
of the things we look at
in Xero Small Business Insights
is we actually look at how
the small business economy overall
is fairing across this great land
and cashflow's still
the number one challenge
for small businesses.
Probably the last quick
question for me is,
we always ask this as well,
if I was the small business genie
and I could make something happen,
and we do get everyone up to the ministers
watching these videos as well,
if you could wish for one thing
that would help you make your business
be the best it could possibly be,
what would it be?
- (laughs) It's gonna sound really shallow
and I don't mean it to.
- That's all right.
- But funding.
For us, whether it be,
whether we're talking about investors
or government funding
- That's not shallow at all.
- or whatever,
it's simply the fact that
the cash allows you to trade.
It allows you to expand your equipment,
it allows you to employ more people,
it allows you to push through
these barriers with council
'cause you can pay people
who can tell them what is
right and what is wrong.
And as much as it'd be great
to have somebody come and fix
our problems with council,
in reality, that does all
of that and so much more.
We're very positive about the future
because we have such a great success
with the reception of our business,
but for me, it's all
about that next phase now
and it's all about raising the capital
to be able to continue winning,
to be able to stay here.
- Well, it's a massively growing industry.
So if people are in Tumut,
they can obviously swing
by seven days a week
and grab a beer.
- That's exactly right.
- Or a ginger ale,
or I think you've got a few other things
up on the menu there.
I'm gonna sample a few
more before I leave.
But if they're not in town,
how would they find you
or how would they sample
one of your products?
- So on our website, all of
our 300 sites are listed there.
- [Trent] Yeah, great.
As well as, we also
have an online web store
that we can sell and
ship to them directly.
- [Trent] Oh, fantastic.
- So, yeah, we would love to
see them place some orders,
we'd love to see some product go through.
- Well, we're definitely gonna order some
for the Xero team down in Melbourne,
so we'll make sure that happens.
But it's been a pleasure to meet you
and thank you so much for
spending time with us today.
I know you're very busy, of course,
and we really appreciate it,
thank you so much.
- Thank you.
