Keynote: Transform Your Business With 1 Simple Question

Speaker 1 [00:24] All right, the last time I was on this stage, I was about, I thought I was a month away from being a first-time dad, um. And it turns out that it was less than a week away, and You know, plans change. Things come at you fast, and all of a sudden you know you've got a nearly 1 year old named Sophie B. Kendall who is doing all these amazing things. Excuse me, I'm getting a little choked up talking about her. Um, but she's crawling, she's almost walking, she's, you know, trying to climb stairs with no fear of gravity. She's just this amazing human, uh, that I'm so lucky to be her dad, and, uh, I'm not trying to bring you all down, like she's amazing. We, she's just growing so fast, and you know, the reason I bring her up is You know, we all try and plan things out and we think that we can see the future and you know we can't. You know I had no idea what I was getting into. I had no idea that this little human being would be dropping upwards of 18 spoons in a feeding while she's covered in banana and mango like. It, it's just amazing. She plays ball with our dog, Dusty Rhodes, you know, she chases the cat, you know, and it's just this amazing thing and my partner Marcy has been so great at taking care of her. And, uh, you know, that the reason I bring all this up is I thought I had a crazy year. And you all had a much crazier year than me. You, you know. The last time I was up here, you know, we thought, you know, the big issue was a can shortage and labor shortages, and that can crunch turned into a minimum order quantity fiasco. It was CO2 shortages for, you know, some, rising cost of goods, more labor shortages, and now potentially a railroad strike. We had a convergence of the beverage, alcohol and non-alk industry that is now moving at hyper speed. When I was up here last. Monster and Constellation was a hot rumor that didn't turn out to be true, or at least it didn't come to fruition, but Monster ended up buying Canarchy. And then who would have thought a cannabis company would be among the biggest acquirers of craft breweries. And now we've got a consumer who's even harder to understand, but that gets me to why we're here these next two days. We come here to share strategies and ideas and network and build partnerships and prepare for what's ahead and try and take advantage of the opportunities. And that's what we're going to do these next 2 days with one of our strongest speaker lineups that we've ever put together, and it all starts with our keynote speaker, Carrie Yunker, the executive vice president of Bell's Brewery. There are few people in this industry who have made the most of, or made more of their opportunities than Carrie Yunker, and if you'll allow me to channel Ari Melber, the nerdy MSNBC commentator who is always uh quoting rap lyrics. She's, Carrie started at the bottom and now she's here. She started at Bell's as a receptionist and she worked her way up over 20 years to be the heir apparent to founder Larry Bell. She now leads the Michigan Craft By as EVP and over the last year, she's helped guide Bell's through Larry Bell's retirement and an ownership change into the Lion Little World family with New Belgium. I've had the pleasure of getting to know Carrie over the last couple of years, and she's one of the most people-focused straight shooting leaders in this industry, and I am so proud to have her as our keynote speaker this year. So please welcome Carrie Yunker to the stage.

Speaker 2 [04:42] Hi, everyone. It is so lovely to be here with all of you today. Justin stole my first two slides, so you'll have to bear with me uh during the introduction. As he said, my name is Kira Juncker. I'm the executive vice president of Bell's Brewery, where I've had the opportunity to work for almost 20 years. And during that time I've had the pleasure of helping to bring our world-class brands like Two Hearted Oberon to fans across the country, all while working alongside an incredible team of coworkers through many different seasons of innovation, growth, and change. And so, as Justin said, unlike many beverage alcohol executives that I know, I don't come from an MBA program. I don't come from the sales and marketing side of the business. I didn't start or inherit the business. I came from the people side of the business. In fact, as you said, I started almost 20 years ago as the receptionist. So let's go on a little bit of a journey, shall we? Flashback to 2003. A friend of mine was working at a temp agency at the time, and she called me up and she said, I'll just never forget the pitch that she gave me. She said, I've got this job and I'm having the hardest time filling it, Carrie, and I can't give it to just anyone. It's got to be someone who can work hard, who can multitask, but most importantly, this has to be someone who has thick skin and can work with a bunch of burly dudes. So I was on a bit of a journey of my own at the time, becoming independent from my parents, going to college, you know, the one, and as someone who is always up for a challenge, without much thought, I said, I'm in. A few days after my friend's phone call, I started at the brewery as employee number 50. And what started as a receptionist role as our company grew quickly became a catch-all for all of the various needs throughout the brewery, everything from payroll administration to tax filing to how do we get uniforms or janitorial services. Often I would be asked that very same question Hey Kiri, what do you think? And I would be tasked with finding solutions. So fast forward a few more years and as our company was growing, so was our leadership team. We had a strong and steady leadership team in many aspects of the business across production and safety and quality and sales and marketing and hospitality, but what we didn't have at the time was someone dedicated to caring for the people who made all of that happen. So what began with my friend's simple question of what do you think and a bit of a catch-all receptionist job. Became my life's passion as I took over the role of caring for the humans who powered our business. And now I told you I started as coworker number 50, and as I stand on this stage together with New Belgium, we are over 1300 coworkers strong, and you can imagine that in that time and over that course of change we've learned a thing or two. One of those early opportunities for learning came in 2007. At our all company meeting, we decided to host anti-harassment training. How progressive of us in 2007. So we hired a local Kalamazoo business consultant, a friend of the brewery's, to come in and host this training. I walk into a room, much smaller than this. The training title sides on the board, and it says sexual harassment training. Great start. So it turns out this version of harassment training was to role play scenarios. Gets better. So you guessed it, yours truly gets called up to the front to role play a scene in which myself and my friends and coworkers are in the break room, frankly an all too real scene if I'm being honest. where one of my coworkers is bragging about his conquest with another one of our coworkers' twin sisters, of course, at the same time. And it's my job to role play my response in front of the entire company. So as I took some time to process that day, that very hard day, What struck out to me was that the onus was on me as the woman in the room to get myself out of an uncomfortable situation. The onus was on me to be trained how to deal with boys' talk and dirty jokes and learn how to laugh it off. And as I processed that, I had this moment of clarity where I realized that what my actual job is as a leader. Isn't to teach people how to deal with those scenarios, it's to make sure that those scenarios don't exist in my place of work. Because no one should be made to feel uncomfortable because of their identity, because of whom they love, because of a break room conversation. In fact, we as leaders and business owners should hold ourselves to a higher standard. We need to be, I see you, Mary. We need to be prioritizing the work of creating safe and inclusive environments for our teams. Because our business is not powered by hops and six packs and tanks, our business is powered by people. And our priority has to be to the commitment of creating that safe and inclusive culture. So you're probably wondering, What does this mean? We hear you say that, Carrie, we know that you care for your people and we should care for ours, but what does that actually look and feel like? Well, I have good news and bad news. The bad news is that I can't give you that answer. But the good news is that you can source that answer for yourself. Ask your people, ask them for their perspective. Ask them for what their experiences are like. Ask them a question as simple as the one that my friend asked me. What do you think? Because I promise you that what works for me and my coworkers at Bell's and New Belgium isn't what will work for you and your coworkers, and that's actually what makes this work so meaningful and so personal. One of the personal points of pride for me along this journey was when I had the opportunity to hire our very first dedicated DEI role at the brewery, a gentleman named Jay Maddock. He came to us from his role as executive director of OutFront Kalamazoo. OutFront Kalamazoo is the local LGBTQ plus leading resource center in Southwest Michigan. So Jay came onto our team and he spent his first couple of weeks taking a fine tooth comb to our onboarding process. And after those two weeks I met with Jay and I asked him my favorite question. I said, Jay, what do you think? And he had an enormous amount of feedback. Now it's 2019. This is a point in which Bowles was already being looked at as a leader in this space. But he had a tremendous amount of feedback around here is what someone with a different home life or a different belief system or you know even just a different family structure, here's how they would experience our onboarding process and our benefits. Now we weren't doing it all wrong by any means, we were certainly getting some of it right, and we cared a whole heck of a lot about it, for that I will happily take credit. But our intention didn't match our impact, and we realized we had a lot of work to do because when I heard Jay's feedback, when I asked for my co-worker's feedback, when we saw the stories that were brought to life bravely by rat magnet in our industry, we realized that we needed to prioritize this work at the highest levels of our company. So my first act when I took my job as executive vice president was to hire Courtney Simmons to the senior leadership table at Bell's as our director of diversity, equity and inclusion. Because what we realized not just at Bell's but throughout the craft industry was that the world was changing. The world around us was changing. We were no longer in a space of needing to fill roles with people who could work with burly dudes. We were adding talent, recognizing that each of those people brought a perspective that we needed to ask about and we needed to consider. Because we rely on that feedback every day to make us a better business. And you know what, this work, it's challenging even if you have dedicated resources, and there really is no finish line. Take a deep breath. You and me both, friends, this work is hard and it's scary, and we have seen that the judgments for missteps along the way is swift and it is harsh, and that response alone is a huge detractor from people wanting to begin or commit to continuing this work. But I promise you that if you can see past those scary what if's, if you can commit to practice over perfection, and you recognize that you will get it wrong sometimes. When you deliver on this kind of work for your coworkers, the impact is huge. Because what we as leaders need to be willing to do in this moment is we need to be willing to be brave and we need to be willing to take action. So I think back about 15 years ago. When we at Bell's took a scary action of our own. We were in conversations with outfront Kalamazoo and local community leaders about bringing the very first ride festival to life in Kalamazoo. And this was a community that we knew that we wanted to celebrate and a festival that we knew we wanted to be a part of, but not long. After the sponsorship was announced, the hate mail started to show up at the brewery, and not today's version of internet troll Yelp review takes a quick 30 seconds to tank your Google scores. I mean, people put pen to paper, they spent their own money on a stamp, and they sent us letter after letter telling us how they would never buy our beer again. And do you know what we did with that hate mail? What I personally did with that mail, I threw it in the trash, all of it. Because no amount of hate mail was going to change our belief that every single person deserved an equal opportunity. And do you know what? We've continued to support Outfront Kalamazoo and Pride every year since that first year, and our support and our business has grown every single year. We produced Sparkleberry and release it in June in honor of our LGBTQ plus co-workers. We make thousands of rainbow tap handles and ship them out to accounts across the country, and you will see them in use every day at our own eccentric cafe. And do you know what some of the most meaningful feedback that I've heard in my time in beer? Is from consumers who reach out to us and they tell us that when they walk into a bar and they see that rainbow tap handle, they know that they are safe. They know that they are welcome there. So to all of the entrepreneurs in the room, and like many of our brewery founders before us, we need to be unwavering in our commitment to getting it right, even if it's scary. Because the future success of all of our businesses depends on it. Today's consumer is not the same as yesterday's. Who people are buying from matters as much if not more than what they are buying, and what I think we all need to pay attention to in this room is that that has nothing to do with the products that we make. We can have the most delicious beer, the most impressive, captivating marketing campaign, but if you have not done the work to ask for feedback, to understand if your naming and your artwork. If that matches your intention, you could be missing perspectives that lead to unintended consequences. We had just such a learning opportunity of our own. The very first time that we released Cold Hearted our delicious cold IPA. We do, we released it with this Dea de los Muertos inspired skeleton drawing and this label copy. One of our Latina coworkers reached out to us and she told us what a negative connotation that this had for her community, specifically this idea of being from the wrong side of the tracks at a time when in our country immigration and border control and citizen status was at the forefront of the conversation. And her and I had a great conversation. And we acknowledged our missteps. And we fixed it. That beer lives on. It's just as delicious as ever with this label and this artwork, but what I'm most proud of isn't the beer in the bottle. It's the fact that we had created a culture in which our coworker felt safe sharing that feedback and providing that perspective to us. It's that type of feedback that we rely on every day. To keep us connecting to a broader set of communities and consumers. It's that kind of feedback that helps to drive the long-term success of the business. So at this point, you're probably asking yourself, OK, I'm in, but where do I start? So my advice to you is to be ambitious, set a visionary goal. And then take that breath and take 5 steps back and do at least one small thing, because small thing after small thing is the only way to tackle this work that is so complex. And it is one of these small actions that is perhaps the most memorable and still in practice today at Bell's. So it's 2019. Thanks for staying with me on the time warp as we travel back and forth. We're at our all-company meeting. We'd figured out anti-harassment training by then, luckily. In every formal meeting that we have at Bell's, we start with a safety moment. And as a leadership team, we decided that this year, our safety moment was going to be to ask all of our co-workers to eliminate the phrase, hey guys, when they're addressing a group of people. This wildly culturally acceptable practice, we ask them instead to use terms like friends, humans, teammates. We asked them to remove. This unnecessarily gendered language. Because it didn't accurately always represent all of the humans in the room. And do you know what? That change cost us $0. That change cost us $0 and it took us 5 minutes to communicate. Now we had to commit to that and hold ourselves accountable. So if you think that it is your job to drive revenue and hit business targets, good, because the best way to go about doing that is by being a people leader first. People power your business and your business will only thrive as your people thrive. And the data continues to tell us that this is the right way to build a successful and profitable business. Because ethnically and gender diverse teams offer companies more problem solving capabilities and better solutions. This changing workforce and world around us requires a change to our business practices. We need to recognize that all of our businesses are made better by inclusion-based work. So while the data proves out the business case for this point, I draw my personal passion for this work from my experience and long tenure here in craft beer. Being a woman in craft beer is wild. I see some of you nodding. And understanding what I mean, and I certainly hope that there are many of you who have no idea what I'm talking about. I remember, I remember being in those decision making rooms and having to make space and room for my voice. I remember needing to work harder than my male colleagues in order to have my work be considered equal. I remember asking for years to get to go represent the people side of the business, and finally, after many years, I got to attend one of our most prestigious events, CBC in Washington DC. Where I was one of only a handful of people who represented the people side of the business at the time. And at an after party at a dive bar full of industry elites and now colleagues, I stepped away to use the bathroom. And I was sexually assaulted. And I remember making a choice. I remember choosing not to let that person take away a career and a company and an industry that I loved. And I did what many women do. You shove it way down. You wonder what you did wrong. And you look around the room for your allies. It changes the way that you meet people, it changes the way that you trust people. But in that choice, I also remember. That that's what motivates me to keep going. It's what motivates me to strive for a truly inclusive culture at Bell's. It's this idea that none of my coworkers need to worry about a trip to the bathroom. None of my coworkers have to worry about walking into a room and what would their greeting be like, because they know that the only acceptable response to them is to be treated with love and respect. They know that at Bell's we celebrate, that the best idea wins regardless of where it comes from. And that we recognize and value the inherent self-worth of every employee, full stop. So as proud as I am of frankly both my own personal resilience and the work that we have done at Bell's as a company, the thing that has me the most excited. Is our future. Unless you've been living under a rock, you know that we joined voices with New Belgium Brewing about this time last year. A company which in its own right is a DEI leader and which we share a deep commitment to this work. And we've joined forces in an era and a time when our worlds and our communities feel more divided and more pessimistic than ever. But what our collective histories have taught us is that business and believe it or not, beer has the power to bridge those divides and bring us together and back to a place where we can learn to trust. And the other thing that I have learned is that this work. is actually harder at scale. Even though we have more time and commitment and dollars to be able to give to this work, it's significantly harder at scale. But where we're gonna spend our time. And where I'm going to spend my time. is by continuing the work that I started almost 20 years ago. Because my job in this new era hasn't changed. My job is still to take care of the humans of our business. My job is to create space and to ask for, but most importantly listen to perspectives and viewpoints other than my own. So I will leave you with this team. If nothing else, as you walk away today. And you go back to your teams. I would ask you To ask them for their input, ask for their feedback, ask them a question as simple as the one that my friend asked me. What do you think? Who knows? You never know how far that may get you.

Speaker 3 [28:17] Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Speaker 1 [28:30] I've been doing this a few years and that is the first standing ovation I think I've ever seen a keynote speaker get, so fucking

Speaker 2 [28:39] awesome. Thanks. Time for a damn beer.

Speaker 1 [28:45] So there are a lot of personal things in there and thank you for sharing those and it obviously not easy and yeah, I'm sorry you had to deal with that bullshit. Appreciate that. So, uh, Kraft is in a moment of flux, uh, where there seems to be a shift away from founder-led face of the business model, and for those companies facing a similar change, you've obviously been through this, uh, what advice would you give them?

Speaker 2 [29:18] You know, I would tell those who are fortunate enough to be the leaders that follow Founders that what we need to prioritize is recognizing that in those moments of change, what is really core to your culture. Because things like processes and those pieces, those are not what's important to your culture. What's important to your culture are the things that touch the humans in your business, right? How do you treat them? What do your benefits look like? Those are the things that you need to stay true to and understand what's really important to carry on. And the other piece of advice that I would give you is be intentional about what are those things that you want to leave behind. That everything that we have been doing for 20 years is going to serve us for the next 20. So be diligent in asking those questions and figuring out which of those things is important and do you need to carry on, and what are those things should you intentionally leave behind.

Speaker 1 [30:13] So When a business is going through such a major shift like you all have went through with the integration with New Belgium, how do you maintain that culture, or do you accept that there are going to be some differences?

Speaker 2 [30:28] I think that you embrace the change. You accept that it's going to be different because anything other than that is really not truthful, right? In almost all of these deals, people are like, nothing's going to change. That should be every person's red flag, by the way. Is that nothing is going to change because it is, but what you need to do is be intentional about that those changes are for the better and that your people feel like they have an input into those changes and that everything isn't just happening to them.

Speaker 1 [30:57] How difficult is it to manage those expectations?

Speaker 2 [31:00] It's incredibly hard. It's incredibly hard. And I think the advice I would give is to tell folks, and a lot of what I've spent my last year doing is giving the advice to my coworkers to be patient. To assume positive intention and to ask good questions because in these moments of change, it's really scary and people's natural reaction. is to, is to be scared. And I think you really have to be intentional about making sure that folks know it's gonna be fine. Take a breath. All of these humans around us are great people.

Speaker 1 [31:37] Most of them,

Speaker 2 [31:38] most of them.

Speaker 1 [31:39] Uh, one of the things I really like that you talked about though was there's this paralysis that can happen, you know, and your focus was, you know, start small. And, and I really like that because I feel like you can build and there's, there's less fear of fucking up.

Speaker 2 [31:56] Right. So when I say start small, I mean things like what do your email signatures say, what does your bathroom signage look like, you know, what are you doing with you send out all of these employee surveys we do a lot of surveying and trying to understand, but what do we actually do with that and how are we making sure that our coworkers know that when we're asking for feedback we're utilizing that and so those are some of the ways in which I think folks can start small.

Speaker 1 [32:26] So switching gears a little bit, uh, we're heading into 2023. What do you see as the biggest opportunities for bells?

Speaker 2 [32:33] You know, I think our biggest opportunity, one, we're going to become a national brand finally, so I'm really excited about that. That's been a goal we've had for a while. Pandemic and sale pushed that off, so I'm excited to see that through to completion. And the other thing that I'm really excited about for Bell's is that, you know, as we've joined forces with New Belgium we've really been very strategic about making sure that we're prioritizing our core four brands between those two breweries and. Brands like Oberon and Two Hearted and Voodoo and Fat Tire, you are going to see more of, more dollars behind. We recognize that those are the brands that are powering our business and that consumers are connecting to. And so we will put a lot more horsepower behind those brands in 23. Awesome,

Speaker 1 [33:20] thanks for doing this. Give it up for Carrie Juncker. Thanks

Speaker 3 [33:22] team.