The Sunday Times Magazine • 37when BrewDog won a home-brewing
competition sponsored by Tesco, which
offered them a contract to stock their beer.
The first day BrewDog appeared on the
shelves, Watt recalls “standing in the aisle in
Fraserburgh, accosting old grannies telling
them, ‘This is the beer I made down the
street.’ ” Soon enough Sainsbury’s picked up
BrewDog too. The revolution had begun.
The company quickly started looking
abroad, opening its first international bar in
Stockholm in 2013. Watt didn’t have a lot of
time for holidays in those early years. “Our
initial export strategy was ‘Let’s send beer
to places I want to visit’, ” he says. “Because
then it kind of counts as a holiday. How can
we send beer to Tokyo so I can go and hang
out there for a few days?”
Sustaining the kind of growth required to
turn BrewDog into a world-beater proved
onerous. It’s a familiar start-up tale: do-or-
die founders and ambition that rapidly
outstripped good governance. As with many
private companies, its board is mainly
composed of its own senior executives; and
Watt and Dickie still own half the company
between them (Watt says the pair have
“never had a major disagreement”). It was
only in September last year that the City
grandee Allan Leighton lent his
respectability to BrewDog, becoming its
first full-time professional chairman.
“The scale and speed we’ve gone — that
comes with a whole host of challenges,”
Watt says. “It’s tough on the team, it’s tough
on the company, it’s tough to do.”
He admits some people were poorly
treated in the quest for rapid growth. One
employee, Janine Molineux, a financial
accountant, reported that on her first day in
2017 she was told: “If you see James Watt
walk down those stairs, don’t make eye
contact with him.” In January 2018
Molineux told Watt that her father had been
diagnosed with terminal cancer. She was
fired the following day, the company says
due to performance issues and independent
of anything to do with the CEO. Watt says
this was an unfortunate accident of timing
rather than anything malicious, but in an
“ideal situation” he might have inquired
after her general welfare behind the scenes
following the cancer revelation.The Molineux case is not an outlier. Many
ex-employees say they fear Watt because of
his willingness to threaten legal action and
his use of private investigators. This is why
they sought strength in numbers through
Punks With Purpose. The collective is run by
a small group of former BrewDog employees
including Charlotte Cook, 33, a brewer who
worked there from 2012 to 2014. One of its
founders is Rob Mackay, 37, a marketing
executive who left in 2018 and now works
for a rival, Drygate. Mackay said his time at
BrewDog left him “mentally damaged”.
“We have experienced and heard of
multiple accounts of people terrified of
being in James’s presence, whether one-on-
one in his office or across the bar when he
inspects them,” Punks With Purpose says.
In 2019 BrewDog commissioned a
company-wide survey undertaken by an HR
firm that revealed employee satisfaction to
be minus 19. At head office it was a dismal
minus 54.
“I fully accept that I’ve been too intense,
too demanding as a manager,” Watt tells
me. “At times I miss the social cues that
would enable me to kind of review that
situation and then maybe don’t course
correct. I can understand why people felt
the way they did in regards to my leadership
style.” He says he doesn’t shout or smash
things, as has been alleged, but it’s notdifficult to imagine him bringing a harsh
intensity to bear that could crush a young or
new employee. This is a man, after all, who
takes ice baths in the morning because they
help him realise that “any other challenge
today is going to be less intense than sitting
in this thing for 90 seconds”.
He admits he is not “massively blessed”
with patience and becomes “very fixated on
timelines”, leading him to “push hard” to
make “unrealistic expectations happen”. He
concedes that “we haven’t done enough for
people. Have I pushed too hard? Yes. Have
we always been the best employer? No.”
Watt is now working with Leighton
to find an “optimal leadership style that
means that people don’t feel scared or
intimidated”, while also trying to retain the
intense drive that has made BrewDog such
a success. The company also brought in a
consultancy, Wiser, to review its internal
culture and has introduced an ethics
hotline and salary reviews. It is understood
that profit-sharing and equity proposals are
in the works.
Yet despite Watt’s admissions of error,
some of his critics say he is still behaving as
a bully, intimidating would-be and actual
whistleblowers. Punks With Purpose
described taking on BrewDog as
“terrifying”, claiming that Watt “has
behaved in a combative mannerIT SHIPS ITS MOST
POPULAR BEERS —
INCLUDING PUNK
IPA, HAZY JANE AND
ELVIS JUICE — TO
55 COUNTRIES.
IT’S EVERYWHERE
The small industrial
unit in Fraserburgh,
Aberdeenshire,
where the company
began in 2007An artistic rendering of a 30,000 sq ft rooftop bar planned for the
Las Vegas Strip this year, with swimming pool and retro games zone➤
BREWDOG