“The party is over my friend. They are shutting Terrapin down at the end of September.”

He did not have all the details yet. He was in Costa Rica at the time, taking training in Qigong. (That fact got me thinking about a book Spike recommended several months back that I have been meaning to write about. Strength to Strength. More on that in a future article.)

For those who do not know the Terrapin origin story, here is the short version.

Spike and I were both working at a local Atlanta brewery in 1998 when the Brewers Association brought the Craft Brewers Conference to Atlanta. For Georgia in particular this was a significant moment. Georgia was still a beer desert in those days. High gravity beers over six percent ABV were illegal. Breweries could not sell directly to consumers on site. Sunday sales were banned. Bringing two thousand brewers and industry people into the middle of all that was a deliberate statement. The Brewers Association wanted to put the economic power of craft beer directly in front of lawmakers who had been blocking it for decades.

A few days before the conference started, our manager took the brewing staff to a Braves game for a team building event. Not just any game. It was Opening Day, March 31, 1998, at Turner Field. The Milwaukee Brewers had just moved to the National League that season due to realignment, which is why seeing them in Atlanta was notable enough to warrant a field trip for a group of professional brewers. And come on, it was the Brewers; the irony was not lost on us.

The next morning the owner lost his mind about it. He believed with the Craft Brewers Conference fast approaching, our time would have been better spent cleaning and prepping the brewery to show off to the world. And then, to make his point, he had us outside all day with buckets of blacktop sealer. Repaving the parking lot. With paint rollers. By hand.

That was the day Spike and I decided we were going to open our own brewery.

We came up with the name Terrapin that same week, just a couple of days before the conference began. We named it after the Grateful Dead song Terrapin Station. Spike had spent several summers in his younger days following the band. We even invented a little turtle hand gesture that we used whenever we passed each other in the halls of the conference. That was the birth of Terrapin Beer. Born in spite, named after a song, launched four years later on a personal credit card.

Fast forward to today. Terrapin Beer is owned by Tilray Brands, a cannabis company originally out of British Columbia. Tilray expanded aggressively into craft beer starting in 2020 with the purchase of Sweetwater Brewing in Atlanta, then kept going. Green Flash and Alpine in 2021. Montauk in 2022. Eight brands from Anheuser-Busch in 2023 including Shock Top, Breckenridge, Blue Point, 10 Barrel, Redhook, and Widmer Brothers. Four from Molson Coors in 2024 including Terrapin, Hop Valley, Revolver, and Atwater. Then Brewdog in 2026, making Tilray the fourth largest craft brewing company in the country behind Yuengling, Sierra Nevada, and Boston Beer.

That is a lot of breweries. Even so, all those breweries only account for 29% of Tilray’s overall business. Which is exactly why what happened next makes sense from an overall business perspective. (Get ready for the corporate buzzwords!) Tilray began implementing Project 420, “a business optimization plan designed to consolidate production, streamline operations, and improve the Company’s cost structure. Activities implemented under the plan included the closure and consolidation of certain brewery and related facilities, including Redhook, Terrapin, Atwater, Hop Valley, and Revolver.”

After making some calls and talking to a few people, here is what I learned. The Terrapin brand is not going away. Tilray plans to open a Terrapin taproom in downtown Athens, which makes sense considering the current facility sits in an industrial area a couple of miles from downtown. Production will shift to other Tilray breweries, most likely Sweetwater. The production brewery itself closes at the end of September. Supposedly, the warehouse in Athens will remain and serve as a storage and shipping hub for several Tilray brands.

Tilray may know its numbers. But here is what Tilray does not know. Here is why this “smart” business move hits differently, at least for me.

The Cochran kids grew up in that building. When my daughter was born, Irina worked full time at the brewery and had a crib set up in her office. Before Terrapin expanded and needed more office space, we kept a private room upstairs where the kids would hang out while we were working or were there on weekends for tours and events. We spent the night there often. The kids had a TV and VCR combo set up in what would later become the QA/QC lab, and all our Disney movies were stacked in the corner. Toys everywhere.

More than once a parent on the Terrapin tour would come to the bar asking if anyone had seen their kid. Our first instinct was always to check upstairs and see if they had wandered up to play with ours. The Cochran kids were into geocaching then, so we set one up at the brewery which they would keep stocked. My oldest son’s first job in high school was working at Terrapin. Addison worked in the back doing odd jobs like cleaning and painting kegs. He purposely did not tell the others that he was related to the owners; he wanted to be treated like one of the crew.

Spike lived in the brewery full time when we first opened. He would find himself walking into the brewery in the middle of the night just to check on things. Always on duty, 24 hours a day.

We both met some of the most important people in our lives in that building. People met their spouses there. We hosted multiple weddings, several family reunions, and more charitable events for the local community than I can recall. Several of our friends now, two decades later, started as employees or even part time tour volunteers. We met and enjoyed spending time with many local and touring musicians. After one big event, the McCoury Brothers and the rest of the Del McCoury Band ended up at our bar after hours. That was a pretty good night.

The brewery was Terrapin’s best marketing tool. It was our policy that we would not consider a new distribution market unless the decision makers at the distributor made the trip to Athens to see us first. Seeing Terrapin meant seeing us. The brewery defined the brand in a way that no logo or label ever could.

And now it is closing.

When Terrapin took a minority investment from Molson Coors back in 2011, everyone said big beer was going to kill craft. The pitchforks came out. We sold out, they said.

In hindsight Molson Coors treated Terrapin, and its employees with respect. Yes, they shifted some production of Hopsecutioner, Terrapin’s flagship IPA. But they kept the Athens brewery open. Expanded it even. They spent money in the local community and hired more people. I have to assume it was similar for the other breweries in their portfolio. As brewers themselves, Molson Coors understood what it meant to have built something in a specific place with specific people.

Tilray is running a different kind of math. They are not wrong. The numbers make sense. Eighteen brewing facilities is too many and consolidation is the rational move for Tilray overall. But does it make sense for Terrapin individually? Only time will tell.

All I know is it stings on a personal level when the facility being consolidated is the one where your daughter took her first steps.

The brand will continue. But the brewery where it all started, where Spike had a full apartment, where our kids had a playroom and spent half their childhood, where strangers became friends at the bar, that brewery closes at the end of September. And it will not reopen.

On September 25, the official last day of production, Irina and I are going to drive up to Athens and have one last beer there. Who am I kidding? We’ll have several. Spike will be there for that. And hopefully many of the Terrapin crew from the last 24 years. We are treating it as one last Terrapin family reunion at the place where it all began. If any Terrapin fans want to join us for one last pint, come find us. Friday, September 25. 3-9pm. 265 Newton Bridge Rd. See you there!

Not financial advice. Personal experience you can use.

[JACKASS = JAmes Chambers Kick Ass Summer Social. ]

Every year a group of Georgia Tech Phi Taus gather at our place on Lake Hartwell in memory of Jim Chambers, our fraternity brother, and former Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Ole Miss, who perished in a house fire in 2016.

Jim is one of the reasons I am in the beer business. I never got the chance to tell him that.

In December of 2015, only three months before Jim passed, I wrote a post for my blog at Terrapin about how I got into the beer business. Buried in there is a small detail about a beer bottle collection Jim had on the wall of room 8 at the Phi Kappa Tau house at Georgia Tech. I saw that collection as a freshman and decided to start my own. That decision, more than any other, led to me spending almost 30 years of my life in the craft brewing industry.

I am sharing that blog post again now, unedited, exactly as I wrote it in 2015. https://johnatterrapin.wordpress.com/2015/12/11/how-i-got-into-the-beer-biz-part-1/

How I got into the Beer Biz – Part 1

December 11, 2015 by JohnatUpCountry

The one question I’m most asked when people find out I own a brewery is, “How did you get started in the beer business?” Or some such variation. Since I still get asked that question over and over even after 20 years in the craft beer industry, I figure it’s about time to try put my story down in writing. I am going to ramble a bit so hang in there and I hope you find this somewhat interesting.

Like it does for most of us, my history with beer goes back to my teenage years. Growing up in the late 80’s, I knew I wanted to be a military pilot. This was the time period of “Top Gun” and I’m sure I’m not the only one that saw myself as Maverick flying inverted and keeping up foreign relations.

In high school I applied for admittance to the Air Force Academy and earned an alternate nomination. Rather than wait to see if I got in, I took my name off the list and figured I could do ROTC in college instead. So in 1987 I started as a freshman at GA Tech with the intent to study AeroSpace Engineering.

While a freshman at Ma Tech and only 17 years old I joined Phi Kappa Tau Fraternity. I could tell tons of stories about my time there but some things are better left unsaid. What I can say is that Chambers and Barney in room 8 could be the reason I am where I am today. They had a beer bottle collection on the wall of their room, inherited from Bosomworth I assume, and I thought it was really cool. Impressionable youth that I was, I decided to start my own collection. Over the course of the next couple of years, I had pretty much bought out every style and size of domestic light lager it was possible to find. Like any collector does, I kept searching for items I did not have. And since I had to actually drink the beer in order to keep the bottle, I began to build an appreciation for the taste of better beers.

By the time 1989 rolled around it was obvious I was not meant to be an engineer. After all, how many students at GA Tech actually take history and political science classes to keep their GPA up? Or have an English professor tell them to consider majoring in English? (Should I mention I actually made the square root club after one particularly bad quarter and a bout of mono? Nah.) So I did what any young man would do – I switched schools to be closer to my girlfriend.

Starting at UGA I continued the tradition of looking for new beers I had never tried. By the time I was a senior I even tried home brewing once or twice. The initial results were not good but I knew I had a passion for better beer.

Upon graduating in 1993 my wife and I moved to Seattle, WA. This move sealed my fate. At the time I left GA there were no local breweries and in Seattle I had found beer paradise. I will never forget going to a local pizza place just after arriving. It must have had at least 16 taps. Back home in the GA I had just left it was unusual to find a bar that had more than six taps. And those six taps were usually all domestic beers. If you were lucky you might find Heineken or Guinness in the mix. But this Seattle pizza place not only had several taps but they were almost exclusively all local beers!

Since my degree from UGA was in Risk Management and Insurance, my first job in Seattle was of course selling insurance. Six months after I started my boss pointed out my affinity for local beers and suggested I get involved with the brewing community to help them with their insurance needs. I decided he was right. I did belong in the craft beer community. But not for the purpose of selling life insurance.

My wife and I moved back to GA in late 1994 after our year long honeymoon in Seattle. By this time there were two breweries in GA, Marthasville Brewing Company and Atlanta Brewing Company (now Red Brick Brewing). I went knocking on the doors at Marthasville first. Imagine me as a 25 year old kid confidently telling the owner how I was going to open my own brewery soon and wondering if he had any pointers for me. (This is why I always help anyone I can that comes to me asking for advice on opening a brewery – I used to be that person.)

George Lamb, one of the owners at Marthasville, told me the best thing I could do would be to work in a brewery for some time to see how things ran. Unfortunately he did not have any positions open but he would be happy to let me come in and volunteer my time for free. Made sense to me!

So I found two part time jobs at restaurants – fry cook at Applebee’s and server at Red Robin, to allow me the free time to drive 50 miles each way and work for free at the local brewery. (Thank God I had a supportive wife. I never would have been able to break into this industry without her. Here’s to you, Irina.) After 2-3 months of free labor sweeping floors and washing kegs, I was offered a job at Marthasville making $5 per hour. I was ecstatic! And I was officially on the inside of the craft beer industry.

Jim never knew what that bottle collection started. I think about that sometimes. How many small things we do without realizing they are setting something in motion for someone else. A collection on a fraternity room wall. A conversation. A book handed to a friend. We rarely get to see where those things land.

This weekend, several of us got together the way we do every year. John Ridgley brought several of his homebrews, as did Pote’s son, Sebastian. We swam, cooked out, drank, and reminisced about the old days. Jim never opened a brewery. But somehow that bottle collection helped start two of them. And maybe more importantly, it gave a bunch of fraternity brothers one more reason to keep getting together every summer.

I wrote about building the store in Part 1. This is the honest 30 day report card. The short version: building the store was the easy part. Marketing it is not.

The First Sale

The store had two orders in 30 days. Two. One of them was me buying samples. So the real customer count is one person.

That person was my friend Ed Irvin. He bought the UpCountry Outdoors logo tee in black and forest green without being asked. When I thanked him he texted back:

“No thanks needed. Just wanted to support a friend who has given me a ton of support over the years too. I felt like it was the least I could do.”

I have been in business long enough to know that the first sale is never really about the money. Ed did not buy because he needed a shirt. He bought because he wanted to support something I was building. That matters more to me than the dollar amount and I will not pretend otherwise.

But one friend buying two shirts is not a business. It is a starting point.

What I Got Wrong

When it comes to marketing UpCountry Outdoors there are three main things I got wrong.

First, I have not added a single new product to the store since it launched four weeks ago. I initially set a goal of one new item per week. The store should have nine or ten products by now. Instead it has only the original five. This is the same pattern I described in the Entrepreneur Mindset article — I tend to start strong, get distracted, and move on to the next shiny thing. The next shiny thing in this case was writing about crypto wallets, credit cards, and generally obsessing over what is happening in the market right now. The store suffered for it.

Second, my social media posting has been inconsistent. After researching various ways to promote UpCountry Outdoors, I decided to use a combination of TikTok and Instagram as the main way to acquire new customers. Since launching the store 4 weeks ago, I have released six videos. Six videos in 28 days is not enough. The algorithm rewards near daily content, not one post every five days. TikTok and Instagram need volume to figure out who to show your content to. Six posts is nowhere near enough data for either platform to understand my audience.

Third, I have been making product content instead of value content. Here I am at the airport launching a store. Here is what the hat looks like. Those are fine as occasional content but they are not what builds an audience. The content that actually builds an audience in this space should educate and entertain. Content that teaches something useful while also making people laugh. The product does not even have to appear. In fact the best outdoor lifestyle content rarely leads with the product at all. It leads with the lifestyle and lets the viewer connect the dots. I have not made that content yet. I know what it looks like and I have not made it. That is the gap between where I am and where I need to be.

Truthfully, I dread making video content so I postpone it until later. I have no issue sitting down to write a substack article or a LinkedIn post, but the thought of putting my face and voice in front of the camera makes me uncomfortable. So I avoid it.

Stop Watching The Scoreboard

There is a temptation when you have a new store to check the analytics constantly. How many sessions today. How many yesterday. Why did no one buy. But this is the wrong focus entirely.

The only thing that moves the sales number is activity. Make the next video. Add the next product. Write the next post. Show up where your customer is, consistently, and give them a reason to care. The sales are a lagging indicator of the work. They show up after the work, not instead of it.

I learned this with Terrapin Beer before I even knew it was a lesson. In the early days of Terrapin, Dustin Watts and I traveled to Asheville to meet with a potential distributor. Our brewery was only a couple of years old and doing less than 1,000 barrels per year. At the time, Gerry Sigmon was the general manager at Skyland Distributing. He asked us how a brand our size, with no physical location, was outmarketing breweries ten times bigger.

The answer was that we had no choice but to show up. We were a contract brewery with no facility to manage. Sure, that meant no production problems to solve and no equipment to maintain. But that also meant no location to market and no tours where people could visit. Everyone in the industry knows the location where the beer is made is by far a brewery’s best marketing vehicle. And early on we did not have that. All we could do was go to every festival, every event, and pour samples for anyone who would take one.

Nobody bought Terrapin beer because we had a clever marketing strategy. They bought it because we kept showing up. Every weekend. Same popup canopy tent. Same folding table. Same team who clearly believed in what they were pouring.

UpCountry Outdoors needs that same energy applied digitally. Post consistently. Add products consistently. Show up online where hammock and hiking people already spend their time and give them something worth watching. Activity drives sales. It always has. Most times it just takes longer than you want it to.

What Is Actually Encouraging

Before I make this sound like a complete disaster, some context.

The store has had over a hundred sessions in 30 days with essentially zero marketing. People are finding it through Instagram, through Google search, and through direct links. A traffic spike in late May correlated directly with two posts I made that week which proved something important. Post content and it drives traffic. The model works. It just needs more consistency than I have given it.

I’m giving myself until year end to prove this works. In retail, online especially, the majority of annual sales happen between October and December. I launched in May. I am in preseason right now. The regular season starts in the fall.

The Plan

My goal is one new product per week. The catalog needs to grow.

Three posts per week minimum across TikTok and Instagram. Less announcing, more educating and entertaining. Content that teaches something about hammocks, hiking, or mountain life will outperform content that says hey look at my store.

Launch on Etsy by September 1. Etsy has built in search traffic that Shopify does not. A second channel means a second discovery engine.

Build the email list. I mentioned earlier that TikTok and Instagram are my acquisition channels. Email is different; it is the channel for retention. While social media accounts are great at building a following, you do not own that following. The social media channel does. At any time they can decide to delete your account and you will be left with nothing but starting over. It has happened many times. In contrast, an email list is owned by you. No social media company can take that away. My plan is to build an email list of recurring customers and provide them something of value each month. This will happen over time. For now, the popup to subscribe is live and the welcome email with the discount code is finally delivering. Every session that does not convert to a sale should at least convert to an email address.

The Honest Bottom Line

I treated launching the store as the finish line when it was actually just the starting gun.

The tools work. Shopify and Printful handle the infrastructure. Canva handles the design. The product is real and I believe in it. What I have not done yet is show up consistently enough or create content that gives people a reason to care.

That is the work. And it is harder than building the store.

The next UpCountry update will be about what I am actually learning about content creation and whether any of it is starting to work.

Not financial advice. Personal experience you can use.

This is one of those.

A few weeks ago I decided to build a Print On Demand merch store. I'd done a version of this with the brewery gift shop a few years back, so the model wasn't completely foreign to me. The idea is simple: design products, list them online, and when someone buys one, a company prints and ships it for you. No inventory. No warehouse. No boxes of unsold t-shirts in your garage. You set it up, point people to it, and theoretically collect a margin on each sale.

I say theoretically because I have not sold a single thing yet. That’s Part 2.

For now, here’s how I built the store.

Step one: picking a niche.

This is where most people get stuck, and where I almost went wrong.

My gut said use UpCountry since I already have the name and logo from the brewery. The original idea for the store was to focus it on everything people love about living near the mountains. Hiking, kayaking, mountain biking, fly fishing, camping. The problem with that list is it’s a buffet. Buffets make money in Vegas, not in brand positioning.

I used ChatGPT to help me think through it. I gave it context about my background, my goals, and the info from a YouTube video I’d watched on niche selection. Then I asked it to interview me until it was 95% confident it could help me pick a lane. It asked me twenty detailed questions — target customer, tone, passion level, what I actually know versus what just sounds good.

The last question hit close to home.

“Are you choosing UpCountry Outdoors because it’s the best niche, or because it feels emotionally familiar from your brewery past?”

Honestly? Both. But I decided that’s not a reason to abandon it. That’s a reason to focus it.

The final answer: hammocks and hiking. Those are my passions and what I know. Also the rewards after the trail (think burger and beers.) Keep it funny, easygoing, not hardcore. That’s a real customer. Because it’s me.

Step two: the brand.

I already had the UpCountry Brewing logo from the brewery days. Good bones, badge structure, retro letterforms, illustrated feel. But the red said brewery, not outdoors. And “Brevard, N.C.” and “Brewing Company” obviously had to go.

For now I kept the core art intact, stripped it to a single gold color, removed the city name and brewery bar, and replaced it with “Outdoors.” It is not a full redesign. Think of it as the same logo with a new job. Eventually I want to rework the hammock element and maybe adjust some colors, but that is a later problem. Getting the store live was the priority.

For the design work, I initially got off track. I hired an artist on Fiverr to design a tshirt logo based on my idea. What I got back was so off direction that I just wrote off that $25 and doubled down on learning Canva myself. ($18 per month after a free trial.) If you haven’t used it, it’s worth knowing. Not as powerful as professional design software, but fast, intuitive, and good enough to get started without hiring anyone. Fair warning: I did spend several hours and watched a few YouTube videos to get the hang of it. Turns out it was more satisfying to do them myself anyway.

Step three: the store.

The first order of business was securing a domain name. I used GoDaddy since I had a prior account with them. For the storefront I used Shopify and chose Printful to handle printing and fulfillment. The two platforms connect directly. When someone places an order on Shopify, Printful gets it automatically, prints it, and ships it. I never touch the product.

Setup took longer than I expected. Not because it’s complicated, but because there are a lot of small decisions. Shipping settings, tax settings, product descriptions, sizing charts, banner images, store colors. None of it is hard. All of it takes time.

So what does it actually cost before I sell a single item? GoDaddy runs about $2.50 a month amortized over the year. Shopify is $39 a month after a generous intro period. Canva is $18 a month. Printful costs nothing until I sell something. I also need to order samples to check quality and placement before I promote anything — four shirts and a hat ran me about $80 with shipping at Printful's discounted sample rate. And once I start building an email list I'll use Klaviyo to manage it, which is free until I hit 250 subscribers and then runs $20 a month. Call it roughly $80 in one-time startup costs plus $60 a month in ongoing fixed costs. At $15 margin per shirt, I need to sell about nine shirts just to break even in month one. After that it drops back to four a month. That's the bar. Not a high bar, but it's real money until I clear it.

Where things stand.

The store is live with four shirts and one hat listed. The tagline is Hike. Hang. Repeat. The hero image is a hammock, my hammock, strung between two trees at the lake. It looks like what it is — a real brand with a clear point of view.

Go take a look: upcountryoutdoors.com

I have set a goal of adding one new item per week. But first I need to find customers. As of today the only people that know about this online store for UpCountry Outdoors are you, the readers of this substack article. So a huge welcome to you, my only fans! ;-)

Finding customers is the part I’m actively researching now. It looks like it will involve TikTok, Instagram Reels, building an email list, and potentially reaching out to people in the hammock community. I have not quite figured it out yet which means it’s exactly the kind of thing I should be writing about.

Part 2 coming soon.

A few of the tools I used to build this. If a link is attached, it is an affiliate link. If you sign up through them, we both get a small bonus. I’d recommend them regardless.

GoDaddy — where I registered the domain.

Shopify — the storefront. First month free, then three months at $1. https://shopify.pxf.io/rE2ZjG

Printful — printing and fulfillment. Free until you sell something.

Canva — design tool. Free version gets you pretty far.

Fiverr — I used it, got burned, tried again myself. Still worth knowing about. https://www.fiverr.com/pe/xX0b9R1

Not financial advice. Personal experience you can use.

I’ve come to believe it’s equal parts blessing and curse. For me, it shows up as this constant, almost compulsive need to start something new. That’s the blessing part — the energy, the ideas, the inability to sit still. My wife would tell you it’s not always a blessing for her. When we moved into our current house, she immediately saw it as a beautiful place to host weddings and events. A joyous hobby. A way to help people celebrate something special.

I saw a business.

Within a month I had built a webpage, created a Facebook account, set up email marketing, and started advertising. She pumped the brakes — hard — and rightfully so. We eventually settled on three or four events a year, which has been great. But left to my own devices, I would have had us fully booked every weekend before she realized what happened.

That’s the blessing. Here’s the curse.

The same brain that generates all that energy makes it nearly impossible for me to stick with anything.

Don’t believe me? Here are most of the jobs I've held over the past forty years — the first eighteen of them crammed into about fifteen. Heck, I’m sure I’ve forgotten a couple.

• Dishwasher — Boardwalk & Baseball Theme Park (I was 17. The chefs thought I was 21. Must have been the mustache.)

• EDIT: (Knew I would miss one.) McDonald’s. 1988. Lake Wales, Fl. We set a record for number of cars through the drive through in one hour. Don’t recall exactly but it was well over a hundred.

• Preload — UPS (4am to 9am. So stressful I had nightmares about cardboard boxes.)

• Campaign Staff — Georgia Lieutenant Governor Candidate Matt Towery (One of only three full-timers. Reported directly to the campaign manager and met more than a few Atlanta political bigwigs.)

• Hot Dog Cart Operator (details below)

• Cold Caller — Dial America (details below)

• EDIT: (Missed another one. Irina reminded me of this one. I recalled it as just an interview but she recalls me working here for a few days at least.) Funeral Home Overnighter. Seriously. There was a cot and a tv in the basement. Shift was full overnight. I could sleep,study, watch tv, whatever. Just needed to be there to answer the phone. They wanted a live person to respond. When they told me I could begin to accompany them on death calls, I moved on.

• Insurance Sales — The New England (Straight from UGA to Seattle where I knew no one. Tough gig, but I made my own schedule. Somehow found time to go skiing with Irina most Wednesdays.)

• Assembly Line Temp — Seattle (Stood in line every morning to see if we got picked to work. Full days stuffing Microsoft or Intuit floppy disks into packaging.)

• Seasonal Delivery Driver — UPS

• Delivery Driver — Norwalk Furniture (received tips and got to keep people’s old furniture)

• Server — Red Robin (I sucked at this.)

• Fry Cook — Applebee’s (Also sucked at this. These two jobs convinced me to open a production brewery instead of a restaurant. I forgot that lesson by the time UpCountry came around.)

• Filler Operator/Brewer — Marthasville Brewing (first brewing job. Learned a lot about what to do — and what not to do.)

• Medical Warehouse Order Filler

• Cellarman — Atlanta Brewing Company (this is where the idea for Terrapin was born.)

• Attempted Real Estate Investor (Scoured the AJC classifieds and met people willing to sell with zero down. Got close. No cigar.)

• EDIT: (This is the 3rd job I forgot to mention in the original article.) Delivery Driver - Atlanta Beverage. (This was the Anheuser Busch distributor in Atlanta. I worked there one summer between Atlanta Brewing and Thunderhead. The most hardworking group I ever met. I was put on a route delivering Bud/Bud Light mostly out in rural GA west of Atlanta. We would drop 500+ cases at a time. Worked from 6:30am until we finished. Could be 12 hours later. If another employee had finished and was heading home, if they saw our truck they would stop and help us finish up. I’ll never forget that. )

• Delivery Driver/Salesperson — Thunderhead Distributing (This is where I met several alcohol people in Atlanta and Athens — and found Terrapin’s first customers, because they already knew and trusted me.)

• Delivery Driver/Salesperson — Golden Flake (Once Terrapin launched, Georgia law required me to quit Thunderhead. After delivering beer for two years, potato chips were easy.)

• Georgia 8th Grade State Essay Examiner

• Co-founder/President — Terrapin Beer Company

• Founder/Owner — UpCountry Brewing Company

• Writer — Founder Reboot (for now)

That last one is slightly sarcastic. But only slightly.

Two of those deserve a little more airtime.

The hot dog cart was 1993. I had just graduated from UGA in December, but my fiancée Irina still had one quarter left, so I stayed in Athens. I was already working UPS Preload — 4 to 9 in the morning — and picked up a second job running a cart for a guy named John Gundaker, the self-described original hot dog man of Athens. John was a one-man operation who hired me to run a second cart outside the Georgia Theatre, starting around nine at night.

Athens bars closed at 2am. Which meant that right as several hundred people spilled out onto the street looking for something to do before heading home, there I was. Hotdogs. Cash only.

John taught me to make a show of it — banging the tongs on the cart, being loud and outgoing. This did not come naturally to me. I am an introvert. But you figure it out when you’re standing outside alone at midnight and people have other options.

I was usually the last person on the street. Got to know a couple of the homeless regulars. Walked the cart back to a storage alley at 2 or 3am with hundreds of dollars in cash in my pocket, prepped it for the next day, then went straight to UPS at 4am. A few months of that and I had a real appreciation for people who grind two jobs without complaint.

Dial America was around the same time — pure cold calling, which I hated with every fiber of my being. One Saturday morning they handed us a list of Hawaii leads and nobody caught the time difference until about ten minutes in. Another time I was selling TV Guide subscriptions to prospects in Manhattan when someone threatened to have me arrested. I just laughed. The best assignment was calling credit card holders “just to check in” — we were authorized to offer lower rates if they asked for one. So the whole game became figuring out how to get someone to bring up their rate. I got pretty good at going completely off-script, talking about the weather, their weekend, whatever it took, until they circled back around to the thing I needed them to say.

I bring all this up because it’s directly relevant to Founder Reboot itself.

Go back and look at my posting history. Two articles in June 2025. Nothing for five months. Four more in November. Then nothing again until March of this year. Same curse. Same shiny object problem. I’ve been doing this my whole life — before I retired I told my wife to expect exactly that from me. He’ll try something, get excited, move on. I knew it. She knew it. I’d spent years treating it like something to fix.

But here’s what I finally figured out: what looks like a flaw from one angle looks completely different from another. The same restlessness that made me a lousy employee turns out to be pretty useful when you point it in the right direction. I’m not going to sit still long enough to write the same newsletter forever. But I will try new things, report back honestly, and let you decide what’s worth your time. That’s the deal.

I’m not here because I have all the answers. I’m here because I can’t stop starting things, and I might as well make that useful for someone.

Speaking of which — that cold calling experiment I’ve been running for a friend? I’m pausing it. Not quitting exactly, but stepping back. He went back to basics, called some old clients and old contacts, and landed several new jobs that way. Cold calling strangers was never his real problem. Working in the business instead of on it was. So we’ve shifted. I’m going to focus on warm conversations — friends, family, people I already know — and mention his work naturally when it comes up. (If you need a website or hosting, call Clay at Steamworks!) And I’ve offered to help him think through his social media, which right now consists of one post every two or three months.

In the meantime, I’ve been spending the freed-up time on something that actually energizes me. Ever wanted to do a merch store using Print on Demand? That’s the next one, so stay tuned.

Grade? D. Maybe a C- if I’m being generous.

I’m not calling it a failure because I did take action — and that’s the real first step. But between the setup and the follow-through, I left some points on the board.

The process worked fine. My goal was 50 prospects a week. I scored 53 websites, had AI rank them for conversion potential, and found 11 that looked like real opportunities. That part went exactly as planned.

Then I got in my own way.

I hate cold calls — said so in the last post. So instead of calling, I sent introductory texts to all 11. Here’s what I sent:

“Hi [Name] – this is John, I’m local in Westminster. I took a look at your website and noticed a couple of things that are probably costing you calls. Mind if I send you a quick summary of what I found?”

Two replied. One was Jheremy. He said he was done with his website and only taking word-of-mouth referrals. Fair enough — I told him word of mouth is the best kind of business and wished him luck. Clean exit.

The other was David. He said sure. So I sent him the actual findings — a blank Team page, a FAQ page with placeholder text, and the point that his Google reviews were great but his website wasn’t backing that up. I asked when was a good time for a two-minute call.

He read it. March 16th. I haven’t heard back.

Then I went and hiked a section of the Appalachian Trail for a week. Great trip. No regrets. But I came back to find two and a half weeks had passed since I first reached out. That warm lead is probably cold by now.

So here’s what I learned.

Have a timeline, not just a process. I had steps. I didn’t have a schedule. After X days, send a follow-up. After Y days, move on. Without that, things just drift.

Drop the all-or-nothing thinking. When I took the hiking break, I let everything slide with it. One pause turned into a full stop. I've always been my own harshest critic — that's gotten me places, but it's also gotten in my way. The trick is to not let the self-criticism become the reason you quit.

Get back at it anyway. That’s the real test. Not whether you stumble — you will. Whether you pick it back up.

So that’s what I’m doing. I’m going back to those open leads this week and starting a fresh 50 for next week.

More to come.

(If you actually need help with a website or hosting, Clay is genuinely good at this. Steamworks.)

He asked if I could help. I said yes.

Here’s where it got interesting.

I spent the better part of two months creating a tracking system and building a Custom GPT that analyzes websites for small service businesses — HVAC, plumbing, electrical, roofing. The kind of hardworking small companies where a better website actually changes someone’s life. My GPT scores their current site and spits out the top three things holding them back from turning visitors into paying customers.

Honestly? Building this system was pure fun. Retired and sitting at my computer creating something useful — the time just disappeared. That’s the version of this phase of life I’m looking for.

Then I finished it.

And realized I had to actually call these people.

I hate cold calls. Always have. Hate making them, hate getting them. If I’m being honest that’s exactly why this project has taken two months instead of two weeks. The GPT and tracking system were done. I just kept tinkering instead of picking up the phone.

But here’s the thing. My friend needs clients. These business owners need better websites. I have a tool that can connect those two things. The only thing missing is me getting out of my own way.

So I’m posting this publicly to hold myself accountable.

The calls start today. I’ll tell you exactly what happens — the rejections, the conversations, whatever works and whatever doesn’t.

That’s what Founder Reboot is for.

👋 Hi, I’m John.

I co-founded Terrapin Beer Company in Athens, GA. We built it from nothing, grew it for over a decade, and sold it to MillerCoors in an eight-figure deal. But the real education happened along the way — taking a scrappy few-person operation and figuring out how to scale it past 100 employees without breaking everything in the process. Then I started UpCountry Brewing in NC. Two locations in Asheville and Brevard. Big ambitions, expensive lessons, and a restaurant component that humbled me in ways I'll be writing about for years.

Almost thirty years of building, grinding, missing family dinners, and figuring it out the hard way.

When I finally stepped away I had money in the bank and told everyone retirement was great. The truth? I was bored.

Not looking-for-something-to-do bored. There are still plenty of projects to do around the house with my wife and I am truly enjoying that time. Instead it was more of a genuinely under-stimulated, not-ready-to-be-finished-in-business bored. I didn’t want the full grind back. But I wasn’t done building.

So I started trying things. And writing about them.

Founder Reboot is the playbook I wish someone had handed me at 25. What I got right. What I got wrong. What it actually cost. Three things, one newsletter:

Founder Files — Real business stories from 30 years in the trenches. Hiring, firing, partners, exits, and the moments nobody puts in the highlight reel. I'm not the guy who teaches you how to run a Fortune 500 — I'm the guy who figured out how to get from three employees to a hundred, and learned the hard way that at a certain point I was the biggest thing holding the company back. Plus the stuff I'm trying right now, because apparently I'm not done yet.

Crypto Notes — I’m learning crypto in real time and writing it all down. Not to hype coins. Because it’s genuinely interesting, I think it matters, and I’d rather learn out loud than pretend I already know.

Money Lessons — 25 specific lessons for the younger generation on building a financial life that works. Not theory. The stuff I learned the hard way so you don’t have to.

Founder Reboot is for the person who knows they want to build something but hasn’t figured out how to start. And for the one who’s already in it and realizing the money side is scarier than they thought.

If I get something wrong I’ll say so. If I learn something the hard way you’ll hear about it.

Subscribe and see if it’s worth your time.

— John

P.S. Reply and tell me what you’re building or thinking about building. I’ll aim posts at the problems you’re actually going to face.