Bill Shufelt On Raising $225 Million To Revolutionize Craft Beer For The Modern Adult

In a world where adult beverages have long been synonymous with alcohol, Bill Shufelt saw something different—a cultural and economic opportunity hidden in plain sight. He successfully navigated the startup ecosystem–scaling, manufacturing, building, and financing his company.

Bill’s company, Athletic Brewing, has attracted funding from top-tier investors like General Atlantic, Keurig Dr Pepper, Blake Mycoskie, and Lance Armstrong.

In this episode, you will learn:

• Bill Shufelt left a successful Wall Street career to build Athletic Brewing after realizing the power of an alcohol-free lifestyle.
• A two-year business planning phase and mission-driven vision laid the foundation for long-term success.
• Vertical integration and owning manufacturing became Athletic’s key quality and supply chain advantage.
• Grassroots marketing—like sampling at races—and e-commerce innovation jump-started early customer adoption.
• Raising capital for a manufacturing-heavy business was challenging but ultimately successful through disciplined, aligned investors.
• Scaling manufacturing requires careful planning around utilization, logistics, and operational costs.
• Deep passion for the mission enabled Bill to endure entrepreneurial lows and build a brand that reshaped modern drinking culture.

 

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About Bill Shufelt:

Bill Shufelt has worked in the financial industry since 2005. He began his career as a trader at KCG Holdings, Inc., and then moved to Point72 in 2011, where he held the same role.

In 2017, Bill became Co-Founder & CEO of Athletic Brewing Company. In 2021, he was appointed Board Member – Chairman of the Adult Non-Alcoholic Beverage Association (ANBA).

Bill Shufelt attended Middlebury College from 2001 to 2005, earning a Bachelor’s degree in Economics. He also holds a CFA, Lapsed from the CFA Institute.

Connect with Bill Shufelt:

• LinkedIn
• Crunchbase
• TheOrg
• RocketReach

Read the Full Transcription of the Interview:

Alejandro Cremades: Alrighty, hello everyone and welcome to the DealMaker Show. Today we have a founder behind an amazing company. I’m a big, big fan—my fridge is full of the beers that he and his team have been putting together. What a remarkable story. Very inspiring—the way they’ve thought about scaling, manufacturing, building, financing—all of the above. I think today’s episode is going to be very inspiring, especially the way they’ve dealt with all types of economic cycles that have come their way.

Alejandro Cremades: So, brace yourself for what’s coming. What a conversation we have ahead of us. Without further ado, let’s welcome our guest today, Bill Shufelt. Welcome to the show.

Bill Shufelt: Thank you so much for having me. Cheers. It’s exciting to be here.

Alejandro Cremades: That’s amazing. So, Bill—

Bill Shufelt: Thank you for the kind words on our beers, also.

Alejandro Cremades: I mean, mega fan—mega fan. It’s going to be exciting to chat about it today. So, Bill, give us a walk down memory lane. How was life growing up for you in Connecticut?

Bill Shufelt: You know, I had a great childhood. It was pretty straightforward—a great family, a great community, a small community. I grew up loving the outdoors, loving sports. I was always in motion.

Bill Shufelt: My calendar was always full. I did every activity under the sun, played at a minimum of three sports year-round—seriously—but usually it was six to eight sports. I generally just loved being in motion, playing outdoors, playing sports. I grew up in a town that was very finance-oriented—we’re just outside New York City.

Bill Shufelt: I left that town for college thinking: finance, finance, finance. That was kind of the life I was on.

Alejandro Cremades: And why finance? Was it just because you were surrounded by a bunch of investment bankers and private equity folks and so forth? How did the whole finance idea come to you?

Bill Shufelt: It was really almost the default path. We definitely came from a wealthy town—my family was definitely not wealthy. We were definitely pretty thrifty, but we had a really nice childhood. A lot of the people I saw doing the best in our town were in finance, so that’s kind of what I aspired to. I attributed that to success.

Bill Shufelt: I also found finance and investing really intellectually interesting. I’ve always been a math and science person, so I went to college with that track in mind. At Middlebury—which was a great educational experience and a great athletic experience—the companies that came to interview people for what I thought were the best jobs were finance companies. So it was Goldman, Lehman, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America—everyone. That was definitely the track I was on. I did finance through college and then 10 years in New York City after that. It was a great start to my career. I loved sharpening my sword, if you will, in the financial field.

Bill Shufelt: So it was a good start.

Alejandro Cremades: Well, I mean, you ended up at Point72—Steve Cohen, probably one of the most successful hedge fund guys and one of the top firms. Now they’re obviously doing a bunch of stuff around startups and things like that. How did you end up there? What was the experience like? Because I’ve heard the culture at Point72 is quite competitive as well.

Bill Shufelt: Yeah. Honestly, it was a perfect fit for me. I’m an extremely competitive person. My default mode is “on.” Of course I can relax, but my favorite state is moving and being “on.”

Bill Shufelt: I can’t say enough good things about Point72. I started in the financial world at Knight Capital Group. I had a really good professor at Middlebury who helped me think through what I was actually interested in within finance, and I really zoomed in on trading. I loved the concept of trading—how fast-paced it was. When I was interviewing at firms, Knight was one of them.

Bill Shufelt: That professor actually said, “I know it’s not the biggest headline firm, but it might be an awesome spot for you to learn the craft of trading.” It was as pure a trading shop as there was.

Bill Shufelt: The firm evolved over time, but at that point in the early 2000s, it was pure trading—NASDAQ—and it was a great seven years at Knight. I worked with amazing people.

Bill Shufelt: Through there, I built relationships with people at SAC and learned of a job opening. I got my CFA and started to move up the investment ladder. Point72 was exactly where I wanted to be. It was at the top of the investment process, high turnover, a lot of trading, very intellectually challenging. The way Steve built that firm and attracted talent—it was the smartest collection of people I will ever be in a room with. The intensity all day was great.

Bill Shufelt: It was as merit-based an organization as you can get. If you show up, you are prepared, and you get it done day in and day out—it was as merit-based and opportunity-driven as you could ask for. I had a great experience there.

Bill Shufelt: And it goes right to the person with his name on the door. He was in that seat every day. The reason it’s known as a competitive environment is because he is literally in the middle of the room, eating people for breakfast—because he is “on.” I really respect how he shows up for work every day and drives the organization forward.

Bill Shufelt: It’s a really talented group of people. I loved my time there and thought I would never leave.

Alejandro Cremades: So I guess from a leadership and team-building perspective, what would be your three biggest takeaways from your time at Point72?

Bill Shufelt: Yeah. So even in that 12 years of finance, I was very fortunate to have both really good leaders and very mediocre leaders. I learned equally as much from both.

Bill Shufelt: One takeaway is that a merit-based, opportunity-driven culture is probably the most important thing. Of course, people love the soft, nice edges of culture, but at the end of the day, there’s nothing more fulfilling than having opportunity and feeling good about the work you’re driving forward. So I took a lot of those merit-based and opportunity-driven elements—that’s definitely one.

Bill Shufelt: Also, especially at both Knight and Point72, one of my original bosses at Knight Capital Group, a guy named Joe, really believed in my potential and kept reinforcing that in me and giving me more and more opportunity.

Bill Shufelt: That carried through at Point72 with my boss there, Jeff, who really believed in my potential as well and kept encouraging me. I’ve taken that to Athletic and given people a ton of opportunity and believed in them. People who run with opportunity cover a lot of ground and advance really quickly within the walls of Athletic.

Alejandro Cremades: So then tell us about what happened with stopping drinking. Twelve years ago, that’s basically what happened. You did that for lifestyle reasons, but that kind of triggered this rocket ship that you’re riding now. How did the whole origin of Athletic come to mind?

Bill Shufelt: Yeah, so in the early 2000s, when I was entering the financial field, it was a badge of honor to be hungover—to be out. People were at steak dinners and happy hours four nights a week. It was a very boozy Wall Street culture.

Bill Shufelt: I saw that shift dramatically toward a performance culture over the 10–12 years I was in finance. Toward the end, it became more aspirational and more respected to ask a contact on Wall Street, “Hey, rather than a steak dinner, would you want to meet at Barry’s Bootcamp in the morning?”

Bill Shufelt: I had a similar shift in my life. I was 29, about to get married, and looking at the future—my family, my health, my career progress—some really big bucket items. I realized alcohol wasn’t serving me and was probably holding back a lot of those things.

Bill Shufelt: So I put alcohol to the side. Of course, I was drinking too much from time to time—like most people in their twenties. The second I put alcohol aside, it was like the biggest life hack I’d ever discovered. I was extremely sharp every day at work.

Bill Shufelt: It created a virtuous cycle—better sleep, better eating, better performance, better relationships. It all built on itself. I found myself falling in love with distance running. I used to just survive workouts. I was sleeping eight hours through the night, which I thought was impossible as a busy adult.

Bill Shufelt: I never looked back from that choice. I was lucky in the workplace, too. I shared with my colleagues that I was drawing a line in the sand—I was done drinking.

Bill Shufelt: That was really well received. I was still out at three or four work dinners a week and often had nothing in my hand or a standard brown bottle non-alcoholic beer from the 1980s. That would inevitably bring up a ton of questions. I’m someone who loves beer, loves nice drinks, loves food.

Bill Shufelt: It broke my mind that in today’s modern, healthy, busy world, all adult beverages contain alcohol. Why is everything centered around this one functional ingredient?

Bill Shufelt: I started looking at stats. The average adult has 0.1 drinks or less per week, which is crazy. Sixty percent of adults have 0.1 drinks or less per week.

Bill Shufelt: I thought of how underserved the adult community was in terms of offerings. More importantly, I looked around and realized that moderation—though it aligns perfectly with modern health standards—is totally out of reach and not on the menu. If you go out and want to pay $15 for an adult beverage, there’s no option without alcohol.

Bill Shufelt: I saw a big economic opportunity developing, and that stuck in my craw for a year. There were awkward social situations, frustration, and no options in places I wanted to spend money.

Bill Shufelt: I started saying this out loud to people. My friends and particularly my wife said, “You should fix that.” I asked, “What do you mean?” She really encouraged me to start looking into it. She was getting her MBA at the time, which was very helpful.

Bill Shufelt: So my wife and I started to look into it. That began a two-year business planning journey for Athletic Brewing, before I made the fateful decision to walk out the door at Point72.

Alejandro Cremades: That’s very calculated—the risk. Two years building the business plan. Typically, you see people just taking the plunge or doing an MVP.

Alejandro Cremades: Two years of business planning—what were you doing during that time?

Bill Shufelt: There were definitely sprints where I worked on it a lot, and times where I wouldn’t work on it at all for two or three weeks. But it was where the passion and fire for the idea turned on. I’m so glad I had such a long business planning period.

Bill Shufelt: There are so many businesses that just launch without much thought. I feel for those founders. They’re up in the air and trying to build it as it goes. I had a really long business planning cycle of two years.

Bill Shufelt: At the end of that, I wasn’t going to quit my job. My wife encouraged me. She said, “We’ve saved enough. You should do this.” She basically pushed me out the door of my old job.

Bill Shufelt: Then I had another 18-month period where I was looking for a co-founder. I found one through a lot of rejection. We were home-growing our MVP product during that time.

Bill Shufelt: Me and him were talking about what’s important for the company, building the foundation—employee handbooks, mission, culture—all these big things. I feel very fortunate that we had this huge foundation of planning before we were out the door selling our products, scaling, and hiring.

Bill Shufelt: Said differently, we had 18 months where it was just me and our co-founder talking about what’s important and building the foundation.

Bill Shufelt: A lot of founders are often building, and all of a sudden have 25 people around them. You’re trying to convey a culture that doesn’t exist yet. The long lead time has been an advantage for us in many ways.

Alejandro Cremades: So what do you think needed to happen at that 24-month mark that made it so clear to you and your wife that you needed to take action? What was that inflection point?

Bill Shufelt: That was when it went from economic to actually being a meaningful, fulfilling impact I could have. I described earlier how moderation was out of reach for most people. I probably would have moderated my drinking 10 years earlier if any options had been available.

Bill Shufelt: And as you look at the stats out there—and Athletic Brewing will never stand on a soapbox and point a finger at people’s decisions—we’re not out against the alcohol industry, but…

Bill Shufelt: There are a lot of stats out there. Hundreds of thousands of people die from alcohol every year. Five percent of cancers are attributed to alcohol. Forty percent of incarcerated people were drunk when they committed their crimes.

Bill Shufelt: These stats just go on and on—the impact alcohol has on society. I’m not out to attack alcohol, but at least if we can give people options to be moderate when they want to…

Bill Shufelt: I then saw that there are also 15 million people in documented recovery in the U.S. too. And so, if we made moderation accessible rather than anonymous and hidden, I saw a way that we could possibly impact tens of millions of lives. When that light bulb went on—I’d been working this hedge fund job that was very self-serving—it was rewarding, for sure…

Bill Shufelt: But I went from a place where I was only going to positively impact myself and my family to potentially tens of millions of people. That fire lighting is something that—as you know, I know you’ve talked to a thousand entrepreneurs plus—

Bill Shufelt: It is so hard to build a business. The valleys are so deep. Every day can be excruciating in its own way. That fire for me burned so bright that no matter how challenging any day is, I can plow through it and I’m excited to meet it. That moment of knowing I could have a huge impact on tens of millions of people has been so pivotal—pivotal to my whole journey.

Alejandro Cremades: Now, one thing too that I find really interesting here is that you’d been at it for two years, doing all the legwork, figuring out the roadmap, the economics.

Alejandro Cremades: It sounds like you had a clear plan. So why not go solo? Why did you decide that you needed a co-founder to be part of this journey?

Bill Shufelt: Oh yeah, I definitely don’t want to paint it as if I had a super clear vision. It’s actually so funny to look back and think of how delusional I was.

Bill Shufelt: I think I had a good foundation in skills like finance, sales, and marketing. I love the HR and legal elements of our business—although I’m not skilled technically in those areas.

Bill Shufelt: But I had enormous blind spots. I definitely needed a technical co-founder. I had never brewed a batch of beer in my whole life. I didn’t really know anything about operating a manufacturing facility.

Bill Shufelt: I teamed up with—I got rejected by hundreds of brewers I tried to network with—and then ultimately found a really highly awarded craft brewer in Santa Fe, New Mexico, named John Walker. He’s such a talented guy, but also a great person and, it turns out, a lifelong learner. He and I have been on this learning journey together, both growing with the company.

Bill Shufelt: It’s been one of the most important things—probably the most important thing in the whole Athletic journey—finding someone who really matches my vision, my enthusiasm. We complement each other so well that it could have never worked without either one of us, I think.

Alejandro Cremades: So let’s say I put you into an elevator with all of our listeners, okay? And you only have maybe 15 to 30 seconds to tell them—first time you meet them—what Athletic is all about. What would you tell them?

Bill Shufelt: Revolutionizing beer for the modern adult. Alcohol has been tagging along on adult beverages for 5,000 years. This is a way that anyone can drink adult beverages anytime—whether it’s a meal pairing, refreshment, or just a de-stressor.

Bill Shufelt: It’s the best part of your day, every day, without the alcohol. For the last 5,000 years, adult beverages have been a line in the sand—once you have alcohol, it takes all these things off the table for the rest of your day. We’ve kind of freed it from that.

Alejandro Cremades: I’ve got to say, as a consumer of Athletic, I was blown away. I remember—just my story real quick—I had a concussion playing soccer, and I couldn’t drink during my recovery. So I tried a couple of non-alcoholic beers, and they tasted really non-alcoholic. It tasted so different.

Alejandro Cremades: But then, all of a sudden, I had this cousin, and he was like, “Hey, I think you may want to taste this one.” It was Athletic—I think it was the lager. It was mind-blowing how amazing the taste was. It was just like drinking the same beer I was used to.

Alejandro Cremades: Since then, I was like, “My God, I’m just going to drink this now.” In your guys’ case, I know that once you got together and everything, it took two years of iterating to really get it to that point.

Alejandro Cremades: What were some of the testings and what were some of those phases you guys needed to go through in order to be like, “I think we got this taste right now”?

Bill Shufelt: Yeah, so most CPG businesses go from idea to finding someone to make it. It jumps to a contract manufacturer, and then they outsource production the rest of the way.

Bill Shufelt: What we did differently at Athletic—our first principles moment—was realizing that all non-alcoholic beer was still made with 1970s or earlier technology. We needed to reinvent how it’s made.

Bill Shufelt: So we took it down to the screws, homebrewing in Gatorade jugs, and did hundreds of batches like that. Finally, around batch 30 or 40—and our co-founder John speaks to this really well—the beer started to actually taste really good.

Bill Shufelt: By batch 60, it was just plain old good beer—not “good for a non-alcoholic beer.” We’ve always said: without compromise. It’s got to be award-winning beer that stacks up to any beer you have.

Bill Shufelt: We achieved that. Then an even bigger decision was that we were not going to outsource our production. We were going to build it all ourselves and own the quality of everything we do.

Bill Shufelt: That was a huge quality decision that continues to separate us from the field. Non-alcoholic beer is a really heavily imported and contract-brewed category.

Bill Shufelt: We are making it here in the U.S. We’ve spent hundreds of millions of dollars on building manufacturing plants. But that is such a differentiator on quality. Every beer that goes out our door has undergone over 55 quality tests—for spec, for sensory—everything, every step of the way.

Bill Shufelt: That dedication to quality has been a major distancing factor. I will say—it was an extreme turnoff to early investors, what the capital road ahead looked like for this business path.

Alejandro Cremades: So at what point do you guys realize, “Hey, I think we’re onto something here”? When did you really feel like you were turning a corner?

Bill Shufelt: Yeah. So in 2017, John and I couldn’t get anyone to talk to us. In 2018, as we were launching, I’d gone around the state of Connecticut and gotten hundreds of accounts—local liquor stores all the way up to Whole Foods. They had tasted the beer and thought it was great.

Bill Shufelt: I got a list of accounts, and I convinced a local distributor—Star Distributors, the biggest beer distributor in Connecticut—to take us in, which was a huge win. I’m thankful they saw the opportunity in us.

Bill Shufelt: We launched, and the rate of sale was not great to start. One of my biggest underestimations was that no one had been looking at the non-alcoholic set for 50 years. Why would they suddenly start shopping that shelf? They wouldn’t even know a new product was there.

Bill Shufelt: There hadn’t been anything exciting over there ever. I realized I had to get hundreds—if not thousands—of people shopping those shelves across Connecticut really fast. We did that in a couple of ways. I started going to races every weekend.

Bill Shufelt: At a liquor store sampling, you can talk to like 20 people in two hours—it’s a pretty inefficient use of time. But if I go to a local 5K down the street from a store that has our beer, I may interact with 300–500 people in a 20–30 minute period.

Bill Shufelt: I’d pull up with a full cooler, usually run the race myself for fun, then be happy and sweaty behind the table handing out hundreds of beers. All of a sudden, you’ve got dozens of people going into the store the next week to buy the beer.

Bill Shufelt: I saw that starting to work. I did 75 races across the area that summer—much to my wife’s chagrin. It wasn’t the best family summer.

Bill Shufelt: The next year, we had five salespeople and we did like 350 events that summer. We really built it brick by brick that way. The other very differentiated thing we did in marketing early on was—

Bill Shufelt: If you go back 15 years to the craft brewing scene in New England or anywhere in the country, there’d be a brewery everyone was excited about launching.

Bill Shufelt: You’d have to drive to that brewery and wait in line for hours to get the beer you wanted.

Bill Shufelt: Distribution is such a hurdle. You have to get on distributors’ trucks, then they have to sell it in stores. Even going a few counties away means you need another distributor—let alone in other states. To build a national DSD beer network—we have 270+ distributors at Athletic—it takes multiple years.

Bill Shufelt: Beverage on e-commerce wasn’t really a thing back in 2018. But I built a website and started putting our beer for sale on it. People said, “You’re a total moron. No one’s ever going to buy beer online.”

Bill Shufelt: I said, “We’ll see. I’ll pack the packages at night.” All of a sudden, it was five orders a day—no marketing budget, basically. Then next week, it was 10 orders a day.

Bill Shufelt: All of a sudden, I came in and there were 30 orders a day. Within two months, it was like 200 orders waiting when I came in on Monday.

Bill Shufelt: That local taproom experience—where people had to drive and go there—I had opened a national taproom, where people could order in minutes and we would mail it to them.

Bill Shufelt: At the same time, non-alcoholic beer had been a shelf of five boring lagers. When Athletic Brewing launched, all of a sudden it was IPAs, stouts, golden ales.

Bill Shufelt: And John was making a different, unique, limited variety every week—into a category that had never had any variety. And so, all of a sudden, people were seeing double IPAs, Gohs’, and really pumpkin beers—really fun launches.

Bill Shufelt: And so, when we would put these beers for sale at five o’clock on a Monday, it was like a Taylor Swift concert on Ticketmaster—they were selling out in like 30 seconds. That was a great marketing tool also, because we not only had built this national audience, but we had this unbelievable data set too.

Bill Shufelt: No beer company had ever had first-party data from their whole customer base before. That was a big advantage. And so, all of a sudden going forward at that point, I knew I’d made it—because we were selling out so fast.

Bill Shufelt: The race and sampling strategy was selling out our beer at the grocery stores and liquor stores we were at—to the point where people were meeting our distributors’ trucks in the parking lot at Whole Foods.

Bill Shufelt: It wasn’t even making it to the shelf. And then, um, so there was this huge amount of demand, plus I could see all the data, and that gave us really good data to go out with our future fundraising rounds then.

Bill Shufelt: The downside—yeah, the downside of that is we outgrew the brewery in 10 months.

Alejandro Cremades: That’s—well, talk about scale. And I guess that a piece of it, you were alluding to, is the investment, right? I know that you guys have done a bunch of rounds. You’ve raised over 220—think 225 million, correct me if I’m wrong. But walk us through: What was the experience? What was that journey like, going through all those rounds and raising the money for a company like this?

Bill Shufelt: Yeah, so our first angel round was—we were essentially raising $3 million to build the first non-alcoholic production brewery in the country. And it was a category that had no momentum. The category basically didn’t exist.

Bill Shufelt: Surely no marketing excitement—and we had no product. So raising that first angel round was extremely difficult. It was 120-plus meetings, mostly rejections. And then—so in the first 50 meetings, I would say it was like 90% rejections.

Bill Shufelt: And then, all of a sudden, we started to network to people like one layer beyond—people who had heard about it. And so we were getting a lot of inbounds at that point from people I didn’t necessarily know, but who were really excited because they had heard about it and reached out.

Bill Shufelt: So we ended up with an angel team of about 70 people in that first round that helped us build the first brewery.

Bill Shufelt: That group helped carry us through three financing rounds. And so we outgrew that first brewery in about 10 months, which was way faster than we anticipated. And we basically did a round a year for four or five years after that.

Bill Shufelt: And, um, you know—I know there are a lot of companies that raise a lot of venture money.

Bill Shufelt: We were mostly private capital and investor capital through those early rounds. But the major difference with us is we weren’t just buying Instagram ads and throwing money into the paper shredder like a lot of brands were in this 0% interest time. And you know, a lot of our competition—still in this category, there are over 150 brands—

Bill Shufelt: Most of our competition still has not built anything. They’re just spending, spending, spending. And their brands had raised way more than we had at that stage in our life, and still not built anything.

Bill Shufelt: We were putting steel in the ground with our dollars. And so, of that 225 million, over 150 million went into actually building breweries. We’re currently building our fourth brewery right now.

Bill Shufelt: That’ll be online by the end of the summer. We also were building a national sales force. And there was no marketing in non-alcoholic beer, so we had to market the category.

Bill Shufelt: We had that obligation—leading from the front. We were spending on marketing out in front of where the category growth was. And I think a lot of companies have benefited from Athletic spending on marketing—and still don’t spend. They still don’t spend much on it.

Bill Shufelt: So yeah.

Alejandro Cremades: And as you’re talking there about scaling too—you know, a lot of people listening are probably used to the scaling of technology, tech startups, software, maybe hardware. I guess in this case, scaling manufacturing—how does that look?

Bill Shufelt: Yeah. So manufacturing—when I told investors I was building manufacturing and planned to continue to do that—that was a hard “no” for a lot of people. I’d have whole dinners of 8 to 10 people basically stand up and walk out when we got to that point.

Bill Shufelt: Same thing with institutional investors. A lot of venture capital firms want you to spend as quickly as you can, but they have a five-year time horizon. And building manufacturing does not align with five-year time horizons.

Bill Shufelt: So we had to find the right investors who believed in a multi-year period to spend on manufacturing and spend on marketing—with the faith that gross margins and EBITDA would catch up. Not many companies make that turn.

Bill Shufelt: We were really disciplined in how we spent and disciplined financially to make sure that did play out. We were really—I’d say—rigorous stewards of investor capital as well.

Bill Shufelt: We take that obligation extremely seriously. But yeah, in terms of scaling manufacturing specifically—I came from a financial background. I had my CFA. I thought I knew everything in the world about finance and financial statements.

Bill Shufelt: The biggest difference for entrepreneurs between financial statements and operating models is the granularity of it. Most of my models I had built as if the breweries would be running at full capacity and that I was almost at economies of scale ingredient costs from the start.

Bill Shufelt: As I started to do an honest assessment of our ingredient costs and COGS builds in 2018, 2019—after we launched our business—utilization is one of the hardest factors. Very often, our breweries were being run at under 50%, and as we’re growing 100%…

Bill Shufelt: There’s such a brief moment in time where you’re running your breweries at full utilization before you have to build the next brewery and layer in a lot more overhead. So that’s something I’d definitely make sure entrepreneurs are getting right.

Bill Shufelt: Also, the variable costs of logistics and shipping costs—and here I was, my model had not been built around e-commerce. But e-commerce went to 70% of our business.

Bill Shufelt: And a lot of that beer was shipping all the way across the country. So we were losing more money on each package we sold than we were making. So getting to the granular bit of the operating model was super important.

Bill Shufelt: That scaling—manufacturing utilization—is such an important thing to get right. We’ve gotten much better at that in our third and fourth breweries—building them in staged processes, having utilization thresholds that trigger in order to unlock the next build.

Bill Shufelt: Building manufacturing is really tough. And I know it was extremely out of vogue pre-2020, especially in 2021.

Bill Shufelt: But when that switched—like now, there’s such a movement to onshoring for such obvious reasons. I think people realized how vulnerable supply chains were.

Bill Shufelt: When 2020 hit and COVID happened, we were so lucky to be vertically aligned.

Bill Shufelt: We weren’t relying on a network of eight to ten different vendors and stuff—for 3PL, for production, everything. It was Athletic doing everything. That was a huge competitive advantage in that time period—and in the current environment.

Alejandro Cremades: So I want to ask you one thing here that comes to mind too. Obviously, when investors invest—and customers, employees—it’s all betting into the vision, right? And talking about the vision here—if you were to go to sleep tonight and wake up in a world where the vision of Athletic is fully realized, what does that world look like?

Bill Shufelt: I think it’s a moment where you can go into a bar or restaurant and open up both sides of the menu—alcoholic and non-alcoholic—and you can be equally as excited by both. I think that’s when we’ve had a real impact—when people can hold delicious non-alcoholic beverages and have people excited to talk about that. I think Athletic achieves that and has broken the barrier to that happening in society.

Bill Shufelt: So, definitely that—for sure.

Alejandro Cremades: That’s amazing. Now, we’re talking about the past, but I want to talk about the past with a lens of reflection. Let’s say I put you into a time machine, and I bring you back to that moment where you’re about to give your notice at Point72 and venture into the unknown.

Alejandro Cremades: And let’s say you’re able to stop that younger self coming out the door of Point72—and sit that younger Bill down for a coffee or whatever that is—and give that younger Bill one piece of advice before launching the business.

Alejandro Cremades: What would that be and why, given what you know now?

Bill Shufelt: So, for me personally—I’m lucky the fire burns so strongly. I think the riskiest thing for entrepreneurs in that moment is if they don’t absolutely love their idea—it’s going to be the toughest journey ever ahead.

Bill Shufelt: But I loved my idea. So, there’s a million things I should have learned and known at that point that I didn’t. And I know some of those now. But the passion burning is so key.

Bill Shufelt: It’s so, so key. And I was really lucky to have good household support too—and an awesome co-founder. There are a million lessons on fundraising, getting good legal advice, having really good investor alignment.

Bill Shufelt: I think communicating time horizon and aligning goals with your investors is so important. A lot of governance things too—that I see founders get in trouble with.

Bill Shufelt: There are so many learnings along the way that are really important. And you pretty much only learn those by going through it yourself. So I think at the end of the day—if the passion is there—then time is the other variable. Because time, and just working at your problems, solves all of them basically.

Alejandro Cremades: Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, Bill, for the people who are listening and would love to reach out, learn more about Athletic—what is the best way for them to do so?

Bill Shufelt: Yeah, I’m on LinkedIn—super easy to get me there. And then all our information is at @athleticbrewing on social. Athleticbrewing.com on the internet is where we launch our 50 limited releases every year.

Bill Shufelt: I’m just out here having fun—but I love to hear from entrepreneurs too. So please, hit me up.

Alejandro Cremades: Amazing. Well hey, Bill, thank you so much for being on the DealMaker Show today. It has been an absolute honor to have you with us.

Bill Shufelt: Thank you so much for having me. I had a blast. Really appreciate it.

*****

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