‘I couldn't find an IT job I was excited about. The problem wasn’t them, it was me’
Why this former IT manager traded in Amazon for her own beer-canning line.
MY BACKGROUND WAS in IT - I sort of fell into the industry because it seemed really busy and it was taking off in Ireland at the time.
But there always seemed to be a problem with the job – either I didn’t like the team, or I didn’t like the work, or I didn’t like being outdoors, or I didn’t like the way the company was run. I tried a few different places, doing a few different things, and I never really settled.
Eventually I found myself working at Amazon in 2007. The work was really exciting, the people were really smart, everything was very fun and I had nothing I could be complaining about… and I still wasn’t happy. And that was, I suppose, the point where I knew that I was never going to find a job in IT that I was excited about. The problem wasn’t the job, the problem was me.
I had started brewing beer at home a few years earlier – myself and (my partner) Tim had lived away in Europe for a bit – and when we came back to Ireland in 2005 we were kind of horrified that there still wasn’t any decent beer to drink that was readily available. You had to either seek it out or, ideally, live in Dublin – and if you didn’t it was really, really hard to get anything unusual or nice.
A few bad beers
We resorted to brewing at home ourselves – I’m sure we brewed some pretty awful beer, but we also got quite good at it after a while. So when I was casting about for something to do in 2007-2008, when I realised I was going to need to take some evasive career action, it crossed my mind that maybe setting up a brewery would be interesting and fun and exciting.
I did a lot of research into it. I had been doing a masters in theoretical physics at the time as well because at one point I thought academia might have been the way to go – which was a huge mistake – so I finished that off in a hurry and started writing a business plan for opening a brewery as soon as I could. In October 2010, I handed in my notice – and started Metalman as the first employee in February 2011.
Walsh and partner Tim Barber
I don’t think I even had time to think about whether it all ‘just clicked’ or not. There was just so much to do and so much to learn, and it was all so new and interesting. With everything going on, I never really stopped to think about whether it was fun or not fun. Which means it probably did click straight away.
Relentless
Running your own business is pretty relentless. While it is great fun, it’s exhausting and I’m much more prone to burnout now than I ever was when I worked in IT.
There isn’t really such a thing as a day off. If there’s a lot of hairy stuff going on and maybe we’re having a bit of a cash-flow squeeze, it’s that bit harder to sleep at night when you’re not quite sure whether you’re going to be able to pay your staff in two weeks’ time unless that invoice that’s due comes in.
There’s stuff like that which was never an issue before when you worked for the man and this miraculous lump of cash appeared in your bank account every month. I found you really appreciate the value of disposable money, much more than I ever did when I had loads of it.
One thing I wasn’t prepared for, especially coming from a very fast-paced environment like Amazon, was how slowly things happen in the small business world. Everything takes at least twice as long and probably costs twice as much, if not three times as much, when you’re trying to do something on a small scale.
The right time
There are eight of us now. We started off as a draught-only brewery and we contract-brewed for the first year while I built the brewery here in Waterford. But we entered the market at a good time – craft beer was growing and we were almost too busy to do anything else for those first few years.
We finally got ourselves to a position where had the resources to buy a canning line in 2014. We started selling cans of beer from January of last year and we’re just launching our fifth beer in a can this week. We’re pretty busy all the time.
Grainne Walsh is the founder of the Metalman Brewing Company. This article was written in conversation with Peter Bodkin.
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