Q&A: Marlborough brewery says navigating COVID helped set it up for future success
Photos | Matt Wright
John Paul and Melynda Gallagher operate their Lost Shoe Brewing and Roasting Co. on Weed Street in downtown Marlborough.
Melynda and J.P. Gallagher opened Lost Shoe Brewing and Roasting in downtown Marlborough nine months before the coronavirus pandemic. Their business had begun to ramp up when they had to close. Then it stopped, and the business they’d been waiting to open, that they’d both eventually quit their full-time jobs so they could dedicate their lives to operating, needed to change to survive. Survive they did. They adapted. They changed. They navigated.
Lost Shoe has become an important fabric in the beer community in Massachusetts. J.P. was elected as vice president of the Massachusetts Brewers Guild on Monday and does a dozen or more collaborations a year with other brewers in the region, always trying to connect and keep the community moving as one. On Thursday, Lost Shoe was hosting Twisted Fate Brewing from Danvers for its latest collaboration. Melynda wants to do the same with coffee roasters soon and hopes she can bring those businesses together so they can feed off one another and learn from each other in the same way that craft brewers do.
Lost Shoe Brewing and Roasting celebrated the fourth anniversary of its founding on May 11. With that in mind, the owners of Lost Shoe sat down with WBJ to talk about what they’ve learned and what they’re looking forward to.
What is the first lesson you've learned in the four years since opening? What was the one thing you didn't know?
JP: You can't do everything.
Melynda: You can't do everything, yes. When we first opened, it was us and a very small front-of-house team. We had no help in production. We were doing it all. I was still working my full-time corporate job at the same time that I was roasting coffee; I was managing the team schedules. It was not sustainable.
It took us time. Being a small business, you don't want to jump in and hire all these people and not be able to have the sales to match what you're putting into place, so we were very careful with bringing new people on. As we've grown over the past four years, we now have an assistant brewer and assistant coffee roaster, we have a general manager, we have an event manager and social media manager. We've slowly added these positions into place that are helping take things off our plate and take them to a level we couldn't have done ourselves before.
Because you're able to do that, is your coffee roasting more consistent or your brewing more consistent?
JP: Yeah, absolutely.
Melynda: It gives us a little bit more flexibility to look at the bigger picture of the business and focus on where we want to see that growth happen versus being in the day-to-day, where you just can't get out of that day-to-day mindset and see the bigger picture. That kind of held us back for some time, and now we're able to look at where our growth opportunities are.
JP: One of the best pieces of advice we got was, “You can't work on the business if you're always working for the business as owners.” That gave us some perspective on where do we want to be. How do we do that without constantly being employees here? We need to bring people on, and let them have a focus and really do that well, as opposed to just spreading ourselves thin.
Because things fall through the cracks when you're trying to do 20 things.
Melynda: Absolutely. The other biggest thing we learned was just to be flexible because especially with COVID happening nine months after we opened, we never really had that first solid first year of being a new business. It was nine months and COVID, shut down, restrictions. We had to learn to adapt and be super flexible pretty much right off the bat, which I think did benefit us in the long run. It helped us in the past couple years with different things and not getting so set in one way and not being able to change based on what's going on in the economy.
If you can survive COVID, you can almost survive anything.
Melynda: You can't plan for that. We never thought we would live through a pandemic in our lifetime or as business owners. So to experience that, we are kind of lucky in a way to have had that experience.
JP: It would be a totally different mindset that we have now had we not gone through that
You got kind of a dry run at opening, and then you got to close and rethink it.
Melynda: That was a blessing in disguise because things at that point, by February of 2020, were ramping up for us, and things were starting to get busy. We were understaffed, and we didn't have systems in place to handle the volume we were starting to get to. So, Covid happened, it was kind of like, “Okay, reset. Let's take a look at the business and put some things in place that are going to help us once we get back into the post-COVID world.”
JP: It allowed us to take each thing on at a time: online ordering, grab-and-go bar flow, things like that.
Melynda: Online ordering was something that, before we even opened, we knew we wanted to implement. But then it's time to open, and we're just rushing to get things together. That kind of got pushed to the side. As soon as the shutdown happened, within two days, we had online ordering up and running because we needed to focus on getting that done. Now, we still have it.
Lost Shoe is one of the more organized breweries, online ordering-wise.
JP: We like things to be organized and clean and simple, and we've definitely had to change things.
This is a messy business. It's not a clean business. It's just always sticky. Everything needs to be cleaned constantly. If the other parts aren't working, then that part's hard.
JP: Exactly.
Melynda: Cleanliness and maintenance is a huge priority of ours.
JP: It's easy to overlook those things when your other processes aren't dialed in. It's like, all right, all these other things aren't working well, the last thing I want to do is be tidy.
Is there anything else I should know?
JP: We are super grateful for how much support we've had from the community. The last four years, we've been lucky that Marlborough has been so easy to work with. I mean, city hall is our neighbor.
Melynda: The City of Marlborough has been so helpful. They gave us permission to shut the road down and have outdoor music on the weekends. They definitely want small businesses to succeed, which makes our lives so much easier. It’s so easy to work with them. We're excited to keep creating more community events, reasons for people to come out here and have fun downtown.
This interview was conducted and edited for length and clarity by WBJ Staff Writer Kevin Koczwara.
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