Monday Night Brewing co-founder and CEO Jeff Heck had an Office Space moment a couple of years ago after returning from a three-month sabbatical in the South of France.
“When I came back, I realized the company was generally doing great,” he said, adding he had a moment straight from the movie’s famous meeting-of-the-Bobs scene and asked himself: “What is it that you say you do here?”
“If you can leave your job for three months and things are generally fine, it’s worth asking what would you do here,” Heck explained. “I’ve just never wanted to be the old guy who comes in with a newspaper and puts his feet up on the desk because he’s 80 years old and just wants to be at the office. I like working. And I like having something meaningful to do.”
That moment spawned the beginning of a succession plan for the CEO role, which transferred to Monday Night co-founder Joel Iverson last month.
On the latest Brewbound Podcast, Heck and Iverson shared that their eventual succession plan was a reflection of Monday Night leaders’ overarching cultural philosophy of working to make their jobs irrelevant and identifying the coworkers next in line to take the reins.
“That’s true for everyone – from our general managers at each of our six locations to our production team – ‘Hey, if someone gets hit by a bus tomorrow, who is it that’s ready to step into your role?’” Heck said. “And the answer is not always clear, but if there’s not a clear answer, your job is to start working on that.
“The reality is that we’ve never had a concrete, explicit plan for what transition looked like,” he continued. “But the core was how do we make sure we’re culturally and missionly aligned across our leadership team so that in the event that Joel, Jonathan and I all went down in a plane crash that there would still be torchbearers for what we want to be as a company and a brewery if we’re long gone.”
Getting there took the Atlanta-headquartered craft brewery 12 years, Heck and Iverson shared. In the episode, they discussed how they eventually arrived at a transition plan, the importance of the culture they’re built at the brewery and their vision for the future.
Before the interview, Justin, Jess and Zoe discuss the latest bev-alc news, including the re-emergence of hard sodas, the Great American Beer Festival’s move outdoors and surprisingly positive scans to open the year.
Listen here or on your preferred podcast platform.