Entrepreneurship has deep roots in my family’s past and in my personal life. I have many aunts, uncles, cousins, and my immediate family who all have tried, and successfully, pursued entrepreneurship.
I have several inspiring examples in my family that led me to start Bell Tower Brewing Company. When my mother’s father came home from WWII, he married my grandmother, started a family, and cultivated an apple farm in Geneva, Ohio for 18 years. Sadly though, when Interstate 90 was built in the 1960s the state used eminent domain and located the highway through the middle of my grandparents’ farm. This crippled his production levels and he was forced to get creative for the second time in his life. As a self-taught general contractor, he started replacing the apple trees that remained orchard land with houses that he built and sold to area residents.
Early in my parents’ careers, and while they were starting their family, my dad decided to start a feed & tack store in Streetsboro where he had several successful years in retail. My parents later pursued the rental business with much success.
My entrepreneurial life started when I was in elementary school. By happenstance, I ended up selling a single stick of gum to a friend on my bus for ¢5 (that’s $0.05). I learned on my long bus rides home that my fellow schoolmates loved gum but their parents didn’t allow them to have their own, so they were willing to buy it from me for a small price. Learning this, I went to the grocery store the next day and bought big packs of gum for cheap. Now knowing how much I could sell a stick of gum for I made sure I would retain a profit after the sale based on the price I paid upfront for a large pack. The profit was used to buy more gum to sell and occasionally helped buy extra candy for me. I started selling hundreds of sticks of gum over the next several weeks to everyone I could on the bus ride home.This was my first lesson in sales and economics.
And then the principal found out… I still have a distinct memory of being called down to the principal’s office where I had to explain to him what I was doing on the bus each day. I pulled out my large ziplock bag of quarters, nickels and dimes, and my other ziplock full of sticks of gum. He confiscated it all and called my parents. I’m sure my parents used this experience as a teachable moment when I got home, them being teachers and all, but all I could remember is that people were happy when I supplied them with something they wanted and I loved selling them something they wanted.
Several years later, after joining my Middle School’s juggling club, my good friend Clayton Watson and I had an idea! Why don’t we start our own entertainment company where we would perform for local events, birthday parties, festivals, etc.? So we did just that. We created a name, a logo, fliers, a set list based on our skills and a price that was reasonable for any interested party. With my dad’s help, who was always encouraging us to be creative and think differently, we created t-shirts with our logo on them. We were the Catchum Jugglers! We had a ton of fun practicing for these gigs and performing at them. We performed for younger kids’ birthday parties and even did a show at Beckwith Orchards on one of their popular summer Saturdays. Looking back it was a great thing for young teens to focus on and it kept us out of trouble.
Skipping ahead to … My career… into the growing field of User Experience Design. UX, as it is often referred to, is about crafting digital experiences that are in tune with what people need and want when using technology. I’ve spent a significant amount of time understanding the needs of both customers and employees. I use that information to design elegant web experiences via websites, web applications, and social media to meet those uncovered needs. I’ve learned from these experiences that I enjoy those efforts as I often replace frustrating experiences with ones that meet people’s needs and even add delight to their daily life. It’s this type of work, crafting enjoyable and sometimes even meaningful experiences for people, that has played into my interest in opening a small neighborhood brewery.
As a side benefit of my work I have spent a lot of time learning about manufacturing processes in my company’s many paint manufacturing plants world-wide. Always having a passion for craft beer and large shiny stainless steel tanks I felt at home in these manufacturing facilities. Making paint, in a lot of ways is similar to making beer. You start with quality raw ingredients, mix and perform special processes to them and ultimately transform them into a high quality end product that is packaged and customers get to purchase and consume them. I helped design the systems that help make these plants operate smoothly which integrate the manufacturing process and the underlying economics from finance to sales to customer service. All of these experiences helped me understand basic manufacturing processes from the perspective of the people performing those functions. I did not go into paint manufacturing knowing how these experiences would later serve me in entrepreneurship, but in retrospect, I can appreciate my meandering path to beer.
These experiences have helped me really come to enjoy learning about what people need and want and then meet those desires. The basic concepts can be applied to anything really. From how someone uses an app on their phone to how someone experiences the act of going to a restaurant. The whole point is to empathize with these individuals and respond to their needs and wants in meaningful ways. How does that not scream excellent customer service in any field!
This is where my career and my passion collide. The name of that collision is BEER. My beer journey has run concurrently with my professional career since 2008 when my brother, Seth Tipton, and his roommate invited me over to brew beer in their basement. I was mesmerized by the process, the smells, and the experience. Since tasting the first sip of that beer I was hooked on a brand new hobby, homebrewing! I spent the next 12 years brewing beer and other fermentable goods like cider, wine, and kombucha. I even brewed (with help from many friends and family) five different beers and a red and a white wine for my wedding as a chance to get to share my passion with those closest to me. A few years into the hobby is when I met Jennifer. You can read more about our combined story in our other blog post here; https://belltowerbrewing.com/shared-vision/.
My love for craft beer grew even deeper as I helped start Kent’s first craft beer fest as a Kent Jaycee (Kent Junior Chamber of Commerce) in 2019. The Kent Jaycee’s launched The Kent Craft Beer Fest with two objectives: a fundraiser to support community initiatives and to support the craft beer industry.
We worked with 22 area breweries to make the event happen. It was a great experience to get a taste of the excellent people that work in the Craft Brewing Industry and gave an indication of the strong enthusiasm of the craft beer drinkers out there!
Continuing to add to my brewing knowledge, I’ve also spent about a year as a part-time assistant brewer at Lock 15 Brewery in Akron, OH after the owner/head brewer, Joe Karpinski, offered to give me some real-world experience working in a professional brewery. That opportunity was a game-changer. I was able to take my homebrewing knowledge and understand what it really takes to operate a brewery. This opportunity demonstrates the collaborative spirit of the craft beer industry and is one of the many reasons I am excited to be a part of it.
All of these experiences have led me to today, where I am part of a small team starting this neighborhood brewery together in our hometown of Kent, OH.
