Lessons in Resilience: A Conversation with Dan Garrison

I’ve always heard that one of the most important traits of being an entrepreneur is resiliency. This should come as no surprise to anyone because it’s everywhere in business culture. Its’ importance is reinforced by a constant barrage of stories of individuals who are willing to do whatever it takes to get the job done. Can resiliency really be reduced down to those examples, or is it something more? After a recent conversation, I’m now leaning towards the latter.

Meet Dan Garrison, founder and CEO of Garrison Brothers Distillery, the makers of the very first legal bourbon bottled in Texas. If you’ve been fortunate enough to visit their distillery in Hye, TX and meet Dan, you’d know he is a vibrant personality resembling something of a bull in a china shop. Because of his confidence and positive nature, you’d never get the sense that he is an individual who has experienced a lot of hardship and failure in the past.

After hearing more about his past, his story resonated with me because it embodies what resiliency should really look like. Refusing to let past failed business endeavors define him, Dan broke into a regulation-ridden industry that solely existed in Kentucky and Tennessee. On a deeper level, resiliency looks a lot more like Dan accomplishing this while also never sacrificing on values and principles. His product is a testament to that and has helped them build a strong reputation in the whiskey community. However, beyond the quality of the bourbon, Dan never wavered on doing what really mattered in the midst of the struggle and hardship that comes with building a business: using his craft as a way to love on other people and strengthen relationships and communities.

Dan Garrison

Founder of Garrison Brothers Distillery

Hye, TX

How did your upbringing really influence your desire for entrepreneurship?

I’ve got to put all the pressure on my dad for that one. My old man was an amazing success story. He graduated high school first in his class. He was accepted into the Naval Academy. He graduated in the math field first in his class. Then he went off into the Vietnam War and was a submarine navigator through Vietnam. He was responsible for putting those submarines in just the right position to launch missiles into Vietnam.

He ran into some difficulties though with getting promoted in the Navy (not because of his own fault). My great grandfather was having battles with Hyman Rickover over the nuclear submarine program and the Navy during the time. That led to my dad’s ability to progress the ranks of the Navy getting squashed. Nobody knew it was happening including my dad and my grandfather, but we found out later on.

So my Dad bailed out of the Navy when he could and went to Harvard Business School graduated top of his class again. After that, he went to Houston to start working as a stockbroker and then found a role as a CEO of an international recruiting firm. He excelled at that again and was a hell of a leader but along the way he went through a nasty divorce. He was a terrible father and he’ll admit it to this day. But his solution to making us good kids and giving us some ambition was to send us articles.

He would cut out articles in magazines all the time about Michael Dell or about Ross Buford or about other young men who had made successes out of themselves. So I kept reading all those stories about Michael Dell (I actually knew Michael Dell because I went to high school with him) but there was just an intense pressure from my dad throughout my high school years and even my college years to make something of myself and to do something entrepreneurial. All it did was stunt my growth because I constantly felt like anything I tried wasn’t going to be live up to his expectations.

We’ve come a long way now that I’m 54, and he’s 78 and now we have a great relationship but back in those days it was a relentless pressure to do something entrepreneurial and to be successful in business which did nothing, but shove me away from business back then.

I finally broke out of that mold when I lost my job at 40 years old during my midlife crisis. Here I was, with a family a stunted career, trying to figure out what I was going to do with the rest of my life. I went to Kentucky and looked up at the Kentucky bourbon distilleries and went, “Oh my god, I can do this.” Not only could I do it, but the opportunity was ripe because back then everybody thought of bourbon as your grandfather’s drink. It was old and tired and nobody was drinking it.

I apparently picked the right time to get into this business because once we launched what we were doing here in Texas it injected life into a very burnt out, tired industry. I can’t completely take credit for the bourbon turn around myself, but I do know that we played a role because we started making bourbon cool again, and nobody was doing that until we came along.

Going back to what you mentioned about the entrepreneurial pressure you felt, did you ever try and start anything earlier on in your career before Garrison Brothers?

Sure. I had a failed advertising agency that I tried to start with a good friend of mine who I still work with today. I had a failed public relations firm that I tried to start, and then I tried to start a direct marketing company and never got off the ground because I’ve never landed any clients. It was just youthful exuberance on my part. I wasn’t sophisticated enough to walk into a room and explain the return on investment that each of these individual businesses could create and I still wasn’t when I started this business, but that didn’t stop me because I love bourbon so much.

What was one of the more valuable lessons you learned during some of those failed ventures that has really helped with your current business?

Hmm. That’s the first time I’ve ever been asked that question before. Resilience I think more than anything else. Just because your business is failing and not going anywhere, you can’t get down on yourself. You have to just keep pushing along and keep exploring new things.

So you left Kentucky after that week and you decided you’re going to go after this. What was maybe the lowest point you experienced in trying to get this off the ground?

I broke up with my partner. I didn’t start this on my own. I started it with a business partner, and both of us have been bourbon lovers since we were 13 years old. When I came up with this idea he happened to be looking to get out of the industry. We were both going through a midlife crisis simultaneously and I made the error of saying hey, “why don’t we do this together?”

We were friends. We got along, we enjoyed each other’s company, we thought along the same lines… only to find out three years and about a half million dollars into it, that we were completely incompatible and had very different ambitions.

My ambition was to create something that I owned and made its’ own product. His ambition was to make a hell of a lot of money really fast and fluid and that didn’t work for me. I was much more interested in creating a business that could stand the test of time and control its’ own destiny in terms of production facilities and producing bourbon. He wanted to buy bourbon from someone else, wrap it up into fancy packaging, sell it, create a big demand for it and flip it before we even invested in our own production facility.

That breakup was really hard. It stunted the business growth for about a year. It cost me every penny I had and we were pretty much on the verge of bankruptcy when that happened.

So what was the break you caught at that point in time?

Suddenly for the first time (and I don’t know if this was a sympathy vote or what) my dad and my brother invested and a good friend of our family’s decided to buy my partners equity up. We split ways and all of a sudden the business was debt free. However, we now had two or three investors in addition to my wife who was my initial investor. So we moved forward and started to move forward a lot faster. Then, I was able to raise additional money from nine new friend and family investors. They seemed to believe in my passion. “I looked them in the eyes and said I’m going to give it everything. I’ve got to make you money back” and they believed in me.

It’s funny, here I am 15 years later and I still haven’t turned a profit. I still haven’t paid back the debt that these fine folks loaned me, but they look at me today and say, “Don’t worry about it. The time will come it doesn’t matter. If you pay me back great. If you don’t pay me back, it’s been a lot of fun to be involved with this.”

I’m very fortunate to have angels like that on my shoulder that believe in the bourbon, believe in me and believe in the business. Most people aren’t able to find those types of angels and I was very fortunate to.

When you got additional investment, did you even have bourbon you could sell yet? Or were you still in the process of aging it?

No we were in the process of aging it in 2008. We didn’t do our first bottling until 2010. So we had absolutely no income coming in whatsoever except for a few t-shirt sales. We used to tell people that they were we were happy to have them come out and take a tour of the Distillery and give them a tour as long as they bought a $25 t-shirt.

And I imagine that there were days where you maybe thought, “What did I get myself into?” Did that happen?

I didn’t have those days because come hell or high water this was going to happen and maybe I’m just too stupid to realize that it might not work. There’s no logical way to fund a business that’s going to take five years just to create a product and then another five years to return the investment to your investors. Nobody looks at a 10-year investment cycle. So like I said, I had some very fortunate friends, but for me personally there was never any question that this was going to be an international brand someday and that I was still going to be at the helm of it when it became an international brand. I’ve often been described as a bull in a china shop. I really don’t care what other people tell me is not possible. We’re going to get it done come hell or high water well.

The company values that you have on your website. I’m curious to know when those were established and how that came into being. What was the vision behind creating those?

It’s funny you ask that question because yesterday I taught an entrepreneurial class at Fredericksburg High School for about 80 students and it was so much fun talking about the importance of a mission statement and establishing your core values upfront. What many people don’t understand is those values play directly into things that you’re going to do as you run the business. When I’m approached by an investor and the investor seems a little cagey, like they may not have my best interest in mind or the business’ best interest in mind, I go back and I reread those core values to make sure that I’m comfortable with this investment. If I still have a pit in my stomach and it’s not feeling right, then I’m going to go to my board or my management team and say we’re not doing this because I don’t like this individual and what they bring to the table.

It’s the same thing when we have partners. If we’re meeting with a distributor in a certain state and that distributor doesn’t seem to share those same core values we share, then how are we ever going to be compatible?

Those core values were and are extremely important. I wrote those back with my original partner back in 2004/2005 when we were drafting the business plan and articles of incorporation. To this day those are still the values that this company believes in. If you apply for a job at Garrison Brothers Distillery, there’s a cover page on top of the job application that says, “This is our mission and corporate core values, if these do not align with your personal values, you need not apply.”

What are the key characteristics you look for in employees?

Honesty and a big smile. Here’s a good example of why that matters. Because of some ridiculous archaic regulations that the state imposes, Texas limits our ability to sell more than two bottles to people who come visit us. Well, if you’ve just driven in from Omaha, Nebraska just to come to Garrison Brothers and we have seven different brands that you want to try and you can only buy two, that can piss some people off. I’ve actually had customers go into our gift shop buy two bottles, then come back in and pretend they’re someone else and give a fake name and another credit card just to try to buy another two bottles. I tell my people in the gift shop, you just have to learn how to smile at them and say: “I’m so sorry, but I cannot sell you those bottles, aren’t you precious for coming back in and trying to get another one.” We have to be friendly at all times and I look for people that understand that.

If you can’t roll with the punches you’re probably not going to be a good fit at Garrison Brothers. If you’re looking for a regimented environment where you’re trained exactly how to do every step of your job, you’re probably not going to like your job at Garrison Brothers because we ask our folks to use their personality and their knowledge and a little bit of street smarts.

For example with our sales force, we have about 25 people today that are out on the road all the time selling. Every state has different laws though. The laws in Connecticut are totally different from the laws in Kentucky, which are totally different from the laws in Florida, which are totally different from the laws of New York. So putting a salesperson out in the field and telling them to go out and introduce our brand to all kinds of different markets is really challenging. In some states you can’t even have products in your vehicle to take to an account. How can you go out and sell bourbon if you can’t carry the bottles around in your car? So we have to hire people that are very resilient and very proactive with their ideas.

Where did where did your volunteer bottling force idea come from?

In 2010 we got wind of a startup distillery here in Texas that was the second whiskey distillery in Texas. They started it in 2009 and planned on releasing one whiskey to one retailer just because they wanted to be the first whiskey sold in Texas.

Well, we’ve been working on this for four years and I’m patiently waiting for my bourbon to mature to a quality that’s exceptional. Here is this little pissant company trying to get to market before me using a product that wasn’t even made here in Texas. It pissed me off and the other guys that were working at the time. We decided there was no way in hell we were going to let them go to market first, but at the same time we were working three shifts a day. Fred Cook, my master distiller, would work the stills for 8 hours. Then, Donnis Todd would work the stills for 8 hours, and then me. Whenever someone was not working the stills they’d go sleep. So we had no bandwidth and we had no one to set up and build a bottling line and order all the materials that were required for testing. I handled the procurement of the materials and bottle design but when it came time to bottle 2,000 bottles we needed help. So we reached out to a bunch of our friends in Stonewall, Johnson City, and Blanco and we said: “Hey, if y’all will come over and help us bottle for the next two weeks we’ll smoke some briskets and we’ll give you free food and free beer.” Sure enough, every morning they showed up and every morning we had a blast dancing around the room and singing songs. We did quality control samples every half hour to keep everyone motivated. By the end of two weeks we had 2,000 beautiful bottles that were ready to go to market.  

Turns out that little pissant company I mentioned earlier sold a lone bottle to one retailer in Waco, Texas. Legitimately, they had the first whiskey that was ever sold in the state of Texas and they can legally make that claim today, but we almost got them.

So that’s how the volunteer program started. Today it’s 17,000 bottlers strong. We have 25 new people here every day. Next year, it looks like we’re going to go to a night shift. So we’re going 25 people there during the day and 25 people there at night. We’ll probably end up having 30-40 thousand bottlers next year.

Wow. That’s incredible. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a business having something set up like that.

It’s interesting, if you look at the engagement for a liquor brand across social media, the average engagement for all brands across the country is about 1%. We are at 8%.

Why do you think that is?

We hardly even post on social media anymore. Our fans will go out and they’ll find a bottle at a local liquor store or bar and they’ll drink that bottle dry and it’ll take a picture of a before-and-after. We’ve got some incredibly loyal people that love our bourbon and we’re just blessed to have such a great family. When I say “family”, we really do treat our customers like family. One of our frequent volunteers had knee surgery recently, and when he got to his room at the hospital there was a gift basket with a bottle of Garrison Brothers and a whole bunch of flowers. We look after our own around here.

What’s the what’s the most rewarding aspect of what you do?

Pride in my team. They go above and beyond to make sure that the customer is always right. Awfully proud of that bourbon, too. If I go to New York City and I’m sitting in a bar and somebody walks in and they independently order Garrison Brothers without any prompting from me, I’ll turn around and buy drinks for the entire bar and pat that person on the back. Then I let that person tell the story of Garrison Brothers. They get a sense of pride because then they’re a part of the story as well.

You’ve been in advertising and have a background in that. What do you think it takes to build a cult following?

Patience, good people, and a great product.

How have you learned to balance the demands of your job with the demands of family and personal life?

Well, I’ve got a great family. I’m my kids are at the age now where my wife and I are almost empty nesters. My wife is a businesswoman on her own and she’s got all sorts of real estate Investments and activities going on constantly. She’s been the one in our family who has raised our kids, who’s taught them how to study, who does the homework with them, and who’s gotten them into schools. She’s the one that has made them what great kids they are and what future leaders they’re going to be.

They’ve watched me from afar because I’m gone all the time. I’m on the road 275 days of the year, so I’m not around to be at soccer practice. I’m not around to be at this and that, but I was when they were elementary school to junior high. Back then my wife was the breadwinner in the family and I lived off her when I was trying to start all those failed businesses I mentioned earlier.

We work as a great team and when we’re able to get together, it’s joyous. She’s also my largest investor to this day. When we don’t communicate and neither of us knows what each other is doing or thinking, that’s when the real danger comes in the relationship. Communicating better has been a long lesson for me to learn.

If you could share one thing you’ve learned during your entrepreneurial experience with someone who wants to be an entrepreneur, what would you tell them?

Trust yourself and trust that God has plans for you and eventually you’ll figure out what those plans are. Don’t let it stress you out.

What is the future look like for Garrison Brothers? What are some major challenges? You’re looking forward to tackling.

Well, we’ve tackled one already when we dramatically expanded production last year. We brought in a 2,000 gallon still that we affectionately refer to as the Big Johnson. It’s one of the largest pot stills in North America and enabled us to increase our production capacity by 4x. Which means that in 2020 – 2023 we’re going to have a ton more bourbon than we’ve had in the past. We are currently in 26 states and 6 foreign countries, but will finally be able to expand across the United States. We should be national by 2022 and international by 2023. That’s what I’m really excited about and I’m hoping at that point in time I can turn over leadership of the company to some of my incredibly talented team.

I’m also hoping I’ll be able to go out and enjoy life a little more with my wife and travel. The idea of going to Rome and sitting down at a restaurant for Italian food and ordering a Garrison Brothers from the back bar is pretty exciting to me.

What is your ideal weekend look like spent out on the ranch?

Nobody knows this but my wife and I have just bought a little small farm about 20 miles away from the Distillery. We used to have a farm across the road from the distillery but whenever I was over there, my staff would call and ask if I could come over and sign a T-shirt or meet someone. So there was never really any time for peace of relaxation.

My dream is to take a tractor I’m going to buy here in the next week or two and ago around in circles in a field with a big Yeti tumbler in my cup holder. Plow that field, plant it and grow my own corn. That’s all I want to do. I want to grow that corn and put in my bourbon and call it Dan’s bourbon blend.

For more information on Dan Garrison, be sure to check out the following:

Garrison Brothers

Texas Parks & Wildlife Interview

Modern Huntsman interview