Glasgow's Minerva up for Great British Entrepreneur Awards
The shortlist for this year's Great British Entrepreneur Awards, dubbed the 'Grammys of Entrepreneurship', includes more than 800 entrepreneurs, who have been recognised for their innovation, impact, and resilience. Previous winners include BrewDog, Grenade, ClearScore, Zilch, and Unbiased.
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Minerva's R&D tax consultants deal mainly with small and medium-sized businesses, with a diverse client base in sectors such as veterinary medicine and livestock farming, racehorse breeding, architecture, construction and engineering.
Mr Pearce, who won the SME News Business Elite Awards for the second time running in 2024, added: 'Our expertise comes from understanding the finance and the complex processes around research funding regulations. So many different businesses can benefit from R&D grants and tax relief without having to spend all their business hours on R&D.
'Short-term initiatives to improve the delivery of services or the development of goods also qualify under the legislation if there is an 'appreciable' improvement. It doesn't have to be significant and is not limited to laboratories or scientists.
'On average, our clients can generate cash benefits equal to 2.72% of their turnover and 7.30% of their wage bill.'
The winners of the Great British Entrepreneur Awards will be announced at a ceremony at London's Grosvenor House on Monday November 17.
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Telegraph
15 hours ago
- Telegraph
How BrewDog's craft beer revolution went flat
When James Taylor became chief executive of BrewDog in March, he was heralded as the man to take the troubled brewer 'into its next chapter'. After a turbulent few years that saw the company accused of running a 'toxic' workplace and post spiralling losses, Taylor, a cool-headed former fashion industry executive, hoped to draw a line under BrewDog's past. His surprise appointment came after former boss James Arrow stepped down after less than a year in post. But just months into Taylor's tenure, BrewDog has found itself in choppy waters once again. Unite, the union, has accused the company of 'potentially unlawful' behaviour after BrewDog announced the closure of 10 of its bars because they were not 'commercially viable'. The union claims staff were given less than four days notice. The company has refused to say how many staff will be affected. Taylor denies unlawful conduct and claims that Unite's accusations are 'factually incorrect'. A BrewDog spokesman adds that while the bars will close, staff will continue to be paid during a consultation period. 'It sounds fairly brutal from a financial point of view but [the bars] were loss-making,' Taylor says, insisting staff affected by the process are being treated 'with the utmost respect'. Nevertheless, the closures highlight the pressure on a business that was once considered one of Britain's proudest start-ups. Credited with popularising American-style craft IPAs in the UK, BrewDog claimed to have grown from nothing into a 'unicorn' business worth $1bn (£740m) in just a decade. Now, after years of rapid growth, the company is fighting just to stand still. It is battling inflation, falling consumer confidence and a decline in boozing. At the same time, questions have been raised over an unorthodox private equity deal struck in 2017, which turned its founders into multimillionaires but forced BrewDog to deliver an 18pc compounding return to its investors. It is plain to see why Taylor feels he must take action: pre-tax losses at the brewer have spiralled in recent years, growing from £30.5m in 2022 to £59m in 2023. Taylor says the company was profitable on an earnings before interest, tax depreciation and amortisation (Ebitda) basis – a measure used in the city to show the underlying performance of the company – in 2024 but admits full results, when made available, will not show a return to the black. 'Below Ebitda, that is where you get various sort of shareholder financial charges, for example, so no, it won't be a pre-tax profit at all. The pre-tax losses will have reduced,' says Taylor. 'We have an awful lot of incredible things to do with this business. You've seen this week we've had to make some harsh decisions as part of that.' Insiders say BrewDog has been making harsh decisions for some time, pointing to numerous redundancies among the company's central staff. 'In 2023, there was a big cull and then three months ago there was another wave,' says a former BrewDog employee. 'Some people [who] had worked there a very long time left. There were some really surprising names.' Anti-establishment zeitgeist Brewers and pub companies have been hammered by the soaring cost of energy, fuel and labour, with the Chancellor's April tax raid heaping further pressure on businesses that employ a lot of people. Taylor says the tax raid is not to blame for BrewDog's closures but concedes that it 'makes it harder to make money in hospitality [and] makes it harder to make profitable bars'. At the same time, inflation has pushed up the price of a pint just as the high cost of living has made people more cautious about their discretionary spending. BrewDog's sales growth has slowed dramatically in recent years, with revenues rising by less than £3m to £357m in 2024. 'The bars have been a big problem. Smaller ones that are in the wrong location have probably got quite severe overheads, and not a lot of people coming in,' says the source. Taylor says: 'The beer market is not growing. That just means we've got to take market share from our competitors.' In an attempt to restore growth, BrewDog has rebranded its beers around the idea they are 'brewed fresh' and deleted several of its past social media posts, distancing itself from former chief executive James Watt, who would use the brand's social media to rail against big beer rivals. Taylor says he wants to give BrewDog 'a slightly different personality' – toning down its former anti-corporate stance in favour of marketing around the idea of 'quality'. 'We have a different leadership team. We have a fresh attitude to what we're trying to do,' he says. He adds: 'We are going to be exciting in our [new products], we're going to be going to some very interesting spaces and territories. We're going to improve the quality of our headliners.' Whether BrewDog can achieve this is up for debate. The company's reputation has been shaken by allegations of a 'toxic' workplace under Watt, who stepped down as chief executive last year, and accusations that he acted inappropriately with female staff, which he has stringently denied. Its beers are also not considered as cutting-edge as they once were either. 'BrewDog built the category of craft beer,' says Greg Wells, managing director of beer consultancy We Are Beer. 'They were bombastic with it and it spoke to a generation of millennial beer drinkers in a really exciting way – myself included.' But the anti-establishment rhetoric that helped BrewDog capture the zeitgeist – Watt was a prominent critic of corporate 'fat cats' and the actions of big beer companies during his time leading the brewer – lacks some resonance with younger drinkers. 'Poking the corporate in the eye, I don't think that connects with 27-year-olds,' says Wells. 'I think part of what BrewDog needs to find is what that punk spirit and creativity means today.' The former BrewDog employee says: 'Craft beer in terms of pubs, its share has gone backwards. Premium world lager is flying, Guinness – I don't know where, how, or when it caught the imagination of Gen Z, but the whole Kim Kardashian and 'splitting the G' trend on TikTok and everything else – it's just flying. 'For all BrewDog's awareness and for all that it sells in the supermarkets, the [pub] consumer is not demanding it.' Move away from 'Equity Punk' Then there is the £213m deal BrewDog's founders struck with the American private equity giant TSG Consumer Partners in 2017, which gave TSG a 22.3pc stake in the company and turned both Watt and Dickie into multimillionaires. During its wild ascendancy, BrewDog raised millions of pounds from thousands of ordinary people who bought so-called 'Equity Punk' shares in the company, fuelling its growth and international expansion. However, prior to selling the stake to TSG, Watt and Dickie changed the company rules and watered down investor protections, leaving many of their retail investors worried that they will end up with nothing. Crucially, written into the TSG deal was an 18pc compounding coupon, which rapidly increases the interest on TSG's shares on an annual basis, potentially overriding other shareholders and leaving them with little value in the company. 'Effectively, private equity is going to end up owning the entire business,' says a city source. 'If you've got that interest compounding at 18pc and the business is flat, effectively, the business will have to be financially restructured, and with private equity being the lender first resort, it will end up substantially in their hands.' Paul Savage, who bought shares in the company in 2020 during one of its crowdfunding rounds, is among those angry at the structure of the deal, which could wipe him out. 'Why are you trying to hurt your initial crowdfunding people? Why is money from a shady investment firm better?' he says. Taylor says he was not there when the deal was struck, but insists this is not the case. 'We don't 'owe' TSG that money. It doesn't sit on the company balance sheet,' he says. 'My job is to create value for all shareholders. I don't sit there worrying about coupon rates or that sort of thing. I work for all shareholders, it doesn't matter whether that's TSG, whether that's the founders of this business, or [the Equity Punks].' Before James Watt stepped down in 2024, the company had been working towards an eventual IPO or a sale to private equity. Taylor says no IPO or sale is currently planned and that TSG supports his turnaround plans. 'I will try and create shareholder value for everybody and what happens in the future in terms of the value of that? Well, quite frankly, it's an academic conversation for the moment,' says Taylor. A spokesman for TSG Consumer Partners said: 'We remain confident in BrewDog's fundamental brand strength and market position under the leadership of CEO James Taylor, COO Lauren Carrol and the new management team, who have successfully returned the company to profitability in 2024. 'We continue to work closely with management to maximise value for all stakeholders as BrewDog capitalises on the significant opportunities in the craft beer space and leverages its market-leading brand portfolio for future growth.'
New Statesman
2 days ago
- New Statesman
Brewdog Britain is dead
Photo by PA Images/Alamy Punk. Elvis Juice. Hazy Jane. Wingman. Malt Fiction. Crazy Monk. In 2007, Scotsmen James Watt and Martin Dickie founded BrewDog with a simple goal: stick two fingers up at the stuffy, supercilious world of Big Beer by making some of the most unquaffable booze in all of Christendom. And for much of the early 2010s they really did capture a particular millennial zeitgeist, as the aesthetic once lazily branded as 'hipster' – the beards, the Black Keys, the BBQ pulled pork – ingrained its Red Wing boots firmly into the British public's psyche. Post-recession, the traditional English pub, with its sticky, patterned carpets, plush ruby red banquettes, and intimate, convivial atmosphere was on the way out (a whopping 1,973 establishments closed in the year following the financial crash). What followed was a reshaping of the public house itself, with BrewDog at the dark heart of it. Suddenly, exposed brick, industrial ventilation shafts, and harsh lighting became de rigueur, as pubs turned from welcoming third spaces, which often felt like extensions of someone's front room, into experiential holding pens; places where the deep nidor of sticky wings and dragon fries mixed with the stale smell of spilt cloudy IPAs. The chairs were uncomfortable, the drinks were expensive, and the branding was very much a focus group's idea of hip. BrewDog always claimed to do things differently. Its headline initiative was Equity for Punks, a crowdfunding scheme which allowed regular old pintmen like you and me to become shareholders in the company (the Financial Times recently reported that unless a buyer comes in with a mammoth offer for BrewDog soon, the shares sold to its 130,000 Equity Punks will be worthless). They drove a tank down Camden high street, decrying 'tasteless, apathetic, fizzy mainstream lagers produced by huge global breweries' (leaked emails from 2018 show that James Watt was open to a partial sale to Heineken). They projected themselves naked onto the Houses of Parliament, for some reason. This week, BrewDog announced the imminent closure of 10 of their public houses – including their Aberdeen flagship and three London sites – citing 'ongoing industry challenges', such as 'rising costs, increased regulation, and economic pressures'. It's no secret that the hospitality industry is currently in dire straits, but it's been a particularly tough half-decade for these countercultural upstarts. In June of 2021, a significant number of former employees penned an open letter, highlighting the 'cult of personality', 'toxic attitudes', and the 'residual feeling of fear' felt by staff at the company. In 2022, a BBC One Disclosure investigation alleged inappropriate behaviour from then-CEO James Watt towards female employees, which he denied. In 2024, the brewer dropped their pledge to pay all staff the real living wage. Later that year, a second open letter – this time from team members at BrewDog's showpiece pub in Waterloo station – hit the news, with claims of 'bullying, gaslighting … racism, sexism, and ableism'. Up until now, these allegations don't seem to have impacted BrewDog's bottom line too much. The company's financial results for the year ending 31 December 2024 showed gross revenues of £357m, bringing them back into profitability for the first time since 2021. But might this recent batch of closures turn the tide against the brand? Trade union Unite described the move, which will go ahead with just four days notice this Saturday, as 'not just morally repugnant, [but] potentially unlawful'. As for the consumer, walk into BrewDog Waterloo on any given weeknight and you'll find a peculiar mix of commuters, tourists, and team-bonding trips. There's a slide, there's a podcast studio, there's an ice cream truck. It's certainly hard to imagine the pub being anyone's local. And it's also hard to imagine the next generation of drinkers ever being particularly bothered about stepping foot inside its cavernous walls. Much has been said about Gen Z's supposed abstinence (a recent study by IWSR's Bevtrac found that alcohol consumption among 18-25 year olds actually rose in the UK from 66 per cent in 2023 to 76 per cent in 2025) but, anecdotally, you only need to cross the threshold of a traditional London pub on a Friday or Saturday night to see that the one thing BrewDog rallied against is now undoubtedly cool again: the proper boozer, with its packets of pork scratchings and mass-produced lager and stout. Pubs like The Blue Posts on Berwick Street, The King's Head in Finsbury Park, and The Army & Navy in Dalston are regularly teeming with young people chasing fun and authenticity (and, yes, splitting the G). Even the relatively new buzzy Soho boozer du jour, The Devonshire, eschews the stripped-back millennial aesthetic in favour of a classic, cosy pub feel. It's part of a broader trend away from the bland minimalism of the 2010s towards something markedly messier and more free – and towards something that, crucially, is far less concerned with artificial anti-establishment posturing. Of course, one has to wonder if James Watt even cares particularly at this stage. In 2024, he stepped down from his role as CEO after 17 years, 'to take a bit of time off, to travel, [and] to spend more time with my family and friends'. James Arrow, the Chief Operations Officer who replaced him, also quit in March of this year. But since resigning, Watt has found a second wind as something of an online celebrity, creating banal video content with his wife Georgia 'Toff' Toffolo (of Made in Chelsea fame), launching a Dragons Den-style TV show called House of Unicorns, and rubbing shoulders with Jim Davidson and Lee Anderson at Nigel Farage's 60th birthday bash. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe So is this the beginning of the end for BrewDog? Have we reached peak Punk? The world is a very different place now to what it was in 2007. The try-hard PR stunts, the private equity, and the bad employment practices – all under the inauthentic guise of 'punk' – feels, in 2025, deeply uncool. So, drink up your Lost Lager. It's almost time for last orders. [Further reading: A drinker's guide to offshore London] Related
The Independent
3 days ago
- The Independent
Is it time the BrewDog beer empire went flat?
When it launched in 2007, craft beer BrewDog was a 'punk' brand. It's a word that featured on many of the cans of its IPA sold at the Fontaines DC show at Finsbury Park earlier this month, and at summer festivals across the land. It's a sign of something young, cool, edgy. What's not so cool is abruptly closing 10 bars, including BrewDog's flagship outlet in Aberdeen, some within a matter of days. 'Morally repugnant,' said the union Unite, which represents some of the workers whose livelihoods have been affected by the closures. True, companies sometimes have to close outlets when they're losing money, especially if the wider group is in the red and really can't afford to be subsidising places that aren't washing their faces financially. That's the harsh reality. But while that sort of decision is always going to hurt the workers on the receiving end, there are ways and means of handling these things. Unite has raised questions about the firm's tactics, telling the BBC that this is: 'Yet another example of a company that doesn't have the slightest regard for basic employment law, let alone the welfare of their workers.' It says it is working with the affected workers to challenge the decision, legally if necessary. BrewDog was an entertaining and innovative start-up that became a big success, planting its flag overseas and tweaking the nose of the establishment along the way. It had an original way of garnering finance by creating 'equity punks' through crowdfunding. These supporters turned up at sometimes raucous AGMs. The group also had a keen eye for PR stunts. Its critics obligingly went into meltdown when the company launched nuclear-strength beers. In recent years, however, the brand has acquired a coat of tarnish. In 2021, former workers wrote an open letter highlighting what they claimed was a "culture of fear" within the business while alleging "toxic attitudes" towards junior employees. The following year, a BBC investigation aired allegations of inappropriate behaviour on the part of co-founder and now-former CEO James Watt. These were denied. But Ofcom rejected a complaint made by Watt and the company against BBC Scotland on the grounds of 'fairness and privacy'. It said: 'Ofcom's decision is that material facts were not presented, disregarded or omitted in a way that was unfair to the complainants, that they had an appropriate and timely opportunity to respond to the allegations made in the programme, and that their response was fairly reflected in the programme.' Then last April, Watt – who publicly opposed Brexit – was pictured at Nigel Farage's 60th birthday party. Now, I want to be clear here: I really couldn't care less who his friends are, or whose parties he chooses to go to. Business leaders need to engage with all sides for the health of their companies. That's lobbying. It's silly to huff and puff when they do that. But partying with a polarising figure that a large chunk of your customer base reviles is different. The optics are not good. It's a poor business decision. And it was only a few weeks after Farage's party that Watt stepped down from the top job at BrewDog, 17 years after he co-founded the Scottish brewer. The company also decided to cease paying the real living wage, based on the cost of living, in favour of the lower rate mandated by the government, citing the need to return to profitability in a tough climate for the hospitality industry. For his own part, Watt has previously decried those who seek a "work-life balance", rather than what he called "work-life integration", suggesting that if you love you work, you don't need to separate it from your personal life. Much of the hospitality sector has been swimming upstream, it is true. Its businesses have been grappling with higher taxes and costs while consumer confidence is at a low ebb. The country's economic challenges have also hit young people particularly hard. If your rent is gobbling up half your take-home pay, you're going to have to limit what you spend on going out. It's a lot cheaper to buy beer from Tesco and invite friends round than it is to meet up at BrewDog. But one also wonders whether at least some of the company's problems are down to the damage the brand has taken. Brands matter. Companies pour vast sums into building them up. History also teaches us how easy it is to blow them up. If customers stop buying into yours because you've been shooting yourself in the foot and causing them to question your authenticity, then you have a problem. No one would bat an eyelid if, say, Brexit-backing Wetherspoon's boss Tim Martin was spotted out on the town with Farage. Martin is who he is, and doesn't much care who knows it. He's authentically Tim. Is that true of Watt and, by extension, BrewDog, which he is still closely involved with even if he's no longer the CEO? How much are you willing to pay for 'punk' beer that isn't really so punk? A beer that is, in reality, part of the establishment but expects you to pay a premium price that the local Wetherspoon's doesn't demand (far from it). I suspect the answer isn't to BrewDog's taste.
