Thank you.
My name is Lisa Watts. I am the president, CEO and co-founder of Hub Town Brewing, a small microbrewery in downtown Okotoks. We opened our doors in September of 2019 after four long years of planning, writing and rewriting business plans, strategizing, fundraising, and growing our brand and building our community.
I'd like to start by saying thank you for having me here today to speak a little on how the pandemic has affected Hub Town, us as owners, and everyone we've worked with over the past nine months as we navigated both our first year in business and a global pandemic that has essentially forced us to move in directions we had never considered, in an effort to survive.
I think the best way to describe the feelings that have at times completely overwhelmed us and at other times have sat almost mutedly dormant in the background, from the early days in March through to now, is to say that it's been a roller coaster. As each terrifying obstacle was put in front of us, such as closing down our taproom, which provided 99% of our revenue stream, or reducing the capacity to below survivable numbers when we were able to reopen, we seemed to follow most of the stages of grief, holding tight to some of those stages a little more, while experiencing moments of elation and pride in between.
Like jumping over hurdles, each of which is higher than the last, the obstacles that we face and continue to navigate have done a couple of things for us. They have forced us to find a lot of solutions, testing our ability to stretch our limits and to find new paths that were never ever in the plan, nor ever a consideration. It actually managed to boost our confidence in our ability, teaching us that we and our business can survive more than we ever thought possible.
The side effect of this, however, is that roller coaster I spoke of. We would fluctuate from panic mode—trying to find new ways of bringing in revenue when those who provided the revenue to us were being coached to stay home and avoid us—to pure elation, when we would find an unexpected revenue stream that shot us into almost rock-star status with our target market.
What never changed, however, was the mental and physical anxiety that came with each of the highs and each of the lows; the weird new habits that I've taken up, such as chewing on ice all day long. I can't even explain where that came from. The anxiety just produced the desire to crunch on something constantly. There was no other way of getting out what was going on. And there was waking in the morning with a racing heart, wondering what was in store next, good or bad.
As I began to work through what I think I was identifying, for the first time in my life, as anxiety, I would have conversations with my husband and business partner Mark, picking apart every daily update from our federal or provincial governments that we worried would once again threaten our path.
These conversations spilled over into talks with other business owners, our staff, our patrons, our families, our friends, teachers, nurses—you name it. We all talked about it. If it wasn't on the TV, it was on the radio, and it never left our brains.
Even a couple of days ago, when we tried to disconnect from TV, radio and talking about the pandemic, we went shopping at Costco and noticed a flurry of shoppers—on a Tuesday at 4 p.m. In our town, this is abnormal. Immediately we knew that something must have happened on that day's update to cause some panic and that we had better listen to it to see how our worlds were about to change once again.
If the anxiety and elation were the only two things, the only giant swings that we had to manage throughout the pandemic, I think we would have been a little better off. But throw in a little anger and resentment and you have the third and fourth valleys of our roller coaster ride.
As a business, we are subject to criticism and jealousy, like everyone else. When we were positively growing our business during the pandemic, when many were suffering, and we were trying to dodge the obstacles, so too came the anonymous complaints. This would mean that our AHS inspectors would come to see us, measure that all of our tables were six feet apart back to back, reconfirm for the umpteenth time that we had sanitizer available for everyone there and of course that our staff were all wearing masks non-stop.
It didn't matter that the rest of the world didn't wear masks to protect us and our staff, nor bring their own sanitizer, nor ask to sit further away from people but would rather sit closer, if at all possible. We as a business were responsible for ensuring that the world didn't infect each other, and we somehow had to do this without angering them into never patronizing us again.
This was and always will be the hardest position we and our staff have ever had to be in. We were heavily judged for not forcing people to mask, when there was no bylaw, and we were heavily judged for having a sign up reminding people to wear masks when the bylaw became a part of our reality.
It was a lose-lose situation, and we had to coach our team on how to deal with each and every attitude that walked in the door, when honestly, we didn't know what the heck we were doing ourselves; nor did we know what the right thing to do was.
The inconsistent rules between businesses and schools helped further grow our anger and resentment, and although we continued to ride the roller coaster of highs and lows, the anger was drowning everything else out until just over a month ago, when we hit bottom.
Let me just say that I've never had my own experience with depression before. In fact, I was the person who said that depression was an emotion we could probably all control—we just needed to want to try.
When my anger hit an all-time high and was followed by the feeling that I could barely think past 20 minutes ahead—nor did I care to—I realized that I might be experiencing this depression thing.
My motivation to figure out how to manage the next obstacle was gone. My desire to find a new revenue stream, in light of all of the items that come and were being put in our face, was gone. I was tired and wanting nothing more than to just stop.