The New Year has us contemplating the future of Dimes Brewhouse. After our 1-Year Anniversary, we are taking a much needed deep breath as we enjoy the holidays and rethink how we do things around here.
We are still working to ensure that Dimes is a sustainable business. Our mission is to be here, serving our community for a long time. Our first year in business has taught us a lot, and we’ve made many changes and improvements in our brewing process and our taproom operations. Even still, there are so many ways we can get better. We are making a couple New Year’s resolutions that will hopefully allow us to reach our goals – and we have some big ones this year.
New Year’s Resolution #1: Better Planning
We are resolving to set aside time for planning – to plan more and plan farther ahead. Last year, we were always feeling frenzied with too many things that needed to be done RIGHT NOW, and we never took much time to plan for the future. That meant some beers got released later than we wanted them to be, some events were organized and advertised at the last minute, and some didn’t even happen at all. We will be blocking out time on our calendars to sit down and plan our big goals for the year, our beer releases and events for each quarter, the details of each upcoming month, and the production schedule for each week.
New Year’s Resolution #2: Better Communication and Training
We are extremely grateful for the luck we have had in hiring excellent people. Our staff have done such a great job keeping our customers happy and navigating their way through glitches that pop up (like our register refusing to connect to the internet, leaky keg couplers, foamy beer lines, and so many more random little problems that always seem to occur when there is a line of 5 people waiting). We are happy to say that our staff often identify common problems and suggest solutions and preventative measures on their own.
Before we opened Dimes, we took a decent amount of time training our staff, but since then, we haven’t done much beyond sporadic team meetings. We know we can do better at training and communicating with our employees. This year, we’ll be starting monthly individual check-ins to give each person a chance to bring up anything that might be bothering them. We just recently implemented more formal performance reviews, which are designed for 2-way, direct feedback between employer and employee. We are going to stick to a more regular schedule for our team meetings. And keeping some big upcoming goals in mind, we know there will be more training needed for both new and existing employees.
Communication with our customers is also important! As we were working toward our opening, this blog was a great way for us to tell our story; but with the flurry of activity in the first year of business, we went for over a year without posting a single update. Recently, we got back into the business of blogging and people really seem to enjoy it, especially our infographic blog post all about our 1st year in business. So we intend to keep going with the blog!
Speaking of blog posts, as you read this post, you may have caught the not-so-subtle alluding to the big, new goals for Dimes Brewhouse. I may be a tease, but this post is already getting too long, so I’m saving that discussion about our big goals for the next update. If you want to be among the first to know what we’re scheming about, subscribe here!
We hope you all get the chance to spend some time reflecting on your memories from 2018. Cheers to building an even better 2019 for you and yours!