Short interview with Steve Gagne and Matt Kahia, co-founders of 14 Star Brewing Company. They describe transitioning from 24 years in the Army and deployments (including Afghanistan in 2010) to founding a brewery using a small 401(k) loan, local lenders, and the SBA; the business purpose includes raising funds through a distillery for a nonprofit to bring veterans to Vermont and demystify entrepreneurship for them.
Chapters
My name is Steve Gagne and I'm the co founder of 14 Star Brewing Company.
Hi, I'm Matt Kahia. I'm a founder of 14 Star Brewing Company.
I was born in Northwest Vermont and For the last 24 years I've been an army officer.
Steve and I best friends since about 2001. We've deployed twice together.
Well, Matt and I had been home brewers for a long time. When we deployed to Afghanistan in 2010, we lived in a patrol base that had no power, no running water.
So when we weren't doing operations, we had a lot of downtime to discuss what we wanted after the military life.
And when we got back, we didn't want to sit on the couch. We wanted to do something that really made an impact and kind of left a legacy in our community. And so we came up with this idea of starting a brewery and we.
Started writing in a notebook our business plan. And when we got back we decided.
To go for it with a small loan against my 401k. We got the initial gear to start the brewery and immediately couldn't keep up with demand. And then when we decided to fully expand, we turned to local lender and the sba.
We take a lot of pride in giving back.
I like to say that 14 Star builds communities. We just happen to brew world class beer. We knew from the start that it was going to be more than just about the beer and it was going to be more than the dollars and cents of the business. While those things are important, certainly we wanted to ensure that the breweries used as a mechanism to make our communities a better place. Not just our local community, but also our veteran communities.
1, 2, 3, 6.
We're currently at our fledgling distillery.
So the brewery is a for profit business, but we realized that so many of the lessons that we had taken from our time in the service we.
Using to help our business.
Military service actually lent itself very well to starting your own business. We started the distillery solely for the.
Reason of raising money for a non profit to bring veterans up here to.
Vermont to really demystify the process of entrepreneurship, introduce them to the SBA to score to the SBDCs. A lot of times commercial industry tells them that they don't have marketable skills and they may not have marketable skills for big industry, but they certainly have terrifically valuable skills in starting and running their own small business.
And so the SBA has been wonderful.
There are several programs that are geared specifically for veterans and we encourage the veterans that we work with that we coach on entrepreneurship to seek out those programs specifically when we link them up with the sba, because it really is a fantastic benefit for their time in the service.
