Barrels, Brews, and Growth: Ted Mitzlaff’s Goodwood Vision | Restaurants & Franchises Series

Intro: Welcome to another edition of inspired stories where leaders share their experiences so we can learn from their successes how they’ve overcome adversity and explore current challenges they’re facing.

Anthony Codispoti: Welcome to another edition of the inspired stories podcast where leaders share their experiences so we can learn from their successes and be inspired by how they’ve overcome adversity. My name is Anthony Kodespode and today’s guest is Ted Mitzlap, CEO and co-owner of Goodwood Brewing & Sports. Founded in Louisville, Kentucky in 2005, Goodwood produces a variety of craft beers and spirits focusing on high quality ingredients and sustainable practices. They stand out for their use of barrel aging techniques and commitment to local sourcing, resulting in distinctive flavors and a loyal following. Ted has led Goodwood’s growth while also bringing his extensive experience in the food and beverage industry, including management roles at various companies.

Under his leadership, Goodwood has expanded its reach, adding new tap rooms and restaurant concepts across Kentucky and Missouri. Ted’s background as chairman and CEO has helped the brain gain recognition for its innovative blends and community driven mission. His passion for creating a memorable experience shines through every customer they serve. Now before we get into all that good stuff, today’s episode is brought to you by my company, Add Back Benefits Agency, where we offer very specific and unique employee benefits that are both great for your team and fiscally optimized for your bottom line. One recent client was able to add over $900 per employee per year in extra cash flow by implementing one of our innovative programs. Results vary for each company and some organizations may not be eligible.

To find out if your company qualifies, contact us today at addbackbenefitsagency.com. Now back to our guest today, CEO of Goodwood Beer. Ted, I appreciate you making the time to share your story today.

Thank you very much for having me. All right, so let’s go back to before Goodwood. What were you doing before you got involved in Goodwood Beer? What kind of opened the door to this opportunity?

Ted Mitzlaff: I was a chemical engineer, chemistry and business is what I studied in undergraduate school and then went into the specialty chemical company that my father had started. It was a fledgling company and ramped that up to the point where we were a national company that became a target for acquisition. In 2005, I was approached. I never thought I’d sell the company and somebody floated a number and we sold the company.

Anthony Codispoti: And so what kind of chemical company was this? You guys were manufacturing chemicals and selling them?

Ted Mitzlaff: Blending and it was for specialty chemical applications, mostly food processing was sort of our niche. We did a lot of cleaning and sanitation of large food processing plants as well as boiler cooling wastewater treatment. And then I started an automation business. I patented a wastewater optimization system and started an automation company that was a tangent to my chemical business. So when I sold the chemical business, I continued to operate the automation company. What’s the name of that automation company? That is Reliance Automation and we still…

Anthony Codispoti: Tell me a little bit more about what it does. You said wastewater, but what’s specific?

Ted Mitzlaff: It monitors the waste stream in food processing plants. It also work in large manufacturers, metal companies, automotive companies. And it measures the relative clarity of the water and they add chemicals that are positive and negatively charged polymers to basically coagulate and flocculate all the solids. Either sink them or float them to make the water clean enough that they can then discharge it to the city without getting fined. So in the case of a food processing plant, we remove fat, oil, grease, blood, marinations, all those things that would cause them to be out of compliance. And what happens when they dial in those chemicals, if there’s a change to the chemistry, like when they go to a cleaning and sanitation period, for example, or if they dump a massive fryer or even changing from a teriyaki sauce finish to a barbecue sauce finish, that’ll screw up the wastewater. So in real time, our system will recognize and upset, make adjustments in the chemistry, and then enable them to keep going without periods of getting surcharged.

Anthony Codispoti: So let’s say I’m in a restaurant and I’m making a huge vat of teriyaki, it goes bad or the recipe was not good. I just dump it out into the sink so I can start over. And somewhere along the wastewater pipeline, your tech is in place, it detects that and says, oh, alarm, alarm, further down the line, let’s put these chemicals in place so that we can help to capture these solids.

Ted Mitzlaff: Sort of, the chemicals are already in place. And they’re, you know, let’s say they’re breaking the emulsion of blood. Let’s say it’s just a normal, you got blood, fat oil, grease from a poultry processing plant. And they add a certain, it’s almost like a liquid magnet. If you overcharge it or undercharge it, it either doesn’t work or it repels itself. It becomes too charged, like two magnets. So we basically monitor the clarity to make sure it’s good, clear water. And if there’s an upset like you dump a bunch of teriyaki, the changes, they call it Zeta potential, changes the positive and negative charges within that waste stream. The system will then make adjustments to the polymers in real time and identify what combination gives it the optimal clarity. So instead of it going for hours until somebody notices the system’s out of whack, it notices it right away, makes changes right away and fixes the problem.

Anthony Codispoti: And so with either Reliant or the chemical company that you mentioned before, did you have customers then who were in the beer, the brewing industry? Yes. Sort of how you became aware of this opportunity?

Ted Mitzlaff: Yeah, I came in backwards. I started off at the, on the downstream of the production side and then breweries use a lot of cleaning and sanitation chemicals. We always joke around here that they brew about 20% of the time and they clean about 80% of the time.

Anthony Codispoti: Okay. And so through your interactions in the brewing industry, somehow you became aware of an opportunity. Tell us about that.

Ted Mitzlaff: Yeah, this small, very small company was a little production brewery that was having a lot of cash flow issues. They had over 50 people who were on their LLC, which was not very efficient. And they were having difficulty even paying us for our chemicals that were needed to clean and sanitize the back of the house, the fermenters and the cookers, the mash tons. So we knew there was problem. And then one of my friends put together a group of us or five of us that negotiated to acquire the business. And that was in 2005.

Anthony Codispoti: And what did you see there? Why were you excited about pursuing this opportunity?

Ted Mitzlaff: Well, I’d always been a fan of beer and craft beer going to school in Virginia. I was at the University of Richmond. Craft, the craft beer Renaissance, if you will, sort of started at either coast and worked its way inward. So the two companies that really put craft beer back on the map were Boston Brewing and Sierra Nevada, and then kind of moved inward.

There were a lot of others that were players as well, but those were the main two. So we were at the precipice of the craft beer movement. And then if you look in my high school yearbook, my senior year, it actually said when I grew up, I want to and it said own a brewery. So sort of sort of funny that that came to fruition, but wasn’t wasn’t necessarily my goal, but but I sort of fell into.

Anthony Codispoti: Okay. And so what were those early days, months and years like, like what were some of the big changes that you wanted to implement right away?

Ted Mitzlaff: Yeah, well, I didn’t take the company over until 2013. So it had grown from just a small little mom and pop to the point where we were distributing in three states and had a pretty significant portion of the Kentucky market. However, there weren’t that many breweries in Kentucky. When we bought the brewery in 2005, there were about 1200 breweries in the US. And Kentucky was grossly underrepresented per capita by craft breweries. So it wasn’t too much of a bragging right to say that we were one of the largest in Kentucky.

But as the industry grew, and certainly as more and more craft breweries came to be in Kentucky, a decent craft breweries at that, it was a more competitive environment. So when I took it over in 2013, the company was basically insolvent at that point. Unfortunately, there had been a lot of mismanagement prior to my taking the reins. So so the in the landscape had changed dramatically in craft beer. So when I first took it over, the challenges were just really overwhelming.

Anthony Codispoti: Can give voice to what some of those challenges were. Sure.

Ted Mitzlaff: You had mentioned, you know, we’re known for our barrel aged products. We do a bourbon barrel stout, which was our flagship. That product takes about three months from start to finish. So we brew the beer, age the beer and barrels and then the package the beer and then get it to market. So so when I took the company over, we had no product in the pipeline. None of our suppliers would sell to us. We tapped all of our credit. And all of our fermenters were empty. So knowing that I had to go to all of our big clients, the the progers of the world.

And I know you all have proger as well. That was our biggest client by far and tell them, yeah, not only do we not have product to fill those shelves that have our name on them, but it’s going to be three months at the earliest before we can get product in those shelves. If I pulled the trigger today. So so it was it was a lot of begging and just we had to work with our distributors, a lot of damage control. So so the first several months were brutal. And I had so many creditors calling me and folks that we owed calling me that I got to the point where I wouldn’t even accept a live call. I would wait until it would go to my voicemail.

Hear it. You know, here what the problem is, I might not even know that we owed them money. And then wait till I sort of had a plan to reach back out to them and say, hey, you know, I apologize.

This is what happened. We’ll work with you. You know, please give me a little bit of time to pay it work out payment plans. So that was the better part of a year, year and a half after I checked the company over. So it was it was quite unique.

Anthony Codispoti: So was this an asset purchase when you took it over? Was it a stock purchase where you also assumed the liabilities asset purchase only?

Ted Mitzlaff: So it wasn’t, you know, the company we bought was tiny and there was really no issue moving forward from there. The problem became the far managing partner was not doing a great job as far as being a steward of our resources, not necessarily. Up front, he was cooking the books. He was sending us PNLs that were that were phony, then taking some extreme liberties with expenses. For instance, we had season tickets to Manchester United soccer. And he was going to games on the company dime. And believe me, we weren’t selling much beer in Manchester.

Anthony Codispoti: So the issues that you had with having to explain to, you know, having to repair relationships with distributors and say, hey, we will pay you or your suppliers, we will pay you. That wasn’t from what you had acquired from the original owners. This was from one of your managing partners and some of the misdeeds that have gone on since you had acquired the business. Correct. Correct. And how did this all come to light?

Ted Mitzlaff: Well, I was on a business trip. I was just an investor in the brewery at the time. I had, I was running Eastern US for a company that had acquired my chemical business. So I was in the Atlanta airport, and I got a call from our biggest distributor, which was the Louisville distributor.

And the president of the company and owner happened to be a good friend of mine. And he said, Vince Lough, why can’t I get your beer? And I thought he was pulling my leg. I said, I don’t know, John, why can’t you get my beer?

Waiting for the punchline. And he said, no, I’m serious. He said, all your fermenters are empty and your suppliers apparently won’t sell to you.

He said, there’s a problem. So I called the plant and the managing partner was AWOL. And the guys at the plant told me that they had been instructed not to talk to any of the investors. And I explained to them, I owned a quarter of the business and I was a guarantor of the note. So they were going to tell me everything they knew. And I jumped off, I cast my business trip, jumped the next flight home, and met with them. I got three years of bank statements.

Could have gone back seven, but I only went back three. And, you know, just right off the cusp, I found about a quarter of a million dollars at theft. So it was a daunting situation and a difficult situation because all the partners were friends and several were related and related to that managing partner. So it was an interesting time.

Anthony Codispoti: Wow. And I think you sort of intimated at this already that, you know, you were seeing P &Ls, but they weren’t accurate. You were running your other businesses, you had invested in this one, and I’m sure that you’re checking in, you’re having board meetings and whatnot, but the information that you were getting funneled was cooked. It was false, there were lies. You look at this and you think, okay, we’re in good shape.

Ted Mitzlaff: Right. Not the case. Yeah. And he would say, oh, we need another capital call due to our growth. And so I thought, okay, well, that’s a good thing. So you contribute. And I didn’t think a whole lot of it until it kind of, I’ve given a nice cold bath, if you will, of reality.

Anthony Codispoti: Now, this can, you know, post mortem, this can always be difficult to do. But as you look back, were there red flags that you missed along the way or knowing what you know now, would you have done anything differently? And the reason I ask this is, you know, for everybody listening, you know, who’s in a business deal or thinking about entering into a business deal, you know, help them sort of identify and understand what kind of flags and warning signs they should be looking for.

Ted Mitzlaff: Yeah. Well, one of the biggies was make sure that you’re transparent with cash. You know, I give everybody in our, I have several investors, one in particular, significant, you know, they all have the number for our controller. I can give bank statements and whatever they would like to see. We are completely transparent. I do put out a monthly P &L. Anyone that’s interested in seeing it.

Anthony Codispoti: Anyone within the company, any of the employees?

Ted Mitzlaff: Well, from the employee standpoint, I let our executives see that we have. So we’re basically a three-legged stool. We have our restaurant division. We have beer and we have bourbon. So I have individuals, you know, I have a CEO of operations on the production side and I have a CEO of restaurants. And I do share the information with them. Okay.

Anthony Codispoti: So, okay, so you find out the shenanigans that are going on. Now, this is the time where you step in and start taking active control of the business?

Ted Mitzlaff: Well, the other partners asked me to. I had sold my chemical company. You know, I was running a division for the company, the Bopline, but I knew that that was not long term. I owned a mill with another guy. I was the operating partner in that. But truthfully, we had people in place that were doing the day-to-day operations. So I did have the flexibility to come in and take the reins. I didn’t realize what I was walking into.

Initially, I thought it was going to be, you know, a 20 to 30 hour a week job and it was a 60 plus. But that’s okay. You know, that’s to your point, everybody thinks, oh, it must be great to be CEO or owner of a brewery and a good friend of mine always laughs and goes, yeah, it’s a 10-year overnight success.

Anthony Codispoti: Right. People don’t see what goes on behind the scenes. Right. They just see, they just see the pretty facade. Yeah. So you come in and obviously a big thing that you had to clean up were these vendor relationships, the, you know, your customer relationships, everything had kind of been soured by the poor operations and management before. Once you started to get all that stuff settled, cleaned up, resolved, what were some of the big forward-looking changes that you wanted to implement?

Ted Mitzlaff: Yeah, that was the fun part. First and foremost, we got into a little bit of food service here in our tap room. Our tap room is not a large facility in our kitchen. It’s not a full kitchen. We built it out as much as we could, but we’re limited without putting a huge investment in. So we basically just did a light bar grub and added spirits because we are in Bourbon Mecca.

We get about 2 million visitors a year to Louisville for the Bourbon Trail. So I wanted to have spirits and wine available for our guests. My wife is a big wine drinker and I don’t want her saying, no, I don’t want to go to the brewery because you don’t have wine.

So I wanted to have no reason for someone to say no. And we also noticed that with food, you keep people in seats a lot longer. They’ll stay if they can get a dozen wings and enjoy a couple more pints of beer versus having a pint, getting hungry and going down the road to a place where they can have it all. So that was our first foray into food. And then we opened our first restaurant in 2019, which was in a small town in Kentucky, Frankfurt, which is our state capital.

But there wasn’t a lot of competition. So when we opened there, it was exciting and fun and I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. So we stepped on ourselves several times, but as awful as the COVID lockdowns were, to open in August of 2019 and then be shut down in March of 2020 was brutal, but it enabled us to reboot to find some outstanding talent that was available in the market because everybody had lost their jobs pretty much. So we were able to identify a few individuals that were exceptional and bring them on board.

And they helped me fix the things that we were not doing correctly. And really, when COVID finally relented and all the lockdowns, we were in position to grow that pretty rapidly. And we were able to, during COVID, to take over several businesses that had gone out of business, several restaurants. And so we ended up growing by acquisition during that period as well.

Anthony Codispoti: So this is interesting. So when most people are hunkering down and they’re laying off their staff and they’re trying to get as lean as possible, you took a slightly different approach. You’re like, this is an opportunity for us. Like, you kind of put on your creative problem-solving hat and said, how can we take these lemons and make some lemonade out of this for us? And at a time when you weren’t sure what the future held, if I’m hearing you correctly, you went out and you hired more key staff that takes a special kind of vision. Where did that sort of gumption come from?

Ted Mitzlaff: Stupidity, I guess. No. It really was dumb luck. We hired a guy right before the lockdowns that had a lot of restaurant experience. And he told me when I hired him that he had aspirations to open his own restaurant, which was fine. I learned a lot from him. And he was able to hire a couple of these individuals that when the governor finally sued over Lintett, I would call it, because we were extremely restricted.

But we brought on a guy, his name’s Chris Sparks. He had opened 140 Darden restaurants. He had worked as middle management for craft works, which was Logan’s Roadhouse, Old Chicago Pizza, Gordon Bearsh, Rock Bottom, Brewery, and Big River Brewing. So he knew restaurants inside and out.

He’s kind of a savant when it comes to all that. So we hired him to just be our general manager in Frankfurt. And after I got to know him a little bit, realized that he had tremendous restaurant experience in scaling a business.

That’s what we did. So he runs, he oversees all the restaurants. He’s helped me pick out sites, help us develop our brand. Obviously the menu, which is constantly evolving. We try to integrate a lot of our beer into our food, which is fun. Beer battered fish. Obviously the beer cheese utilizes our product. Anytime we can, I call it cross pollinating, anytime we can use products in different areas of the business. Another interesting foray for us was I had done a couple bourbon collaborations with friends of mine in the distillery industry, where they took their aged bourbon and finished it in our beer barrels. So we buy once used bourbon barrels. We put four of our beers in those beer barrels.

We have a stout. We do a walnut brown finish. We do a honey ale finish. And then we do a mild, an English mild, an ale in barrels as well.

So we have four different barrels full of beer. Well, after those were emptied, the friends of mine that have these distilleries, one was Bartstown Bourbon Company, the other was Chickencock Whiskey. They said, hey, we’d like to do a collab where we put our bourbon and your used beer bourbon barrels.

So we bourbon, spirit competition in San Francisco. So those bottles which sold at the time for like 175 a bottle, I’ve seen them on the secondary market well over $1,000, which is crazy. But we then in 2019, we acquired a bunch of bourbon, finished it in our own barrels, and then had it packaged and released. It was a 12 year, 1792.

If you know the Sazerac product 1792, we bought a bunch of 12 year 1792 and finished it in our barrels, and then released it. And that was successful. So post COVID, we launched four products. And that’s what we’re doing today. So we have the bourbon, we have beer and then restaurants.

Anthony Codispoti: So tell me more about the beer. The collabs are a lot of fun. And that’s such a neat story about how we’ve heard about people taking the bourbon barrels and then finishing some beer in them. And you’re kind of taking them back and forth, which is a neat way to, like you said, cross pollinate, not just the brands, but sort of the flavor, the nuances of the product. But yeah, tell us a little bit more about the beers that you guys brew. Yeah.

Ted Mitzlaff: So we have our core beers. We have a Lager, we have a walnut brown. We have an IPA. We have a salad. And then we do barrel age products. We do a stout year round. We do a walnut brown finishing at barrels. We do a brandy barrel honey ale. We take our honey ale and finish those in brandy barrels. And then we also do an ale finishing in the bourbon barrels as well.

So we’ve also over the years had a lot of fun just experimenting because we are a bourbon mecca. We have unfettered access to barrels, or at least until recently. Recently, it’s been a bit of a challenge with the explosion of the bourbon industry to get barrels, even for us, with our relationships that I’ve had with several of these distillers. Most of my life, we’ve still run into some challenges getting barrels. But historically, we’ve had the extreme luxury of being able to get barrels whenever, wherever we want.

And that’s been fun. I mean, we’ve finished product at tequila barrels. In addition to bourbon being here, you have a lot of the Coopridge companies that are headquartered here.

So Spacide or Kelvin Coopridge or some of these big Coopridge companies. Yeah, they’re servicing the bourbon industry. But they also will get back wine barrels, tequila barrels, brandy barrels, and they’ll either repurpose them in the spirits industry.

A lot of them are chard and shipped back over to Scotland for use of Scotch. Scotch, then they don’t care that’s had product in it before or not. Same thing with rum. But bourbon has to be a never used barrel. So bourbon has to be a new white oak freshly charred barrel. Rum, tequila, Scotch, they don’t care.

So in safe wine. So you basically have access to all these different barrels. So we’ve had a lot of fun over the years. We’ve done saison and wine barrels. We’ve done October Fest and rum barrels. We’ve had our initial brandy barrel.

Honey ale was basically on a whim. A friend of mine that owns Heaven Hill Distilleries contacted me said, hey, Mitzvah, I’ve got a bunch of brandy barrels. Do you want them? Not do I want to buy them? Like, do you want them?

I said, okay. So we got about 20 of these brandy barrels. Didn’t really know what we were going to do with them. So whatever was in the fermenters at the time, what we stuck in these, if we had access beer, we just stuck them in these barrels. And the barrel that was wildly successful was the brandy barrel honey ale. And it’s our most awarded beer. So it’s a fun, very different beer. Now, a lesson in marketing, because I’m an engineer, not a marketing guy. I know how to make the trains run on time.

But as far as, you know, thinking outside of the box and what’s going to resonate with people, that it’s not always my forte. We were selling it as a brandy barrel honey ale. The consumer had no idea what that package was. They thought, what the world’s a brandy barrel honey ale. So it was, and it was a big, you know, high alcohol beer.

So we didn’t sell a ton of it. We rebranded it as sting like a beer as a tip to Muhammad Ali, who’s from Louisville, like sting like a bee. And we put the city skyline on it and a pair of boxing gloves, and, you know, and products sold like crazy. So you just, it’s so much of it is marketing.

Anthony Codispoti: And so you’ve got somebody on your team that kind of helped you with that rebrand?

Ted Mitzlaff: Yeah, much, much smarter people than me. I try to make myself laugh.

Anthony Codispoti: So I think the innovation that you’re talking about sounds fascinating. Like, hey, let’s take a brandy barrel that’s mixed up with this kind of a beer. I mean, do you get like extra excited to roll out of bed in the morning and to say, hey, I’m going to get to go to work and, you know, taste these creative concoctions that we put together?

Ted Mitzlaff: Yeah, it is fun. And in this industry in particular, because the brewers are artists and they love to create. It’s often difficult to get them to stay focused on, you know, hey, we still need to produce, you know, X gallons of lager and X gallons of walnut brown. I know it’s boring. Exactly.

You know, like time to do the donuts. But on the same hand, you know, give them the flexibility. The beauty now, I’ve got a team of three brewers. They’re terrific. They love to experiment, but they also understand what it takes to make money. So they’re all about getting product out, letting me, you know, forecasting when we need cans, when we need grain. They’re wonderful on the business side, which I need.

And then I give them the carte blanche to create and have some fun. That’s the beauty of having, we now have seven restaurants getting ready to open up our aid. You know, we can really use that as a litmus. We put beer in all these locations and we’ll see what sells.

Because sometimes what we think is going to resonate with the population doesn’t necessarily. Right now, we just started doing a blood orange blonde. And I’m not a big, you know, fruity beer type guy. Just like your basic loggers and stouts. Browns. This beer sells like crazy. So, so we’re going to start putting it in cans and we’re launching it in the spring.

Anthony Codispoti: I know that sustainability is a big cornerstone for you guys at Goodwood. What are some of these sustainable practices that you’re most proud of and why have they been so important to you and your business model?

Ted Mitzlaff: Well, obviously, you know, the use of the bourbon barrels we use them three times, which is great. A lot of folks use them once and then get rid of them. The, what we’ve done with our grains has been fun. We have contacts with farmers around the state, really more in the region. We produce a lot of spent grain with each batch of beer. We’re the second largest brewery in Kentucky. So we put the grains out, the farmers come by, get up there, happy to do it, feed their hogs, the cattle.

Then we’ve got a plan in place to roll out the grains to produce our own bread using spent grains, which we’re looking forward to that as well. Our kitchen staff, we now have a director of culinary, which has been phenomenal. He and the gentleman that I mentioned earlier, Chris Marks, the guy’s name is Ty. Ty and Chris, they put together sauces where we use the beer infused barbecue sauces and hot sauces to compliment our food. And we sell those in retail. So it’s also a creative to the brand. And then we’re also Kentucky proud. So the vast majority of our product is grown in state or in the region.

So we’re really excited about that. There’s a friend of mine. He actually is a family member of the Brown Forman family, which is Jack Daniels Woodford Sonoma, who is a huge company.

He’s a great guy. He’s got a farm in the adjacent county, a large farm called Ashburn Farm. We’ve done some collaborative beers with them where we’ve used products that they’ve grown on their farm. So that’s fun. And we’re also trying to incorporate more of their products, their materials into our other products as well.

Anthony Codispoti: Your mission statement, Ted, you know, it talks a lot about delivering outstanding service, creating this up the atmosphere. I’m curious if maybe you can share a particular moment or experience that really exemplifies that mission in action.

Ted Mitzlaff: Yeah, I mean, there are many. But I think what’s most gratifying for me is when I get a note or I see a Google critique, you know, they’ll give us a five star and say, you know, the service that Crystal gave us was exceptional. The traditional food was great. You know, the value was there.

But the experience that we had, the service was exquisite. And we really do hammer that. You know, there’s a lot of competition, and particularly in today’s world where people are more discriminant with their entertainment dollar as inflation’s gotten up. People don’t have as much discretionary money. So when they do go out, they expect a little bit more than they used to, frankly. And there’s a little less tolerance of poor service. So knowing that, you know, we’re not the only folks that are selling burgers and grilled chicken, you know, beer, beer products.

So how do you differentiate between us and everybody else? And it’s got to be service. You have to go the extra mile. You have to be friendly. You have to be prompt.

Listen to the customer. And it’s really a culture that we’ve tried to foster and develop. And it’s become more challenging, the more locations we have to keep that continuity to keep the to really instill in your staff the importance of positive experiences for clients. And for us, it’s even more important because if they if they have a great experience in our restaurant, chances are when they’re their local grocery or liquor store and they see a six back of Goodwood. Logger or Walnut Brown, they’ll pick it up. So yeah, I had that in the restaurant or had a great experience. I’ll try this.

Anthony Codispoti: That was it. You actually touched on what was going to be my follow up question. You know, you guys have expanded quite a bit, you know, new new locations like Housertabern and Game Your Social and you know, you talked about another one coming online soon. And yeah, I can see that it would be a big challenge as you’ve got, you know, sort of these diverse restaurant concepts and, you know, locations throughout the state. How do you go about maintaining sort of the core identity of, you know, what Goodwood is what it stands for what your core mission is. Are there things that you’ve sort of put in place that you’ve found have been successful and sort of making sure that that mission statement remains consistent throughout? Yes.

Ted Mitzlaff: In fact, you know, we’ve got a great executive management team on the restaurant side. The gentleman I mentioned, Chris Barks, and then under him, we have two regional managers. They both been with large corporations, you know, Cracker Barrel, Bougain-O-Betbo, other large organizations. Our culinary director has been in a number of different locations as well.

He’s dynamite. We’ve created best practices, not only in the kitchen for all the staff, but also front of the house. And we really instill it and we I send secret shoppers around to different locations and I’ve got a score sheet and I have them score and give me feedback. You know, how long did the ticket time take? Did they ask, you know, if what sauce you would be interested in? If you’d like to try any of our homemade sauces, you know, were the bathrooms clean? Were the window sills clean?

You know, there’s little things like that. If you walked into a restaurant and there are dead bugs on a window sill, you’re going to think, OK, well, if it looks like this, you know, this is my first impression. What’s the kitchen look like? So you even though might be the kitchen might be spotless, you know, but you’ve got a big spider web in your front window. It’s going to be a horrible impression. So all the details, every little detail is important.

Anthony Codispoti: You know, and you touched on earlier, we’re talking about the mission statement of sort of delivering, you know, this this exceptional experience and high value service. And you said, yeah, you know, if I go on Google and I see, you know, they gave you five stars because Crystal delivered a great experience there. You know, that I think it says it all right there. Like it all comes down to the quality of the people that you’ve got in place, right? From leadership on down. And in what most people still describe to me as a pretty tight labor market, can be hard to find good folks can be once you find them can be hard to hold on to them. I’m curious what you have tried and found success with in that realm.

Ted Mitzlaff: Yeah, and that’s a great point. It is it is just as hard to keep the talent as it is to find it. And we know quickly who our A players are. And when we have B players, we try to coach them up or or coach them out one way or the other. But they they need to buy in fully. And then, you know, I think the the main incentive is the money to these folks.

So the better they do, the more tips they’re going to make and, you know, the happier they’re going to be. So we want to keep them busy. We want to keep them wealthy. We want we want the money to come in. So that’s really the goal. And we just explained to them, you know, the happier our clients are, the more. Through what we have the harder you work, the more money you’re going to make.

Anthony Codispoti: No, you know, in talking with you, Ted, it’s it’s clear to me that you’re a forward thinker and an innovator, right from the wastewater automation, the chemical company that that you help to grow and sell. And now, you know, some of the cool things that you guys are doing with the collaborations, you know, with some of the bourbon brands and, you know, aging beers and different styles of barrels. I’m curious as you look to the future, are there some new ideas or innovations that you’re excited to explore that you’re able to share with us at this point?

Ted Mitzlaff: Yeah, for sure. From a, I mean, we’re looking at a number of different options from a beverage standpoint, as we’ve seen, you know, the cell serves are now 15% of the malt beverage market, which is unbelievable to me. My son was a K. A. at Auburn University. And if if you had told me five years ago that when I visited my son at K. A. that I’d see a bunch of guys drinking, you know, white claw, I had told you you were crazy. But indeed, that was reality. So I’m not naive to the fact that things change. And there are new things in the pipe. We’re looking at ready to drink products. We’re looking at which, you know, those have spirits in them. We’re looking at CBD options with THC. So we are right now we’re willing and interested and want to be at the forefront of the market as it changes.

Anthony Codispoti: So with the RTD drinks and, you know, the seltzer world, is that a significantly different manufacturing process? Will that require investment in a different style of equipment? Are you able to use a lot of the same equipment that you already have?

Ted Mitzlaff: We can use a lot of the same equipment. The frankly, the the seltzers are easier to produce, because you you basically take water, you take a sugar source, you convert those sugars to alcohol, just as you do with beer, you add some flavor and then carbonate it. It takes a couple of days where, you know, the quickest beer we can produce is 10 days. And it’s up to three or four weeks, depending on the type of beer you’re producing. So you have to give to put the grains in the mash ton heat heated to 180 degrees, create your own sugar water. Then you’ve got to add all the other components that give the beer the profile that you have to ferment them at a certain temperature.

I mean, it is it’s a process. So that versus seltzer, seltzer takes just a few days. It’s very simple. Even easier are ready to drink products. You mix the spirit, you mix the water, the flavor profile and carbonate. That’s it. And then stick it in the can.

So that’s, that’s really simple. The bigger hurdle in those areas, particularly with the THC, but also ready to drink are regulatory licenses. And the myriad of licenses and regulations that we go through, it’s, it’s unbelievable.

We go through it at the federal level. Every product we produce, we have to register. They call the DTV now, the, the, the, it’s tobacco tax bureau, basically. But alcohol falls into that used to be called ATF, alcohol, tobacco firearms, but that’s now more.

Anthony Codispoti: So you have to jump through all these hoops with the, the RTD and the seltzers as well or just the CBD THC.

Ted Mitzlaff: Every product we produce beer, we come up with a new beer. We have to register it and the package, you know, the can, correct morning labels, all that with the federal government. Then we have to register it with every state that we’re going in. So, and some states have different laws than even the federal government. Like when we started distributing beer in Texas, even though the federal government said percent ABV was acceptable, alcohol by volume. And Texas, we had to say Alk by Vaughn, ABC, you know, ABV wasn’t acceptable. So we had to spell out Alk by Vaughn. So I had to, I had to buy an entire truckload of cans just for Texas.

And I just to put up your end for Texas. So it’s, it’s interesting and goofy and anyone that has dealt with the government at all levels, like we have would be as almost libertarian as I am. You know, I’ve just become very anti government because it’s it doesn’t help anything.

It just slows processes. We have for our restaurants, we have a beer by the drink. You have a wine and spirits by the drink. You have a special Sunday license. And then if you want to sell package, because we’re brewery, you have to have a separate package license. So each one of our restaurants, you know, we’re carrying five or more licenses that you have to pay an annual fee on. You have to pay, you know, every year you have to pay to register. It’s crazy.

When you purchase a beer at a restaurant or a Kroger up to 60% of the cost of that beer is tax. Just crazy. Is that right? Up to 60% up to 60%.

Anthony Codispoti: Wow. Is there anything besides cigarettes that is at a similar level?

Ted Mitzlaff: Well, it’s all spirits. And I suspect as they continue to legalize marijuana and once the federal government gets involved, they’re not yet. But once they do, I’m sure it will be at the same level or higher.

Anthony Codispoti: So when can we expect to see some of these new beverage concepts that you guys are working?

Ted Mitzlaff: Well, right now we’re, we are in the process. We’ve got playing with some of the labels. We have the regs. We understand what we need to do to make it happen. We’re basically weighing whether we want to do these in-house or contract it out.

You know, if we contract the recipe and oversee the production that places and that may be the way we go into it initially. You know, sort of a walk before you run so we can try it. See how it goes.

Somebody that’s already set up to do it. And just see what the market’s temperature is for those products. And if they resonate, then probably bring them back in-house where we get more margin. If not, then, you know, maybe I don’t need to complicate things too much for my folks before we reinvent the wheel.

Anthony Codispoti: That makes a lot of sense. And I’m not sure how the RTDs and the seltzers are priced, but the manufacturing process is much shorter, much simpler. If it’s a similar price point to beer, am I correct in assuming that the margins would be much better on these new product ideas?

Ted Mitzlaff: The seltzers are a little lower margin simply for the fact that the big boys got in there quickly and threw a lot of money at it. So trying to break that market now and white claw and Anheuser-Busch and, you know, truly all these, you know, big, big companies have invested a lot. And their volumes are huge to try to come in. And basically our price point would be double what they’re selling.

And it doesn’t make much sense for us. And I think the seltzer run has plateaued that we’re seeing a little bit of a decline actually in that area. The RTDs are on the rise, and that seems to be the kids 21 to 30. That’s what they want. You know, I think you and I are of the generation where I’d rather buy the spirit, you know, bring home the mixers and make it how I like it. But the younger generation, they want convenience, so they’re willing to pay for it.

Anthony Codispoti: Right. You know, you’ve got an engineer’s brain, you’ve been involved in several businesses, including, you know, the turnaround of this one. You know, as a business leader, one of the things we’ve always got to keep our eye on, which you’re managing partner, you know, originally was not, is, you know, the bottom line, the P &L. I’m curious, you know, with sort of the creative, innovative plus engineering, you know, mind that you’ve got, are there different things that you’ve tried with either one of those levers that, you know, maybe is a little bit outside the box that you found some success with?

Ted Mitzlaff: Yeah, I mean, not too outside of the box other than really just trying to develop relationships with our suppliers and being transparent with the suppliers saying, look, if you guys can help us here, you know, if we can get the costs down, you know, a nickel a pound, I’ll give you the business, you know, all of our business for the year. Or if not, I’m going to continue to shop it and, you know, and I’ll switch, you know, for a nickel or dime here or there. So I’d rather have the relationships that’s particularly been instrumental on the food supply side with the food cost skyrocketing over the last couple of years.

So real inflation, cumulative inflation, it’s about 30%. So dealing with that has been difficult. We’ve been very fortunate that at the same time we’ve grown like crazy. So our volumes have gone up like crazy. And we’ve been able to negotiate with our principal food supplier. Hey, you know, we’ll enter longer term agreements with you if you keep our costs flat or give us plenty of notice when we’re going to have price increases. So we’re able to absorb that, pass it along, figure out options to substitute, you know, where we, where a customer won’t notice. But we can maintain the same price points, keep the same margins. So that’s, that’s really been the biggest challenge in our world the last couple of years.

Anthony Codispoti: Yeah, going through COVID was rough for a lot of businesses. Certainly, you know, restaurants were top of that list. And, you know, going through and coming out of COVID dealt with, you know, huge price increases, you know, in your cost of goods.

Lots of, lots of headwinds that you were facing there. How do you feel we’re recording this at the end of 2024? How do you feel about 2025 and beyond going forward? What, what’s your, are you optimistic, pessimistic and why? Extremely optimistic.

Ted Mitzlaff: And I’ll tell you the main reason why is I believe the biggest mistake the Biden administration made was when they went and they went after. The energy for whatever reason, they were very pro green energy instead of, you know, what, what makes the most sense economically. I’m all about, you know, green energy if it’s viable.

But right now there’s, there’s really no viable alternative. And to be honest, you know, what we’re tapping in the United States is cleaner. We do it better. We have EPA.

We have all these other standards. So the energy that we’re producing and capable of producing is cleaner than what we’re buying. We’re still consuming energy. Now we’re just buying in from Venezuela, which is dirty. And, you know, we’ve got to ship it here, which burns more energy to get it here. So it just doesn’t make much sense.

So everything is tied ultimately to energy. Well, I think that part of the inflation was the crazy spending that went on. I think a bigger, the initial domino that fell was, you know, canceling the Keystone pipeline, prohibiting a lot of the new drilling. Those, those items caused fuel to basically double.

Everybody saw it in there at the gas tank. Well, everything is driven by, by that. Although the food that you process, the food that you transport, the inside of each location, our energy costs, our electric costs, our gas, we use a ton of gas in the kitchens, all that’s affected. So those, those costs were just out of control.

Anthony Codispoti: So you think that the costs of energy are going to come down and that’s going to have sort of this cascading effect. Yes. You guys in your industry as well as many others.

Ted Mitzlaff: Yes, I think it’s huge. And I also like what Elon Musk and Graham Swammy are looking at as far as the doge, I guess they call it, just getting rid of a lot of the inefficiencies of government. And frankly, that’s what we deal with on a regular basis is, you know, the, these, these owners regulations and inability to get, to get an answer. I got a bill from the IRS last week.

I almost had a heart attack. Said we owed $104,000 that they were going to seize assets. And I contacted the IRS. I sat on the phone for 45 minutes before I got somebody to answer the phone or to be, you know, I was in the queue forever.

And finally, the woman after speaking with her for 20 minutes, she was delightful. Said, well, we sent that as an error. It’s a mistake. So what, what repercussions are there on you guys? You know, you, you gave us a heart attack. You’re threatening to seize assets. And oh yeah, our bad. Sorry. That’s crazy.

Anthony Codispoti: Let me shift gears on you Ted. I’m curious to hear about a serious challenge that you’ve gone through overcome and maybe some lessons that you’ve learned coming out the other side.

Ted Mitzlaff: Yeah, well, I mean, the, in my career here at the Berger, the two biggest challenges were obviously the, the mismanagement prior to my getting involved, which we talked at length about, and I’ve tried to be the opposite. I’ve tried to be extremely transparent and forthright. Good, bad and indifferent.

You know, I’ll let everybody know what’s going on. The other major, major hurdle was COVID. Just, you know, having 97% of our revenue stream cut off twice and seeing how some states dealt with it.

You know, states like Indiana, Tennessee, border states of ours that were open, Florida, Alabama. Meanwhile, we’re closed. And just, you know, their positivity rates were the same as our positivity rates and their death rates were going to our point.

Like, what, what are we doing? You know, it was, it was crazy. I’m hopeful that nothing like that ever happens again. And I ended up litigating against our governor and one. He, he was given executive or authority by our House and Senate in January of 2020. Obviously, you know, he closed and shut us down twice. And then when he did open, we were very limited, you know, 30% and then 60% capacity. And then you could eat outside in a tent, but you couldn’t eat inside in a restaurant. None of this made any sense. You know, you could wear a porous mask that, you know, if anyone’s ever done drywall work, you know, you wear one of these masks, your face is still covered in dust.

It’s not, they’re not effective. So we ended up after a year of his executive or authority, the House and Senate revoked his executive or authority. They rescinded it and he sued in Franklin County and won. There’s a judge there that’s very pro pro our governor. So he gave him executive or authority in perpetuity.

So basically he said, you’re king. And I was on an email thread with about 100 other restaurant tours. And I was able to come up with a law firm, a Pacific legal foundation, their very pro constitution legal organization. They took our case and I sent out a document to all the folks that were on the email thread saying, Hey, you know, here’s how you join our suit.

There are only two other restaurants that were had enough courage to join our suit. So, so because we were the biggest, they named Goodwood as the lead. And so we we sued and Scott County, which is the adjacent county to Frankfurt and we won. And then the governor appealed it to the state Supreme Court and we won there as well. So, you know, no longer as king.

Anthony Codispoti: I’m curious if you experienced any either direct or indirect backlash because of that.

Ted Mitzlaff: Yeah, all of my businesses, including me personally, were audited by the state come back eight years. I’ve never been audited in my life.

Anthony Codispoti: And then sorry, they were audited by the by the state or by federal state, the state state.

Ted Mitzlaff: I’ve never been audited at the federal or state level. And then yeah, we had, you know, a lot of folks felt that I was, you know, being aggressive because he’s a Democrat and I really don’t care if he was a Republican or Democrat, I care that, you know, my business was shut down and impeded. So, so there was some initial backlash and, you know, the negativity just because I opposed the governor but hindsight now I think, you know, it was shown. Those lockdowns were unnecessary. The, you know, the states that were open versus states that were closed, they benefited. We, you know, we lost. So for a myriad of reasons, I feel justified that what we did was the correct thing and, you know, moving forward. I think we all learned valuable lessons and, you know, hopefully people won’t surrender their freedom so readily moving forward.

Anthony Codispoti: I’ve just got one more question for you. But before I ask it, I want to do two things. First of all, for everyone listening today, I know that you love today’s content. Please hit the like share or subscribe button on your favorite podcast app. Ted, I also want to let people know the best way to get in touch with you. What would that be?

Ted Mitzlaff: Yeah, through our website, there’s a link there info at goodwood.beer. That’s the easiest way and quickest way. And that’ll go through our marketing team and then they’ll kick it over directly to me. They can reach out to me, Ted M at goodwood.beer, which I like the dot beer. It’s kind of a fun little platform.

Anthony Codispoti: But yeah, for the uninitiated dot beer works the same way as .com. So whether you’re typing in the email address that he just gave you or you’re looking for the website, the website is goodwood.beer. You don’t have to put a .com on the end of it.

It’s just goodwood.beer. Sorry, go ahead. Right. No. So those would be the two ways. You know, go to his website, goodwood.beer. You’ve got info at goodwood.beer and then Ted.m. Is that right? Ted M.

Ted Mitzlaff: Ted M at goodwood.beer.

Anthony Codispoti: Ted M at goodwood.beer. Okay. So last question for you, Ted. I’m kind of curious what you see being the big changes coming to your industry in the next couple of years. How do you see things unfolding from here?

Ted Mitzlaff: I think it’s people want more than just a box to walk in and get a get a burger. I think they’re looking for more experiential dining. You’ve seen, you know, things like duck bin bowling and, you know, trash can beer pong and things like that that have become a shuffleboard. It’s going to become sort of staples in a lot of restaurants. We’re getting ready to roll out a new concept. It’s going to have a lot of game activity. Obviously, we’re going to have food and beverages as well, but, but it’s more, more of an experiential dining type environment.

So, so I do think that we’re going to see a lot of that. I think people post COVID are more inclined to sit outside, which I like. I love the fact that people are sitting on patios, more porches. So we’re really focusing on either retrofitting our existing restaurants with more outdoor seating or seeking new locations that have great patios, great, great outdoor dining.

Anthony Codispoti: Say more about the new concept that’s coming. Is there a name that we can give? Is there a location or a timeline that we can talk to?

Ted Mitzlaff: So that’s going in and bowling green Kentucky. It’s about 45 miles north of Nashville. And that’s called game yard social, which is going to be fun. We ran into some construction issues. But, but we seem to have gotten past all that the bedrock and some of the supply chain issues with construction, but, but we’re rolling. So, so hopefully we’ll have that open in the coming months. And then we’re opening a new location in Louisville.

This can be very music focused. It’s got a phenomenal stage is in the heart of whiskey row right next to old Forrester. They have a wonderful bourbon experience. Evan Williams is around the corner, Mikter’s peerless. They’re a bunch of distilleries within a stone’s throw angels envy.

So we’re right in the middle of it. We’re obviously beer focused, but we’re going to have spirits and the stage. It is phenomenal on a private event space. So we expect to sort of be a spot in Nashville in downtown Louisville.

Anthony Codispoti: Well, that’s some fun stuff. It’ll be really neat to follow along with those new concepts as they open up hopefully sometime here in 2025 will be able to provide some updates to folks. But Ted, I want to be the first one to thank you for sharing both your time and your story with us today. I really appreciate it. It was a pleasure talking to you. I appreciate it. Folks, that’s a wrap on another episode of the Inspired Stories podcast. Thanks for learning with us today.