Keeping your business lean is an important skill for new companies. As your brewery begins to grow, costs can rise faster than profits, and can easily get out of hand.
A growing business is great, but it’s critical to learn to manage the growth without spending too much. One temptation can be to hire a lot of extra people to help you keep up, but this can be a costly decision.
Before hiring more people, see if there are ways that automation can help you keep pace with your growing business. There are many processes in your brewery that can be automated, or at least sped up by automation.
Automation does cost money upfront, but it saves money in the long run because it has a much lower cost of maintenance compared to hiring an employee. For example, adding a keg cleaner to your business will cost a bit up front, but it will free up the personnel currently cleaning the kegs forever. This may eliminate the need to hire another person, at least in the short run, and a keg cleaner will certainly ensure kegs are cleaned with less hassle and more precision.
Other simple automation for breweries includes carbonation systems that speed up the process of carbonating your beer and automated filling processes for bottles and cans. Even tank cleaning can be automated to allow you to quickly clean tanks between batches without any hassle.
Talk to your equipment brewing company about ways using simply automation like keg cleaners can increase efficiency in your brewery. These may seem like expensive investments, but when you compare the cost of automating some of your processes to that of hiring more employees, you will quickly see that automation is a better investment.
