4 things I learnt about perseverance through COVID

It was 28 November 2019, and Four Pillars had been shortlisted for International Gin Producer of the Year at the International Wine and Spirits Competition annual awards. We won! Just short of our sixth birthday, our little Australian gin distillery had been named the world’s best. For a moment, it felt like all our ambitions were coming true. What we hadn’t counted on was 2020 showing up.

The summer of 2019/20 was a horrible one in Australia: a horrendous and deadly bushfire season caused untold damage, hardship and loss of life as the realities of catastrophic climate change hit home. Then within weeks, it was clear that COVID was going to change our world and our lives, at least for a period.

Looking back, I’m proud of how early we took the threats of COVID to our business and our people seriously, and got ourselves ready for the decisions that lay ahead. I want to focus on four big themes, each of which matters not just because of COVID but because of what they revealed and reinforced about the ways we were running Four Pillars.

1. Communication

Communication is key when events are moving fast and facts are evolving in real time. First, with your partners and fellow leaders, helping you make better decisions together. And then communication with your teams and people on the front line of your business, making sure they understand both the decisions you’ve made and what those decisions mean for them.

I put my cards on the table to Stu and Cam in a very blunt email on 12 March 2020. I detailed my views on the very real likelihood of imminent hospitality shut downs, and how that would affect our staff, our events, our business and our friends in the bar trade.

The following day, our senior leadership team held an urgent meeting to discuss critical points around the business performance for the rest of the financial year (best-, worse-and middle-case scenarios), short-term defensive measures (health and safety, cash flow, staff impacts), implications for the timing and scale of current planned initiatives, and the opportunities that this ‘new normal’ might bring to mitigate or offset some of the obvious downside risks.

Coming out of this meeting, we quickly sent an email update to our whole business, outlining our responses and how we were going to think about COVID as a business moving forward. First, addressing the short-term pressures we could see hitting us fast, then addressing the long-term question of our homes and our ambitions.

A couple of days later, we sent a ‘Business not as usual’ email to every customer on our email database. We talked about the four principles that would drive our thinking moving forward. The first two were about supporting the public health system and taking collective responsibility for slowing the spread of the virus. The second two were more specific to our business of gin, drinks and hospitality.

2. Pivot with purpose

One thing that started to come up again and again was whether we would make hand sanitiser, as a number of distilleries and breweries around the world were doing.

At first we were a little sceptical and didn’t want to appear to be making a cash grab out of people’s need for hand sanitiser. But then Cameron started to receive calls and emails from people on the front line of our health sector looking for products to use.

Cam had already been using the highly alcoholic heads and tails of our distillations as a cleaning product in the Distillery. By following the World Health Organization’s guidance on turning alcohol into a liquid hand sanitiser, and with the addition of some aloe, he could produce a product at scale.  Cleverly, and unlike most distilleries who were shipping small quantities of sanitiser in small plastic bottles, Cameron had the brainwave to ship our product in 1-litre bottles that we could run down the bottling line. With international air travel pretty much on hold, we had plenty of spare 1-litre glass bottles. By running sanitiser down the bottling line, we created more shifts for our casual and hospitality staff.

We ended up making two products. The first, called Take Care and sold at cost, was exclusively for front-line carers. The second, sold at a small margin to help us keep the lights on, was called Heads, Tails and Clean Hands. We only made the consumer product once we were confident the need on the front line had been met.

3. Staying the course

We also stuck to our core purpose and released a gin we had been working on since the middle of 2019.

Cam and Stu had lined up The Kyoto Distillery to be our third Distiller Series partners, and the resulting gin was slated to be released in late March 2020. After much debate, we decided to stick to our guns and press on with the release of what we called Changing Seasons Gin.

It went on to be one of our most successful limited-edition releases of all time, giving us confidence that, even if our business wasn’t going to be the same for a while, it was all going to be okay.

4. Culture and community

The last lesson we learned through that challenging COVID period was the value of keeping our team connected and smiling.

After experimenting with various forms of digital content, virtual tastings and Instagram live fiascos, we settled on a regular format whenever one of our teams was in lockdown. We called it the Super-Terrific Happy Hour, with a variety of segments that would have the whole Zoom screen full of Four Pillars people laughing together for an hour on a Friday afternoon, G&T in hand, and life feeling just a little bit more hopeful again.

Our HR team did so much to support people, from allocating time for staff to meet, walk and talk together in small groups, to ensuring that everyone had confidential access to mental health support if they needed it, to sending meals home to people who they knew were doing it tough.

The end of 2020, that strangest of years, brought the massive energy boost we all needed, when Four Pillars was named the IWSC International Gin Producer of the Year for the second consecutive year. We knew, however, that not everyone had survived (and thrived in) 2020 as well as we had, so we marked the IWSC win with a letter of thanks to everyone in Victoria, celebrating our success while also acknowledging the difficulties of this most challenges of years. The response back from the community was extraordinary and heartfelt. It was the most Four Pillars way imaginable to celebrate such a big win, and I ended 2020 with a feeling of huge pride in what we’d built.

Written by Matt Jones.
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