overview
Founded in 2019 by a group of friends who traded their work with oil barrels for beer barrels, Tall City Brewing brings West Texas a community-oriented brewery. In the first two years of operation, the brewery has earned recognition in its community, including being named one of the top new breweries in Texas.
challenge
Before Justin Sparks, general manager, joined in June 2021, he said the brewery wasn’t using Ekos to its full capacity. “They knew Ekos could help with reporting and COGS, but they didn’t dig deep into everything it can do, so improving our use was one of the first things I did,” he said. This disconnect caused their inventory to be wildly inaccurate and, in turn, it was challenging to move forward on important decisions and keep up with TTB reporting.
results
Tall City is able to sell more and power efficiencies since Justin overhauled the brewery’s use of Ekos. Plus, these changes are allowing Tall City’s team to work better together.
Justin met weekly with an Ekos Customer Success Manager for several months to ramp up their use of the software and get their accounting and POS systems to talk to Ekos. He says this personalized time spent with a CSM has made all the difference for Tall City. “Ekos really helps you understand what goes into each individual glass, helps with those margins, and helps you figure out where things could go better,” Justin said.
The Arryved and QuickBooks integrations that Tall City implemented are also giving Justin hours back into his schedule each week. On a Monday morning, Justin can come in and easily adjust inventory locations from their Arryved integration to the Ekos inventory, return kicked kegs, and have all the numbers from a busy weekend synced to QuickBooks. “These integrations are improving my day-to-day life exponentially,” Justin said. “Now, some of the things that took me a few hours, I can get done in 15 minutes.”
Ekos’s unlimited users feature is also helping the brewery become more productive and efficient. When Justin joined Tall City, he was the brewery’s operations manager. Now that he’s the general manager, he’s training the new operations manager to use Ekos, boosting the amount of work they can get done as a business. “The more people who can use Ekos, the better,” Justin said. Plus, the Ekos Academy Live sessions, which offer weekly training on best practices for using Ekos from Ekos Customer Success Managers, are making everybody’s lives easier. “Having our new operations manager learn everything from beginning to end with the Ekos team is so important to our growth,” Justin said.
This year, the team is looking forward to making more great beer and building relationships with their customers and distributors. “I’m learning more about Ekos every day and looking forward to growing together and seeing how it continues to push our brewery forward,” Justin said.
Take a tour to see how Ekos can help your business just like Tall City Brewing Co.
