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I'm James. I am Managing Director here at BrewDog.
We make beer for punks.
Our beers are a modern-day rebellion
against bland, tasteless and apathetic beers.
We set up the business with two humans, one dog, a £20,000 loan
and a big mission back in 2007.
Martin and myself have known each other for over 20 years now.
We used to make beers at university.
It's amazing to think we've turned that hobby, that passion into this business.
When we started dealing with HSBC,
we had four employees and a turnover of less than £1 million.
In less than five years, we've now got 250 team members,
we're on track to turn over in excess of £30 million this year
and we're the fastest-growing food and drink company in the UK.
There was a lot of ambition
and we helped work with them and their advisers
to formulate a plan to take the business forward,
from a very small,
almost a home-brewing business into a multi-million business.
We've helped them to set up a purpose-built brewery
with state-of-the-art equipment
that allows them to increase the capacity to meet demand
and we run their day-to-day banking requirements.
The first export market that we sent beer to was Sweden.
And that was back in 2007.
Our Punk IPA flagship beer
is the biggest selling IPA in the whole of Scandinavia.
They're now dealing in over 30 countries
and that develops a need for foreign currency, credit cards
and some other services that we can provide, as well.
65% of what we do goes into overseas markets.
We've got some very ambitious expansion plans for 2014.
We're opening eight bars in the UK, plus another five internationally.
We're doubling the size of our production facility
and we're going to be adding about 150 new people to the team.
Our long-term plan is global domination,
but in a nice way!
We want to elevate the status of beer.
We want to get more people appreciating
how beer is made, the ingredients that go into it
and we want to get more people drinking good beer,
as opposed to the generic mass-market beers that dominate the market today.