overview
In 2010, Chris Farmand launched Small Batch Standard with a hope to help breweries in North Florida with their accounting practices and technology. Since then, the business has grown to a financial agency supporting more than 60 brewers coast to coast with finances and consulting. The team boasts accountants, analysts, and other specialists who see to it that Small Batch’s customers can grow their business with the attention and organization they need at their side.
challenge
In the past, Small Batch Standard’s team worked with a variety of brewery technology platforms — Orchestra, Beer30, you name it, they’ve worked with someone on it. However, the SBS team had to learn far too many different softwares, many of which are “a mess” according to Brewery Consultant for SBS, Derek Smith. Founder Chris said he was disappointed in the user interface of the other software systems. Plus, he wanted to partner with a company that offered high-quality customer service. Chris was looking for a software that can do it all — excise taxes, benchmarking, production data, and a great user interface — and he found that in Ekos.
results
As a full-service financial agency for breweries across the United States, Small Batch Standard works with customers who each have a unique set of challenges and state regulations when it comes to their finances. Derek says Ekos’s reporting capabilities are the software’s biggest selling point. “We’ve got states that want barrels, we have states that want gallons, we have states that want tall cans versus short cans and high point beer versus low point beer … with all that, you need a robust system that can produce all of these reports per state, and Ekos does that,” he said. In fact, the reporting functions are so robust that Small Batch won’t take on tax reporting for businesses without Ekos. “When a client comes to us without Ekos, we say ‘you keep the taxes because we don’t want to deal with your spreadsheets and Google Sheets,’” Derek said.
The assistance Ekos’s technical support team offers is another reason Chris and Derek recommend Ekos to their customers time and time again. “I have never seen a support team for a software that is as good as Ekos,” Derek said. “The Ekos support reps are very knowledgeable and we can shoot off an email and get our questions and issues resolved right away.” Chris said that from the start, Ekos’s customer service blew him away. “Josh (McKinney) and Greg (Forehand) showed up with their emotions on their sleeves and were willing to learn and make changes,” Chris said.
Brewers often get into the game for their passion — they love connecting with customers and shaping up their recipe. Something they don’t often have a passion for is technology. Derek said Ekos makes tackling a technology hurdle easy. “Because Ekos is so easy and user friendly, we’re able to get the back end financial information that we need — the insight into their business, the batch costing, the cost of goods, all of that — whereas if the system was more difficult, they’d just skip over it,” he said. Those insights are made even more valuable by Ekos’s seamless integration between sales and inventory. “What’s great about Ekos is when our customers go into Ekos and make a sale and produce an invoice, it affects the income, inventory levels, and the COGS, so having that all streamlined is just amazing,” Derek said. “There are no extra steps for us to reduce inventory, everything just flows through and we’re able to get accurate reporting.”
From the get-go, Small Batch Standard has seen Ekos as the centralized hub of information it is — providing their team and their customers with valuable insights to help them grow. For Derek and Chris, no other brewery management software compares to Ekos. “From what we’ve been able to get from Ekos, we won’t recommend any of the others,” Derek said. Chris backs that up. He says that from his first meeting with founders Josh and Greg in 2015, he hasn’t recommended any other software to his clients. “Ekos has become a household name,” he said.
Looking forward, Small Batch Standard is developing “the baddest ass team of accountants and leaders in the industry,” Chris said. Three years ago, Chris was running every part of the business. Now, he’s developed a team that’s “hungry for knowledge.”
To learn more about Small Batch Standard, visit sbstandard.com.