Harlan County Beer Company is a brewery and family-friendly restaurant in the heart of the Appalachian coalfields of Eastern Kentucky.

We brew high-quality beer and serve delicious, locally inspired food in a restored 100-year-old building in downtown Harlan, Kentucky. Our mission is to strengthen community bonds, build pride, and contribute to the growing tourism industry in Appalachia.

Before founding Harlan County Beer Company, I’d gotten my MBA and PhD at Harvard and started a software company. We had two young kids, and we were thinking outside of places like Harvard or New York or LA.

We were jolted by my mother-in-law getting very sick. My wife is originally from Eastern Kentucky. Her mother had taught in Harlan County in the 60s. I could have continued as the CEO of the software company, but instead, I applied to a job in Harlan as the executive director of a nonprofit. So we moved from Harvard Yard to Harlan County in 2015.

I sold most of my shares in the software company, had some money, and decided, I want to invest in Main Street. I really love Main Street America, because I grew up in a small mining town on the Iron Range in Minnesota. The buildings here are beautiful, but there had been decades of divestment.

In December 2019, my wife and I opened a coffee shop in downtown Harlan called Moonbow Tipple. My business partner in what would become Harlan County Beer Company, Gill Holland, does a lot of neighborhood revitalization projects in Louisville. He has a saying that “whenever you’re revitalizing a neighborhood or community, you’ve always got to start with a coffee shop. The next step is a brewery or a place where people can gather for lunch and dinner and have a drink.”

Gill, my business partner in the brewery, had past experience with Wefunder from working with Cornbread Hemp. He knew people in Harlan would love the idea of a community round, and it would be a good marketing tool.

My past businesses with my wife were mostly self- and bank-financed, so I’d never really considered Wefunder. But when I really thought about it, community rounds give people in your own community an opportunity to invest in their community—a place that they love. That's what made it worth it for me. Because I'm no fan of Wall Street. So when we were raising, I told people, “If you give me 100 bucks or 1,000 bucks, you can walk by the building, look inside, and see the carpenter, the plumber, and the electrician, who are all local, that your money is being invested in.”

That's the most powerful thing that community rounds allow. Divert money out of corporations that don’t give a shit about places like Harlan. Divert that money back into entrepreneurs and businesses that are not only trying to make a profit, but also trying to better their community.

Equity doesn't make sense for small businesses. It just doesn't. You're either going to get swindled as an investor, or you're going to get swindled as an owner. And if people aren't being transparent about that, then that's problematic.

When you’re raising equity, there needs to be a liquidation event, or exit, for your investors to get their money out. In a small business, there’s typically no exit. Small business owners run their businesses for 20, 30, 40, maybe 50 years. And even if they do sell, they're not going to sell for multiples on the investment.

If we’d decided to sell 25% of the business for equity, we probably would have raised the same amount of money. But then we would owe our investors nothing until we sold. That wouldn’t be right for our community. For small businesses in rural communities, revenue share for Regulation CF is the way to go.

Every quarter, we calculate 5% of our gross earnings for the past three months. For instance, say we made $150,000, so 5% is $7,500. We email the Wefunder team and tell them, “Hey, we had these sales, and here's the amount of the revenue share.”

Then they say, “Wire the $7,500 to this account.” Once they receive it, they distribute it to each of our Wefunder investors’ accounts, in the right proportion according to their original investment amount.

Over 6 months, we raised $240,000. With that, we were able to renovate a 100-year-old building that literally had grass growing on the floor of the building because it had been leaking. We used the funds to purchase all the brewery equipment, kitchen equipment, furnishings, finished contract work, plumbing, and electricity. We opened for business in October 2022.

Along the way, I’ve had so many awesome interactions meeting people who believe in their community. People who don’t even drink have wanted to invest. People have handed me cash in an envelope to invest. And when some people got their first check from us, they didn’t even care. One guy in Louisville I met, he carries his check around in his wallet and just thinks it’s so hot. He’s like “What you’re doing is so cool, I’m never going to deposit this.”

There've been lots of memorable stories like that.

About half of our investors are from Kentucky, but another half are from 32 other US states. Those people in those other states, I can guarantee that 90% of them have some connection to Harlan County, whether it’s through their grandparents or parents, or they were raised here. It's people who love their community. For them, investing is one way they can express that love.