Career Pivot From Worship Pastor to Distillery Owner with Matt Estrin

Matt Estrin is an entrepreneur, speaker, and founder of 477 Distilling. After 15 years as a worship pastor he made the leap into business ownership and has since launched seven businesses. He is the author of I Know the Owner: From Holy Water to Happy Hour, where he shares lessons on entrepreneurship, leadership, and building businesses that matter.

On what prompted the move out of ministry, he frames it around passion. Church culture uses the word calling a lot, and the way he describes calling is a deep feeling in your soul that you have to be part of whatever that thing is. For 15 years that was ministry. He believed and still believes in the mission of the church and what it means to follow Jesus, and he is a music person, so for a long time that was the thing he knew he was supposed to be part of.

Somewhere in his mid-30s the passion started to change. Not that the mission or value of the church became less significant, but the way he was involved in it no longer produced that same feeling. Meanwhile he and his wife went to Napa Valley for an anniversary, and he jokes that on that trip he fell in love with alcohol. The whole experience was incredible to him, from the manufacturing, which he can thoroughly nerd out on, to the tasting room. They would be in rooms with 15 or 20 other people from different backgrounds who believed different things, all united over a glass of wine, which sounds goofy to him but was a experience he could not shake.

He came back without the passion for worship ministry and with a new fascination, and decided he needed to learn how to make alcohol. Of beer, wine and spirits he loves spirits most, and is a big bourbon fan, so he started distilling. He bought a five-gallon stovetop still, a small pot you put on the stove, and did everything on it: mashing, fermenting, distilling. The more he did it the more he fell in love with the process. Eventually he graduated to a much larger system in his garage.

Then a grandfather passed away and left him and his wife a small inheritance. He tells people it was not enough to start a business, but just enough to let you dream a little. So they decided to try. He went and got some education on what it really takes to open a distillery, came back, and left a 15-year career in ministry to open one. That was nine years ago.

The book came out of being asked the same questions repeatedly. He opened the distillery and has since opened an axe throwing bar and two restaurants among other things, and people kept coming to him wanting to know how to transition from whatever they were doing into their own business. He found himself telling the same stories and giving the same advice over and over, and thought he should write it down. He has always enjoyed writing, had a few things published in newspapers, and had run a blog at one point.

He had no expectations for it. He never thought he would get published or that it would become what it has. He just sat down and started writing out his story, and the more he wrote the more he realized how much he had learned in the last eight and a half or nine years, and before that in worship and in an earlier stint as a chaplain for a professional golf tour. Both the good and the bad: he has had failures, dark moments, and things he has had to work through.

What he wanted was a tool that was open, honest and real about his experience. He reads a lot of business books and has nothing against them, but they tend to read as five steps to success or three things that will make you a millionaire, while the reality is that half of businesses fail in five years and a lot of them were probably following those steps. So he wanted something authentic: the things he has succeeded at and the things he has failed at.

On the nagging in his soul that he describes in the book, he thinks the feeling had always been there and that the worship pastor job suppressed it for a long time. Every week is different, you are always creating something new for services, being creative, building teams. A lot of what you experience as an entrepreneur he got to experience a little as a worship pastor. When he and his wife first got married they wanted to open a coffee shop, so the pull was there early.

But the real understanding of it did not arrive until after he opened the first business. He got into distilling because he loved alcohol, and when he imagined the distillery at night the dream was being the guy mashing grains, doing the fermenting, running the still and getting his pants dirty. About six months in, a switch flipped. As much as he loved that part, what he loved more was the business. Having a vision of something, creating it, opening it and giving it to the world. He realized he was not a distiller, he was an entrepreneur.

The whole transition took about two and a half to three years from Napa to deciding he wanted to start a distillery, and then another year and a half from that decision to opening the doors. Leaving the church was a long process inside that. He moved his plan forward for a while without telling his superiors, partly because you never know what happens when you tell an employer you will eventually be walking out the door, and a steady income matters when you have two daughters and two dogs.

The other reason was controversy. He is a Christian who loves alcohol and says he can defend both all day long, but not every Christian believes that, and in a church of about 1,500 people where he was the second most recognizable person every Sunday, he knew there would be friction. So the first six months of the journey happened behind closed doors. Then he told everyone, and worked at the church another six months after that before transitioning out.

His original plan was to keep the job and build the business on the side, purely to keep a steady paycheck. He says that is the number one hang-up he hears from entrepreneurs: the risk of leaving a nine to five you do not love when you have a family, a mortgage and bills. He felt it himself. He believed in his abilities as a distiller, had been making product in his garage and had tested it on people, but he still had to keep the lights on.

Full-time ministry is about 60 hours a week and not a clear-cut nine to five, so he was going to do that and build a business alongside it. When he brought everyone into the fold on the plan, it caused considerable controversy. He was never a rebellious Christian, but alcohol is polarizing for some Christians, and someone leading worship on stage while owning a distillery created a real problem. There was about a one-month window where the elders, who function as the bosses of the church, had to decide whether to keep him and allow it or let him go. He estimates they had ten meetings over the course of that month, repeatedly wanting to decide and finding it hard.

On the day of the meeting that would decide his fate, he took the day off and drove down to see a friend, his own youth pastor growing up, who was randomly in Colorado speaking at a college. The talk was about what it means to be all in on the passions in your life, built around the story of Nehemiah. The walls of Jerusalem had been destroyed and they wanted to rebuild them, but enemies outside were trying to kill anyone who did. Scripture says Nehemiah and his men built the wall with one hand while holding a sword in the other.

The point was that if you want to do something that matters and pursue your passion, you have to be all in. The people who would take that job, building a wall while fighting with one hand, were the ones passionate enough about their country and their families to protect it. There were about 200 people in the room, and Matt says it felt like it was just him and the speaker. He had a moment of clarity: there was no way he could build the business while holding onto the paycheck.

That night he went back to the elders' meeting and resigned. They did not fire him and they did not ask him to stay. He told them that as grateful as he was for the conversations, if he really wanted to build the business he had been dreaming of, he had to give it everything, and he could not keep the job and build a business at the same time. He calls it the most terrifying thing he has ever done, and the best decision he made, because trying to do both would have meant one or both suffering.

The framework he uses for it is the push and the pull. One of the best pieces of advice he ever got is that you always know it is time for a good transition when both are present. Sometimes you feel pulled toward something but have a good job and a steady paycheck and no push out. Sometimes you feel the push out of where you are with nothing pulling you forward. For him the pull was there: he wanted to open the business, he was excited, he had the funds and the recipes. What he was stuck in was the comfort of a paycheck. The controversy at the church was the push he needed. If the elders had simply said go start your business, we are fine with it, he would have continued with the original plan and both would have suffered.

Amy noted that she experienced the same thing not long ago, leaving a steady job and wrestling with building something new, trying to deny and suppress it for a while until she could not. She also wanted to build it on the side and found there was not room for both. Matt agreed it is terrifying, and said the further you get from the leap the more you look back and know it was right.

On the business side, he had all the technical education. He knew how to distill and make the products and felt comfortable there. The business piece was a different matter. He had never started a business, has no business degree, and says there was no background that made what he was doing make sense. At some point you just make the leap.

He figured out the business by trial by fire. When it is your business and you are the owner, you cannot point to the person behind you and say that is their job. He had good friends in his corner with expertise he could ask. He made more mistakes than he should have early on, and the learning curve that first year was steep. He had to deal with things nobody dreams about when they imagine owning a business, like insurance, sales tax, payroll tax and employees, instead of just making product and making customers happy.

They opened in June of 2018, so they marked eight years this past June. That made him a new business owner going into COVID, roughly two years in, and the shutdown hit his industry hard.

It hit them hard and was also generous. The spike in alcohol consumption during that period is probably unmatched. His business has two arms: a manufacturing operation that bottles and distributes, now to nine states but then just locally, and a tasting room that operates like a craft cocktail bar, which Colorado allows as long as the alcohol in the drink is alcohol you produced.

The original intent of the business was to become a large distribution hub, because that is how those businesses grow. But their location is in the heart of downtown Greeley, Colorado, a city of about 120,000 with heavy foot traffic, and when they opened, the tasting room took off. He compares it to being on a horse that bolts while you hold on for dear life. They had built the business for distribution and suddenly it was a brick and mortar customer-facing business making all the money, so they pivoted and put all their energy there, successfully.

Then the governor shut down in-person business on March 13, 2020. At that point about 80 percent of revenue came from the tasting room and 20 percent from distribution, so closing the tasting room closed the revenue generator. They did not have mass distribution going to liquor stores to fall back on, and it felt like the business was done. Over the course of that year they were shut down for a total of four months.

One piece in their favor was that the tasting room can also sell bottles, like a liquor store. They shut down on the 13th. On the 14th he went in and emptied all the fridges, unplugged everything and turned the heat up, trying to reduce every expense he could so they could survive. At that moment it was only supposed to be two weeks to slow the curve.

On the 15th he told his wife he was going down to the tasting room to open the doors and see if they could sell a few bottles, since they could still sell like a liquor store as long as people did not congregate. He posted on Facebook that he would be there. Right as he arrived, the governor announced that pot shops and liquor stores would also have to close, at five o'clock that day. People reacted as though the world was ending. Massive lines formed, everyone piling in to buy as much as they could, because nobody knew how long it would last. They bought him completely out of inventory. Then before five o'clock the governor came back on and said liquor stores and pot shops could stay open after all.

So they kept selling bottles. They opened every day for a limited window. He brought his staff back to work because they had to remake everything they had just sold. They started doing limited releases of 150 or 200 bottles, and when they were gone they were gone. That is a wild thing in their industry, because it normally takes about 60 days to get a product to market once you have a formula, given all the steps with the federal government. They were getting products to market in a week: formulas, labels, federal submission, production, bottling, selling. With everyone stuck at home, bottles would sell out in an hour.

Customers started saying they had bought so much alcohol they did not know what to do with it, so 477 started hosting online cocktail classes on Facebook Live, which turned into hour-long shows with sketches between the cocktails. He admits they also drank through them, so the later portions got loose. For a year it was pivot after pivot: special releases, online cocktail classes, reopening at 50 percent capacity, to-go cocktails. He was part of a group that got the whole downtown street shut down so they could put more tables outside. Every day he woke up not knowing what the day would bring and decided to go for whatever it was.

The strain did not catch up with him until it was over. During the constant change he just took whatever each day gave him and kept rolling. The letdown came in 2021 when things were semi-back to normal and he realized what he had just done for a year and a half and how exhausted he was.

He looks back on that year fondly in some ways. With no one allowed in the tasting room they moved the tables out and set up disc golf baskets, and he and his employees played disc golf every day. They had what they called Blackout Fridays, when his whole core staff was in and they would drink all day, which lived up to the name and produced some stories and some security camera footage.

The aftermath is a whole chapter in his book. He essentially had a mental breakdown. 2021 was worse than 2020: in 2020 people were spending money and taking pride in supporting local places, and in 2021 the support dried up, student loan payments resumed, and things reopened to something that was anything but normal. There were weeks where they were not sure they would survive or make payroll the next day. It took a massive toll on his mental and physical health.

Turning it around took about a year. He acknowledges the way he dealt with stress was not healthy either, and that owning a distillery and a restaurant meant his vices were close at hand. He became the most physically unhealthy he had ever been while his mental state was bad and the business was hanging on. His wife and his mother were instrumental in pushing him to get actual help, and his doctor put him on a plan for fitness and eating. About a year of hard work turned himself and the business around.

Several of the pandemic innovations survived. The cocktail classes still run, in person now rather than online and more polished, once a quarter. They also put classes on the website, so anyone who buys their products can watch videos on making cocktails and find recipes. That came directly from customers saying they had bought everything and did not know what to do with it, so they turned the website into a cocktail school.

The other survivor is their biggest sale of the year, which they started in year one. They open for two hours on Thanksgiving night, from 10 to midnight, and sell every bottle at 50 percent off. His cousin, who was working for him and living at his house, suggested trying it. The first year the line wrapped around the corner. When the second shutdown hit the week before Thanksgiving, they moved the sale entirely online with staggered pickup windows, and it was the best one they had ever had. What they learned is that as many people as want to leave the house on Thanksgiving night, there is an equal number who want the bottles without coming in. So now they do both, and the sale has quadrupled since.

It is still only two hours, and the bar is open during it. He calls it his favorite night of the year. Everyone is in a good mood, the lines wrap around the corner, and people stay to drink because they have had enough of their families. They now have two locations, so this year the Greeley location ran 10 to midnight alongside the online sale, and the Loveland location opened two hours earlier without the online component.

Asked how much of himself is in the brand, he says 98 percent. The title of the book is I Know the Owner, and he says there is not a single other phrase that has had more impact on the success of his business. What he realized six months in was not only that he was an entrepreneur rather than a distiller, but that he was the owner rather than the distiller, and there is a massive difference between owning a business and working in one.

They had a lot of early success, and then it started dying off, because that early wave was friends and family and people who knew him and church patrons who were not upset with him. Once it trended down he realized he had to keep working to get people through the front door, and that his best value was being the face of the business in the community: going to networking events, sitting on boards, being involved, bringing his personality out into the community.

He says all the time that if five people a night walk into his bar and say they know him, that is not enough. The most important thing he can do is have people get to know him, because if they do, they will trust him, and they will want to support his brand and his product. He acknowledges it is different for everybody and that he runs mostly brick and mortar, but for him the most important thing he has ever done is create an image in his community where people know him, trust him and want to support him.

It drives his family crazy, since they are not nearly as extroverted. They cannot go to the grocery store or a restaurant without somebody knowing him, and then of course he stops to talk. The best version of the story happened about five years ago in the M&M store in Times Square in New York City, when someone called out his name. His wife and two kids looked at him and walked straight out the door, saying they did not even want to know who it was.

That was not part of the original plan. One advantage of being a worship pastor at a large church for eight years is that for 52 Sundays a year he was on a stage, and while he did not get to know everyone facing him, they all got to know him. He became a recognizable face. He and his friends have a joke word for it, grebrity, a mix of Greeley and celebrity, meaning you cannot go anywhere in public without somebody knowing you. His grebrity status was pretty well cemented by the time 477 opened. But it was never in the business plan until he realized how important it was, when people walked through the door saying they knew him, or that they used to watch him play music and were excited for what he was doing.

On why that matters, he points to the networking saying that people do business with people they know, like and trust. Think about the last time you recommended a plumber or an electrician. His example: the neighbor two doors down texted to ask whether he knew anyone who could get bats out of an attic. They had bats in their own house four years ago, and they knew the company, liked them and trusted them, so that is who got recommended. In a brick and mortar world the brand carries some weight on its own, and plenty of people eat and drink in his establishments with no idea who he is. But many do, and they do it because they have gotten to know him personally and know he cares about their experience.

On getting employees to represent the brand, he calls it one of the hardest things he has had to figure out. He tells people that nobody will ever care about the business the way an owner does, because it is like a child: it was his idea and he birthed it. The challenge was how to get staff to provide service above and beyond what he asks for.

One advantage from the worship pastor years is that he led teams of volunteers, 40 to 50 at any given time, across music, security, parking and greeting. When people are not getting a paycheck, you have to motivate them to give beyond what they are capable of without money, which means casting vision and getting them passionate about what you are doing. He assumed that once he had paid employees, money would motivate them to be great. He has learned that money does not motivate them much at all. They expect to get paid, and they still need to be motivated to represent you well.

He has about 40 employees now and says some would probably call him a horrible boss while plenty would call him a pretty good one. What he focuses on is creating an environment where people feel they are gaining value for their future. Most of his employees will not be with him forever. Many are college students or just out of high school and will be there one or two years before moving on. His hope is that when they look back on their time at 477 or Oak and Maple, they can say some of what they learned there provided value later. Creating a culture where they feel valued is the other half of it.

The second piece is letting people use their skills. He says there is no part of his ego that is intimidated by somebody who is a better bartender or a better distiller than he is, and the reality is that a lot of people are better at things than he is. Some of the people who work for him are incredibly talented and he has to let them be talented. A man who started as a host on day one is now his full-time head distiller, creating all the products. Another who started as a one-time bartender, and is the best bartender Matt has ever seen, is now the general manager running the people and the operation.

At the end of it, he tries to create a culture where the team feels highly valued, whether they are making waffles or cocktails or manufacturing the product. If they are with him 20 years he wants them to enjoy working there, and if they are with him two years he wants them to look back and say it shaped a piece of who they are.

Practically, he knows all of them. With 40 employees he knows their stories, their hopes and their dreams, so when he sees them he asks whether school has started and how classes are going rather than whether they are having a good day. It has gotten harder as the team has grown, and he admits there have been moments where he signed a paycheck for someone he had never met. A friend used to tell him to do for the few what you cannot do for the many, so he has a core team of five managers who get the majority of his time and energy, hoping they carry it to everyone else.

The other practical piece is that everyone gets an opinion on what they sell. The fall cocktail menu comes out in six weeks, and the entire team of bartenders will spend six hours together working through it, rather than one person developing it and handing it over. The goal is that every menu has a cocktail represented by every single person on staff, so when a customer asks a bartender for their favorite, they can say they created that one. That gives them ownership. The restaurant side works similarly with the waffle of the month and specialty drinks.

They run four cocktail menus a year, one per season. The sessions have become fun team-building, and more than that, they have made the team creative in the times between. People see something on Instagram and try to recreate it at work, which keeps their brains on creative problems. As the team has grown the sessions have needed more structure. In the early days five or six people would mess around and come up with a cocktail. With 20 people there has to be a plan.

They have three core values across all his businesses, adjusted slightly for each. The first is that they love serving people. He never wants to forget that theirs is a business of people, and he repeats a phrase to his staff until they are sick of it: every person who walks through the door, every person who picks a bottle off a shelf, is either having the best day of their life, the worst day of their life, or somewhere in between, and they have the privilege of being part of that. Those people are not a tip, a number or a dollar sign.

The second is that they love their community. He never wants to forget they are part of something larger, so they support a charity of the month every single month, give away a lot of product and a lot of money, and he personally gives time to boards and to work that benefits the community.

The third is that they love being creative. At the distillery that core value is that they love making cocktails better. At the restaurant it is that they love making waffles better. The aim is to be at the far edge of creativity in the industries they are in, so that when you show up at the tasting room you experience flavors and mixes you could not get at any other bar in the country. People, community and creativity.

He is a big fan of hiring people over experience. He says you can teach anybody to bartend, because if you can count you can make a cocktail, but you cannot teach everybody to hold a conversation. So they have worked to build a staff of good human beings who enjoy connecting with people, who turn out to also be really good bartenders.

Those values also let him define success more healthily. In business success often becomes dollars and cents, and yes, that is the goal, because you do not open a business to lose money. But if the business has improved somebody's day, that is success. If the community is better because they exist, there is success there. If they created something nobody has created before, there is success there too. The dollars will always be there and you always have to make money, but when that becomes the only filter, that is when it gets unhealthy, which is what he experienced four years ago.

Asked how to spell entrepreneur, he says he has no idea, and that spelling was the hardest part of writing the book. He discovered late, as an adult, that he is severely dyslexic. He was always a bad student but, by his account, the nicest guy you will ever meet, so his parents' teacher conferences went: Matt is a pretty bad student, cannot read well, not doing a good job, but he is the nicest kid and he will be just fine. He barely graduated high school, went to junior college and dropped out, went back as an adult student at 26 and graduated at 30. It was hard.

The diagnosis came through his oldest daughter. When Sam was around the same age he had been, they started having the same meetings, where teachers said she struggled with reading but was the nicest kid. One teacher, Mrs. Lowe, whom they consider a saint, had a son with dyslexia and suggested getting Sam tested. The testing showed she was off the charts dyslexic, but the clinic hesitated to diagnose her without a family member who was also dyslexic, since it is highly hereditary. Matt and his wife could not think who it might be, until the clinic handed them a list of what dyslexia looks like in an adult, and they looked at each other at the same moment.

He brings it up because of the nagging voice entrepreneurs hear telling them they are not good enough, do not have the skills, cannot do it. He has not met an entrepreneur yet who has not had a moment of self-doubt. His point is that he sincerely cannot spell entrepreneur, knows there are R's and U's in weird places, and wrote a 55,000-word book anyway. At 44 he still struggles with the two versions of their and there. He is a fan of people pushing themselves to realize they are capable of far more than they think. Fear is real, and part of fear is not believing you can do what you are actually able to do.

Amy added that this is the biggest lie people tell themselves, that it keeps people stuck more than any pandemic or competitor, and that the internal battle can make or break whether somebody succeeds. Matt's response was simply: welcome to the club, he doubts himself every day.

His book, I Know the Owner: From Holy Water to Happy Hour, comes out October 6 and is available for pre-order on Amazon and Barnes and Noble. They built incentives for bulk purchases, and his favorite is that anyone who buys 50 or more books gets their name tattooed on his leg. He has two names so far, both men, and would like a woman in there at some point. It will be documented on social media.

Matt closed by congratulating Amy on her own new venture, noting that it is hard to step out into a new thing. Amy said conversations like this one make it rewarding and far less lonely than feeling like you are in it by yourself.