-Next on "Start Up", we meet up with Shane and Beth Faulkner, the owners of End of Days, a distillery that produces small batch spirits.

All this and more is next on "Start Up."

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♪♪ ♪♪ -My name is Gary Bredow.

I'm a documentary filmmaker and an entrepreneur.

As the country focuses on recovery, small-business owners everywhere are still fighting to keep their dream alive.

So we set out to talk to a wide range of diverse business owners to better understand how they've learned to adapt, innovate, and even completely reinvent themselves in this ever-changing world.

♪♪ This is "Start Up."

♪♪ Distilling is essentially the process whereby a liquid made of two or more parts is separated into smaller parts of desired purity by the addition and subtraction of heat.

The vapors or liquids that have been distilled will separate from the other ingredients that have a lower boiling point.

Distilled spirits are produced from agricultural raw materials such as grapes, sugar cane, molasses, potatoes, and cereals.

Early evidence of distillation was found on Akkadian tablets that date back to 1200 BCE.

It provides evidence that early primitive forms of distillation were practiced in ancient Mesopotamia.

In 1500, distilling became popular when a German alchemist published a book called "The Art of Distillation", providing insight and instruction on the process to the general public.

Today, I'm heading to Wilmington, North Carolina, to meet up with Shane and Beth Faulkner, the owners of End of Days Distillery.

From what I know, they opened in February of '20, and were able to pivot and stay above water during that extremely uncertain first year of the pandemic.

I can't wait to meet Shane and Beth and learn more about their business.

♪♪ ♪♪ What did your wife think when you told her you wanted to do this?

-"Absolutely not."

-[ Laughs ] -"Are you crazy?"

-"No way."

-Yeah.

And honestly, she was very supportive.

You know, I have so many ideas.

I've come to her with with years of ideas.

And this one she actually was pretty excited about because she appreciated it, as well.

She loves the whole entrepreneurial spirit, as well.

Once we had some raw data, you know, this is what we're going to do, this is the plan, yeah, there was a little coaxing.

-Did you take a bit of the dream crusher roll with these thousand ideas?

-Yes, always.

-Like, "No, no, put it to bed."

-Yes.

Correct.

He laughs a lot the past couple of years.

Like, "Really?

This is what you said yes to?"

Shane is very much, I think he has this compliment of being a business minded guy.

-Yeah, creative.

-But he's super creative, very entrepreneurial.

So what we did before, although it was a great living, it was not something that ever fed his creative soul.

And I think because I love him, I wanted to embrace that, as well.

-Tell me about your history and background in brewing, distilling.

How did you become interested in this?

-You know, it's interesting.

I have no distilling experience other than the fact that I just love the process.

We would go to Kentucky or a distiller.

Every town we ever visited, my wife and I would go and visit the distilleries and the breweries and take the tour.

I could literally give the tour for the guy.

-[ Laughs ] -And so that's where it all started.

It's just the passion for it.

-When did you make the decision to say, "I am going to do this"?

-I owned a couple of other businesses, and it never stretched my mind.

It was not creative.

Great business, you know, took care of our family.

And I remember sitting at a little FA café, believe it or not, sitting there, having a bowl of soup with my nephew, one of my business partners, Cameron.

-Oh, okay.

-And he's, you know, just a few years younger, and I talked to him about it.

I said, "Hey, what do you think about this?"

And he looks at me, and he says, "Spectacular."

And then I saw an opportunity here in Wilmington.

I found this magnificent building.

And it all just kind of came together.

-Let's talk about the financial element.

I mean, obviously, if you're going to start a business, it's going to need a lot of equipment, physical space, build out.

Did you self-finance?

Did you get a loan?

How did you acquire the financing?

-I did.

I self-financed.

I sold as much as I possibly could in order to do this.

I'm very hands on.

So, I mean, from cutting the concrete to the welding to pressure washing, everything -- painting, drywall, everything.

If I could do it myself, I would.

So for me, starting the business meant that I was all in.

And as time went on, we did take on a few friends that were investors that I wanted them to be part of the team -So they're buying into the business.

-Yeah, absolutely.

And they became integral parts of the overall team that we that we've built, and they all brought something that was totally unique.

-What made you want to invest?

-I'm a CPA and an accountant.

When Shane came to me and said, "I'm making it happen, it's a reality, I'm doing it," I really started thinking about where I was in my life and my career.

And could I be part of an entrepreneurial story myself?

It was a way for me to have a creative expression, as well.

Accounting and creativity doesn't always have a positive connotation.

"Creative accountants."

And so for me, being able to be creative and have an expression here and put my signature on this business has has been a real joy.

-What were the main spirits that you wanted to focus on in the very beginning?

-What got me into the distilling world was visiting different distilleries that had different mash bills, from bourbon, whiskeys.

And I soon quickly learned that was a very expensive process because you make this product, you put it in a barrel, and you sit on it for years.

You know, two years minimum for bourbon.

And so now you're like, "Okay, well, how do you actually pay the bills in the interim of that?"

And while we're building the distillery, the laws literally changed in North Carolina as I am building.

We originally planned for a little tasting bar.

Come in, have a quarter ounce, buy a T-shirt.

Thanks for visiting.

There was the tour, and that's it.

In the interim of building this, they said, "Hey, by the way, you can now have a cocktail bar," like a full cocktail bar.

I'm like, "Wait a second."

-That helps.

-And this is where it kind of gets interesting because now you have this entire cocktail program.

That's where we brought Oliver, one of my business partners in.

Wonderful mixologist.

And he created a cocktail program.

Well, what do you need for cocktails?

You need your clears, you need your vodka, rum, gin.

So we started off with with a corn based vodka, seven times distilled, charcoal filtered.

And wow, we won gold at the Denver International Spirits Awards Won Vodka of the Year, and I'm like, "What in the world?"

And so then we brought out our rum.

So we had rum and vodka out.

Rum was incredible.

Double gold on the rum.

And so we kind of dialed that in.

It's very crisp and very clean.

So then COVID hit, and we brought our gin out during COVID, and it went crazy.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ -Let's talk cocktails.

-Oh, yes.

The fun stuff.

-What is the most frequently ordered beverage on this list right now?

-I'd say the hurricane is one of our most popular cocktails.

We're actually importing the passion fruit pulp with the seeds still in it from Brazil, and we're making a house syrup that becomes kind of the highlight of that cocktail.

And then it perfectly highlights the buttery-ness of our Port of Entry rum, which is the clear rum that we serve.

So it's a very popular cocktail.

-I would love to try a Hurricane Warning.

-You want to try it?

♪♪ ♪♪ -So this is for you, my friend, the Hurricane.

-Oh, my gosh.

-I don't know whether to drink it or frame it.

It's beautiful.

My God.

-Well, thank you very much.

-All right.

Let's have a little sip.

-Oh, man, that is so good.

And you know what I notice?

I bartend it all through college, right?

This was quick.

-Yeah, but some of these cocktails, we've spent the time developing these syrups that are just fantastic.

And this one we actually bottle, as well.

-Oh, you do?

So we can buy that?

-Yeah, that one's actually a mixer that we we keep available right here.

-Okay.

-And it's just an easy way to pour a drink.

It's quick, it's refreshing, and it's delicious, too.

-And could I order that mixer online?

=You can order that mixer online.

-Excellent.

-Yeah, absolutely.

♪♪ -You don't have any formal training as a bartender/mixologist.

I know accounting and booze go hand in hand.

-To a certain extent.

You know, I think you might you might need a good drink if you get your tax bill on some days, for sure.

-Right.

Exactly.

But this was all self-trained.

-That's right.

-Just a good palate.

-Yep, so I had done, over the years, I became known as just the home mixologist, basically.

It was my stress relief.

And so the only experience I had was really for free, doing it for free for friends, getting through the grand opening and actually being behind a bar myself and learning, you know, if you write a menu, you need to be able to execute the drinks flawlessly yourself.

-And quickly, to a degree.

-Exactly.

-Before you can train other people how to do it.

-I've learned, I've learned the muscle memory of being a mixologist now to get behind the bar, but also I've trained this incredible team of people who really helped me out, who let me be the entrepreneur that I want to be and to create new cocktails and be creative behind the scenes because they're up here really executing the vision of this place.

-So let's break down what it takes to be a distillery.

-You have to have a lease on a building.

-Okay.

First?

-You have to -- -Yeah, yeah.

So think about that.

You lease this building, and now you start the process.

You don't start the process and then go get the lease.

-You might get turned down.

-You might, yeah.

And then they do a federal -- you know, they do a background check on you, of course.

And then you go into a city like Wilmington, who didn't have any distilleries.

So how do they even know what to do with you?

What kind of permitting, what kind of fire protection, what kind of -- -Which can be good or bad because they can throw the whole kitchen sink at you or you can just skate by.

-Oh, I've heard horror stories, horror stories.

I have to say the county, the city, and North Carolina have been phenomenal to deal with, to be able to to work with them, with the permitting process and to come up with ideas.

Everybody was really excited.

Wilmington was super excited for a distillery to come here.

They supported us from day one.

2,500 people show up for grand opening.

-Wow.

-Yeah, I mean, the place was a sea of people.

They have totally supported the distillery, the process, and they continue to do so.

-We met up with local small business advocate Jim Roberts.

If anyone knows how important community support is, it's definitely Jim.

-So I have a nonprofit organization called the Network for Entrepreneurs in Wilmington, and we're an organization that nurtures entrepreneurs in Wilmington to help the next set of startups innovate, grow, and create jobs for the citizens of Wilmington, North Carolina.

-What's happening in Wilmington right now?

Like, what should people around the country know about Wilmington, North Carolina?

-An organization called Startup Genome that most of us had never heard of before putting out a ranking last year that said Wilmington was the 91st best emerging ecosystem in the country, and we were the third smallest city in the United States to make that list.

And that, to me, really says a lot since our ecosystem only started in 2013.

-You've seen a lot of failure and a lot of success with entrepreneurs.

What advice would you have for people that have a thought, have a dream, have a vision, haven't quite put it in paper yet?

-You have to have grit.

You have to be tough.

-This room that we're walking into right now, tell me a little bit about what happens here.

-Oh, so much.

Production.

-This is where the magic happens.

-This is where the magic happens.

We do everything back here.

As you can see, we're actually running out of space.

Look at additional options to grow.

We receive all of the products here.

We mash the products here, you know, like, we actually mash it into the thousand gallon mash ton here.

We ferment it, we distill it, we bottle it here.

We just got our canning line for our canned cocktails.

We fill our barrels here.

We brand our barrels here.

So it's, all of it's done here.

-You guys are going to be doing canned cocktails?

-We did.

We took three of the most popular -- Our cargo mule, which is kind of like a Moscow mule.

And then we have the gin and tonic, and we have the hurricane.

So we just got our cans in.

Our canning line, literally we have to cut the bands off of it, get it going next week.

-This equipment is intimidating -When you start to scale it up, it's big.

It's thousands of pounds of corn.

You know, you have to put all of that in there.

It's a lot of work, but it's just a little bit of science to it, and you get to see product being made right before your eyes.

Like, right here is bourbon.

It actually is fermenting as we speak, making alcohol.

-It has to get into the barrels.

-Yeah, so from there, once it's done fermenting, it has created all of the alcohol that it can create.

Now we have to extract it.

So one of those tanks is in the still right now.

And then tomorrow, we'll start to distill the alcohol off of them.

-Were there any times that you wanted to give up?

-Oh, absolutely.

One of them, one of them was taking a shipping container apart because that's a shipping container, the actual hallway.

-Okay.

-I remember coming home and being totally defeated.

I couldn't get the thing apart.

They're made for the high seas for 20 years.

So they're very tough.

But, you know, you go home, you get rest up, you're back at it next day.

Never give up.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ -What do you like to make the best?

-I love to make gin.

It is very much like cooking.

I love cooking anyway.

I grew up cooking.

And so I get to use all of these spices, botanicals.

It smells delicious.

The cleanup is horrible, you know, because you're putting all of this into this still.

-Sure.

-I also love making -- you know, I love it all.

-You love it all.

-I do.

I'm very passionate about everything we make.

-How are you selling right now?

Is it local, regional?

-So we sell, you know, right out of the merchandise room here.

-Sure.

-But we're in North Carolina, which is a controlled state, so we have an ABC store.

-So you distribute to ABC.

ABC distributes to themselves.

-Yes, exactly.

So it and all goes an hour and a half away to come back to the store right around the corner.

-Right.

-Which is -- it's fine.

You know, whatever they decide to do.

But yeah, so we're distributed throughout North Carolina now, and I'm almost -- like, we are there, all of North Carolina.

-You're in all the ABC stores?

-Mm-hmm.

Just a few boards, a few small boards, you know, some of the little little towns.

It's a little hard to pick us up, but we are working.

We're almost there.

-In the time period of where you are today, congratulations, man.

That's astounding, to open up a distillery this recent and be distributed in an entire state.

How does it feel?

You ever sit back and say, "Whoa"?

-Every day, every day, you're very thankful.

-Like, surreal?

-Surreal.

That's a great word.

You know, there's multi-facets to this business, from making the product, you know, ordering raw product, making the product, you know, to distribution.

-And then a bar.

-Oh yeah.

And a cocktail bar.

Yeah.

-Any food?

-We do.

As a matter of fact, we have food trucks daily.

-Food trucks, okay.

-And we bring in like pre-made food from a little local, I guess it's like an eatery type thing, like private catering.

So they come in, and they bring food, charcuterie plates, vegetable plates, and people love that.

It's options.

And then of course, we do a lot of pop ups here with chefs.

-Great space for that.

-Oh, yeah.

And so that kind of opened up this is an event space, as well.

So we have, you know, we have weddings here, corporate events here, yeah.

♪♪ ♪♪ -There are a lot of distilleries out there.

How do you stand out?

-I think the thing that we want to do is one thing, make a premium spirit.

So we wanted to compare and to compete with the big guys.

Secondly, we partnered with a local branding company that specializes in the spirits, wine, kind of beer industry.

And they helped us kind of create a lifestyle brand.

So we wanted to be something like where we're walking around town, or even recently, one of our co-workers was in the airport in Charlotte and see somebody walking around with one of our shirts.

-That's awesome.

-So we wanted to kind of create something bigger than just our spirits, but that brand presence.

And we have so many cool designs that are coming out with like our bourbon and our whiskey and the American single malt.

So lots of fun, fun, amazing designs.

♪♪ ♪♪ -Take us back to March 2020.

-March came around, and everything was shut down in North Carolina.

And this is only six weeks after grand opening because grand opening was February 1st.

-Wow.

-So now we get shut down as a business.

Thankfully, I had a friend in another country tell me that COVID was on its way, and I knew I could make alcohol, so I knew I could make some kind of sanitizer.

Didn't know the need at that time.

So I just happened to order a bunch of plastic bottles.

-Okay.

-With caps on them.

We were thinking, "Okay, well, what do we need to do in order to continue in business?"

I just put my life savings into this building.

Like, what are we going to do?

-Yeah.

-And then we became essential business.

-Nice.

-So now we we go from making these beautiful cocktails to making hand sanitizer.

And we gave it out.

We donated.

I think we're up to like 20,000 bottles.

-All donation?

-Absolutely.

If you could afford it, you come and grab it.

And if you want to make a donation, great, if not, great.

Just keep safe.

We had lines wrapped around the building every day that we were open.

-The day after every bar and restaurant shut down, we had sent out a little press release saying we had hand sanitizer.

-Amazing.

-I came to work, and there were already lines of people just waiting because they were so concerned and so stressed during that pandemic time.

And so to be able to provide some relief to them was so enriching.

But then we had businesses.

We had businesses like BB&T.

We had Spectrum that reached out and said, "You know, we see that you're providing this for the community."

-For free.

-For free.

That you're donating this to non-profits, to food banks, to all these places in the community.

Even the hospital was low on hand sanitizer.

-Wow.

-And we were able to donate to them.

And so they saw that we were a small business just trying to make it, and we were able to do that.

And they said, "No, you charge us the commodity price basically," that you charge us what you need to.

-That was their contribution to you being the intermediary to the community.

-That's it, and so they they encouraged us to continue donating, and they helped us by having us provide hand sanitizer to their multiple store locations in many states.

-Awesome.

-Which became a huge order that helped to keep our doors open, helped us to continue to be able to pay our staff, and to donate even more to the community.

♪♪ -At what point were you able to sort of open back up, let people back into the tasting room, and start to function in a way that's close to normal?

-We were down for a few months, and... -Okay.

-And then they started to allow us, you know, social distancing with masks.

We opened up the cocktail program.

Because at that point, they were saying, "Okay, you can make to-go cocktails."

And we really dialed in our craft.

At that point, we had plenty of time during COVID to make, you know, our cocktails program even better.

Oliver dialed in, perfected it.

You know, I mean -- -It's almost like you got a pause to just like completely perfect your business.

-And finish the construction because we opened during construction.

Like, no way, man.

And it allowed us, like, you know, sanitizer, selling sanitizer allowed us to actually not go into debt during COVID and say, "Okay, let's go buy equipment as we can afford it."

-You seem happy.

Did you make a good decision?

-Absolutely.

And you know what?

What's great is my training as a CPA, it's useful.

It's one that, you know, a lot of people think about their accountant.

They're just the guy sitting in the back room.

But really, the good CPAs that I've known over the years genuinely care about the businesses.

And so they take on a lot of the stress load, because who do you talk to when your money is tight?

You talk to your accountant.

-Yep.

-Or your bartender.

So there's a bit of -- -You're both, man.

-There's a bit of a dual role there that comes into play.

But as an accountant, what I really loved is seeing my clients succeed.

-Mm-hmm.

-As an entrepreneur, an investor in this place, watching this play succeed, watching new ideas come to fruition has been immensely rewarding, and it continues to be.

And so I'm having fun with it.

-What's the future hold, man?

It looks like the sky is not even the limit for what you're doing.

Where do you want to be?

-I want to have fun every single day, and I want to enjoy the time that I have with my children, with my friends.

And I see people come in and have something very special.

You know, they have this cocktail, and they're looking at it, it's beautiful, it tastes great, and they're enjoying it.

And at the end of the day, that's what we want to do.

-I really enjoyed meeting Shane, Beth, and Oliver, and the rest of the End of Days team.

They created a pretty exceptional business in true Wilmington fashion.

And like so many of the stories of this season, End of Days isn't just the distillery.

It's a family business that started from an idea that Shane had one day and has quickly become a multi-award winning distillery.

And they're doing it for all the right reasons -- to work together as a family, provide free hand sanitizer to the community, and produce a really high quality product.

I'm excited to see how far these folks can take this business.

But if I had to guess, I would predict that End of Days is well on its way to becoming a major player in the distilled spirits market.

For more information, visit our website and search episodes "End of Days Distillery."

Next time on "Start Up", we head to Charleston, South Carolina, to meet up with Courtney Bukowsky, the creator of One of a Find Charleston, a used furniture and accessory resale business with an interesting back story.

Be sure to join us next time on "Start Up."

Would you like to learn more about the show, or maybe nominate a business?

Visit our website, at startup-usa.com, and connect with us on social media.

♪♪ -♪ We got a long road ahead of us ♪ ♪ A long road ahead of us ♪ Got a long road ahead of us ♪ Before we pay our dues ♪ We've got a long road ahead of us ♪ ♪ A long road ahead of us ♪ A long road ahead of us ♪ ♪ Before we pay our ♪ Dues ♪♪ ♪♪ -Spectrum Business partners with small businesses across the country to help them achieve their goals.

With high-speed Internet, phone, TV, and mobile services, Spectrum Business provides the tools to keep you connected with your customers.

Spectrum Business.

No nonsense, just business.

♪♪ ♪♪ -Vistaprint, a proud sponsor of "Start Up" and small businesses everywhere.