Inappropriate Conduct or Falling in Love at Work – What happened at Black Hops

In July 2022 I was the CEO, Co-founder, major shareholder in Black Hops Brewing Pty Ltd, Australia’s favorite craft beer Brewery.  

Eddie, my co-founder came into my office. 

“Are you dating Erin?” He said. 

“Um, yeah”. 

“People are not happy, they are saying it’s inappropriate”. 

After a few months of being together, the news finally spread. 

“I’m allowed to be in a relationship.” I said. 

Apparently, he didn’t agree, and was hearing from my ex and her friends that my behavior was inappropriate, and he had obviously made his mind up without even talking to me. There was a recent staff survey where it came up a lot as well. 

I felt sick to my stomach. From my point of view, I was finally happy. I had moved out of an awful, toxic situation and finally had a great relationship. The idea that any of this could be seen as inappropriate made me ill, but I also understood my history of relationships could be problematic. 

I knew our relationship would be unpopular, but I was also conscious of ensuring I never did anything that breached policies. I never got involved in any decisions involving Erin, and we didn’t have a direct reporting relationship in the business. 

It was a messy situation and it would only get worse. Much worse.  

I didn’t believe I was guilty of anything other than falling in love at work and moving on too quickly. As far as I was aware, no one had ever made any complaints about me before. There were no policies preventing dating at work, and I strongly believed that such a policy would be discriminatory, since you can’t discriminate against someone based on a consensual relationship. 

However, there was a vocal group of people in the business who did not agree. My ex was still working there, and when she found out, shit hit the fan. Erin’s ex also worked there and their circle of friends did NOT want me and Erin to be together. Some had quit over it.

There were eighty people in the business. I suspect most people just wanted to come to work, do good work, and didn’t give a shit about my personal life. However, the vocal ones in this group certainly made it known, and it wasn’t just one or two, it was a lot. 

Eddie didn’t know what to do. He was terrified about bad press for the company. He said to me, “The last thing we need is for Matt Kirkgaard at Brews News to write an article about this.” 

In my opinion, the company would have survived bad press. We had done it before. It’s not fun, but we had an extremely strong brand on the back of a genuine, transparent approach to what we did. If things didn’t go well, we would just own up to it, and people would respect us for being honest, even if it was ugly. 

Our investors, customers, and partners knew what we stood for—transparency—and they had shown us many times in the past that they would forgive us for mistakes if we were honest about them. 

Eddie looked at me like a frightened deer. 

We had financial challenges coming our way, which I could clearly see at that time. Plus, we fractured the founding team, which could destroy the brand. 

Our slogan was “Made by 3 mates in Burleigh.” The whole idea of the brand was the Aussie dream of mates starting a brewery together and sharing everything they learned along the way. If Eddie and I couldn’t find common ground, that dream would be over, and the whole brand would be dead. Over a thousand people had invested in Black Hops at this point, multiple millions of dollars. And there was a huge multi-million dollar loan with Judo Bank that me and Eddie were personal guarantors for. There was a lot at stake.

Our governance structure also made this situation challenging. The board was Eddie and me, which meant everything was fine if we agreed on things. But if we didn’t, well, then we had a stalemate, and that would be a big problem. 

After a few days of trying to work out what to do, Eddie said that to get a proper resolution, we needed to do an investigation. 

Darren Hill, was the first guy we ever pitched the business to. He had gone on to invest in subsequent rounds and had become somewhat of a mentor to me. I’d call him when we had tricky situations and he’s always give me a unique perspective on it. When I called him about this situation, he volunteered to come in and help resolve the issue quickly and come up with some suggestions. We needed to deal with this quickly because of our financial challenges. This was the most important thing to me. Whatever we did, it had to happen quickly. 

I suggested we let Darren come and run a quick process and work out what to do. If, on balance, he decided the behaviour was inappropriate, I would stand down as long as someone else would stand up. If he decided it was just a messy situation, I would return to work quickly with some policy changes and some communication for the team. I knew he would be fair and unbiassed, him and his partner ran a professional operation aligned to this type of thing, and I knew they would do a good job.

Eddie didn’t agree. 

He said we needed a 100 percent third-party consultant, and Darren Hill was biased because he was a current investor. 

I was frustrated. Darren was a current investor which is why I wanted him to do it. He knew how important it was to get to a resolution quickly, but a 3rd party investigator wouldn’t care about that. 3rd party investigators get hired by board who want to fire the CEO. We had a HR person, we had investors who could help, we had plenty of capacity to handle this internally and quickly.

I wanted to make sure a reasonable process cleared me, but I also knew I needed to be at work. The business needed a CEO, even if I was an imperfect one. 

Our original investor, Simpo, sent Eddie and me a text: “Hey, they had a situation with a CEO at my misso’s work, and they hired this mob to do an investigation.” He provided a contact for a high-profile Brisbane CBD investigator to handle it. 

I thought it was completely insane. Not only did I think I had done nothing wrong, but we also had no money, and Eddie was about to hire a corporate investigator for $15k+ to run an investigation on our small business while we were bleeding for cash. 

I was very reluctant to agree, but Simpo and Eddie thought it was for the best. I wanted to make 100 percent sure I was found not guilty of any inappropriate conduct, and we needed to do something, so I went along with it as well. 

In my mind, I was guilty of falling in love at work three times over six years, and that was it. I didn’t want to be branded as someone who was inappropriate at work. I also knew that the people behind the allegations were ex partners and people in that circle who all hated that me and Erin were in a relationship for various reasons, but there was no substance to anything other than a messy situation.

I also thought it would happen quickly. I recall two weeks being mentioned, and we had chatted to other advisors about the process, and had roughly agreed that we’d get this done quickly. Then, I’d come back to work and make a few changes to policies, etc. 

This was July 2022. This whole situation didn’t come to a close until I resigned in February 2023, 7 months later. 

Eddie put the investigation in place. The first request from the investigator was to stand down from my position during the investigation and not speak with anyone at work.  

Meanwhile, the people making the allegations, including disgruntled ex-partners, could continue to spread rumors and feed the whole mess. And crucially it meant Eddie was running the business, which to me was a big problem. Eddie does not like making hard decisions and in my opinion didn’t have what it took to run a company. Nor did he want to do it. I imagine he would agree with me on that. 

I thought it would take a few weeks to work out that all that had occurred was a consensual adult relationship. 

I was very wrong.

It surprised me when I was finally presented with the list of allegations. It was a long list and it wasn’t a pleasant read. I had to respond to each one as best I could and it was a painful and frustrating process, because there was a mix of things in there that didn’t really add up. 

There were some things in there that were so stupid that I didn’t think an investigator should even include them in a process like this. In processes like this, which I’ve run before (ironically I have a HR degree, hasn’t proven all that useful), the first thing you normally do is get a list of allegations and then refine the list into something meaningful and worth looking into. You normally exclude anything frivolous, so people who make the grievance know they can’t just include a whole long list of irrelevant shit.

Like I bought my dog to work and that made my ex uncomfortable. Or I went out to lunch a few times with others from the office and my ex felt left out. It was awkward with my ex for sure but if you get into a relationship with someone at work and it ends (you end it), I don’t know a person on earth who would expect it to be super comfortable at work afterwards and expect to be invited out to lunch, or not see the other person or the other person’s dog – given they sometimes bring them to work. That to me was very weird. 

There was a list of relationships I’d been in over time, it was 3 long term relationships over 6 years (Ali who I was engaged to and living with before we broke up, Alisha who I had been with for over a year openly, then Erin (who I am obviously still with today). And one brief fling which I ended quickly. Too many by most people’s standards no doubt, and I can fully understand that people aren’t comfortable with that from the CEO – especially given there wasn’t much gap between Alisha and Erin. It was over a long period of time and I didn’t attempt to deny any of that, it was all pretty much public at that point.

There was some stuff in there around drinking too much at Black Hops events, telling unsavoury jokes. That was true, I liked to drink at our events. All the founders did, I don’t think I was any looser than any other staff or founders but obviously this group of people said I was. But I didn’t try to deny that, I liked drinking and carrying on at the brewery at our celebrations.

I made jokes that I can understand aren’t to everyone’s taste. If you’ve met me you’ll know that about me. It was frustrating that to my knowledge there had never been any complaints before me and Erin were together, nor had Eddie or anyone ever said anything. If that happened I would have reeled it in, like I do these days (I don’t socialise with people at work, and I don’t make rude jokes at work). But it was part of our culture back then and I had no reason to think it was problematic. That said, it wasn’t false and I didn’t attempt to deny it. 

Then there was some stuff in there that was straight up fake. Some people had clearly lied and made things up. One that really stood out was I was accused of saying that women should never be brewers. I had literally just put a woman in charge of the whole brewery, leading a team with one of the highest percentages of women brewers in the industry. Not because they were women, but because they were the best candidates, and great brewers were super valuable and hard to find. So that one hurt and I knew it was 100% made up, obviously l would never say that or think that, it’s fucking stupid. But it’s hard to prove that you never said something.

There were some things that I could prove absolute did not happen, but for a lot of it, it’s kind of hard to prove if someone says you did say that, and you are saying you didn’t.   

So the whole thing was super frustrating. I found myself trying to prove that bringing my dog to work wasn’t an inappropriate action, while also just agreeing and not even bothering defending some of the stuff in there. We ran a small brewery, things got loose from time to time, especially in earlier years when some of the stuff dug up dated back to. I was 100% honest with the investigator and pretty much agreed that a reasonable person wouldn’t expect to see this list of things from a CEO of a company. 

In my mind, what had very clearly happened in the whole situation was my ex was extremely unhappy about me moving on quickly with Erin, which is totally understandable. She and some others, including ex-partners and their close group of friends weren’t happy about it and had dug up a whole bunch of stuff from that past, that no one had ever complained about at the time. They gave it to the investigator, it was all written down in a report, and it didn’t look great. 

Just to be 100% clear, none of this was done in any kind of legal process. There were no complaints to Fair Work or anything involving courts or civil cases or anything like that. It was an internal investigation that we put in place, and resulted in a list of things that people weren’t happy with. 

I wanted to make that clear because in many ways I would have preferred if that were the case, at least I would be able to clear my name of anything other than creating some messy situations. But it wasn’t, and never will be because nothing happened that was illegal. So what’s left is a vague shit stain that sits with me forever. Perhaps I deserve that. Certainly there will be some people who will think that, and some that won’t. 

While I didn’t believe that I did anything that could be considered illegal, nor breached any of our policies, it didn’t mean that I was in the right.  

It was a messy situation, that I had created, and my behavior wasn’t the behavior some of the staff wanted from a CEO at that time. They made that very clear and they weren’t wrong. 

Ordinarily, in a business where such a situation exists, the board may choose to fire the CEO even if there are no legal issues. A CEO’s job is to ensure the team is aligned and healthy, and I had clearly not done that part of the job particularly well. 

I had no problem not being the CEO either, I was actually pretty keen to not be the CEO. I never particularly wanted to be CEO in the first place, but that all assumed I could still ultimately have financial control, because I believed that to be critical.

Eddie didn’t know what to do. The challenge was that the company was governed by a board, which didn’t really exist, and was just Eddie and me. 

In the past, I’d tried to inject some structure into what we did, but it never really landed. Eddie and I were the major shareholders and only directors, so it was up to us at the end of the day. 

The situation dragged out, and what I thought would be two weeks turned into month after month after month. 

This was a huge problem because no one was really running the company while this was happening. 

We said Eddie would be “MD” during that time, but as far as I could tell, he was not making any difficult decisions. He was just treading water waiting for the report.

When the report came back in, the story was not over. It wasn’t clear; it pretty much said that some of the behavior was inappropriate. But I knew it also listed some things that I knew weren’t true. The investigator accepted my version of events for some things and not for others. I knew I wasn’t innocent of everything listed in there, a lot of it was true – just up to judgement whether it’s acceptable or not for a CEO in the context of the business. To me, that decision needs to be made by the board, not a 3rd party investigator. So the report coming back in really changed nothing. 

There was no doubt there was enough in there to show that what happened was not ideal behaviour for a CEO. But there was also evidence in there that people had made claims that the investigator had decided were most likely not true. In my mind if someone is lying about one thing, they are probably lying about everything. But that’s not the approach the investigator took.

Still, there was no doubt that all of this had really screwed up the culture at the time. 

However, the biggest problem was that, after all this time, there was no clear decision. 

We had to work out what to do about it. Eddie thought if I returned to work, a whole bunch of people would quit. He was right in that, quite a few had quit already and it would get worse if I returned. But I felt if I didn’t return to work, the company would ultimately collapse.   

I realized we were in a deadlock. We needed another director. The worst thing would be to continue dragging this out. We needed to decide and move on. Even if it wasn’t in my favor, we’d be better off getting another director and at least making a decision. 

I asked one of our shareholders, Tony Sutherland, to come on board as a director to help facilitate any deadlocks between Eddie and me. I filled him in on everything, and he agreed. 

Unfortunately, the stalemate only continued. We had agreed to hire a new GM, and that process was underway (this was happening before this whole situation happened). I had participated in the recruitment, and we had a new guy, Nathan, starting early in the new year. 

I supported hiring a GM, as long as the Directors still had control. If I could hand off some of the part of being CEO that I was no good at, then we might be better off. But it was never the intention for the new person to have control, they were an employee, we were still the directors.

We had hired a new Financial Controller Andrew and he was very calm about our financial situation, and I think that made Eddie calm. I was not calm. 

We had no structure for running the board, so I put a structure in place where we met every month, took proper board minutes, and executed decisions in a formal way. It had never been needed before because Eddie and I agreed on everything and filled in board minutes as a formality. 

Eddie, Tony and I regularly discussed me returning to work “once the dust settled,” but as the weeks and months went on, I grew increasingly uncomfortable with the approach we were taking to it. The staff had been told I would no longer be CEO, but I would still be a company director and involved in projects. So, me, Eddie and Tony agreed that I should return to work part-time to focus specifically on getting a better understanding of our inventory and finance.

Being back at work was difficult, and my role was still unclear. Eddie told me to not go to certain parts of the building because people didn’t want me there. It was a fucked up situation and handled extremely poorly.  

We had all assumed the mess would be cleaned up well before Nathan started. But by early 2023, it was clear it wouldn’t be. 

I began filling Nathan in on some of the details of the whole situation. 

I was still coming in part-time to work on the finance and inventory project, but I was getting no support from Eddie or Andrew. It was a very uncomfortable situation. It was very clear Andrew didn’t like me and didn’t want me there (I didn’t like him either, I thought he was slimy and dishonest). 

I never saw Eddie in the office. He was in the warehouse doing his old job. Andrew would turn up to work at 11:00, leave at 3:00, and spend most of the day having long-winded conversations with people about random things. He was getting paid more than any employee had ever been paid before at the company.

The situation was truly bizarre—and heartbreaking. It felt to me like Andrew was running the company, which terrified me. 

I explained to Tony, Eddie, and Nathan I needed to return to work full-time. 

It was now February 2023 and we were 7 months into the whole saga. 

We clearly needed to make a decision. We no longer had a deadlocked board, Eddie and Tony now had the power to remove me if they wanted to go in that direction, and I put Tony in place knowing full well that was a possible outcome. I believed we had to go one way or another, and not let the situation drag out any further. 

I pleaded with them to either agree to fire me or agree to have me return to work full-time. Whatever the case, something had to happen and it had to happen now. 

I planned an in-person meeting to discuss the matter with Tony, Eddie, and Nathan on Friday. A few hours before the meeting, Tony messaged me and said we were meeting on Zoom instead. 

I thought this was very odd. We all lived and worked in the same area; there was no reason to meet on Zoom. This was well past COVID, and the idea of using Zoom was weird. 

When I called in, it had a somber vibe. Eddie and Tony weren’t talking, which was strange. Nathan delivered the news. “We think you should resign. I’ve reviewed the report. I think the behavior is inappropriate for a CEO, and you should step down as an employee and as a director.” 

Tony and Eddie didn’t say a word on the call. They had made it the first job of their new employee to try to fire the founder, director, and lead shareholder of the company while they stood by on the call and watched. Eddie had been my best mate for 20 years too, best man at his first wedding and planned best man for his second wedding, so that fucking hurt. 

The reality was that Nathan had no legitimate power in the situation. He was hired by the board as a manager; he couldn’t sack a board member. To legally sack a board member Tony and Eddie would have to come to the board meeting with a resolution, put it forward and outvote me on it.

However, Tony and Eddie clearly didn’t want to make the decision, or at least implement it, and they wanted Nathan to do it.

I was blown away. I knew they struggled to make decisions. However, giving this kind of decision to an employee in their first week really shocked me. 

I told them I’d think about it over the weekend and on the Monday I agreed to leave. 

It was a heartbreaking moment in the middle of many more before and many more to follow.