Georgia Toffolo's new fiancé is one of the country's most successful entrepreneurs - however, he's not without controversy.
James Watt, 42, co-founded the Scottish brewery and pub group, BrewDog, in Fraserburgh, Aberdeenshire, in 2007 alongside Martin Dickie. The company is now reported to be worth a staggering £1.5 billion. However, in May James stood down as CEO, admitting there had been "highs and lows" during his tenure.
James' success at BrewDog had been spiked by drama in recent years. The company faced criticism for its marketing campaigns as well as its workplace culture. The firm was accused by former workers in an open letter in 2021 of having a "culture of fear" within the business with "toxic attitudes" to junior staff.
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PA Wire/PA Images)In 2023, James spoke to STV about the backlash against BrewDog, saying: "I think there’s a small amount of criticism of us that is potentially justified. Have we got everything right? Absolutely not. Have we made mistakes in the past? Yes, absolutely we have. But I think the same is true for any company and I think because we’ve always been quite high-profile, a lot of these have been taken way out of context or blown way out of proportion, and there’s a lot of things that are not true in the mix and all kind of blended together. But regardless, we take it, we take the feedback, use it as a catalyst to get better and keep building the business.”
In January, Brewdog hit the headlines again after revealing it would no longer hire new staff on the real living wage, instead paying the lower legal minimum wage.
In a long post shared across his social media accounts, James complained that the "media storm" had been “incredibly tough”, posting: “If you saw the media storm last week (and let’s be honest – it would have been hard not to) you would be forgiven for thinking that we pay our fantastic people in the most miserly of ways. Or worse, that we had cut our teams pay.”
He then proceeded to list various things that he claimed BrewDog was providing its bar employees, including “better” starting packages than “90% of [its] competitors”, wage increases “almost double the UK average” since 2022, and he also said that would be giving “20% of [his] own equity in BrewDog to [its] amazing people over a four-year period”.
“Business is incredibly hard, especially when the UK economy is in such poor health, and sometimes you have to make incredibly difficult decisions," he stated.
Summing up his time as the CEO of BrewDog, James, who is now "Captain and Co-founder" of the business, said: "During my time at the helm of BrewDog, there have been highs and lows, up and downs, crazy successes and incredibly hard challenges. When I look back on the last 17 years my overwhelming feeling is one of gratitude."
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