As TailGate has expanded across Tennessee, one of the biggest lessons hasn’t been about brewing beer at all. It’s been about building systems that can scale without stripping away the personality that made the brewery successful in the first place.
For owner Wesley Keegan, growth has required balancing structure with flexibility, especially as TailGate evolved from a single brewery into a multi-location operation spread across different neighborhoods and markets. While each taproom technically operates under separate LLCs for liability and accounting purposes, he said customers and employees should never feel those divisions operationally.
“The corporate separation doesn’t really exist in operations,” Keegan said. “If somebody takes a promotion, they go to a different taproom.”
That operational fluidity has become central to how TailGate maintains consistency while still allowing individual locations to reflect the communities around them. Beer production and food menus remain standardized, but Keegan said the personality of each taproom is intentionally shaped by its neighborhood rather than forced into a single template.
“East Nashville, for example, is super hip, super trendy,” he said. “That’s a really tight space. It’s got to feel like you can kind of see everything all in one room. That wouldn’t work everywhere else.”
Meanwhile, suburban locations require a completely different atmosphere.
“Out here, people love that there’s space,” Keegan said of the HQ spot, where he chatted for the recent BREWER cover story. “If the picnic tables are too close together, people get weirded out and they start moving them.”
Rather than over-engineering those differences before opening, Keegan said TailGate’s approach is often to launch quickly, establish operational basics and allow customers and employees to shape the final identity of the taproom over time.
“My model is, get open as fast as possible,” he said. “Make sure the beer’s cold, make sure the pizza’s hot and ready to go.”
That philosophy runs somewhat counter to an increasingly common industry instinct to perfect every detail before launch. Keegan argues the market itself becomes the best consultant once the doors are open.
“We can at least pay our bills while we’re taking our lumps,” he said. “And they also tell us what they like.”
The staffing model follows the same philosophy. Instead of moving a uniform culture from location to location, TailGate hires heavily from within each neighborhood and allows those employees to influence the experience organically.
“One of our taprooms, I think the entire team is some form of musician,” Keegan said. “Their primary job is they’re musicians, but when they’re not on tour, they’re working at the local brewery.”
That approach highlights a broader leadership principle: culture at scale may depend less on controlling every variable and more on establishing non-negotiables while allowing local adaptation. TailGate maintains brand standards, but Keegan appears cautious about confusing consistency with uniformity.
That same tension shows up in management decisions. Keegan said one of the hardest parts of leadership has been empowering employees while still recognizing that ownership ultimately absorbs the consequences when decisions fail.
“I’m a big believer in delegating and empowering people,” he said. “I think people like that.”
TailGate’s employee retention supports that claim. Keegan noted several original employees have now been with the company for a decade, a notable benchmark in both brewing and hospitality industries where turnover is often high. Still, he acknowledged delegation becomes complicated when experimentation repeatedly collides with operational reality.
“Where we miss the most is often where it’s like, ‘Hey, we’ve learned this lesson. We’ve learned it doesn’t work,’” Keegan said. “But somebody comes in and it’s really important to them to spread their wings and try things.”
His example was smoked Lagers, a style he joked TailGate has unsuccessfully attempted countless times.
“Every brewer loves to do it,” he said. “But that’s one where it’s like, ‘No, we’re just not going to do it.’”
The comment may sound humorous, but it underscores a larger operational challenge for growing breweries. Innovation culture can become expensive when organizations fail to distinguish between creative experimentation and repeating already-proven mistakes. At the same time, Keegan cautioned against becoming overly rigid.
“There’s other things where it’s like, ‘All right, I think this isn’t going to work, but you say you want to make this work … go for it,’” he said.
That balancing act also shapes TailGate’s organizational structure. As the company expanded, Keegan said he increasingly looked outside craft beer for management inspiration, studying multi-unit operators like Target, Trader Joe’s, Starbucks and Toyota rather than relying solely on brewery models.
“There’s great businesses that have done the hard part for us,” he said.
The brewery now operates with director-level leadership, general managers, assistant managers and supervisors that resemble traditional restaurant or retail hierarchies more than the flatter structures many breweries begin with. Notably, Keegan said nearly all senior leadership has been promoted internally.
“We’ve tried bringing people in from outside, but corporate doesn’t understand small business,” he said.
READ MORE: How This Brewery Chooses to Empower Employees in Management Ideals
That philosophy may resonate with brewery owners who have struggled integrating executives from larger corporate environments into founder-led organizations. While outside hires can bring expertise, Keegan suggested institutional understanding and operational adaptability often matter more in independent brewing. Even with a more developed hierarchy, TailGate regularly reevaluates staffing needs to avoid unnecessary management bloat during periods of growth.
“When you’re really busy, it’s easy to overreact and think, ‘Hey, I need this position, I need this position,’” Keegan said.
For breweries navigating expansion, note that scale itself is not the solution. Systems, hiring philosophies and leadership structures all require continuous adjustment as a brewery grows. TailGate’s evolution suggests successful multi-unit growth may rely less on creating rigid uniformity and more on building adaptable frameworks that preserve accountability, local relevance and operational clarity at the same time.
