A cidery can make a good hire and still lose that person within the first few months. The problem is not always the employee. Sometimes, the business never gave the new hire a clear enough path to succeed.
For cidery owners and managers, the first 30 days can expose weaknesses in hiring, communication and management that were easy to overlook when the position was vacant. Expectations may be unclear. Systems may still be evolving. Managers may assume that someone with the right experience will naturally figure things out. Those gaps can turn an otherwise promising hire into a turnover statistic.
For High Limb Cider CEO Colin Geoffroy, the biggest problem is often described as expectations, but the word needs a closer definition.
“Owners hear ‘expectations’ and think of the number,” Geoffroy said. “The gap that actually kills people in month one is smaller and more boring than that. The new hire has no idea what a good day looks like.”
That distinction matters. A sales representative may understand that the company wants more placements, for example, but that does not tell the employee what should happen on Monday morning, what accounts deserve attention first, how much time should be spent in the field, how the brand should be presented or when the manager will consider the employee ready to work independently.
Geoffroy’s approach is to make those decisions before the employee arrives.
“When we bring on a field sales rep, the first month is written down before they show up,” he said.
The process starts with the company story and brand expectations on the first morning, followed by a tasting of the portfolio with the cidermaker. The next day is a ride-along in which the new employee observes rather than sells. The employee then moves into supervised calls, role-playing and distributor rides before taking on an independent route in the fourth week.
“None of that is clever,” Geoffroy said. “The value is just that somebody sat down and decided what days 1-20 were for.”
That may be one of the more useful lessons for a cidery because it does not require an expensive training program or a sophisticated human resources department. It requires management to spend time defining the learning process before asking the new employee to perform.
The alternative can be particularly damaging.
“A cidery hands over a territory and a price sheet and calls the first month ‘learning the market,’” Geoffroy said. “So the new person spends 30 days guessing which of 40 possible activities is the one that counts, then gets measured at day 45 against a standard nobody ever said out loud.”
The problem there is not that the work is difficult. It is that the employee has been given responsibility without enough context to understand how to succeed.
“That’s what pushes good people out,” Geoffroy said. “Not the difficulty. The work is supposed to be hard. They leave because they can’t tell whether they’re winning, and to a conscientious person, ambiguity feels like failure.”
For anyone in connection with hiring, that should prompt an uncomfortable question: Is the new employee actually underperforming, or is management asking the employee to interpret an undefined job? That distinction becomes even more important at younger or rapidly changing cideries, where there may not be a finished playbook.
Benny Boy Brewing co-founders Chelsey Rosetter and Benny Farber said their company is still developing its own systems. That makes pretending everything is already figured out potentially more damaging than acknowledging that it is not.
“We are only a four-year-old company, so it’s important to be upfront that we’re constantly evolving,” Rosetter and Farber said in an email to BREWER & Cider Business. “We set expectations early on that things are always changing around here, and we genuinely appreciate constructive feedback from new employees.”
That creates a different kind of expectation. Instead of promising a perfectly established system, management can be honest that some systems are still being built and make adaptability part of the job.
“Strong management and clear communication are essential,” they said. “Systems are the hardest to nail right out the gate and are often the last piece to become fully refined in a growing business, so flexibility on both sides is incredibly important during those first years.”
There is an important distinction here for growing cideries. Having imperfect systems is not necessarily the problem. Failing to tell a new employee which systems are established, which are changing and which still need work can be. A new hire can generally tolerate some uncertainty when it is acknowledged. What is harder to tolerate is uncertainty that management treats as if it were obvious. That also means onboarding should not be viewed as something that ends after paperwork, a facility tour and a few training shifts. It is an opportunity for managers to discover whether the assumptions they made during the hiring process match the reality of the job.
Ilwaco Cider Company owner Vinessa Karnofski said that reality can be particularly important in a cidery because many positions demand more from employees than a job description might communicate.
“It’s a physical job no matter what position,” Karnofski said. “It can also be mentally exhausting to have daily interactions with the customer.”
That means hiring decisions need to account for the actual demands of the work rather than simply whether someone looks good on paper. Karnofski said her cidery looks for people who enjoy talking with customers and do not have significant physical limitations that would interfere with the work. But she also looks beyond the immediate requirements of the position.
“We also encourage them to share their other talents with us to see if we can utilize them in other ways and make the job more fulfilling,” she said.
That is another useful first-month lesson: onboarding is not only about teaching an employee how to perform the job. It can also be about learning what the employee brings to the business.
A person hired for a taproom position may have photography skills, an interest in events or experience with social media. A cellar employee may have organizational or mechanical abilities that can be useful elsewhere. Those skills should not become an excuse to pile unrelated responsibilities onto someone, but recognizing them can help an employee see a longer-term role within the company.
The hiring process itself can create another problem before the first day ever arrives.
Jon Hoag, sales and distribution director at Ponderosa Cider Co., said determining whether a candidate will remain committed after being hired can be difficult.
“Determining a candidate’s dedication and commitment during the interview cycle can be difficult, which causes more turnover than expected,” Hoag said.
That points to a limitation of interviews: A candidate can say the right things, understand the position and still discover after starting that the job is not what they expected. The solution is not necessarily to become better at predicting whether someone is inherently “committed.” That can be an unreliable standard. A better approach is to make the realities of the job increasingly visible during the hiring and onboarding process.
If a position requires substantial standing, customer interaction, weekend work, independent decision-making or frequent travel, those realities should be clear before the person accepts the job. Otherwise, a manager may interpret an employee’s eventual departure as a lack of commitment when the employee may simply have discovered that the job did not match what they understood they were accepting.
That makes the first 30 days something of a two-way test. The employee is learning whether the cidery is the right place to work. Management is learning whether its job description, interview process, training and expectations accurately described the position. The mistake is treating the first month primarily as an evaluation of the employee. A better question may be: Have we given this person enough information, structure and feedback to make a fair evaluation possible?
Geoffroy’s account provides a straightforward test. If a new salesperson cannot explain what a successful week looks like, which accounts matter most, what activities take priority and how progress will be evaluated, the problem may not be the salesperson. It may be the manager. His advice to replace a vague territory with specific accounts illustrates how small changes can make expectations tangible.
“One fix that costs nothing: hand them a list of named accounts instead of a territory,” Geoffroy said. “We keep a target list we’ve agreed on with our distributor, and it doubles as the onboarding roadmap.”
His conclusion is particularly applicable to small and midsized cideries that do not have extensive training departments or formalized human resources systems.
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“‘Go win these 40 doors’ is a job,” Geoffroy said. “‘Go work Rhode Island’ is a shrug.”
That may be the larger lesson from the first 30 days. A new hire does not necessarily need a perfect organization, a 50-page employee handbook or a fully mature operating system. They do need to know what matters, what happens next, who can answer questions and how the business will determine whether they are making progress. Growing cideries will inevitably have unfinished systems. Customer-facing jobs will inevitably be demanding. Hiring managers will inevitably make mistakes predicting who will thrive. But ambiguity does not have to be part of the process.
The first month is an opportunity to turn the unknowns of a new job into something more manageable. Managers can explain what is established and what is evolving, show employees what good performance looks like, provide increasingly independent responsibilities and create opportunities to give feedback in both directions. That does more than help a new employee get through orientation. It gives management a better chance to determine whether it actually hired the right person and gives that person a fair chance to become the right employee.
