The 15 minute call
BrewDog just showed us what organisational shadow looks like.
Twenty-five minutes’ notice. A 15-minute Teams call. No questions allowed.
That’s how 484 BrewDog workers found out their jobs were gone.
Staff were informed of the closures during a short Teams call hosted by BrewDog’s chief executive and a restructuring specialist.
“Your role is no longer required. Your position has formally been made redundant.”
That was it.
Fifteen minutes to end someone’s livelihood. Fifteen minutes for hundreds of people whose labour built an entire brand from scratch.
Unite’s Bryan Simpson, who has represented hospitality workers for over a decade, said it was the worst mass redundancy he had ever dealt with, including during the pandemic.
The punk brand and its shadow
BrewDog built its identity on rebellion. On being different. On sticking it to the corporate machine.
Founded in 2007, BrewDog grew from a self-proclaimed “punk” startup into one of the world’s most recognisable craft beer brands. Its Equity for Punks scheme invited ordinary people, many of them workers, to become co-owners. Shareholders with skin in the game. Partners in the revolution.
Then the revolution ended. The company posted a pre-tax loss of £37m in 2024, the fifth consecutive year it had failed to make a profit.
The media were informed about the administration decision before the workers were told.
Punk, it turns out, had a shadow.
And that shadow looked a lot like every other corporate structure it claimed to oppose.
Organisational personas
This is a story about what happens when an organisation builds its entire identity on a persona, a carefully constructed mask, and never looks underneath it.
Jung called this the persona: the face we present to the world. For BrewDog, that persona was loud, values-driven, and anti-establishment. It told a story about community, belonging, and shared ownership.
But personas always have a shadow. Everything that doesn’t fit the story gets pushed down. The inconvenient truths. The gap between the values they marketed and the decisions they made.
In 2024, BrewDog faced backlash after revealing it would no longer hire new staff on the Real Living Wage, instead paying the lower legal minimum. A company that had staked its brand on being a better kind of employer abandoned its commitment overnight. That’s shadow behaviour.
Robert Bly described the shadow as the long bag we drag behind us. Every part of ourselves that we can’t afford to show, we stuff in the bag. Organisations do exactly the same thing. The gap between the values on the wall and the decisions in the boardroom gets wider and wider, and nobody talks about it, until the bag gets too heavy.
The believers
It wasn’t just the workers who were left holding nothing.
BrewDog’s Equity for Punks scheme raised around £75 million from roughly 200,000 small investors between 2009 and 2021. These people were true believers in a different kind of company. They bought in at £20 to £30 a share, drawn by the story as much as the returns. Some invested a few hundred pounds. Others put in their life savings.
One investor, Richard Fisher, told the BBC he had written off his £12,000 stake. “There’s nothing for us,” he said.
He won’t be getting it back. Administrators confirmed that equity holders, including every Equity for Punks investor, will receive nothing from the Tilray deal.
Here’s what makes this particularly sharp. When US private equity firm TSG Consumer Partners took a 22% stake in BrewDog in 2017, they were given preference shares. That meant they would be first in line in any sale. The punk investors, the believers, the ones who funded the dream in the early years, were always going to be last.
This is how shadow operates in organisations. The gap between what is said and what is true. People buy into the persona. They invest, emotionally and financially, in the version of the company that it being presented, and that they want to believe in.
In an email to investors after the administration, the new owners thanked shareholders for their “belief, passion and investment” and invited them to continue as “ambassadors for the brand.”
Ambassadors. For the brand that just took their money.
The workplace is a mirror
I wonder about the 484 people on that call. What was it like for each of them?
I believe the workplace is a mirror. What it brings up can tell us a lot about ourselves.
Maybe some felt pure rage. For some, it might have brought up feelings of being discarded before, treated as disposable, told that the numbers matter more than they do.
Maybe some felt something colder. Resignation. Of course, this is how it ends. This is how it always ends. That kind of numbness is also a signal. Parts of us stop feeling when feeling has cost us too much in the past.
Maybe when you read about the layoffs, you feel vicarious rage. Maybe you’re looking at your own boss, wondering whether you’d get fifteen minutes or less.
All of it is data.
The workplace is a mirror.
BrewDog is not the first company to behave like this, and it won’t be the last. This kind of behaviour exists everywhere, in different forms. The performance review that comes with no prior feedback. The way certain conversations simply never happen in organisations, until it’s too late.
Organisational shadow
Gabor Maté writes about how trauma isn’t what happened to us; it’s what happened inside us as a result. The same is true for organisations. BrewDog’s wound wasn’t the £37m loss. The wound was the years of unacknowledged tension between image and reality, between the story being told and the decisions being made.
Workers cited a lack of consultation about major company decisions, the abandonment of commitments to pay the real living wage, widespread closures of underperforming bars, and significant reductions in contracted hours. One worker said they had found out about the sale at the same time as the press.
This is what the shadow looks like in an organisation. Not dramatic villainy. Just a persistent pattern of the people at the top making decisions in the dark, and the people at the bottom finding out through a fifteen-minute call.
Unite general secretary Sharon Graham put it plainly: “BrewDog workers built this brand. They deserved respect. Instead, they were treated as disposable pawns.”
The BrewDog story is an invitation
Not to feel superior to BrewDog’s leadership. That’s easy. That’s cheap. That’s shadow work of a different kind, the kind where we project everything we don’t want to see in ourselves onto a convenient villain.
The real question is: what is your organisation’s shadow?
What do you know, and don’t say? What does your company claim to value that gets abandoned when the numbers get difficult? What version of the 15-minute call exists in your own working life, either one you might be on the receiving end of, or one you might one day be delivering?
And perhaps most uncomfortably: when have you been the one who treated someone as disposable? Not dramatically. Just by prioritising the task over the person.
I know I have in the past. I’m aware of my own ability to drop people, to cut them off and cut them out when the relationship no longer serves me. I have, at times, behaved no better than the Brewdog leadership.
By sending the email instead of having the conversation. By letting the meeting run over and pushing the difficult thing to next week, and then the week after, until there was no next week left.
BrewDog’s fifteen-minute call didn’t come from nowhere. It came from a thousand smaller moments where the harder, more human choice wasn’t made.
That’s where organisational shadow work begins. With the small, daily decisions about whether to be honest or whether to preserve the persona a little longer.
The bag gets heavy over time. Always.