Cigar City Brewing Company is assessed through an interview with Chris Lovett. Key points: - Cigar City is growing rapidly and maximizing production capacity but struggling to meet demand. Expansion of production space and land is needed. - Communication of vision and values relies on supervisors but could be more standardized. Monthly meetings are recommended. - Customer feedback is gathered through social media and sites like Yelp. A customer survey is suggested to better understand satisfaction. - The workforce is mostly white males but diversity could be improved. Employees often leave to start their own breweries which Cigar City encourages. - Management emphasizes values and local charity work which benefits public relations.

1. Cigar City Brewing Company
Organizational Assessment
Team Members:
Charllotte Waddell, Kenny Horne, Kyle Mann, Collin Horne
Introduction
On April 9th, 2016, our organizational assessment team spoke with Chris Lovett about
Cigar City Brewery and we asked him questions that allowed us to gain a better understanding of
Cigar City and the effectiveness of its operations. Our team asked a series of questions that

2. ranged from general to specific. For example, we asked general questions about how well the
organization is doing as a whole, and areas where Mr. Lovett feels improvement could be
implemented. We then asked more specific questions which were more customer based, on how
Cigar City approaches and handles its customer feedback, customer dissatisfaction, and personal
recommendations made by the consumers. We as a team, feel that Mr. Lovett did an excellent
job overall at executing our questions to the best of his ability. He delivered clear feedback
which allowed us as a group to analyze and measure the effectiveness of the operations held at
Cigar City Brewery.
Operations
It is evident that Cigar City Brewery is rising above its competitors. According to Mr.
Lovett, “Cigar City Brewery has grown at an accelerated rate”. Mr. Lovett also stated that “the
company tries to utilize every square inch of its infrastructure in order to maximize the brewery's
beer production”. After further assessing what Mr.Lovett said, we have found that Cigar City
seems to be bursting at it’s seams. Working at maximum production capacity and being able to
use every aspect of its production staff and equipment is a good indicator of how well the
company is performing. However, we were told that with all the expanding, Cigar City is having
issues with meeting distributor demand. Finding a way to increase CCB’s maximum production

3. capacity should also be a top priority. Recently your company finished a major expansion on the
original brewery to increase production space. It is also understood that this last expansion used
up the rest of Cigar Cities available property. In addition to the expansion, Cigar City has also
reached out to other breweries to help out with backed up production.
After listening to Mr. Lovett, we believe that Cigar City needs to make a decision on
buying additional land. This acquisition will need to be large enough to exceed your current
demand. The property that we have in mind is relatively close to the Home Depot located around
the corner of your brewery in South Tampa. The property should provide your company with
more than enough room to expand at your current pace for at least 8 years into the future. A
potential option would be a 16.71 acre commercial lot located on 7001 Rowlett Park Drive, in
Tampa FL. The lot currently has an asking price of $1,450,000. The land would provide your
company with more than enough space to grow your business to its desired amount. When
building is complete on the property, we believe that Cigar City will be more than capable to
meet its demand. Another benefit with this expansion plan is, that a new brewery will allow
Cigar City the ability and capacity to perform all of its brewing in house.
Leadership
According to Mr. Lovett, Cigar has no set way of communicating the company’s vision
or values. Your current system for communicating these items is left up to your supervisors. This
is then translated into them drilling your employees on values and cleanliness. With only 86
employees on staff, this system seems to be working for you. However, a more standardized way
way of communicating should be developed in the near future. In addition, with your system

4. being set up as it is, if one of your employees does not share the same vision of your supervisors,
they are expected to change. If they fail to comply however, either by their own stubbornness or
lack of communication, then they are just expected to fall from the ranks. Also according to Mr.
Lovett, this way of communicating has created a laid back, but equally stressful environment to
work in.
This above issue can be easily resolved. Our recommendation, would be to develop a
more standardized form of communications between supervisors and their underlings. The first
step would be to create a new employee manual. The manual should give the new recruit a brief
overview of what their new job entails, as well as more efficiently communicating the company's
set visions and values. Another measure to take into consideration would be monthly mandatory
meetings. Theses meeting should be used to put everyone on the same page within the company.
These measures should help reduce the overall stress of your employees, yet keep the somewhat
laid-back work environment.
One area in which your current system appears to be working well is establishing and
communicating timelines. In this industry, the time and task variations between project timelines
is vast. This can become a difficult task to manage. At Cigar City we see that you have left this
planning mostly up to your brewmasters to balance these time tables with things such as
fermentation. It is also understood that brewing is an art and cannot always be predicted. You
strive to get your product to leave at the very last second, so that your customers consume it at
it’s freshest. This system looks to be working well in this regard and should not require any
changes.
Customers

5. Both finding and retaining consumers is a vital part of any business. In this assessment
our team established that your company seems to be doing well in most customer related areas.
According to Mr. Lovett, you acquire feedback from your customers through the use of social
media. In addition to this, your company reviews its standings on multiple websites such as Yelp,
Ratebeer, and talk advocate. These are all great resources for trying to discover how your
business sits with your customers. There is room for some improvement though. Similar to what
Mr. Lovett stated in the interview, most consumers who are dissatisfied with a particular product
are more likely to use one of the aforementioned media sites to express their dissatisfaction.
Conversely, those who had a positive experience are much less likely to do so.
An additional category that Cigar City excels in is how well you handle customer
dissatisfaction with your products. At the moment we understand that you attempt to personally
reach out to unsatisfied customers. You perform this in an attempt to better understand what is
causing his/her problematic experience. You then attempt to fix the issue to the best of your
ability. However this strategy is at the moment, the way in which you handle the service may
need to be modified later on into the future as your company grows.
One way to improve your ability to gather information on customers, would be to create a
short customer survey. This would be a simple survey in which it will ask questions such as:
How satisfied are you with our product?, how likely are you to purchase our beer in the future?,
Age, Gender, and so forth. The answers should be on a scale of 1-6 or number format. The
survey will then be made available at your physical bar locations as well as your company's
website. The physical form of the document would be handed out randomly to customers who
visit your physical locations. You could offer incentive for filling out the survey by offering a
free drink on their next visit. The data gathered from this survey will provide more direct

6. feedback from your customer as well as statistically useful data for finding out customer
demographics. In addition, this survey could also prove to be valuable in your decision making
when it comes to developing new types of brews from feedback of a larger portion of your
customers.
Workforce
During the interview with Mr. Lovett, I noticed that the employees were extremely laid
back and were definitely comfortable with their surrounding workforce environment. “Since the
company has started in 2009, it has grown substantially”(Mr.Lovett). We found it interesting
that when Cigar city first opened its doors, it started with only its two founders and today
employs over eighty five workers. Mr. Lovett claimed that the work force at Cigar City consists
mostly of white males ranging from 22-50 years old. When asked “how well does your
workforce get along?”, Mr. Lovett claimed that “we are all very much so loud and opinionated
but, we don't take it out on each other too hard and maintain good entertainment throughout the
day making it a phenomenal place to work.” As a team we suggest that diversity could be
something to improve on when recruiting new employees. Although the staff seems to be
comfortable with each other, a diverse environment produces a more well rounded one.
We were extremely shocked to hear that Cigar city has a high turnover rate. Mr. Lovett
claims that the high turnover rate was not due to the fact that they didn't enjoy their job or
couldn't hold the position, but because of the fact that a lot of employees leave to start their own
breweries. At first it took our team by surprise, but Mr. Lovett claimed that Cigar City actually
encourages its employees to start their own craft breweries. After further evaluation of Mr.
Lovett’s claim, we have found this to be a unique quality of Cigar City and also this could

7. become a crucial future asset. After evaluating the workforce, it seems that Cigar City is
definitely a company where you can work yourself up in the ranks. Lovett claimed that most
employees start out packaging and getting to know how the operations function, which will
eventually gain them enough knowledge to confidently work on the sales side of the brewing
process. We believe this to be a great strategy for the employees to fully understand how every
aspect of the company works. We also liked how this gives its employees plenty of opportunities
to get more hands on with the brewing process. In order to obtain the brewmaster position, which
is the employee in charge of the brewing process. One must fully understand the entire operation
or have had the same experience at another brewery.
When assessing the work force, Cigar City does quarterly, annual, and real time
workforce evaluations. Doing this often allows for Cigar City to fully analyze its work force, we
believe as a group that this strategy allows for continuous improvement. We were told that Cigar
City has big plans for the future of their workforce. Mr. Lovett claimed another brewery by the
name of Oskar Blues, which is based out of Colorado,are currently taking over the Cigar City
Brew company. Oskar Blues has manufacturing and distribution channels in both Texas and
North Carolina. Our team believes this is a perfect strategic move to ease the tension on the
already overloaded production at Cigar City. Our team also believes that this merger with Oskar
Blues will allow Cigar City’s craft brews to be distributed throughout the lower part of the
United States. We then asked Mr. Lovett if he had concerns about the future workforce of Cigar
City and the Company itself due to this merger, he claimed that “he was confident in Cigar City's
decision and is sure that its workforce will continue its same routine. If anything, Oskar Blues
will only improve the quality of the Cigar City workforce making it an even better place to come
to work”.

8. Management
After interviewing with Lovett, we were able to see that the reason for this company's
success is because of its Management. In other words, the management team appears to be
working as efficiently as they possibly can. Something that stuck out to our team was the
emphasis on the company's values and encouragement that your managers stress on the
individual workers at Cigar City. Encouragement of your employees and passing the core values
of the company down will make Cigar City stand out from other breweries. It was mentioned
before in the workforce section that Cigar City has high turnover rate however, we like how
Cigar City views this in a positive light.
We also valued Cigar City’s involvement with local non profit organizations in the
Tampa Bay area. Mr.Lovett mentioned the partnership with the McDonald training center that
raises funds to help teach job skills to physically impaired adults and help them go through
interview processes.
Another fun philanthropy that we seen Cigar CIty got involved with was Moffitt’s” Cut for a
Cure” where typically the Rays and Bucs players shave their heads, Cigar City employers shaved
their beards and raised about $13,000. After further evaluation of Cigar City’s involvement with
local charities and organizations, we have found that your involvement with these charities are a
crucial factor in creating good public relations for the company.