Shaun Lynch is the co-founder of Dog & Gun Coffee, a coffee business targeting those who love camping, hunting and the outdoors. Adventure and freedom are key to the company’s ethos: The business offers its employees paid ‘Adventure Leave’ and a four-day work week to enable more outdoor time. Shaun, together with his wife Rachel, runs the company while living nomadically across Australia.
Inside Small Business: What gave you the inspiration and motivation to start Dog & Gun?
SL: Dog & Gun started from a passion for the outdoors. I’d gotten into hunting and fishing much later in life, which had a pretty significant impact on me personally: improved physical and mental health, reduced stress, more skills, and a sense of community that I’d never had before.
I was really keen on finding a way to serve the community of people that had shared their knowledge and welcomed me into their world. Coffee made sense as a way to bring people together and it looked like a fairly straightforward business at first glance (I soon learned otherwise).
I’d had some funny encounters while on adventures, with people that would bring a pretty extensive (and heavy) coffee brewing kit on backpacking trips into remote country – the kind of trips where every gram of weight makes a difference in how much you hurt while walking the hills – but when I asked why they’d go through the trouble, the response was typically along the lines of, ‘I NEED good coffee’.
When people are that passionate about something, you know there’s an opportunity there.
The last piece of the puzzle was finding the single-serve drip filters while travelling in Japan. They were the perfect solution for getting quality coffee into the field with minimal weight and minimal fuss to brew.
ISB: When and where did you launch?
SL: We launched Dog & Gun at the end of 2019, just prior to the COVID-19 pandemic and the chaos that came with that.
We were living in Northern NSW at the time but we’d sold all of our possessions, bought a caravan and were getting ready to do a lap around Australia. Initially, Dog & Gun was only meant to be a small side-hustle that I could do on the road. I thought that maybe it would help with fuel money and just be the catalyst for bringing good people together while we were travelling.
We started promoting the products on Instagram and it took off pretty quickly. The sudden uptake in interest made me think we were onto something bigger than I’d initially thought, so we delayed our travels while we figured out how we would manage the logistics of getting coffee roasted, ground and shipped to us on the road or directly to customers.
Before we could get going though, we got locked down. We had rented an industrial shed to store equipment and coffee but thinking the lockdowns would be fairly temporary, we decided to move our van into that and live there in the shed for a bit.
We’d grind and pack coffee 12-14 hours every day for months on end. In between sending out coffee, I’d spend a lot of time talking to customers or potential customers on social media, which really helped with building a strong community behind the brand.
Given that our marketing was towards people who do outdoor activities, we thought that we’d have really limited growth in 2020, with very few people being able to get out and about. It turned out that most of Australia being locked down and spending more time on social media helped get us attention and gain traction early.
ISB: What is unique about your brand?
SL: Our coffee is all specialty-grade, which means it’s selected for its flavour and characteristics, rather than simply price like the coffee you’d find in the supermarket. We source our beans from the best coffee-growing regions across the world and we do all the roasting and packing ourselves in our Brisbane roastery, so we’re in control of the quality of the product and can ensure only the good stuff goes out.
More importantly though, what’s unique about our brand isn’t so much the coffee but rather the lifestyle we promote and the culture we’re building: getting outdoors, chasing adventure, learning new skills, and being more connected with nature.
We rarely promote the product itself, and instead spend a lot of time promoting adventure and just living a good life. We show up as real people, rather than some anonymous brand and we don’t pretend to be something we’re not.
Nobody wants to be sold to but everybody wants to support people they like. When our followers feel that they have that connection with us, they naturally check out the product and become customers.
We’ve got some loyal customers who have been with us since day one, which is pretty humbling.
ISB: What has been the biggest challenge so far in your business journey, and how have you tackled this?
SL: The biggest challenge is probably managing my own energy levels and mental health as a small-business owner. I really enjoy my work, which makes it easy at times to get tunnel vision and neglect other aspects of life. I’ve been through periods where even out on epic adventures in amazing places, I wasn’t entirely present because I was thinking about the work.
The to-do list is never ending, cashflow and stock management are constant, other people’s problems are all your problems.
I’m now very deliberate about scheduling in the things that recharge my batteries: being active, spending time with friends and family, eating good food, and getting out into nature as much as possible.
When we’re out on adventures, I just block out specific time to work and then that’s it, I have to be disciplined about putting the tools down and letting things go.
ISB: Your company has introduced a four-day work week, and you offer your employees paid “adventure leave”. What led you to implement these, and what impact have they had on your business?
SL: We’re very lifestyle-focused and want to build a work culture that contributes to a good life for our employees. A compressed work week gives them more time to go away for weekends, spend time with friends and family, etc.
The Adventure Leave is one of the ways we incentivise the team to be productive. They get two weeks of additional paid leave each financial year, but it will be approved only if we’re ahead of production and any major projects are completed.
The only other catch is that we expect the employees to document that trip so we can use that content to promote the brand – we want to show our customers that we truly live the lifestyle and don’t just talk the talk.
The main impact it has is around team morale (who wouldn’t enjoy being paid to camp or fish?) and building that connection with our community by showing that we walk the walk, not just talk the talk.
ISB: Where would you like to take your business in the future?
SL: We’d love for Dog & Gun to become an iconic Australian brand, synonymous with living the outdoors lifestyle.
We’re thinking in years and decades rather than months and quarters, so we’re not in a rush to stretch ourselves. At the moment, we’re focused on getting the bones in place to support long-term, sustainable growth.
That mostly means getting high-quality equipment that will last the test of time and setting up the policies and procedures that support the team and allow them to get things done without us being around to direct them or resolve the day-to-day issues that come up.
The coffee as a product is pretty straightforward, but the impact we’re looking to have as a brand is to get more people outdoors, to learn more skills and be more connected with the natural world through exploring, fishing, hunting, etc.
We’ve invested a lot in our media capability (and now even have a spin-off business that offers video production), so we’ll spend more time on long-form content production, which will highlight the people and projects in our community that are doing positive work. I think that’s the best way we can reach as many people as possible and have the greatest impact.
This article first appeared in issue 46 of the Inside Small Business quarterly magazine
