When it comes to careers, longevity is hard to come by. Most surveys and job-focused websites will tell you Americans find a new job roughly every three-to-five years. The average American worker changes some aspect of their career—if not their entire professional focus—multiple times over their life. So, when you find someone who’s really committed to the people they work with and those they work for, you know something must be going right.
Such is the case for Jess Griego, now the chief operations officer and co-owner of New Mexico’s Bosque Brewing, which has nine different locations in the state. A decade ago, Jess started with the brewery as a server and has worked up through a variety of jobs, also becoming an equity partner in 2019. But her roots aren’t just with the company, they’re interwoven in New Mexico itself as a native, college graduate, proud resident, and a co-lead for the state chapter of the Pink Boots Society. Jess has also taken her longtime focus on local to a national stage, where she’s a newly elected pub brewery representative to the Brewers Association’s board of directors.
For as much as beer industry pros tout “local” as core to what they do, that often means locally-produced products. In this conversation, we get about as local as we can get as Jess reflects back on her years with Boseque, what inspires her as a leader, and what it takes to oversee a rapidly expanding brewery today. Growth is hard to come by for beer these days, but Jess and Bosque offer a unique example of what happens when you play the long game, in your career and in your business plan.