Alumni in Action: Dean Rohan ’84
by Bill Wells Director of Student Promotion
Dean Rohan ’84: ‘On The Fly’ thinking taps into success
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• Yearbook, 1984 • Dean Rohan ’84 alongside a row of beer fermenters.
• Dean Rohan ’84 outside the main entrance in Charlton, Massachusetts.
n the business world, there has been very little “new normal” during COVID-19. Ever-changing, mandated regulations at the state and federal level have made it nearly impossible for companies to find any consistency. Since March 2020, businesses have had to adjust on the fly. Co-founder Dean Rohan ’84, his partners and staff of 180 employees at Tree House Brewing Company in Charlton, Massachusetts, put a twist on that phrase, firmly establishing the 10-year-old company as a pillar among tap rooms in the world. “We had to think on the fly to make On The Fly work,” Mr. Rohan said of the company’s new method of sales. “It lends itself to a pretty good business model moving forward.” Tree House opened its current 70-acre, 80,000-squarefoot facility in 2017. Business was good. No . . . business was GREAT—serving 15,000 people weekly on site, a figure any brewery on the planet would love to put into its books, and a far cry from its early days of operating in the kitchen of one of Mr. Rohan’s music-playing friends. Rumblings about a novel coronavirus began in January 2020, but most people in the United States had no idea of the life-altering storm on the horizon. Mr. Rohan, though, picked up an early indicator of what was looming. His daughter was supposed to travel to Shanghai, China, for the Mock G20 Summit in late January, and Mr. Rohan and his wife planned to spend two weeks in China prior to the event. The Chinese government, though, cancelled the summit due to COVID-19, which put Mr. Rohan into motion at Tree House well before any restrictions hit the U.S.
“At that point I knew it wasn’t the flu, and it wasn’t a bug,” Mr. Rohan explained. “It wasn’t going to be contained.” The team ordered massive amounts of personal protective equipment (which they later donated to hospitals in Massachusetts) online for the employees. Tree House doesn’t distribute beer, and only made money on site. The company had to stay open in order to survive. First, the team built what Mr. Rohan labeled “The Great Wall of Tree House,” which were rows of plywood standing 8-feet high. Customers stood 10 feet apart and snaked through the property. Health-wise, it was safe and a way to stay open. Mr. Rohan, however, wasn’t comfortable. “I found myself so paranoid; the staff was paranoid,” Mr. Rohan said. “The customers kept coming. But we opted to say, ‘No, we’re done.’ It wasn’t safe for the psyche of our employees.”
