Garage Beverages

The Right Fit, Every time:

Garage Beverages on Working with Us

About Garage Beverages

Fifteen years ago, founder Luke was a project engineer at a major beverage manufacturer when he spotted a gap. Premixed drinks were booming in Australia, but much of the product was made offshore. The big players' equipment was also built for massive production runs, not the smaller, more agile batches that emerging brands needed.

Garage Beverages filled that gap. Starting with one customer, it grew year on year, working with everyone from start-ups mixing kombucha on a kitchen table to some of the biggest names in global beverage. Today it's a pure contract co-packer: it blends, fills, packs and dispatches for brands owners, and has no products or marketing ambitions of its own. That focus is deliberate. Six or seven of the world's top global beverage owners now account for just over 96% of its volume, output that would have seemed unimaginable for a business its size a decade ago.



It delivers that volume with fewer than 100 people. With a team this lean, every hire carries real weight, which is exactly why getting the “fit” right matters so much.

The Challenge: Finding People Who Fit, Not Just People Who Qualify

Compounded growth on that scale creates a very particular hiring problem — one that's less about skills on a resume and more about finding people who can operate in a business that refuses to stand still!

Garage Beverages needed operations managers who could roll up their sleeves and run a line themselves, not just manage a team from a distance. It needed a blending manager who could actually blend. A supply chain lead who understood contract manufacturing rather than trucking and logistics. As the team put it, the brief was often a list of “I want this, but I don't want that” — the kind of role that's genuinely difficult to write down, let alone search for.

On top of that, there were some very real practical hurdles:

• A niche industry with a shallow talent pool. There aren't many other large-scale beverage manufacturers in Melbourne's west, which meant the right candidates weren't always easy to find on paper.
• Culture as a hard filter. As a family business, Garage Beverages has zero tolerance for poor attitudes or difficult people. Technical ability matters, but loyalty, humility and a willingness to muck in matter just as much — and those things are almost impossible to assess from a resume.
• The risk of hiring for polish over substance. The team had been burned before by candidates who could talk the talk in an interview but didn't have the grounded, hands-on instinct the business runs on.
• Succession and continuity.
• As Garage Beverages has scaled, it's needed to bring in senior people who can grow into bigger roles over time, without disrupting the tight-knit culture that got the business here.

In short: this wasn't a business that wanted a recruiter to fill a seat. It needed a partner who understood the DNA of the company well enough to know who would actually thrive in it.

Why Garage Beverages Chose Aspect

Garage Beverages has worked with Eugene Lane-Mullins for close to five years, since the business was around 40 people - a relationship he’s continued since joining Aspect Personnel as Manufacturing and Operations Lead. What's kept that relationship going isn't a single successful placement — it's a pattern of trust that's built up over numerous hires across almost every part of the business, from quality and production to blending, maintenance, HR and payroll, and now around half of the current executive team.

“Eugene took the time to actually understand the business, on the floor.”

Rather than taking a brief over the phone, Eugene walked the plant — more than once. That mattered. As the team explained, most recruiters tell a business what it wants rather than asking to see how the business actually works. Because Eugene had physically seen the lines, the changeovers and the day-to-day realities of the operation, Garage Beverages trusted the calibre of people he put forward.

He gave options and honest opinions, not a hard sell.

Garage Beverages was clear about what it wanted from a recruitment partner: a shortlist of three or four genuinely strong candidates, with the good and the bad laid out plainly for each one — not a parade of candidates all pitched as "perfect." “We don't want someone to make the choice for us,” says Lee McElhatton, General Manager. “We just want somebody to give us the options and explain what they see.” That lets the leadership team do what they do best: make the final call themselves, armed with a clear-eyed view of each person's strengths and gaps. 

He understood fit as well as skill.

One of the standout placements, an operations manager, came from a plastics manufacturing background with minimal beverage market experience. On paper, it wasn't an obvious match. But a walk around the plant showed an intuitive mind, sharp questions, and a genuine curiosity — exactly the traits Garage Beverages has learned matter more than a matching resume. 

The relationship became a two-way network, not a transactional one.

Over time, the relationship went beyond formal job briefs. If Eugene came across someone who seemed like a strong cultural fit, he'd flag them, even without an open role, because he understood that Garage Beverages would often "find a wheel" for the right person. That instinct — knowing the business well enough to spot a fit before a vacancy even exists — is something that only comes from a genuinely close working relationship.



As Lee McElhatton put it when asked to sum up the relationship in one line: “It doesn't feel like we're bringing someone in and having to explain the culture, the business. It's just, give them a call and say, 'I'm looking for this’”, because Eugene already understands the rules, not just the role. 

The Results

• Consistency and retention. Of the people Eugene placed, every single one is still with the business today, bar one — who left for family reasons in the UK.
• Depth across the business. Placements now span quality, production and blending management, maintenance, supply chain, and HR and payroll — roughly half of the current executive team came through the relationship with Eugene.
• A partner for the long term. Garage Beverages already sees Eugene as the first call when it comes to planning leadership succession. Lee McElhatton says, “There's a level of trust there. The people he puts forward are going to be like us.”

Looking for people who'll fit your business, not just the job description? Get in touch with Eugene, our Manufacturing and Operations Lead, at e.lane-mullins@aspectpersonnel.com.au. 

Looking to build a team in a specialist or hard-to-find market? Speak with Aspect Personnel about your hiring plans.