Comedian Merrick Watts finds that finishing the SAS entrance course has nothing on starting a gladiator-inspired business.
Merrick Watts has just completed a morning shift on Triple M radio. He got out of bed at 3:45am having finished a comedy gig the night before at 10pm. And now he’s starting a full eight-hour day’s work for the drinks company, Posca Hydrate, he founded in 2023.
“I’m a magic pudding for work,” he tells Forbes Australia, alluding to Norman Lindsay’s children’s tale of a pudding that keeps on giving. “You know how the 5am club is a big thing now. I always get up before the 5am club. People go, ‘Why?’ And I go, ‘Well, because if the benchmark is 5am, then I’ve got to be before the benchmark. If I want to win, I’ve got to look at what the highest standard is and try and be better … you just thought that man was an idiot with no discipline. But for a clown, I’m very, very disciplined.”
Watts, 51, demonstrated some of that tenacity as one of three celebrities to finish the infamous military training course in the 2020 season of SAS: Australia. Now he is learning the grit required in business. And the standard he’s looking at beating with his sports drink is that set by Red Bull.
“You’ve got an Austrian guy meets a Thai guy and they form this amazing beverage company that has sustained for decades. Posca might be from ancient Rome, but I love the idea of Australia being the birthplace of something that could then translate internationally. That’s my dream: an Australian-made, backed and owned company, producing, exporting and having a presence internationally.”
That dream began when Watts was writing a comedy show, An Idiot’s Guide to Wine. Watts, a qualified wine judge with a WSET Level-3 certification in wine, was doing a deep dive into the drink’s history when he read about how slaves, gladiators and Roman armies marched on a drink called posca, made from red wine vinegar, water and salt. “I read that Emperor Hadrian had marched it all the way to Britain, and I went, great story. Then I read somewhere it was described as Roman Gatorade had all these health benefits. I was like, that’s interesting, but when I read some quotes from Pliny the Elder and Cato the Elder, scribes and philosophers, about the health benefits of it, I went, ‘OK, now I’m interested.’”
He was at home during the second COVD-19 lockdown. He started making a few variations and took it on a 21km run carrying a 27kg rucksack, like he’d done on SAS Australia. “There’s something in this,” he concluded. “But for me, the unlock was when I was at home and I was trialling all these different flavours. I didn’t want to add sugar … and got it to a place where I thought the drink was okay. This is when everybody was making sourdough at home. I looked at the kids’ SodaStream … and carbonated a batch of posca and it was just an instant unlock.”
After lockdowns, he went to a “formulator” to play with commercial mixtures but wasn’t happy. He was making it too fancy, too expensive, with native ingredients. “It was like apothecary, as opposed to just a formulation of a drink. So I started again from scratch with another set of formulators, and came up with the basic foundation of what we now have with Posca Hydrate.
“Doing SAS Australia helped me enormously … because investors don’t just see the comedian. They see a ruthlessly determined individual … I’m massive on preparation and I just don’t quit.”
Merrick Watts
“It was on a very slow boil. I was putting things like trademarking into place. And I decided that if I was going to give it a go, I was going to have to commit not just to the development of the product, but the development of myself. So I committed to studying at the Australian Institute of Company Directors which I found punishingly challenging.
“I know I’m a comedian and it looks like I wing everything. But usually there’s a lot of process and a lot of application behind it. Once I felt comfortable with understanding how to form a board, the company structures, fiscal responsibility, governance, all that sort of stuff, I thought, okay, now I can start approaching people.”
He approached the marketing director of drinks giant Lion, Ed Stening, who he’d worked with in the past. “I said, ‘Hey, listen. This is going to sound weird, but I’ve got this crazy ancient Roman drink.’”
Watts told him the story. Told him the modern applications. Stening got it. Watts pulled out some glass bottles with homemade labels he’d stuck on. “So I gave them to Ed, and it was a do-or-die moment. I hadn’t shown anybody in the drinks business these formulations. Ed drank it, and he just goes, ‘Holy shit! You’ve got something there.’”
Watts felt a huge relief that at least he hadn’t totally wasted the tens of thousands of dollars he’d spent over the last year. “I was really quite taken aback because I literally was drinking my own cordial for such a long time. It was really nice to see that I wasn’t the only person that saw the point of difference.”
“Once you step into the structures of boardroom meetings, you really are in a different space.”
Merrick Watts
Stening wasn’t giving up his day job, though. He gave the comedian a long homework list, things like certifications, the nutrition panels that go on the bottles, shelf-life testing, market research on the hydration and sports drinks industries, ingredients lists, intellectual property ownership, business structures.
“So I went away. I even got some prototype cans made. I had to self-resource all of that.”
About a year after their first meeting, he went back to Stening. “I think by this stage he thought I just disappeared. ‘You know, that shopping list you gave me? I’ve done all of it.’ And I think that’s when Ed went, ‘Okay, he’s not mucking around here.’ And I said, ‘Ed, I need help with this.’”
Stening, 46, was by this time general manager of spirits at Lion, but Watts convinced him to quit and come on board his little gladiator startup.
“I back myself in,” says Watts. “If I say I’m going to do something, it’s going to get done. Like everything I do, I approach it with ruthless determination, and I think Ed knew that. I always had that application to comedy. I’ve always had that application to my work in media. Doing SAS Australia helped me enormously in what we’re doing now, because investors don’t just see the comedian. They see a ruthlessly determined individual, and I am. I’m massive on preparation and I just don’t quit.”
Stening came on board in January 2024 and they launched in November that year. They’ve raised capital “in the millions” from various family offices, Watts says.
“These are all very sophisticated investors, who invest in people as much as product. And I think they see Ed and I and our extended team as people who are very, very serious … We’re not going out and popping champagne corks at every milestone. It’s always about work. It’s always about what’s next. It’s always just relentless.
“I’m doing board meetings now. We’ve got a NED [non-executive director] who’s fantastic, but she’s constantly putting the blowtorch on Ed and I, in a really good way. But there’s no wiggle room. This is a different level of footy to what I’ve played. Once you step into the structures of boardroom meetings, you really are in a different space, but I’m relishing it because it’s the next level for me.”
Posca is currently in 2,000 stores, mostly small independents and service stations. Watts said he did not yet have sales data.
And while Merrick Watts has endured moments of doubt, he’s not backing down. “It comes back to the love of the product, of what’s in the can, and the absolute respect and admiration for the history of this. I just cannot cease until I see it go the full journey.”
