Kim Jordan started her award-winning business in the basement of her parents’ house.

Jordan, CEO and co-founder of New Belgium Brewing, spoke at the Memorial Union about New Belgium Brewing and shared perspective related to running a socially responsible business.

“To be a sustainable business, you have to have all three of those aspects working in concert,” Jordan said. “They need to be complimentary in a way that contributes to success across the board.”

Jordan is a former social worker, and she helped start New Belgium Brewing in 1991 in the basement of her family’s home in Colorado. New Belgium Brewing is located in Fort Collins of Colorado.

New Belgium Brewing is the third-largest craft brewer in the United States.

“New Belgium Brewing is a company known for its innovative environmental and employee practices, so she was an obvious choice by the students planning the national affair series,” said Pat Miller, director of the lectures program.

These environmental practices include producing electricity from solar and wind power as well as methane harvested from its process wastewater treatment plant and diverting more than 99 percent of brewery waste from the landfill.

When finding out what she wanted her company to be in 1999, Jordan came up with four things.

“We were going to produce world-class beers, which in retrospect is kind of hilarious given that we haven’t yet made any beer,” Jordan said. “We were going to promote beer culture, be environmental stewards, and we were going to have fun.”

“For New Belgium, our purpose is to operate a profitable brewery, which makes our love and talent manifest,” Jordan said. “We think it’s important to be loving and excellent; we want to care deeply about one another, and we want to be very good at what we do.”

New Belgium Brewing has 385 employees.

“One of the first things we learned is that nurturing a community of co-workers is incredibly powerful,” Jordan said. “Our co-workers own 41 percent of the company. They participate in the strategy.”

New Belgium Brewing was on the Wall Street Journal’s top 15 corporations in the nation to work for as well as Outside Magazine’s best employees two years in a row.

“We’re very successful, and we think it’s in large measure because of the way we work with one another,” Jordan said.

About 15 percent of New Belgium’s energy is produced out of a methane source.

“We are part of a large demonstration project with the Department of Energy to look at peak load management,” Jordan said. “We are part of a project where [Colorado State University] can look at our energy loads and we can turn energy production, we can shed or add to level out those peaks. We do this because we are intellectually curious in being pioneers; we want to learn what works and what doesn’t work.”

Jordan also gave her angle of running the brewery business as a woman.

“I find that people do sort of automatically assume that there must be a man there doing the work, which can be annoying,” Jordan said “We have some pretty confident women in our organization.”

New Belgium Brewing hopes to serve as a business role model.

“We meet with a lot of people in our city who want to be looking at their own practice and choosing some new paths,” Jordan said. “We do a lot of allowing non-profits to use our space to spread the good word of whatever their issues are.”