{"id":1131,"date":"2013-08-27T06:30:04","date_gmt":"2013-08-27T11:30:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/?p=1131"},"modified":"2013-08-24T10:57:52","modified_gmt":"2013-08-24T15:57:52","slug":"show-me-the-money","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/?p=1131","title":{"rendered":"Show me the money………"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"cartoon\"<\/a>Many college students have no idea what career path they want to pursue when starting college; however, by\u00a0the end of my\u00a0second summer as a college helper for Coors, I had decided that the beer business was my future.\u00a0 I was determined to own a distributorship by the time I turned 30.\u00a0 By my late 20s, I was the EVP and GM of Coors of Kansas and, I had an agreement with the owner, R. D. Hubbard, President of AFG (Safelite Auto Glass) for 25% ownership.\u00a0 Unfortunately for me, Kansas had a 10 year residence statute which had to be verified by 10 consecutive years of state tax returns.\u00a0 As a Texas native, I could not fulfill the verification process.\u00a0 Coors Brewery was aware of my interest and presented several operations for me including three in Missouri, a new\u00a0market struggling with establishing Coors.\u00a0 AB’s backyard was difficult at best.<\/p>\n

Instead, I decided that it was time to find a beer wholesaler to buy, so I retained a broker who only represented beer houses. The firm presented me with a number of distributorships across the country, but when the Schlitz operation in S. Texas became available, I knew this was the right one.\u00a0 At 31, I closed on the operation.\u00a0 While owning Texas Beers, I bought three additional beer operations in my territory and pursued other operations\u00a0throughout the state.<\/p>\n

While at Coast Distributors in Oregon, I purchased three additional operations and\u00a0looked at\u00a0others that had come to market.\u00a0 In the early 90s, I again looked at the possibilities of purchasing another operation.\u00a0 One in Arizona caught my eye, but I was late in getting to the table.\u00a0 Some of the distributors I considered buying were AB houses.<\/p>\n

At that time, most houses were single brand.\u00a0 Some had a couple of imports, maybe a regional or two, but that was the extent of the diversification.\u00a0 Many of these single brand houses decided to sell.\u00a0 The Schlitz houses sold because they were at, or near the top of the market, and owners had lost confidence in brewery management.\u00a0 Many distributors who carried only regional brands lacked the marketing and subsequently had little growth, and they, too sold.\u00a0 I remember some operations were advertised for sale in the WSJ.\u00a0 There were even times when sales were so common there was one a month.<\/p>\n

So what happened?\u00a0 Consolidation at the brewery level forced consolidation at the wholesale level which, in turn, provided the wholesaler with portfolios that were diverse enough that \u00a0if one brand started to decline, the wholesaler had enough brands to more than make up the loss.\u00a0 Imports, headed by the Mexicans and Heineken, ramped up spending and caught fire; RTDs showed up; and of course, the crafts\u2019 dramatic growth has given wholesalers the ability to survive in case one supplier heads south.\u00a0 This means very few, if any, operations come up for sale on the open market.<\/p>\n

The days of an individual buying a stand-alone operation are gone.\u00a0 Now, family and tax issues are the primary reasons beer operations sell and then, usually under the direction of the major supplier, (e.g. MC or ABI).\u00a0 Once a distributor informs their supplier of their intent to sell, it then becomes…show me the money!<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Many college students have no idea what career path they want to pursue when starting college; however, by\u00a0the end of my\u00a0second summer as a college helper for Coors, I had decided that the beer business was my future.\u00a0 I was determined to own a distributorship by the time I turned 30.\u00a0 By my late 20s, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_s2mail":"yes","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2xRTi-if","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1131"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1131"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1131\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1157,"href":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1131\/revisions\/1157"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}