{"id":1336,"date":"2013-12-17T07:45:38","date_gmt":"2013-12-17T12:45:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/?p=1336"},"modified":"2013-12-15T18:25:25","modified_gmt":"2013-12-15T23:25:25","slug":"the-cincinnati-kid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/?p=1336","title":{"rendered":"The Cincinnati kid….."},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Little<\/a>I\u00a0think the first time I met George Henricksen was while I was working at Glazer’s.\u00a0 At the time, George was running Royal Imports out of Cincinnati.\u00a0 Royal was the US importer of Mackenson and Whitbread beers, both owned by InBev.\u00a0 Royal had a 10 year agreement to import those two excellent beers. George, who managed Royal through independent brokers, sans full time employees, had built the company\u2019s annual sales to approximately 300,000 cases.\u00a0 George and Dallas broker, Dick Barron, worked with Glazer’s to establish these brands in Texas.<\/p>\n

When I took the CEO position at Warsteiner’s US, whose headquarters are in Cincinnati, I made it a point to get together with George for dinner when I was in town.\u00a0 It did not matter where we went, we could not walk five feet in downtown Cincinnati without someone stopping George and saying hello.\u00a0 George knew everyone!\u00a0 In a bar, same thing!\u00a0 He knew everyone from the receptionist to the bartender to every customer.\u00a0 It was amazing!<\/p>\n

George spent many years with Hudepohl-Schoenling Brewing Co. selling Little Kings.\u00a0 One of Little Kings biggest markets was Denver, where George lived.\u00a0 The distributor at that time was Murray Brothers.\u00a0 George and several other vendors including Warsteiner, Labatts, and Barton started a club called the “Under Five Club.”\u00a0 The Club was made up of those vendors who had a market share of less than five percent.\u00a0 All of these\u00a0vendors coordinated their individual annual promotions, incentives,\u00a0and special event calendars into one joint calendar which allowed each vendor to promote their respective products without overlapping the promotions of another.\u00a0 Using this technique, the vendors enabled Murray to focus on their programs without competition with other in-house vendors.\u00a0 Obviously, Murray loved this cooperation between vendors.\u00a0 The Under Five Club also worked together and split costs on generic p-o-s items like wooden racks which could be used by any of these vendors during their programs.\u00a0 The top 50 liquor stores all had wooden racks shared by the same vendors.<\/p>\n

This cooperation extended to the on- premise with draft accounts and handles.\u00a0 The vendors supported each other and helped with on premise promos or pub crawls as they worked together in the top 25 on- premise accounts.\u00a0 It would be hard to find a similar type of relationship in today\u2019s beer environment.<\/p>\n

George’s beer career, which spanned decades with Little Kings and Royal, led him to work in 49 states across the US.\u00a0 And just like in Cincinnati, George knew almost every distributor.\u00a0 George, with the help of a small broker network had built Royal into a several hundred thousand case importer.\u00a0\u00a0 When the agreement with InBev expired, however, \u00a0InBev did not renew his contract.<\/p>\n

George has since retired and now spends much of his time with his daughter and granddaughter in Florida fishing and golfing.\u00a0 As a beer salesman, George really believed that “making friends is our business” and he always made sure he knew everyone’s name.\u00a0 With his distinctive, one-0f-a-kind gruff voice, you knew immediately when George was around!<\/p>\n

I never met anyone in the beer business who did not like George Henricksen.\u00a0 In fact, I never met anyone anywhere<\/i> who did not like George, or as I prefer to call him, The Cincinnati Kid.<\/p>\n

BBU Honor Roll;<\/p>\n

2013 – George Henricksen – Royal Imports<\/p>\n

2012 – Diane Fall – Warsteiner<\/p>\n

THIS IS THE LAST POST OF 2013.\u00a0 NEXT ONE WILL BE JANUARY 7, 2014.\u00a0 HAVE A GREAT CHRISTSMAS AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR!<\/i><\/strong><\/p>\n

Geoff<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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

I\u00a0think the first time I met George Henricksen was while I was working at Glazer’s.\u00a0 At the time, George was running Royal Imports out of Cincinnati.\u00a0 Royal was the US importer of Mackenson and Whitbread beers, both owned by InBev.\u00a0 Royal had a 10 year agreement to import those two excellent beers. George, who managed […]<\/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-ly","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1336"}],"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=1336"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1336\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1432,"href":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1336\/revisions\/1432"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1336"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1336"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1336"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}