{"id":1665,"date":"2014-04-15T06:30:34","date_gmt":"2014-04-15T11:30:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/?p=1665"},"modified":"2014-04-07T09:13:03","modified_gmt":"2014-04-07T14:13:03","slug":"you-cant-strike-oil-without-first-getting-dirty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/?p=1665","title":{"rendered":"You can’t strike oil without first getting dirty!"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"O'Keefe's\"<\/a>During the time I spent at Coors Brewing Co., the brewery was buying distributorships to resell as part as certain covenants made to increase the number of minority ownership of Coors operations.\u00a0 Once purchased, the brewery ran it for a short time than sold it.\u00a0 My first assignment was to run the most recent distributorship they purchased, Ogden, Utah.<\/p>\n

This particular distributorship had been owned by the same family for about 30 years.\u00a0 The husband, who had been a driver for another small Coors operation in Utah and his wife, got the distributorship in the early 1950s.\u00a0 He was the driver and she ran the office.\u00a0 This was somewhat typical of many early beer operations, family owned and run.\u00a0 In this case, as Coors\u2019 market share grew, the operation expanded, and many of the family members joined the operation.\u00a0 After a number of years, the husband died, the wife remarried, and her new husband also sold Coors.\u00a0 At the time Coors bought the business, the market share had dropped to the mid 30s from a high of well over 50%.\u00a0 Still a very nice business and the brewery sold the operation after owning it for six months.<\/p>\n

They are many examples of family operations similar to Ogden, Utah where the husband and wife worked from sun up to sun down,\u00a0trying to make\u00a0a living and supporting their family.\u00a0 In addition, there could easily be any number of these small beer operations.\u00a0 Depending on the part of the country you were in, you could see an AB, Schlitz, Pabst, Falstaff, Miller, Coors and a regional or two, all in the same market.\u00a0 Consolidation did, however, finally catch up with these small operations in the late 80s into the 90s.<\/p>\n

Today the industry is seeing this similar business model with the craft breweries.\u00a0 Most are family owned, with long hours and a great deal of hard work and most hoping to be another Sierra Nevada or New Belgium.<\/p>\n

Just recently, a wholesaler in Florida told me a story about a young man who had decided to build a craft brewery there.\u00a0 He happened to be the son of a close friend who funded his son’s brewery.\u00a0 The brewery was built and the distributor agreed to handle the beer.\u00a0 Within a short period of time, the wholesaler had been able to get this new craft beer into 20% of all the on premise accounts in his market.\u00a0 Not long after the wholesaler had achieved this level of success, the young man called his father and told him that being the owner of this brewery was not what he wanted to do.\u00a0 He had accepted a job in Phoenix and dropped everything and moved to Arizona, leaving this brewery to his father to shut down.\u00a0 It obviously put the distributor in an awkward situation with the retail trade.\u00a0 After a while, both the father and distributor shut down the brewery and the market moved on.<\/p>\n

The craft segment has exploded and like the mom and pop distributor operations from years ago\u00a0many of the\u00a0startup craft breweries of today know and have experienced what it takes to be successful.\u00a0 But they all must understand that you can’t strike oil without first getting dirty.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

During the time I spent at Coors Brewing Co., the brewery was buying distributorships to resell as part as certain covenants made to increase the number of minority ownership of Coors operations.\u00a0 Once purchased, the brewery ran it for a short time than sold it.\u00a0 My first assignment was to run the most recent distributorship […]<\/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-qR","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1665"}],"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=1665"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1665\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1713,"href":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1665\/revisions\/1713"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1665"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1665"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1665"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}