{"id":4663,"date":"2018-04-24T06:00:38","date_gmt":"2018-04-24T11:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/?p=4663"},"modified":"2018-04-22T16:38:23","modified_gmt":"2018-04-22T21:38:23","slug":"most-brands-started-from-a-strong-base-and-kept-a-strong-belief","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/?p=4663","title":{"rendered":"Most brands started from a strong base and kept a strong belief."},"content":{"rendered":"

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Schlitz died when senior management decided to maximize profits by using chemical additives that changed the flavor and look of the beer.\u00a0 Schlitz’s white knight was Stroh\u2019s but the heavy debt, along with the lack of senior management leadership, led that venture to also close and sell out.<\/p>\n

Heileman Brewing Co., under the leadership of Russell Cleary, grew to be the fourth largest brewery in the U.S. in the early 1980s.\u00a0 Heileman went public on the New York stock exchange, a move which eventually ended in a hostile leveraged buyout by Alan Bond.\u00a0 Bond-financed\u00a0the buyout with junk bonds at the time.<\/p>\n

Bond’s financial collapse led to G. Heileman filing bankruptcy in 1991.\u00a0 Hicks and Muse bought the firm in 1994 and then sold it to Stroh two years later.\u00a0 This story ends when Stroh sold part of the company to Pabst and the other part to Miller.\u00a0 Once again, another story of how the lack of leadership combined with heavy debt undid several very successful breweries and basically killed some previously great beer brands.<\/p>\n

One would think that given the history in this industry, others would be aware of and learn from these obvious pitfalls. Sadly, this has not been the case.\u00a0 A number of small breweries have closed over the past 12 months.\u00a0 This is not surprising as the pundits and others have predicted this fall out for some time as these closings are not focused on just one market or state, but in all 50 states.<\/p>\n

The recent closing and foreclosure of Green Flash Brewing Co. is the first closing that has caught many by surprise.\u00a0 GF was a brewery that was selling almost 100K bbls. per year.\u00a0 They closed two breweries, laid off 75 people, pulled out of 42 states and are now being sold off!<\/p>\n

Many industry pubs have written about what went wrong with GF through yearly timelines.\u00a0 All indicate very poor senior management decisions from package sizes, flavors, and pricing.\u00a0 Through rapid, and what appears to be the uncontrollable expansion eastward, the brewery imploded.\u00a0 Management did not provide the products and packaging the consumer was looking for simply because they, management, did not listen to their people.\u00a0 In other words, GF was telling<\/em> the consumer what to drink, not listening<\/em> to what the consumers were telling them.<\/p>\n

Is it possible that GF had another agenda?\u00a0\u00a0 Was that other agenda to create a national growth trend and expansion to catch the eye of a potential buyer?\u00a0 Grow the volume and pad the numbers so that a major brewer would take notice and make an attempt to acquire\u00a0GF?\u00a0 Why not?\u00a0 It has happened before!<\/p>\n

Perhaps GF’s timing was off by five years on either side.\u00a0 In 2013, the craft segment was on fire, while major breweries and PE firms were kicking tires everywhere.\u00a0 In 2023, by focusing on their own backyard and not aggressively expanding, GF, with five more years of solid financial and volume growth, might have been in a stronger position to sell out.<\/p>\n

Whatever GF had designed it did not work which all comes back to leadership.\u00a0 As they say, “you don’t lose with the same team twice.”<\/p>\n

Most brands start with a strong base and kept a strong belief\u2026<\/p>\n

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Schlitz died when senior management decided to maximize profits by using chemical additives that changed the flavor and look of the beer.\u00a0 Schlitz’s white knight was Stroh\u2019s but the heavy debt, along with the lack of senior management leadership, led that venture to also close and sell out. Heileman Brewing Co., under the leadership of […]<\/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-1dd","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4663"}],"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=4663"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4663\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4747,"href":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4663\/revisions\/4747"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4663"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4663"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4663"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}