{"id":711,"date":"2013-04-02T07:11:49","date_gmt":"2013-04-02T12:11:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/?p=711"},"modified":"2013-04-02T07:11:49","modified_gmt":"2013-04-02T12:11:49","slug":"the-supreme-quality-for-leadership-is-unquestionably-integrity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/?p=711","title":{"rendered":"The supreme quality for leadership is unquestionably integrity."},"content":{"rendered":"

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\"WashingtonAs a young District Sales Manager for Lone Star Brewing Co., my district included West Texas with many miles to cover and a multitude of distributors on whom to call.\u00a0 One was a medium size\u00a0Miller\/Lone Star\/Pearl whose owner was in college at the same university, at the same time as I.\u00a0 During my visits to this west Texas town, he and I became friends, hunted and played golf.\u00a0 One night, while barbecuing, this friend brought up his desire to purchase a small distributor about 10 miles from his home market.\u00a0 He told me he would pay ten thousand dollars for it (they only sold about a pallet a month, a very tiny operation) and he did not care to whom he paid the money.\u00a0 That statement caught me a little off guard and it did not sit well with me.<\/p>\n

When Coors was only available in the western states, their draft policy was to not split handles.\u00a0 It was either exclusively Coors, or no Coors draft.\u00a0 At the same time in Louisiana, it was legal to sell draft boxes to on premise accounts.\u00a0 The account would pay five dollars extra per keg until the box was paid off.\u00a0 Again, for the distributor, it was an exclusive account.<\/p>\n

Exclusive accounts were almost always driven by market share.\u00a0 At the time, I was in Kansas with a 60%+ share of market, AB and Schlitz each had less than 10 draft accounts.\u00a0 As Coors entered new states and markets\u00a0they had to change their policy of exclusivity.<\/p>\n

The pressure to obtain and maintain draft handles grew to the point that many retailers leveraged that pressure to their advantage.\u00a0 Free kegs, glassware, discounts, p-o-s, and even furniture (including the dispensing boxes) were some of the many requests certain retailers added to the product on tap.\u00a0 Menu prints, credit card charges, in store media sponsorships, then on to third party funding stepping outside of traditional channels all have been, and are still used.<\/p>\n

Franchise laws today not only protect the distributor from termination, but such laws have also allowed distributors to divorce themselves from under-the-table payments to retail since the inception of \u00a0consolidation at the middle tier.\u00a0 Now there may only be two (three) distributors in the market with all the brands.\u00a0 Therefore, all the pressure to obtain taps falls squarely on the shoulders of the vendor.\u00a0 Field sales teams are usually bonuses\u00a0on market performance.\u00a0 I know one vendor who requires all field people to sell in two new accounts each week!\u00a0 The pressure on these people (mostly young) to make numbers could easily result in questionable practices.<\/p>\n

Today\u2019s crafts face similar problems; consider the revolving handles.\u00a0 When we introduced Krombacher in DFW we ran (with the distributor’s participation) kick off draft incentive and achieved a number of key accounts.\u00a0 Within six weeks, Krombacher was no longer in many of those places, served only as the beer of the month on the revolving handles.\u00a0 It cost both of us quite a bit of budget money.\u00a0 Now, was it good for the brand exposure?\u00a0 The next quarter sales indicated it wasn’t.<\/p>\n

As more and more crafts enter the market, the pressure will increase on the breweries from investors, distributors, and retailers.\u00a0 How the craft market handles this pressure will be telling. \u00a0As\u00a0General Eisenhower once said, “the supreme quality for leadership is unquestionably integrity!”<\/p>\n

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

  As a young District Sales Manager for Lone Star Brewing Co., my district included West Texas with many miles to cover and a multitude of distributors on whom to call.\u00a0 One was a medium size\u00a0Miller\/Lone Star\/Pearl whose owner was in college at the same university, at the same time as I.\u00a0 During my visits […]<\/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":"","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":false,"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-bt","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/711"}],"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=711"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/711\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":736,"href":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/711\/revisions\/736"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=711"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=711"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=711"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}