Remember Stroh's beer?
Kerry A. Dolan has a sad reminder in Forbes magazine.
Once one of Detroit's iconic brands and among the city's oldest businesses, Stroh's brewery, on Gratiot near Eastern Market, was a city landmark, and its pungent hopsy aroma wafted daily across the east side of downtown. Tours and samples were a staple of Detroit nightlife.
Dolan writes that Stroh’s surged in the 1980s, emerging as one of America’s fastest-growing companies and the country’s third-largest brewing empire, behind only public behemoths Anheuser-Busch and Miller. The Stroh family owned it all, a fortune that FORBES then calculated was worth at least $700 million. Just by matching the S&P 500, the family would currently be worth about $9 billion.
Yet today the Strohs, as a family business or even a collective financial entity, have ceased to exist. The company has been sold for parts. The trust funds have doled out their last pennies to shareholders. While there was enough cash flowing for enough years that the fifth generation Strohs still seem pretty comfortable, the family looks destined to go shirtsleeves-to-shirtsleeves in six.
“We made the decision to go national without having the budget,” sighs Greg Stroh, a fifth generation family member and former Stroh Brewery employee. “It was like going to a gunfight with a knife. We didn’t have a chance.” His analysis comes tinged with inevitability. It wasn’t. A handful of family-owned regional brewers such as Yuengling and Schell’s continue to thrive, while others, like Olympia and Hamm’s, sold out. And the Strohs’ largest rivals during the 1980s and 1990s, the Coors, who also aspired to turn their no-frills, regional suds into a national powerhouse, remain in the top 100 on the FORBES America’s Richest Families list.
The Strohs chose a different path, a saga that serves as a powerful reminder: Hard as it is to build a family business designed to last in perpetuity, it’s shockingly easy for any successor to tank it.
