Jim Koch is a sixth-generation brewmaster who quit a six-figure consulting job to launch a business. 


Samuel Adams’ founder carried a briefcase full of beer to business meetings before launching his $3 billion empire

Jim Koch is a sixth-generation brewmaster.

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 How Samuel Adams’ founder built a $3 billion beer empire  

When I started Samuel Adams, I used a family recipe. It came from my great great grandfather's brewery in ST Louis in the 18 sixties, seventies and eighties. My dad had actually brewed that beer when he was a brewmaster in Minster Ohio. And the brewery was declining. It was trying to compete with much, much bigger companies. So my dad made something that nobody else was making. The brewery told my dad Charlie, this is not what people want today. This has got way too much flavor. What people want today is water with foam on the top of it. So dump this and go back and make me water with foam on it. I'm Jim Cook. I'm 75 years old. I'm the brewer and founder of Samuel Adams. And these are my secrets to success. I grew up in southern Ohio and my mother was in school teacher and my father was a brewmaster. So I'm actually the sixth oldest son in a row to be a brewer. My first job was when I was 12 years old, it was actually delivering newspapers. I went to Harvard. I was a government major after college. I entered the JDMB A program at Harvard, Harvard Business School and Harvard Law School. And I did the first two years of that program and I realized I'm not sure I want to do this. I'm not sure I want to be a corporate lawyer or, you know, go to a big company. So I dropped out and I spent 3.5 years working at Outward Bound running wilderness courses. And after 3.5 years, I decided, alright, I'm ready to go back, completed the course and went from there to Boston Consulting Group. After seven years, Boston consulting group, I realized that I probably didn't want to do that for the rest of my life. And then I realized, well, the rest of my life starts tomorrow. So I went in and I gave my notice, I thought what I really want to do is what my family has always done, which is make beer. And so I told my dad I was going to leave this, you know, pretty good job to start a small brewery. He looked at me and he said, Jim, you've done some stupid things in your life. This is about the stupidest, the whole idea of small scale brewing and trying to make a living was unheard of explain to him. Look, dad, I'm not going to compete with these big brewers. They will kill me. I get that. I'm gonna start something totally different. I'm gonna make really high quality beer like nobody is making in this country. And he understood that he understood what great beer was after I had a recipe, I needed a name. I wanted a name that would be assertively American. I wanted to be very proud about brewing great beer here in the United States. Nobody knew who Sam Adams was till he became a beer. But historically, uh Samuel Adams was the original revolutionary. He antagonized the British. He was a propagandist. He stirred Boston up against the British troops. He was a revolutionary. And I wanted to create beer independence for America in the same way that Samuel Adams and the rest of the patriots and founding fathers created political independence. Honestly, starting Samuel Adams was easier than it seems. I didn't have much money. I raised $140,000 from friends and family, but I didn't need a whole bunch of people and I had $100,000 of my own money. It wasn't bootstraps. We didn't have bootstraps. It might have been the shoestrings. Uh Because when I started, there were only two people, we didn't have an office, we didn't have computers. My dad gave me some good advice when I started Sam Adams and he told me, Jim, when you start a company, it's kind of lonely and it's really much better if you have a and it's very much better if that partner is different from you. I kind of looked around Boston consulting group which had extraordinarily talented people in the seventies and people like Mitt Romney was there, Benjamin Yahoo was there, but they were all like me, they were all over educated white guys who lived in the suburbs. And then I realized, wait a minute, I think I know the person that I want to, you know, go on this journey with her name was Rhonda and Rhonda was my secretary. She was great at, you know, balancing people management, you know, accomplishing tasks. Uh follow up. Um All the things that I wasn't particularly good at and Rhonda bartended at night. So bars were kind her natural habitat and that kind of gave us a full set of skills. My first tire was my best tire. It became very clear to me that there were only two things that we needed to do extraordinarily. Well, one was we need to make a great beer that was proved when we got chosen as the best beer in America, an honor that we went on to win four years running. That was very cool. This little company, two people was making the best beer in America in Boston. We had to work our asses off to sell it. I just put cold beer in my briefcase with the blue cool packs. Uh I could get seven beers, two blue cool packs and a sleeve of cups. And I went from bar to bar and tried to, you know, get bartenders bar managers owners to taste my beer and to put it into the bar. I never thought Samuel Adams would be this successful. My original business plan was that we would eventually grow over five years all the way up to a million two in sales, we would be eight people. And if after five years, we would plateau and it's 40 years later and we're not a million two in sales, we're over 2 billion and we're not eight people, we're 2800 people. And we're still continuing to innovate, bring out new products and grow. So I believe my job as a business person first is to try to pay back, pay forward, share the wealth. However, you want to say it because at the end of the day, if you're the only person who benefits from your success, you're not going to have much of it. In 2007, we got our management team together and we went to a community center in our neighborhood and we painted the community center and it was one of those feel good things. And I remember walking back to my car and not feeling good about it. And I was wondering why, why am I not feeling good? We just did this really nice thing, but I, I don't feel good about it and I realized I don't feel good about it because I'm a business, you know, I'm a business person. What I do is create value. And I just spent about $2000 worth of management time and we did about $500 worth of crappy painting. So I did not create value. So we came up with the brewing of the American program out of my experiences starting Samuel Adams because when I started, there were two things that I didn't have access to that would have been really nice. First was loan money. I raised equity but nobody would loan us any money. I went to four different banks, banks and finally one of them just said, Jim, nobody is going to lend you money. We're a bank. We don't like taking risks and your company is ridiculous because we're never going to get our money back. And the second, which was much more important was coaching and counseling and advice. When I started Sam Adams, you know, I should have known about business, right? What I realized is, yes, I knew about strategy and things like that. But uh in a small business, you're the, you know, the CEO but it doesn't stand for chief executive officer because there's really nobody to go out there and execute. You're the chief everything officer. You have to do all these things that are really important to the success of the business that you've never done before. And when we started the brewing the American Dream program, I realized, I don't really know about micro finance. How do you manage that whole process? So, uh we partnered with the Axion Opportunity Fund to help us do that. And since then, we've made 100 and $10 million in loans to 4300 companies. We've provided coaching and counseling to many, many more, maybe 15, 20,000 companies and those companies have saved or created almost 12,000 jobs in their communities. I could have a beer with any CEO living or dead. It has to be Steve Jobs. He created a revolution. A big one. I just make beer.