How to Host the Perfect Weekend

Here's how Maker's Mark president Bill Samuels mixes business with pleasure, turns guests into friends, and converts customers into missionaries during the Kentucky Derby weekend.

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Bill Samuels Jr. watches a race at Keeneland racetrack in Lexington, Kentucky

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Flash back to 1967. LBJ is in the White House. Bell-bottoms are a fashion statement. The Monkees dominate the Top 40 (on AM radio), and a rocket-scientist-turned-lawyer who has joined Maker's Mark, his family's tiny distillery in Kentucky, has been given an assignment that has him baffled.

"At the time, we were getting 95 percent of our business, such as it was, from Kentucky, Tennessee, and Indiana," recalls T. William "Bill" Samuels Jr. "There were two huge national distributors outside that area who could do us a lot of good if they would take on our product. Dad wanted me to host them for the weekend. I didn't have a clue about what to do. I am not by nature a social person."

Samuels doesn't remember much about that weekend except that he played semicompetent tour guide, showing his guests all the sights of Louisville, and that the two days were filled with more long silences than he would have liked.

Flash forward to today.

Dressed in a white disco suit that would embarrass even John Travolta, Samuels will host some 1,500 people in an annual event that will probably receive international media attention. Good Morning America once televised its opening from Samuels's Derby-readied house. (See " The Itinerary".)

How did Samuels get from where he started to here? And how exactly do you host a perfect weekend for your key customers -- not to mention people you'd like to become your key customers?

Those are not insignificant questions. You already know that entertaining is part of your job. But you hope that even if you do it badly, it won't cost you business. You'd like to think that quality, service, and price will outweigh the question of whether your customers enjoy your company -- in both senses of the word. But customers do more business with businesspeople they like. And your customers are bound to like you more if you show them a good time.

So how do you do it?

For advice, we turned to Samuels, whose party on the Thursday before Saturday's running of the Kentucky Derby has become legendary. But he does more than throw a nice one-night shindig. Samuels has invited some 60 people to continue celebrating through the race itself. It's clear he knows something about hosting a long weekend.

"It's second nature for me to try to create situations where the mountain comes to Muhammad," he explains. "Our company is not big enough to scream and yell to get everyone's attention. We need to create an environment where people want to do business with us." Or, in this case, an environment people want to be in for the weekend.

So the choice to host the weekend is a business decision that's handled like every other business decision at Maker's Mark. Samuels, the company's president, starts by figuring out how the weekend fits into his company's overall strategy. Specifically, he picks a theme (this year it will be the 1970s) and a tone (disco and tacky) for the event, and then he leaves it to his 60 employees to make it happen.

"We have never used a party planner, and I don't think we ever will," he says. "Getting this done is a real team-building exercise. Everyone in the company works on this in addition to their regular jobs, so the result is, employees who don't normally work together end up being side by side." (See "Party Tricks".)

There are other internal benefits as well. For one thing, something generally goes wrong -- for example, when Maker's installed a new computer system, the list of invitees from previous years somehow disappeared -- so that planning for the weekend is an ongoing exercise in crisis management. And knowing that the festivities always begin on the Thursday before the first Saturday in May provides inflexible deadlines for such tasks as an extra-thorough cleaning of the distillery -- which the guests will be invited to visit.

But important as the internal benefits are, the real focus is external -- trying to raise brand awareness and buzz and, by extension, sales. After all, Samuels isn't spending $250,000 of the company's money just to have a party.

"Can I prove there is a good ROI on this?" he asks. "Are you kidding? There's no way. But this is all about buzz, and I've got to think that having things such as a national morning-news show broadcasting from the house, as happened a couple of years ago, has got to help."

Sales of Maker's Mark, which is now a wholly owned subsidiary of London's Allied Domecq, seem to bear out that assessment. Sales of most "brown liquors," such as bourbon, are basically flat, but Maker's Mark sales have been steadily climbing 11 percent a year, Samuels says. And the sales-territory diversification his father hoped for has come to pass: only 15 percent of the company's sales now come from Kentucky and Indiana.

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