How I Did It: Sidney Frank, founder, Sidney Frank Importing
"I wanted to be a billionaire," says the man responsible for your Jägermeister headache. At age 85 he stunned the liquor industry by getting his wish.
Published September 2005
EMAIL THIS ARTICLE
PRINTER FRIENDLY
COMMENT ON THIS ARTICLEAs told to Stephanie Clifford
His pals in the liquor business thought Sidney Frank was crazy when he started importing a German herbal elixir, called Jägermeister, in 1972. The drink was selling about 500 cases a year. But Frank had a plan, revolving around promotion techniques the liquor industry had never seen. He employed a squadron of young women--dubbed Jägerettes--to patrol bars and sell drinks, and he threw parties for high visibility. In the first half of 2005, Sidney Frank Importing sold 2 million cases of Jägermeister.
Frank's second big success was the French vodka Grey Goose, which he introduced to the market in 1997 and sold last year to Bacardi for more than $2 billion. At 85, he is enjoying his money--his fleet of cars, chefs, and golf instructors attests to that--but he's also looking for new deals. He's rounding out Sidney Frank Importing with wines from around the world and Corazon de Agave tequila; he's introduced an energy drink called Crunk; he just bought a magazine, called Travel Savvy. Retirement, he says, is ages away.
I grew up on a farm in Montville, Conn., near Mohegan Rock. That rock was one of the largest rocks in the United States. So a lot of people would come and look at it. When I was 12, I made a ladder to go onto the rock, and I charged 10 cents to go on top of it. From the top of the rock you can see Long Island Sound, Norwich, New London. So that was my first entrepreneurial deal.
I wanted to save to go to college, and it took me until I was 17 years old to accumulate $1,000. I went to Brown for a year; I didn't have money for the second year. I noticed in the paper that they were hiring people at Pratt and Whitney, which made airplane engines, in East Hartford, Conn. I went up there, and there must have been 100 people in line and nobody was getting a job. And the hiring manager said to me, "No--oh, you went to Brown? I did too. Go down and see the foreman where they test the engines." I went down to see the foreman, who said, "Come back in a couple of hours. I want you to show me you can use a slide rule."
I said, "Of course." I didn't know how to use a slide rule. But I looked at the directions, came back two hours later, and showed him how. It was a great job, a dollar an hour, dollar and a half for overtime, two dollars Sunday. So I worked seven days a week.
The father of a girlfriend of mine was having a party in Greenwich Village. Well, I went down and met her father, Lewis Rosenstiel, who was chairman of the board of Schenley, which at that time was the largest distillery in the world. He said, "You know anything about alcohol as a motor fuel?" I said, "We use it at takeoff. It gives 20% more power." He said, "Will you have lunch with me and my chief engineer tomorrow?" And he began teaching me the liquor business. [Frank married Rosenstiel's daughter, Skippy, in 1947.]
I found out what hard work was. I remember one time there was going to be a glass strike. So we rented every warehouse in the country and filled them with glass, and sure enough a couple of months later, the glass strike came on, and we had glass and no other distributor did. You have to be forward-thinking.
The big time came around 1950 when we bought a Scotch plant in Scotland, and the distiller called up my father-in-law and said, "You have two executive vice presidents getting drunk every night; bring them home and send your son-in-law over." Well, I went up to the plant in Glasgow, and it was producing a million gallons of grain whiskey a year. I didn't think that was much because some of our plants in the States would do 10 million gallons. And so I watched very carefully, and I said to the distiller, "I notice you're only distilling twice a week. Why is that?" He said, "It used to be law." I said, "Is it still the law?" "No." "No? You mean you can distill seven days a week?" "Yes, but my instructions were to do what was always done." So we began doing seven days a week and increased production from one million to three million six. It cost a dollar a gallon to make, and you can sell it for $5 a gallon. That's $10 million and we only paid $13 million for the company. So I was a big hero.
I butted heads with my father-in-law, and I finally started my own company in 1972. It was just me, my brother, and a secretary.
One of the things I'd learned was it's a lot of money for bricks and mortar; don't build a distillery until you have enough money to do it properly and enough production to put in it. So I began looking for something to import. I noticed a few bars selling Jägermeister. I was looking for anything that had a niche. And warm Jägermeister is terrible, but whatever it was, people of German descent like Jägermeister. There were a lot of Germans around the country. So I sent a telex to the president of Jägermeister in Germany and asked if he would see me.
