How I Did It: Sidney Frank, founder, Sidney Frank Importing

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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.

We went to dinner. I said, "I'd like to have Jägermeister for the States." He said, "We already have commitments for most of the country, but we still have Maryland to Florida left." I said, "I'll take it." But the next year the importer from the East Coast didn't pay his bills on time. So I got Jägermeister, eventually, for every place except the West Coast. The president had never been to the U.S. but he flew to the West Coast and asked the importer there to take him to Disneyland. They got lost, so he figured he didn't know the territory. So I got the whole country in 1973.

We had no money for advertising, but we got a big break. The Baton Rouge newspaper said Jägermeister, to the drinker, is instant Valium. Well, there are no drugs in it, but sales went from 10 cases a month to 1,000. I made millions of copies of that story.

But the big thing I had, I came up with Jägerettes. I thought a pretty girl can always help you selling, and I noticed that one girl I had in California would go to 80 tables in a room and say, Open your mouth. She asked, Would you like a Jägermeister? And 80% of 'em said yes.

"It was hard getting that first Jägerette. They thought we were running a den of iniquity."

It was hard getting that first girl. They thought we were running a den of iniquity. Eventually they began to trust us, and we got two and three and 10. Now we have 900. And 300 Jägerdudes.

Grey Goose started because I figured that we were so popular with the bars and distributors were making a lot of money on us. I figured they'd go along if I came up with a vodka. The nice thing about vodka is you make it today, you sell it tomorrow; even Jägermeister is aged for a year. So you don't have to put your money into buildings and machines and warehouses. Just make it today, sell it tomorrow.

The big-selling high-priced vodka at the time was Absolut, which was $15 a bottle. I figured, let's make it very exclusive and sell it for $30 a bottle. I said, France has the best of everything. I asked a distiller there whether they could make a vodka. They said sure. The product manager and I tasted about 100 vodkas on my front porch here, and we agreed on one vodka as the best-tasting.

We submitted two bottles to the Beverage Testing Institute, and Grey Goose won as the best-tasting vodka in the world. So we took $3 million, which was going to be our total profit for a year, and we put it into advertising. We made big, beautiful ads that listed Grey Goose as the best-tasting vodka in the world, and we indoctrinated the distributors and 20,000 bartenders, and when somebody would come in and say, What's your best-tasting vodka, they said Grey Goose.

We gave away Grey Goose to any charity that wanted vodka at its bar. The people at charity events are the people who are our target audience. Sales started to zoom. In 2004 we sold 1.5 million cases.

A few years ago, a banker in Paris asked to see me. He said, "I think you're getting someplace with Grey Goose; a lot of distillers would like it." About a year ago he came to me and said, "I was just with the chair of the board of Bacardi. He says he would give you over $2 billion for Grey Goose." We went back and forth, and then the chairman said, "I'll give you two"--I can't give the actual figure, but it was a lot more than $2 billion.

I wanted to make sure that nobody in the company would quit. So we gave bonuses--if they were with us 10 years, we gave them a two-year bonus. It changed a lot of people's minds. Not one employee left.

First I bought two Maybachs. Two big Maybachs, not the little ones. In one of the Maybachs, if you sit in the back seat and press a button it extends like a bed. I bought a Bentley. Little toys. I gave $100 million to Brown. I wanted to be a billionaire. I'm 85 years old; I wanted to count the money while I was on this side of the ground.

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