Lessons - How Generational Wealth Survives Dynasty Transitions | Billy Busch - Anheuser-Busch Heir

In this lessons episode, discover how poor succession planning can tear family businesses apart. Learn why leaving clear instructions and legal structures is essential for preserving both the business and relationships. Learn how miscommunication and power struggles damage the legacy built over generations, and learn why purpose and tradition can keep you going even after setbacks and loss. Because there's a lot of, so I'm just looking over some of the things that, obviously, it was the transition of power away from your father that was very stressful. There was a battle over Grant's farm as well, and that was stressful for the family. If you think about all these events, and you can, you can touch on even like give like a little bit of context as to what these stories mean and what happened, but what did these events teach you about family business, or how did these events sort of shape your perception of family business? Well, I did learn a lot from it. I will say I think in any family business, I think when you go to pass the baton to the next generation, the leader of that company, they really need to do everything black and white. I think my father, I think it was time. He had lost his oldest daughter, or excuse me, his youngest daughter, and that was very traumatizing to him. He wasn't making the greatest decisions any longer, not that it was right for my half-brother to form a coup in the board and have him removed from his position, because I don't think that was right. But I think there was a bit of much better way to go to my father, our father, and say, hey, this is getting too hard on you, and you need to step back and allow me to run things now, or something along those lines. I think every business owner should realize that one of their times up, and they should pass it on, and they write up the documents, make it very black and white, say, this is how it is. When you do that kind of stuff, you keep the lawyers out of it. You don't have as much argument going on. Everybody's not going to be as happy, but at least there won't be any infighting. When it comes to those kinds of things, definitely, it's like he left us a grants farm. He left myself and my five siblings a grants farm, and there came a time where it was in a trust, and we knew we had to take it out of the trust, because each of our families were getting bigger, and there were more and more successors, because we're all having kids, and we're all married, and we needed to make sure that, okay, what are we going to do with a grants farm? It can't stay in a trust all the time. It eventually needs to be bought out. So my father, and his will, he put in there that he would his biggest wish was to see one or more of his kids buy grants farm out of the trust from whoever didn't want to stay in. So I offered to buy grants farm, because I was the only one in the beer business at the time. I had a beer company. I felt like it would be similar to what dad did. My father did with the breweries that he built. He built breweries, and he put theme parks around those breweries to attract people, kind of like an overgrown craft brewery is today. You know, you get to go there and have food, but here you got to not only have food and try the products, but also visit all the incredible animals and do the rides and all those sorts of things. So I thought it would be a great way to promote our company, a great way to promote our beer. So I offered to buy grants farm, and then jealousy comes in, and one of the quotes from a sister was, there should not be one lord of the manner, something like that. And we didn't follow dad's wish at that time. So my family wanted to sell it to another entity and not one of us, and we got into a big argument over that. I talked about it in the book. I almost had the play spot, but then at the last minute, well actually after the last minute happened because our trustee at the time, which was Wells Fargo, gave a deadline that whoever makes the final offer by five o'clock PM on a certain day, if we don't get a counter offer, that person would own grants farm. So I made the final offer. The counter offer came about two or three hours later from my other siblings, four of my siblings, and another relative, and they ended up bidding higher, going to a place I couldn't go to. So they ended up buying my brother and I out. So I'm no longer a part of grants farm. You know, I miss it. It was where I grew up, but again, my dad should have made it more specific and made it more black and white on how to leave grants farm to a family member or what he exactly wanted to do with it. Because if you don't, it creates a lot of infighting. And now my brother and sisters, unfortunately, and myself don't talk to each other anymore. Even still, even still. Yep. That's so silly. It's so stupid. It's so stupid. Like I guess, I think what's in a lot of people that listen to this are probably first generation entrepreneurs. They built the business. Now they're trying to figure out what to do with that business. And I hear a lot of this. This is going to be this huge transition of wealth because people are all retiring and they don't know what to do about succession planning. And this is the perfect example. Obviously, at a much larger scale in a first generation entrepreneur, but there are people that build businesses that they don't sell and they want to pass them over to their kids. And I don't know how much energy or thought they put into it before it's time. And I think that's going to come around and bite them in the ass. And I also don't think they think about what are the implications of the relationships between siblings. They're thinking about what happens to me when I want to retire. But kind of like your example that you just mentioned, you've actually broken up family bond now because of this. Not only just, not only just the fact that your dad didn't make it clear or whatnot. But now between you and your brothers and sisters, you don't have the bond that you should have. You're 100% right, Scott. And that's why I urge any business owner, family business to make sure that when they do go pass it down, my family always pass it down to the most competent child. It might not have been the oldest, although for the most part, it did work out to be the oldest of the children, oldest male. And it worked out great for three generations. And then when I went to the fourth generation, it all changed. And the irony of it is the fourth generation took it, basically took it from the third generation. And then the fourth generation basically lost the whole company because that I really do think that that line of succession was broken. The way to properly succeed. And it went then to the fifth generation. And the person that took it over, which would be my nephew, was not unfortunately competent because he had substance abuse problems. And he was still given the control of anizer bush. And an outside competitor in Bev saw that it wasn't being run correctly, saw the problems that anizer bush was going through. And they realized it was a perfect time to take it over, which they did in 2008. So where does that leave you in your life? I mean, you've done a lot. So we can talk a little bit about your journey. But all this is leading up to, okay, so how is Billy going to architect his life now? Because right now, your nephew is running the company. I always know he's not. No, no, sorry, I meant sorry. Historically, when your nephew is running the company, you weren't thinking, I'm going to step in line for succession. He's the one running it. And you probably saw the decline. And you probably saw where it was going. And then the in-bed acquisition, yeah, it was unfortunate, but it probably wasn't a surprise to you, at least, because you saw what was happening. I saw what was happening. I was getting feedback. I really didn't have a lot to do with anizer bush at that point. I was still, we still had the polo team. We were playing professional polo from the Bud Light polo team. But I was hearing from people at the brewery, some of the higher up executives at the brewery, that there were problems going on that he was having difficulties talking to people, making speeches, wholesale or conferences, things like that, that he was, he was not competent any longer to even make a speech. And then, and then I, then when I heard that he opened up the distribution system here in America to an outside company, somebody came to me and said, that's exactly what this company was looking for. It was in bed. And so now they were selling Stella Artois and Bex and some of the other beers that Inbevo was making in the United States through the anizer bush wholesaler system. And it gave them Inbevo the opportunity to look at the books, look at anizer bushes books and figure out a way to buy it. So, yeah, so I did see, I could see it was coming. I was hearing from the executives about what was going on. And, you know, I still thought it would be an incredibly tremendous feat to be able to take over the biggest company, biggest beer company in the world. But no longer it was anizer bush, the biggest beer company because Inbevo had formed with other breweries and they actually became internationally the biggest brewery in the world. And so they were able to swallow the smaller fish at that point. And that's exactly what they did. And as soon as that happened, I started thinking, okay, you know what, how do I keep this tradition alive? After reading everything that I read and this is during the time I was really getting involved into understanding the history of our family, my life where I've been leaving some of that to my kids. So they knew it was running through their blood and to understand where they came from. And actually it was good for me too. It was very therapeutic for me to be able to understand where I came from. And I just felt this desire to keep that beer tradition going because I thought about my great-grandfather and the love he had for his family and for his wife and for all the people that worked at thatizer bush. And how he revolutionized the beer industry with pasteurization and refrigeration and how he grew his product and how he how he even came up with the recipe for Budweiser. And I know you read that in the book, Scott. And that's one of the great stories that I love is how he went to Germany and came up with the recipe. And then I think about my grandfather, about how he takes it over kind of unwillingly at first, but then willingly when he realized that he wanted to be in the brewing industry and not so much a rancher any longer. And how he worked his tail off and through love and through determination and grit, he kept the company going through that 13 years of prohibition and how it affected him after prohibition negatively. And he took his life because of that. And then how my dad and his brother kept it going and how it became a household name. And the Patriots that my father and my who was a colonel in the army during World War II. And the Patriot that my uncle Adolphus, his older brother was and how he designated 90% of his marketing to support the war efforts during World War II and really put the products on the back burner because he loved this country and knew what it had done for him and his family. And you know, some of those things and then to see how my dad worked and how he loved the industry. I just felt it was in my blood. And like you said earlier, I felt like I believe blood beer. And so I wanted to keep it going. And so I started the William K. Bush brewing company. I couldn't call it the only way I could use a bush name was by using my full name. I started the William K. Bush brewing company. And it was a difficult time because at that point, it was a 2011. At that point, the craft beer industry was taking off. And I came out with a with with more of a everyday beer like a Budweiser or Miller or of course. So you're standard, you're standard beer. And people were turning towards a heavier, more tasteful beers full body beers. And I came out, it was kind of bad timing to come out with that. But I did. And you know, to get any traction in the mainstream part of the beer industry, where you're going against the behemoths like Budweiser Miller in course is very, very difficult. And they're all you always got to target on your back. So for 10 years, I worked hard to try to grow that business. And we got into five or six different different states as far as distribution goes. But we never could get any traction. So we had to end up, we ended up closing that down. And we got in, we now are doing our own, we built our own brewery right outside of St. Louis, Missouri in an area called St. Charles. And we invite people to come out to our place to our farm and enjoy the beautiful farm atmosphere out there in nature. We've got animals around there. We've got great food for people. We make 12 different beers out there. We have our own brewery. And we're actually starting to distribute locally in the area. So you know what? I love the beer, beer business. My family, my immediate family once in a while looks at me and says, Dad, you know, why do you keep doing this? You work really hard. You're not making any money doing it. And it's just that, you know, I just, I just feel that it's my destiny, basically. I feel like it's something that I need to do to honor my ancestors. Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode. And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the links in the description to watch the full episode. See you in the next one.