Food & Beverage
Top-shelf talent
How Todd Epsten led Major Brands to steady growth by promoting a culture of equality
By Mark Scott
Smart Business St. Louis | April 2008
Page 1 of 3
Throughout the years, strategy and major decision-making at Major Brands Premium Beverage Distributors was something placed strictly under the province of ownership.
But CEO Todd Epsten says that attitude began to change in the late 1990s when an employee in the field tipped the company off to the Red Bull energy drink, which was just starting to grow in popularity.
“He said, ‘I was on the West Coast and this product is doing really well,’” Epsten says of the employee. “‘We need to try and get it for Missouri.’ If he had never spotted it, it never would have happened.
“We regrouped and refocused and actively pursued Red Bull, and now, it’s a successful niche part of our business that’s really provided a catalyst for growth.”
By promoting a culture of oneness in which Epsten encourages employees to offer their opinions and actively participate in the growth of the company, many other successful brands have been discovered by a network of personnel that keeps its ear to the ground in search of trends and opportunities.
The philosophy helped Epsten lead the largest wine and spirits wholesale distributor in Missouri to 2006 revenue of $410 million.
“Everybody in the company should be approachable,” Epsten says. “We have an open-door policy, which sounds kind of trivial, but everybody is free to walk in any door. Hierarchy is something that not only is not important but shunned at Major Brands. It doesn’t mean that we don’t have an organizational chart or an organized way of doing business; it just means that, at the end of the day, collaboration is much more important than hierarchy.
“With a company that has almost 650 people working there, we needed to expand the number of people that were helping chart the overall direction. For the company to maintain its success in the future, it’s much more incumbent on who works there than what ownership does.”
Be a team builder
One of the challenges Epsten has faced in leading Major Brands and developing the culture he wants to see is finding a word to describe the people that most companies refer to as employees or associates.
Neither term is reflective of the type of culture Epsten wants at Major Brands.
“I like using the term ‘the people who I work with’ because all of us work together and ultimately work for Major Brands,” Epsten says. “Employee sounds way too formal. Associate sounds passé, and ‘you guys’ sounds too informal.”
In addition to his disdain for the word employee, Epsten is not a big fan of courtesy titles either, for himself or for his father, Bobby Epsten, the company’s chairman.
“Nobody would ever think to call him Mr. Epsten,” Epsten says. “If anybody does, the first thing he does is correct them. It’s just a very small example of the way that business is conducted. It’s about relationships. Relationships have become somehow a negative in business, or that’s the old way of doing things. Relationships have to be built on wins and performance, but that relationship is still important.”
In hopes of developing relationships with employees to encourage them to offer innovative suggestions, David Vittor, the company’s president and COO, created the Major Brands Council.
Epsten says the new forum provides a chance for midlevel managers to be a more active part of the culture by meeting and discussing possible initiatives that can help the company continue to grow.
“It’s a great opportunity for them to interact with David, tackle issues that a company like us might not normally have the time to do and build our senior leaders of tomorrow,” Epsten says. “As an organization grows larger, I think the most important thing leadership can do is get the right people in the organization from top to bottom.”
The forum reinforces the idea that new ideas are not only welcomed by everyone in the company, but they are encouraged.
“It should flow down and permeate the organization,” Epsten says.
In addition to the Major Brands Council, the company also developed an advisory board made up of seasoned business leaders from outside the beverage industry.
“It gave ownership somebody that would challenge us in a way that had never been challenged before,” Epsten says. “It was a real eye-opener. ... The fact is that, at the end of the day, there are common goals and issues that all businesses have to deal with. I think they brought a perspective that was different than the myopic world that one exists at when they are just focused solely on their business. They have done a great job of pointing out our strengths that we never realized we had, but they also challenged us on remedying some weaknesses.”
Regardless of what method you use to get feedback, you need to be genuine about your desire to get everyone involved in plotting the future of the company.
“If you don’t come at it from an honest perspective, anybody can sniff it out,” Epsten says.
“It’s giving people the right tools, giving them a great work environment, and getting out of their way and letting them do their job. Just like our own families, there are positives and negatives in our familial relationships. But hopefully, if a family is healthy, there’s a lot more positives than there are negatives. At the end of the day, we all pull together in a common direction for a common goal.”
