September 24, 2005

Liquor Pimp: Jagermeister's Sidney Frank

We're not usually ones for the fluffy human interest piece here at Liquor Snob, but there are some topics we'll cover no matter what. One of those topics is Jagermeister. We first discovered Jager in college, and like most of our college friends, when we run into it we usually end up far too drunk, losing our judgment and ending up on a roof wondering how to get down.

One person Jager hasn't caused trouble for is Sidney Frank, the owner of Sidney Frank Importing. In the first half of 2005, Mr. Frank sold 2 million cases of the herbal liqueur. He is the man who invented the Jagerettes, the squads of young ladies who go from bar-to-bar and event-to-event, promoting Jager. His company also went on to create Gray Goose vodka back in the late '90s, and he recently sold the company to Bacarding for "a lot more than $2 billion."

Mr. Frank's life is a regular Cinderella story, going from his early days on a farm in C,T to his current status as multi-billionaire liquor god, complete with a "fleet of cars, chefs, and golf instructors." It does our hearts good to see that liquor has been so good to Mr. Frank, and we raise our glasses to a man who's 85 years old and still going strong.

We'll leave you with some of Sidney Frank's best answers from the Q&A, so you can apply them to your everyday life:

On Succeeding in Business:
"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."

On keeping employees happy:
"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."

Sounds like Mr. Frank knows how to run a business. Of course, if he hired us he'd just have to pay our bonus in bottles of Jager...though he'd have to keep the stairs to the roof locked at all times. Learn more about our favorite liqueur at Jager.com, and read the full Sidney Frank Q&A at Inc.com.

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