This Bud’s for you
In 1987, Anderson donated $15 million to his undergraduate alma mater for naming rights to the school of business. Today, UCLA’s Anderson School of Management ranks among the top business schools in the nation.
One of the key skills students learn in business school is the ability to recognize business opportunities. Not surprisingly, it’s a skill Anderson has displayed throughout his career.
Over the years, he co-founded a bank that was later sold to Mellon Financial Corp. for more than three times what he invested in it. And he invested in real estate and development in Hawaii and, after a series of acquisitions in the early 1980s, became one of the largest property holders in the U.S. Virgin Islands.
"I’ve gone a little crazy over the years in the real estate market," he says. "I’ve bought over a billion dollars in real estate. But for me, the quality of those purchases is worth it. You can get some pretty darn good returns."
Anderson’s ability to see opportunities where others didn’t showed itself early, when he was a practicing attorney at Kindel & Anderson, a law firm he co-founded in the early 1950s.
He was teaching law at night and giving business seminars through the Young Presidents Organization in his spare time. A beverage distributor heard him talk, and soon Anderson represented more than a dozen distributors in California.
"I had some ideas they seemed to like, and I was eventually asked to speak at a state convention for Hamm Brewing Co.," Anderson recalls. "The general manager asked me after the speech if I could help him with the distributorship in downtown Los Angeles. They were having some problems."
Anderson presented several ideas to solve logistics issues, including an plan to set up new delivery routes to compensate for the abundance of one-way streets downtown and make distribution more efficient. He also suggested that, to succeed, the distributorship needed more products than simply Hamm’s beer.
The general manager was so impressed that he offered Anderson control of the distributorship, and suddenly, he was in business as a beer distributor, with Hamm’s beer as his main product and a promise for more products to be added later.
Six months later, however, the general manager hadn’t followed through on a key promise.
"I called him up and told him I was going to get out of the business unless he kept his promise and helped me get another product to sell," Anderson says. "He called me back very apologetically a couple weeks later and told me the only thing he could get me was Budweiser."
It was the 1950s, and the top-selling beer in America was Schlitz.
"I wasn’t happy, but I decided to take it," Anderson says. "I was selling 20,000 cases of Hamm’s each month, and Budweiser wanted me to sell 6,000 cases each month. Well, today, Budweiser has become the No. 1 beer in the world, and here in California, it has between 50 percent and 60 percent of the market share.
"Even with a Harvard Business School education, it’s kind of hard to screw up when you go from 6,000 cases a month to 800,000. So, I’ve been very lucky."
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