Rebound

Well, this is interesting:

Anheuser-Busch heir Billy Busch said he would be the first to buy back Bud Light should the beer’s parent company AB InBev want to sell it.

“If they don’t want that brand any longer, sell it back to the Busch family,” Busch told Outkick host Tomi Lahren. “Sell it to me. I’ll be the first in line to buy that brand back from you, and we’ll make that brand great again.”

Busch explained how disheartening it has been to watch the beer brand, which was so much a part of his childhood, lose its legacy of valuing its customers and employees.

“That culture is completely gone now,” Busch said. “They knew who their drinkers were. … Even my dad at 89 years old, 90 years old, he was still going to the bars selling Budweiser back in those days.”

“We’ve always cared very, very much about the people in America. What made this company great was America, of course,” he continued.

Busch added that AB InBev has missed the mark in knowing its customer base.

“When you are a foreign company and you rely on these woke students that are coming out of these local colleges to do your advertising for you, you’re making a big mistake,” he noted.

Even if they got Bud Light back, I still wouldn’t buy it because it’s shit beer, but that’s not the point.

I don’t know if anyone knows this, but Auggie Busch (Augustus III) has been a lifelong supporter of concealed carry — mostly, it should be said, because of the need to protect his delivery drivers from hijacking.  The family has always been true-blue (red?) American (unusual for a wealthy family) and intensely patriotic, always with traditional values very much in evidence.  A cursory look at older Budweiser ads — the pre-woke ones, that is — will bear that out.

And was there any better or more American an institution than this?

Oh, and if Billy wants a new relaunch payoff line for his acquisition, here it is:

Same Beer, Different Attitude!

Yer welcome.

Getting Your Money’s Worth

Let’s face it:  I don’t want the U.S. to be compared with France on anything (okay, maybe when we start making better food).

From none other than Martha Stewart:

In an interview with the magazine Footwear News, the author, TV personality and entrepreneur slammed hybrid work culture, saying that people cannot “possibly get everything done working three days a week in the office and two days remotely.”

Stewart’s comments come as more managers push for an end to the work-from-home trend that took hold more than three years ago at the start of the pandemic.

Stewart compared the state of in-person work in the United States to France, calling it “not a very thriving country.”

And of course, she’s right — and not just about France.

Here’s a humble suggestion for managers whose employees refuse to stop working from home:  for all those days that they don’t come in to the office, pay them 33% of their rate.  Then, for those who still refuse, use the savings to train their replacements who will want to show up for work.

I’m so sick of people who expect to get paid well, but refuse to do the amount of work that deserves such compensation.

And say what you like about ol’ Martha, but nobody ever accused her of being a slacker.

Consulting Ripoffs

Some time back, one of Insty’s contributors made the following comment regarding the foul McKinsey consulting company:

In my first hand experience, McKinsey was hired (no doubt at great expense) to “review” and “improve” the faltering Bloomberg TV network. What did they do? First, the “consultants” asked all the employees what they did, and how things worked. Then they created mountains of PowerPoint presentations and simply repeated what they’d been told. Finally, they recommended a “reduction in forces” (corporate-speak for layoffs). This pattern is the modus operandi for McKinsey: “Teach me what you do, and then I’m going to tell you how to do it.” Another pattern is that often consultants convince clients that they ought to be hired “in-house.” McKinsey doesn’t mind that at all because it’s one more “in”, one more tentacle reaching into corporate America.

It’s actually a lot worse than that — and McKinsey are far from the only bad actors in the management consulting business:  pretty much all of them (Bain, Booz Allen, Accenture, Deloitte, etc.) are pretty much the same, and operate in the same manner as McKinsey, as described above.

They are called “process” consultants in that they bring little actual industry experience to the party;  senior partners will make the sales pitches, but once the contract is signed, they’ll send in the freshly-minted MBAs (“junior associates”) who spend an inordinate amount of (billable, of course) time in learning the client’s business and industry mostly by talking to mid-level managers in the company.  These managers not only know the business, but are quite likely to know the solutions to whatever problems senior management don’t know how to address.

This knowledge will then be (stolen) used by the MBAs in drawing up their conclusions, with the caveat that if the client management do not adhere to their recommendations to the letter, then the consulting firm cannot be held responsible for any future failure.  Of course, this means eventual failure of the process as no one can follow a plan to the letter, ever.

The other kind of consultancy, by the way, is called “experiential”, meaning that the consultancy brings actual industry familiarity and a track record of both building and running a particular business practice or system.

I was one of those.  Typically, I would be brought in by a retail company to either help build or rebuild a customer loyalty program, back before there were actual systems designed to run them.  Building from scratch meant designing a reporting stream (first), and then creating the database structure that would enable such a reporting stream to function.  Rebuilding often meant tweaking the existing system to work properly, but to be honest, most of the time the programs were a veritable shit-show of catastrophes because they had been designed and built by the IT department rather than designed by Marketing.  I would come with an actual drop-in-ready reporting system to start with, that management could tweak or enhance (depending on their specific needs), and a database- and table structure to support it — CEO-level overviews, Buying/Merchandising detailed data, Store Operations (down to store-manager level) and Marketing/Advertising.

I never had a system fail on me, despite all attempts by IT to sabotage or delay implementation.  (I have stories, hoo boy do I have stories…)

If I were running a large-ish business today and needed help in a particular area where I had little experience, I would only hire consultants in the latter group, and probably not even then — it’s always better to find someone who knows the problem and has solved it before than to make it a blank-page project.

But the process guys?  Waste of money, waste of time.

I remember once working for a Great Big Company whose management decided that we needed restructuring, and hired Bain & Co. to consult on the project.  Because most of us peons were pretty smart guys, we soon realized two things:  a) the Bainies were scouting for people and functions they could recommend for termination, and b) the Bainies themselves were only interested in recommendations over a two-year period (the time in which they themselves were going to be judged by their own management).  Consequently, whenever “interviewed” by a Bainie, you had to make sure that in showing them your function and your business plan, that plan had to have a resolution date of at least three or (better yet) five years in the future.  Then they’d lose interest in you and move on to greener pastures.  As I recall, this intelligence was communicated company-wide by jungle telegraph (cafeteria lunch table, phone calls to friends in the branch offices etc.) after the first three days of Bain’s involvement.  (When I told my boss this tale — long after the Bainies had left — he just put his head in his hands and laughed for five minutes.)

I don’t know what Bain finally recommended to our senior management, but I never saw any particular change in the day-to-day.  Quite frankly, the Bain money would have been better spent in performance bonuses, but no doubt the Finance department would have had a shit-fit, for all their usual reasons.

Don’t get me started on Finance…

Old-Time

As an Ole Phartte of some renown, imagine my gleeful chuckles when reading about this man’s requirements for employment at his business:

A Welsh dessert shop boss has shared the most brutal job advert you’ve ever seen on Facebook, but has been universally praised for his no-nonsense attitude.

And if you don’t give at least one approving “attaboy” when you read the ad, we can’t be friends.

Here’s a similar no-nonsense attitude, but in precisely the opposite direction.

We run Britain’s strictest pub – no phones or kids are allowed inside and anyone who swears is BANNED

As one would imagine, I would be in real danger here — although I’ve found that the more I drink, paradoxically, the less I swear.  (Regular Drinking Buddies Mr. Free Market, The Englishman and Doc Russia might contradict this, though.)

Whatever:  I would happily guard my tongue at the Fox & Goose to be free from screaming children and fucking (oops) cell phones.  The only thing that might cause me to give the place a miss is that I’m not that fond of Samuel Smith beer — but then again, life is full of compromises. innit?