George Garvin Brown IV cut his teeth in the spirits and wine business founded by his great-great-grandfather by selling Bolla Soave to Italian-Americans in Brooklyn.
The experience still looms large for Brown, BA’91, more than 20 years removed from that debut and now chairman of the board at Brown-Forman, whose iconic brands include Jack Daniel’s and Old Forester whiskeys and Finlandia vodka.
“There’s not a week that goes by where I don’t use something I learned in those days at work,” says Brown of the New York sales position in Brown-Forman’s wine division.
He really enjoyed the “salt of the earth” outer borough New Yorkers that he worked with, he says over the phone from his home base in London. It was also an adjustment period. Asked if he liked working in the family business from the get-go, Brown is candid. “Not, necessarily, no.
“I struggled in many ways. When you’re a fifth generation family member with the founder’s name, you have these absurd expectations that… an ancestral hand is going to poke out from the clouds and pat you on the back when you walk through the doors on your first day – and it never happens,” says Brown, who goes by his middle name Garvin.
“So emotionally, I think that the average family business guy probably struggles with misaligned expectations in the first couple of years.”
George Garvin Brown, a pharmaceuticals salesman, founded the company in 1870 in Louisville, Kentucky. The publicly traded, family-controlled business, which still has its headquarters there, recorded $4 billion in sales in 2016.
Growing up in Westmount with his mother and brother after his parents divorced, Brown initially wanted to be a lawyer living in Montreal. Other relatives had gravitated to the profession, including his grandfather who served as a judge on the Quebec Court of Appeal for 32 years.
Youthful ambitions are rarely set in stone, and Brown’s interest in pursuing law faded. While doing a master’s in political science at the University of British Columbia, Brown visited his older brother, who was then working for Brown-Forman in Chicago. The visit stirred up old feelings about the family business.
“It had always tugged at my heartstrings,” says Brown, who has been the chairman of the company’s board since 2007.
He returned to the classroom a few years later after his start with Brown-Forman, heading overseas with his wife to get his MBA at the London Business School.
“We have a rule that if you’re a family member you need two degrees to work in the business,” says Brown. While he already had two degrees under his belt, Brown felt like he had met the letter, but not the spirit of the law.
“And I wanted to brush up on my quantitative skills. I don’t think I was yet ready to commit to a lifetime at Brown-Forman either.”
He returned to the company in 2001, and has worked in various roles, including executive vice president and senior vice president and managing director of Western Europe and Africa.
Shepherding the 147-year-old company’s famous brands is a huge responsibility for the entire team, he acknowledges.
“Whenever we feel like we’re at a crossroads in how to steward these brands, the short answer is that you dig into the core of the brand and you look for the answers in the brand values. And whenever I’m in a conundrum I always ask myself what would Mr. Jack [Daniel] do in this situation,” he says.
“And that question inevitably will lead you to the right answer on how to steward that brand.”
Consumers have come back to flavour in recent years, he says. “You see that, of course, in the spirits category where whiskey is now growing again, but you also see it [elsewhere]. Look at the world of coffee. We all used to drink Nescafé and now people go to Starbucks and order double espresso macchiatos.”
Brown spirits, single malts, Irish whiskey, bourbon and Tennessee whiskey have all been enjoying a real uptick, Brown says. “Rye now is a category that’s doing well. We’re bringing out a Jack Daniel’s rye this year. In the world of bourbon, our founding brand, Old Forester, which was the one that my great-great-grandfather started with in 1870, has been one of our fastest growing brands for the last four years.”
Brown looks back fondly on his time at McGill where he studied political science and history. “I absolutely loved it,” he says. He met his wife at McGill and loved living in the McGill Ghetto. He now chairs the advisory group for McGill in the U.K. and Europe and still considers himself a Montrealer.
“I miss Montreal at least once a week…Ça me manque.”
