New head of Beer Institute wants to grow organization, bringing into the fold many new industry players that have sprung up recently

McGreevy

It could be observed that when Jim McGreevy joined the Beer Institute as CEO in June, he was getting back into the family business.

McGreevy's family once owned a bar in Belleville, N.J., named "McGreevy's Tavern." The establishment had been in the family since the end of Prohibition, when the CEO's grandfather converted a barn on his property into a bar.

"My father worked there in the evenings when I was a kid, and occasionally I would go with him to the bar and run around with my cousin Michael. We would be in and out of the bar. He lived in the house next door," McGreevy recalled.

McGreevy's Tavern is gone. His cousin sold the bar and it has since been converted into a Portuguese restaurant. And now McGreevy himself represents what he says was the most popular product sold there: beer.

McGreevy, 50, joined the $5M-revenue Beer Institute after a 10-year stint as a lobbyist at the American Beverage Association. At ABA, he led fights against efforts to impose taxes on soda products and to cut soda purchases from the federal food stamp program.

Now instead of representing non-alcoholic beverages, McGreevy will speak for some of the largest beer makers in the world. In a recent interview, the new CEO talked with some surprise about the path his career has taken, given he had never expected to end up in a trade association or even in Washington, D.C.

A long history

The Beer Institute is one of the oldest trade groups in the nation, although it has only existed in its current form for roughly 30 years. Its roots go back to the Civil War when a group of U.S. brewers, all German immigrants, formed the U.S. Brewers Association in 1862 to tackle federal taxes that had just been imposed on their products.

The Brewers Association was reorganized into the Beer Institute in 1986. Jeff Becker led the association for many years but died in 2010 while still president. The board of directors then tapped former U.S. Navy Capt. Joe McClain to head the group. He stepped down in 2013, opening the door for a new leader.

McGreevy said he had just started thinking about running an association when he got a call from a recruiter about the opportunity. At the time, he was senior vice president of government affairs at ABA.

"ABA is a good place to work, but I had been in government affairs for close to 10 years," McGreevy said. "I had developed a number of skills that I thought were transferable to other associations."

An association career originally hadn't been in McGreevy's game plan. He had been involved in politics, working on some campaigns, and even spent a year in D.C. in the early 1990s. He was working as a lobbyist in the Minnesota Legislature when his wife, Rachel McGreevy, landed a lobbying job with the International Council of Shopping Centers in 2004. (She is now vice president of state government affairs and community outreach for MasterCard.)

"Up until nine years ago I really didn't spend any time in D.C., and even the first five years I wasn't doing federal work, I was doing state work," he said. "So maybe I'm an anomaly that way among trade association executives. I really have a state background and, for many years, a state focus."

Brewing a business plan

When the opportunity came to vie for the Beer Institute post, McGreevy took it. He made his case to the association board not only by spelling out his vision for where he could take the organization, but by pointing to his record of accomplishment.

"I wanted to get across to the board that I was a leader, and I had shown that in the various issues I had dealt with in the government affairs world," he said.

McGreevy wants to grow the Beer Institute beyond its roughly 100 member companies. The brewing industry has been growing, but most of that growth has occurred in smaller craft breweries, not in the larger brewers the institute had traditionally represented.

It could be a tough sale. Large and small brewers have clashed in recent years over beer excise taxes, with each side pushing its own version of tax reform in Congress. But McGreevy said there are other issues that all sides can agree on, whether it is bringing aluminum prices under control (since many brewers can their beer) or opposing proposed federal rules on how breweries could dispose of spent grain.

"My view of dealing with disagreement is to start by finding what people agree on and start from there," he said. Referring to his time at ABA: "Certainly Coke and Pepsi are fierce competitors, and oftentimes they didn't agree on an approach to an issue. You just got to work through that, and that is why I think communications is such an important issue."