When the
going got tough, David Ingram got into beer. As the Great Recession began,
Ingram Entertainment faced a challenging marketplace for distributing DVDs,
video games and other home entertainment products. In response, Ingram launched
an entirely new business — DBI Beverage — operating beer distributorships.
It may have
seemed an unusual choice, but it was a calculated one. By 2007, the video
business had so thoroughly changed that less than 10 percent of sales went
through wholesale distribution channels. Beer was different. “Picking beer,”
Ingram explains, “was the culmination of a concerted effort to look for an
industry that would likely undergo consolidation and play to the strengths of
our management team.”
And Ingram
didn’t abandon the home entertainment business. Instead, he leveraged the
individual strengths of his two companies to help each succeed. Industry giants
noticed. Pete Coors, Chairman of Molson Coors Brewing Co. and MillerCoors,
became well acquainted with Ingram. “David,” he says, “is a creative and
innovative thinker who is always in search of new ways to improve and grow his
business.”
Jim Bradford,
Owen’s dean from 2005 to 2013, noticed, too. When he established a Board of
Visitors to serve as a strategic partner to the school, he asked Ingram to lead
it. Just as he had helped his own companies evolve and grow, the Board of
Visitors under Ingram’s leadership helped Bradford launch several innovative
new programs at Owen, including the Health Care MBA, the Master of Management
in Healthcare, the MS Finance and Master of Accounting, and the Summer Business
Accelerator.
For both
Vanderbilt and his own companies, Ingram was simply applying a lesson he had
learned from his father, Bronson: “In any business, if you’re not growing,
you’re dying.”