Ideal retirement?

Golf? Family, Travel? Or ... ?

What would an ideal retirement look like?

Travel? Volunteering? Family time, or working on your golf game?

Or does it look like what Jim Koch, the billionaire founder of Boston Beer Company, is doing now that he’s reached his 76th birthday?

His plan: Taking over again as CEO of the company best known for Samuel Adams beer — the job he held from the company’s start in 1984 until 2000.

CEO Michael Spillane stepped down last week for personal reasons. (It wasn't a one-day transition; Spillane gave a few weeks' notice.)

Since Koch has been chairman all this time and has been “actively involved” both in Boston Beer and the beverage industry in general, according to Food Dive, it made sense that he’d step back in, at least temporarily.

Best team ever

“I don’t anticipate doing this in five years. There are multiple people who are not yet ready, but in a couple of years, one or two of them will be,” Koch told The Wall Street Journal, adding that Spillane had helped to develop “the best management team we’ve ever had.”

Here’s what I like especially about this statement:

1. First, it set Koch’s expected tenure: most likely a year or two.

2. Second, it praised the current executive team and telegraphed that Koch expects his eventual successor will come from among that team.

3. Finally, it doesn’t pinpoint who he thinks that person will be — and explicitly says there could be at least two contenders.

I don’t know what it’s like to work for Koch. He's featured prominently in a book I helped write in 2012, but it was my coauthor who did the interviews with him.

From the standpoint of both building up your people and instilling a bit of healthy competition among them, however, this sounds like a very smart rhetorical way to start out.

If you’re curious, the Boston Beer Company website lists seven people on the exec team besides Spillane, Koch, and the husband-and-wife co-founders of Dogfish Head Brewery, which Boston Beer Company acquired in 2019.

It includes the company’s Vice President of Product Design, Research & Development, Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer, Chief Legal Officer (who apparently began working at the company as a temporary employee in 1996, more than a decade before she went to law school), and others.

I asked Boston Beer Company for more information on who among that team Koch might have been talking about when he said he thought “one or two of them” might be ready to take over in a couple of years.

“Your guess is as good as mine!” Dave DeCecco, head of communications, told me in an email. “Naming any names at this point would be pure speculation.”

Pretty clear lesson

If there’s one thing I’ve seen over and over in writing about entrepreneurship and companies, it’s that not having a smart succession plan can be a death knell for good businesses.

Example: Subway, which was once the world’s largest restaurant chain, went through extreme turmoil after the passing of co-founder Fred DeLuca.

Subway eventually recovered; in fact, the company has a new CEO as of a few weeks ago.

Counter-example: How Steve Jobs planned years in advance to hand over the reins of Apple to Tim Cook, having prepped the transition so thoroughly that he was able to recommend it to Apple’s board with just one sentence in a memo.

The lesson is clear, and Koch clearly understands it.

So, raise a glass to putting off retirement.

Sure, travel, volunteering, and family are great.

But how good does your golf game really have to be, anyway?

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7 other things worth knowing

• Elon Musk for J.D. Vance? A month after announcing plans to start a political party, Musk is reportedly pumping the brakes. Instead, Musk and his associates have told people close to him that he is considering using some of his $416 billion net worth to back Vice President Vance for president in 2028. Musk spent at least $300 million on Trump's election in 2024. (WSJ)

• Texas House Democrats tried to use a legal move to block a Republican redistricting effort by adding a trigger that it would not go into effect until the complete release of the Jeffrey Epstein files. The effort was certain to fail in the Republican-controlled Legislature, but was intended to keep the Epstein story in the news and force Republicans to go on record opposing it. (Axios)

• Federal prosecutors in D.C. will no longer seek felony charges against people carrying rifles or shotguns, according to a new policy. Prosecutors had used the D.C. law at issue in the past to charge defendants in several high-profile incidents, including a 2019 shotgun attack in Northeast Washington and the “Pizzagate” shooter who targeted a restaurant in the city’s Chevy Chase neighborhood with an AR-15 rifle and a handgun in 2016. (The Washington Post)

• McDonald’s is lowering the cost of its combo meals, after consumers were left sticker-shocked by Big Mac meals that climbed to $18 in some places. The burger giant’s move follows weeks of discussions between McDonald’s and restaurant operators, including offering financial support if franchisees agreed to drop prices. (WSJ)

• The Richardson's ground squirrel weighs less than a pound, is about a foot long and is native to the northern Plains. The little creature also is a ferocious tunneler, and it’s exasperating the people of Minot, North Dakota, where it's burrowing everywhere from vacant lots to the middle of town, and growing more plentiful. Even the pest control guy leading the charge against the rodent acknowledges that it will be difficult to turn the tide. (MPR News)

• Authorities in Oregon have been trying since Saturday to extinguish a fire in one of the world’s largest trees: a coastal Douglas Fir tree over 325 feet tall and estimated to be over 450 years old. An infrared drone flight on Tuesday showed no active flames or smoke, but it detected heat within a cavity in the tree trunk some 280 feet high. Figuring out how to approach the tree from the side to douse the cavity with water has been a challenge. (ABC News)

• A retired Michigan autoworker received a Facebook message from a stranger: Did you lose your wallet years ago? Turn back the calendar to 2014, and Richard Guliford, now 56, had indeed lost his wallet while working on a car a Ford factory. He and his coworkers searched dozens of cars that day, but eventually gave up. Eleven years and 150,000 miles later, it turned out it had been in the engine bay of a 2015 Ford Edge the entire time. (CBC)

Thanks for reading. Photo by Meg on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this before at Inc.com. See you in the comments.