The Fall of a Dynastic Fortune with Frances Stroh

Imagine what it must be like to watch your family dynasty crumble before your eyes.

My guest is Frances Stroh, fifth-generation member of the Stroh brewery dynasty and award-winning author of: Beer Money: A Memoir of Privilege and Loss. 

By the mid-1980s, Frances’s family, having founded Detroit’s Stroh Brewing Company in the 1850s, held the largest private beer fortune in America. But a little over a decade later, that $9 billion dynasty had collapsed.

In this episode, Frances reflects on the problems that led to the value destruction and tells a cautionary tale for enterprising families everywhere about entitlement and the vagaries of fortune.

Frances and I also discuss the conflicting messages she received growing up from parents who had extremely different money habits – a frugal mother and a spendy father – and what led her to cultivate a more balanced relationship with money and forge her own path apart from her illustrious family.

Today, Frances is an advisor to families with generational wealth, coaching them on how to best implement thoughtful succession plans and set up future generations for success. In our conversation, she urges inheritors to consider the importance of carving out your own identity and she warns against the dangers of overidentification with a family brand.

To find out more about Frances’ story growing up in the Stroh family, you can read her 2016 book Beer Money: A Memoir of Privilege and Loss. To contact Frances about her advisory services, visit www.francesstroh.com

Serious Coin is hosted by Kelly Willis Green. Having spent a career working in wealth management as a marketing executive and having come into affluence through marriage, she brings both a personal and professional perspective on wealth.

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