Betty Buck
_________________
Ready for Anything
Betty Buck answered the phone at 7:00 AM
on Monday morning, still groggy from her red-eye
flight from Carmel, California, where she and her
company had redeemed their prize vacation for
winning the Miller High Life Achievement Award.
It was a nurse on the phone, informing her she had
to be at her doctor’s office by noon. Betty’s
stomach turned, and she immediately called for
her best friend to come over. She knew she would
need moral support for whatever the doctor
needed to tell her.
For weeks, Betty had been
in unbearable pain, such that she
needed to consume an entire bottle
of extra-strength Tylenol everyday
just to go about her daily life. Her
previous doctor had assured her it
was all stress-related, which wasn’t
entirely far-fetched considering her
beloved father had just passed
away, she was in the middle of a
divorce, and she had just taken over
the
family
company
Buck
Distributimg Company.
But the
pain was so deep and so consistent
that she knew in her heart something was terribly
wrong.
When she arrived at the hospital, her
doctor told her she had a progressed form of
ovarian cervical cancer, and that at 8:00 AM the
next morning, they were going to perform surgery
to remove the 18 golf ball-sized cysts they’d found.
“They told me my chances weren’t good, but that
they’d do their best,” she says. “So I left and had
five hours to tell my family, friends, and
employees what was going on before I had to
come back to prepare for surgery. In a single
moment, I had to put my entire life on hold.”
During surgery the next day, the doctor
found her condition was even worse than he had
thought. The surgery took longer than expected,
but despite the odds, it was successful. She spent
three more weeks in the hospital recovering, but
with the help of her friends and coworkers, who
kept the company running smoothly and looked
after her three children (five, seven, and eight at
the time), she was able to step back into her life
without skipping a beat. “I never once doubted
that I would be alright,” she says. “I had just gone
through a horrific divorce, and my ex-husband
decided he didn’t want to see our children
anymore, so I simply did not believe in my soul
that God would leave my children parentless. I
was adopted and always promised that I would
give back what I was given, and I hadn’t finished
doing that for my kids yet.”
Today, Betty is back in full
health and the President and CEO
of Buck Distributing Company, a
malt
beverage
distributor
headquarters in Upper Marlboro,
Maryland. They focus mainly on
beers and crafts, and as of recently
have begun to dabble in wine and
liquors as well, distributing to all of
Southern Maryland and parts of the
Eastern Shore. Her father started
the company in 1946 from one
brewery in Cumberland and a
single truck, which he used to personally
distribute his beer. For years, he maintained his
small but dedicated brewing business, until Miller
selected him from hundreds of candidates to be
their Southern Maryland distributor. Since then,
the company has taken on countless kinds of beers,
from Rolling Rock to Yuengling to many craft
beers, so that today, comprised of 128 employees,
the company sells five million cases a year.
It seems only natural that Betty would
now be the head of the company her father started
nearly seven decades ago. Growing up, she was a
self-described “dedicated Daddy’s Girl,” following
her father everywhere and mimicking what she
observed, such that her Barbie Dolls rode tractors
and unloaded cases of beer. As soon as she was
able to walk, her father would wake her up every
Saturday morning to bring her to the warehouse,
where she’d play or get into trouble. “My mother
Betty Buck
believed girls should never wear pants,” she
recalls. “So she’d put me in a little dress with
white socks and black buckle shoes and send me
off to the warehouse with Daddy, only to be
horrified by how dirty I was when I came home.”
Betty started formally helping out at the
warehouse around six years old doing whatever
her Dad asked her to do, whether it was cleaning
toilets or salvaging bottles from cases of broken
glass to be repacked. “I wanted to do it because it
gave me a sense of independence,” she laughs. “It
was fun for me, and I loved going down and
messing around with the guys. We’d all have
lunch together on Saturdays, and Dad would make
sure they cleaned up their language when I was
around. It was like family.”
Betty’s parents had always wanted
children, but after three stillbirths, they realized
adoption was the path for their family to take.
They first adopted their son Howard, and then
Betty ten months later, just hours after she’d been
born. She was not aware she’d been adopted until
one day at Sunday School when Betty was six
years old, her childhood friend Becky announced,
“Betty Jane, you can’t come to my birthday party
because you have adoption.” Naturally, Betty was
horrified, assuming that to have “adoption” must
be synonymous with some terrible disease like the
measles. When she went crying to her mother, her
parents decided the time was right to sit their
children down and tell them the full story. “We
weren’t at all bothered by the news because my
parents raised us so that we knew how very loved
we were,” she comments.
While Betty spent most of her time at the
warehouse with her father, her brother, Howard,
had gotten into just enough trouble to land him a
spot at Charlotte Hall Military Academy. Their
father wanted to ensure Betty stayed out of
trouble, so, much to her horror, he looked into an
all-girls boarding school for her to attend. She
desperately wanted to stay home with her parents
and attend a public school with her friends, so
father and daughter struck a deal that she could
stay as long as she got straight A’s in every class
she took until graduation. “The only class I came
close to not making an A in was in chemistry in
eleventh grade,” she admits. “I was one point shy
of that A, so I begged my teacher to let me write
extra credit assignments and clean beakers for all
hours after school—anything so that I wouldn’t
have to be sent away to boarding school. I
explained the situation to my teacher, and he could
barely believe it. He gave me the extra point, but
to this day, I think he gave it to me as a gift.”
When Betty was not devoted to her
studies, she kept busy by giving back or getting
involved in her community. She was a cheerleader
and basketball statistician, and on weekends and
over vacations, she volunteered at the main office
of her high school. When she was old enough, she
began working at a dress shop, and eventually, as
a lifeguard. “In our family, you worked,” she
laughs. “You never sat around or spent your
summer lounging by the pool. You always had a
job, even if you weren’t paid for it. That was
certainly a life lesson I learned growing up, which
I think ultimately helped me fight my battle with
cancer.” It also taught her to never take no for an
answer, like when she tried to join the boys’
baseball team. “Coaches from other teams got
upset, but I tried out just like everyone else. I was
better than a lot of the boys,” she smiles. “I even
beat my old boyfriend out of third base. He was so
mad he wouldn’t take me to the prom, so some
other boy did instead.”
While she was tough on the boys, her
father was tough on her. Most often, he refused to
let her out of his sight, such that when she was
sixteen, he bought her a canary-yellow Gold
Duster with a block engine. “He wanted to make
sure he could not only see me coming from twenty
miles away, but also hear me,” she laughs. “He
knew everyone in town and made sure they kept
him updated on my whereabouts. If I was driving
up to the warehouse, he’d know who I was with
and what I was wearing before I even arrived.”
Before graduating high school, Betty was
awarded a full scholarship to Lawrence University
to play classical piano. She desperately wanted to
go because she had earned her spot there after
years of hard work and practice, but her father
decided Appleton, Wisconsin was simply too far
away, and that she would be better suited at the
University of Maryland. Even after she gave in
and started at the University of Maryland, he
would get in touch with his business friends on
campus to find out where she was tutoring and
when, so that he could conveniently run into her.
“I was so mad at him that I changed all my classes
and refused to come home, so I didn’t see him
from August to Christmas Eve,” she says.
Despite her efforts to make the best of her
college experience, Betty felt too unsettled by the
Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area
vastness and impersonal nature of the university,
so she took a job at the National Association of
Manufacturers in D.C. after her first year and
never looked back.
“I was 18, making good
money, making lots of friends, and visiting New
York City every week, so I was just having a ball,”
she says.
In a mere matter of months, however, her
father asked her to leave her job to join the family
business and computerize the company. “I was
still mad at him for the whole issue with college, so
I told him I would only come if he gave me a
contract that specifically set aside an amount of
money for me to spend on technology that he
couldn’t touch, and of course he said no,” she says.
“We are both hard-headed people, and I was
trying to teach him a lesson, so for two weeks, we
didn’t say a single word to each other, even at the
dinner table.” At the end of the two weeks, her
father came home and threw a legal contract in
front of her that his lawyer had drawn up, which
specifically met her demands. “He upheld his end
of the deal, so in 1975, despite a salary cut, I joined
Buck Distributing,” she says. “Since that time, I
only had to pull out that contract once when he
was being difficult.”
Betty spent the next ten years modernizing
the company, which, for a company that has a
tendency to retain employees for decades, has been
on ongoing process. Her father was naturally
gifted at math, with the ability to store all the
necessary numbers and details in his head, so it
was a long road to shift the company culture away
from taking notes on the backs of envelopes, to
putting every piece of information in a database
and becoming familiar with the iPad as a daily
workplace necessity.
Betty never directly asked her father for
more responsibility, but she never had to.
Gradually, he began assigning her more and more
tasks. “He would come to me and say, ‘I don’t
have the patience for the politics anymore, so I
want you to take over the Chamber of Commerce
activity,’” she says. “After I’d do one thing, he’d
pass off another task to me, and then another and
another.”
This pattern continued until one day, in
1985, he told her he just was not hungry anymore,
and he wanted her to take over the company. His
news came as a surprise for everyone, but even
more shocking was his ability to completely step
away and let Betty take the lead. “We would have
coffee together at the office after he stepped down,
and once I asked him for his advice on a huge
decision I had to make for the company,” she says.
“He refused to tell me anything, even though the
wrong decision would have cost us $25,000. I
ended up making the wrong decision anyway, and
I asked him how he could have knowingly let me
do that. He just said I had to learn that is was okay
to make mistakes, and that usually, they were
always fixable.”
Betty’s transition to taking over the
company was far more complicated than simply
taking her father’s place. Because the company
represents Miller, Betty had to travel to Milwaukee
to seek approval from the president of Miller,
Leonard Goldstein; however, Betty had known
Goldstein for most of her life, and naively felt it
would be a seamless transition. When she arrived
in Milwaukee and told Goldstein that her father
was retiring and planned to hand his position over
to her, the President was stunned. “The problem
was that I was I was a woman, and I was 28, so I
would be the youngest person to ever run the
company,” she explains. The President decided to
call an emergency meeting with all the Vice
Presidents, who put together a list of classes and
sales targets she would have six months to
accomplish before they even considered her.
Being the savvy businesswoman that she
is, Betty agreed to their decision and returned
home to accomplish the tasks, all the while caring
for her three small children and running her
company.
Almost as soon as she took the
assignment, however, her luck turned, and it
seemed every possible obstacle was out to keep her
from her goal. “All three of my children got the
chicken pox, and a month later I caught my
husband cheating, so I suddenly had a divorce on
my hands as well,” she says. The most trying of it
all, however, occurred when she was in
Milwaukee for a class, and received news that her
father had suffered a massive heart attack.
She raced home and spent the following
weeks sleeping in the Intensive Care Unit, since
she was the only one who could keep him calm. “I
was there every night, and we had some of the
most amazing conversations I’ve had in my entire
life,” she says. “He asked me one night if he’d
ever really hurt me, and I told him the one time
was when I was 16 and got in my first car accident.
He came out to make sure everything was all right,
but then he just left me there. Of all the times my
Betty Buck
older brother got in trouble, he never once left him
behind, but the one time I did, he left me to fend
for myself. When I asked him why he did it, he
started crying and said he did it because I didn’t
need him. I could handle it, but he was sorry for
having hurt me.”
To everyone’s surprise, her father
stabilized enough to go home, so shortly after,
Betty returned to Milwaukee to finish her
remaining classes and then awaited the President’s
final decision. “I stood up at that meeting and told
them, ‘Don’t even think about telling me no. I did
everything you asked in less time than you gave
me, and all my reports are better than you
required me to do. I don’t want to play your
game. I’m capable of doing this, and my father,
who you all love and trust, believes in me more
than anyone else for this position,’” she recounts.
“They approved me, and Goldstein joked that
none of them had the guts to tell me no after all I’d
been through.”
One of her first major accomplishments as
the new owner of Buck Distributing was to honor
all the hard work her father had done during his
career, so Betty entered the company into a
prestigious contest for highest beer sales. After
submitting endless reports and paperwork, they
managed to win the Miller Masters Award. “We
didn’t tell Dad we had won; instead, we hung the
huge banner they gave us outside the warehouse
for him to see when he drove up to work,” she
says. “He was always this big, 6’8” tough guy, and
that banner made him cry, he was so proud.
We’ve managed to win it every year since.”
The Buck family celebrated Betty’s
accomplishments until, in July of 1986, her father
succumbed to his failing health and passed away,
and barely any time passed before Betty started
experiencing the ominous pain that would turn
into her battle with cancer. She had the tests done
the day before she left for the Miller High Life trip
in California, so while it was a wonderful time, she
felt troubled and unsettled for most of the
vacation. “I went driving around by myself to try
and find some peace, and I ended up finding the
Carmel Mission, which is just a beautiful place,”
she recalls. “I met a monk there who insisted I
walk with him to look at the children’s festival
they were hosting, and I finally found my peace
that day. I truly believe that experience helped
keep me calm during my surgeries and the
aftermath.”
Since triumphing in her battle with cancer,
Betty has brought Buck Distributing to a new level
of success. She’s grown the company, doubled
sales, and won countless awards, all of which she
feels sure is the direct result of her strong team.
“As a leader, I make sure I pick the best team to
surround myself with, so I can trust them to do
their jobs and make the right decision,” she says.
“I don’t like to micromanage. I like to let people
do what they know how to do, and so far, my team
has been exceptional at doing just that.” Even with
all her success, she has always made an extra effort
to give back to her community in any way she can,
be it through a company golf tournament to raise
money for Cerebral Palsy research, to mentoring
children and volunteering at the Boys and Girls
Club. She also makes a point to spend time with
young people entering the business world so she
can share her leadership experience and advice. “I
always tell them to pursue something they have a
passion for,” she says. “But no matter what, they
have to give back. There will always be someone
who has less than you, and even doing the smallest
thing can mean the world to someone else.”
While she is proud of her awards and
business success, her greatest accomplishments are
her four children, three of which are biological,
and one who was adopted after her divorce. “I
always wanted to give back the way my parents
did, so I adopted my youngest son, Timmy,” she
says. “I’ve been open with him from the start that
he is my special gift, and I let him know that if he
ever wanted to seek out his biological mother, I’d
help him. I sought out my biological half-sister,
and we were very close until she died of brain
cancer last year, but it was such a gift to find her. I
would want that for my son as well.” Beyond
Timmy, Betty’s family has continued to grow with
the addition of her loving husband, whose she
been with for the past ten years, and his two
children.
As her company continues to excel, Betty
hopes to pass the legacy of her company on to her
children, who have all sought to get involved. Her
oldest daughter, Kelly, is the Craft Beer Specialty
Manager, while her second daughter, Erin, is the
Sales Manager. As of recently, her youngest son,
Tim, decided to join the business as well, and Betty
has started all of her children where her father
started her: at the bottom, helping on the delivery
trucks. “I know family businesses can be hard, but
I think we do so well because we’ve never allowed
Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area
each other to cut corners,” she says. “I think the
fact that my father was hard on me made me tough
in business and in life, so now I’m treating my kids
the same way, so that when the company is ready
to pass on to the third generation, they will be
ready for anything.”
© June 2013 Gordon J. Bernhardt. All rights
reserved. Reprinted by permission.
 By Gordon J. Bernhardt, CPA, PFS, CFP ®, AIF®
President and founder of Bernhardt Wealth
Management and author of Profiles in Success:
Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the
Washington D.C. Area, Gordon provides financial
planning and wealth management services to affluent
individuals, families and business-owners throughout
the Washington, DC area. Since establishing his firm in
1994, he and his team have been focused on providing
high-quality service and independent financial advice to
help clients make informed decisions about their money.
For more information, visit www.BernhardtWealth.com
and Gordon’s Blog.
About Gordon J. Bernhardt
________________________
Betty Buck
Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area