N.H. Scheppers stays in family with Priesmeyer as president

In 1952, Joe Priesmeyer’s grandfather Norb Scheppers made the trip to St. Louis to acquire the exclusive distribution rights for Anheuser-Busch products in Boone and Callaway counties. That territory quickly expanded to include Cole and parts of Moniteau and Osage counties.
Today, Joe Priesmeyer is the new president of N.H. Scheppers and assumed leadership of the company his grandfather started more than 50 years ago. He takes the place of Joe Scheppers, his uncle. Scheppers will stay on as chairman of the company involved in strategic planning but not in the day-to-day operations of the business.

“It’s a family business,” Priesmeyer said. “What I really like about this company is that we try to keep it a family business. We view people when they come here as part of the family. You put a Budweiser logo on the side of the building, and it feels like you are part of something bigger, which you really are, but there’s still that family feel.”
Priesmeyer started working in the warehouse of the company while he was a student at Hickman High School. He left for college — recruited for diving to New York City’s Columbia University — but returned to Columbia to work in the summers.
He planned to stay in New York when he graduated from Columbia with a degree in psychology but couldn’t find a job.
“I kind of came home to regroup because I wasn’t really sure of what I was going to do,” Priesmeyer said. “I went to work in the warehouse to make some extra cash and ended up never leaving. I fell back in love with Columbia.”

From the warehouse, Priesmeyer found himself moving to a wide range of positions in the company. “It is a small business, so roles are not so defined,” he said. “Everyone ends up chipping in and doing whatever needs to get done.”

One of his earliest jobs, when Columbia still had an aluminum can deposit ordinance, was to collect cans, crush them and haul them off for recycling. Priesmeyer said it was the kind of job that might appear on the Discovery Channel’s program Dirty Jobs.
“It was not fun,” he said.
Priesmeyer said he filled pretty much every role in the office, including the position he held immediately before assuming the presidency: vice president of sales and marketing.
“I just kept working my way around until I knew as much about the business as anybody,” he said. “I just kind of found myself in the position where I am now.”

Today, N.H. Scheppers employs about 70 people, split between facilities in Columbia and Jefferson City. The company’s primary focus is still on Anheuser-Busch products, but it has recently begun to expand into new lines.
Priesmeyer said Anheuser-Busch has a 70-share of the beer market in his company’s territory, which means that about 70 percent of the beer sold there is an Anheuser-Busch product, and that one of the best ways to expand is to sell a variety of products.
The company is exploring a broad range of new products such as high-end sodas, energy drinks, waters, mixers, Dad’s root beer and tea, he said.

“Monster energy drinks really got us started,” Priesmeyer said. “That’s what showed us we could be successful with different kinds of products.”
Tracy Lane, executive director of Ragtag Cinema and the True/False Film Festival, has worked with Scheppers since the early 1990s, when she was general manager of The Blue Note. Scheppers makes the local sponsorship decisions for the products it distributes, and Lane persuaded Priesmeyer to add Mountain Valley bottled water as a sponsor of the film festival this year.

“Joe was always really personable and a great person to work with,” Lane said. “I knew with all of the changes last year with Budweiser that they were looking to get into products other than beer. I thought Mountain Valley water was just really good water and would be a great partner for True/False.”
Priesmeyer said one of the things he likes best about N.H. Scheppers is the opportunity it has for community involvement.
“Because of our size, we get to interact in the community in a way that others may not get to interact,” he said. “We can be more involved. We feel like we are ingrained both in Columbia and Jeff City.”