Being an innovative businessman sometimes means thinking outside the box. For instance, Rahr has informally supplied capital as well as pharmaceuticals to some 200 of his company’s customers with loans to assist in the acquisition of another drugstore or to cover shortfalls. “It’s become a small lending business in and of itself,” Rahr says of the program, which today has grown to $30 million in loans. “They don’t need to go to a bank; I am the bank.” (Now that’s customer service!) Similarly, Rahr aids those closest to him as well, having helped many employees—he refers to them as his “Kinray family”—to get out of debt or to become homeowners. “If I could cut my heart out for him, I would,” Lenny Romano, Kinray Vice President of Operations, said six years ago after Rahr bought him a condo when Romano lost his house in a bitter divorce.
“I never paid any attention to the nay-sayers, and there were countless numbers of them. I believed in myself and the many bright individuals I surrounded myself with.”
—Stewart Rahr
Success also means being tough when it’s needed ... in fact, one employee has referred to Rahr as a “pit bull” when he encounters injustice. This side of his personality was dramatically displayed in 1998 after Rahr lost a $12 million stake in Continental Investment Corporation, a Texas firm. Rahr brought a civil case against two of the company’s executives, alleging that they had deceived him and hundreds of shareholders into thinking that Continental would profit by turning a giant granite pit near Atlanta into a landfill (an engineer’s report, discovered by Rahr, proved the land was unusable as a dumping site). It cost him an additional $15 million in legal fees, but justice won out; the jury awarded Rahr and the other shareholders a $233 million verdict against Continental’s former executives (two of whom went to jail), and their lawyers were disbarred. “They destroyed plenty of lives,” Rahr said at the time. “Now they’ll never hurt anyone again ... I’m the wrong man to anger.” Justice, yes. But justice doesn’t always come cheap; the company is now defunct and Rahr has never seen a dime from the effort.
By following both Churchill’s philosophy that one makes a worthwhile life through giving as well as one of his own guidelines for a rewarding life—“We all should cherish yesterday, we all should dream for tomorrow, but we should make a life for today”—Rahr admits “I’ve made quite a life for myself.”
Making that “life for today,” Rahr is presently and aggressively moving into new ventures. “We’re getting involved in film and recording [Rah Rah Records, of course], restaurants [Rah Rah Restaurants], and distributing sunglasses [his signature yellow Rah Rah Ray-Bans],” he adds. “In addition, we’re looking for office space in Manhattan to expand the philanthropy as well as house my new ventures and eventually a foundation.”
Clearly, the future for Stewart Rahr can only hold countless undreamed challenges, rewarding opportunities, and, as he describes it, more of the “joyful work” for which he harvests so much “rah-spect.”
Rah Rah Stewie!
