Like any good chairman of a multimillion-dollar beverage company, Don Vultaggio knows that distribution is a key to success. But unlike most high-flying executives, Vultaggio, head of privately owned Ferolito, Vultaggio & Sons, maker of the popular Arizona brand of iced tea, will spend a Friday night on a forklift. On a recent evening, Vultaggio, in jeans and an untucked T shirt, zipped around a steamy, 30,000-sq.-ft. Tampa, Fla., warehouse on a hi-low, moving pallets to fit 3 million cans, bottles and gallon jugs of Arizona into the space. Vultaggio had flown from his Lake Success, N.Y., headquarters early that morning to reorganize the space, stopping first in Orlando, Fla., to shake hands with Arnold Palmer, whose face graces the can of Arizona's half-iced-tea, half-lemonade drink. But forget about lounging at the 19th hole: Vultaggio worked the warehouse until 3 a.m., then returned for a 10-hour shift on Saturday. Asked whether he would rather be hanging out with an American icon, Vultaggio says, "What do you think? Doesn't this look more fun?"
Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., Vultaggio prefers the forklift to the corner office because he is more at home on the warehouse floor. "Some may call that micromanaging," says Vultaggio of his hands-on approach. "I don't know what that is. To me, it's just normal."
Vultaggio is the blue-collar anti-CEO, a former truck driver and Brooklyn beer distributor who, with innovative packaging and consumer-friendly pricing, has built Arizona into the fastest-growing major bottled-tea brand in the country. And he has done it on his own terms, dismissing the conventional wisdom about management (chairmen schmooze; they don't reorganize warehouses in the middle of the night), finances (entrepreneurs sell out or go public as soon as they can) and marketing (consumer companies spend at least a few bucks on advertising to consumers) along the way. "Don came up from the bottom and did not forget the lessons he learned from the street," says John Vaccaro, owner of Bett-A-Way Traffic Systems in South Plainfield, N.J., Arizona's national logistics provider for the past 14 years. "Now he's a street fighter in the boardroom."
Vultaggio treats the battle for supremacy in the $3.5 billion ready-to-drink tea category like a heavyweight bout, and he plays the role of the trash-talking underdog. He dismisses Lipton (made by Pepsi and Unilever) and Nestea (a Coke-Nestlé partnership) as "garbage." His advice to Coke: "Fire those people [the marketing executives]. Put them on a truck, and run them south. They're out there covering their asses." Vultaggio gloats about the fate of Snapple, once a proud independent like Arizona, that was swallowed and spit out by Quaker Oats and is now part of Cadbury-Schweppes. To its owners, he says, Snapple is "not even worth talking about." The soft-drink superpowers feel similarly about him. They refused to bash back.