At Harrell's Fertilizer, The Mission Is Not Just About Business...

From episode: EP40 - Growing A Better World with Harrell's Fertilizer

Harrell's as a company, one of the things that really was eye -opening for me is just that, Jack Harrell, the foundation, he's a Christian man. He's got integrity and sets a really strong foundation for strong principles that really was attractive. One of the things about Harrell's is that they're very much grown in size. I want to say we're close to like 500 employees. So it's very much corporate, but it's not corporate.

And these are employees that are not a minimum wage guys.

This is real big company nationwide at this point.

Absolutely and one of the things that happened in recent times is that it became a employee owned. Yeah. That was one of the things.

ESOP it's called the employee stock ownership plan, that's called ESOP. And that's where you guys are now part of the business as an employee.

100% And so you get a piece of the pie, it just gives you that, that extra motivation to do good things for the company. Cause it's almost like you're working for yourself because you know, you're going to benefit from success. And also, just the fundamentals, the day to day, you know, you think twice about spending company money because it's really like spending your own money.

Yeah. And your friend that's sitting next to you, your coworker or whoever.

100%.

The values, the values is what really shook me when Ibwas just reading into Jack Harrell Jr., which is the third generation, his great grandfather started this company in 1941 in Florida. And their core values are to serve, honor and glorify God. That's number one. Number two is take care of people. And number three is growing our financial strength or their financial strength. And that is their circle that continues. You put God first, you take care of people and you make sure you're nice and strong for the company. Those are, those are great things. Something else I've written down here is putting their employees first over their customers, because if you don't have happy employees, how are you going to have happy customers? We've all been somewhere that the staff is upset or nasty and bad attitude or whatever it might be anywhere. Somewhere you go to a restaurant, you go anywhere and you could tell that the employees are not happy, you know? So that model really stands out as well and understanding their customers' needs. They'll do anything. They want to be a part of what you're building.