Richard t farmer biography examples

This model embraces the entrepreneurial spirit and utilizes the collective intelligence of all team members. At Cintas, every facility operates as a separate profit center, and employees are incentivized through a generous profit-sharing program and company ownership. With an unwavering commitment to exceeding customer expectations and a strong drive for continuous improvement, Cintas has a distinct competitive advantage that is difficult for other companies to match.

The engaging book " Rags to Riches - How Corporate Culture Spawned a Great Company " tells the inspiring story of Cintas, written by the late Richard [Dick] Farmerwho was at the richard t farmer biography examples of the business for over five decades. Below are some of my favorite extracts from the book. Once again, we can observe the same timeless qualitative features that have been identified in many other successful businesses discussed in previous posts.

If you are observant, you will notice that most of the checklist items extracted from the recent study of the National Cash Register Company are prominently displayed at Cintas. It is the invisible force behind the tangibles and observables in an organisation. It is a major reason Cintas is different from competitors and other companies. It is our ultimate competitive advantage.

These are just a few of the values included in the Cintas culture and spirit. It is our planned approach to business. And every Cintas Partner must be aware of this approach. I swore that I would do whatever it took to develop obvious and authentic competitive advantages. I'm talking—again—about our corporate culture. By the time our competitors figured it out, we moved on to the next thing.

We've held that edge until this day and we hope to hold it forever. For shareholders, we wanted to maximize the value of the stock. For working partners, we wanted to maximize the value of the stock because they were owners through an Employee Stock Ownership Plan ESOP and we also wanted to maximize their career opportunities. Growth obviously provides career opportunities.

The only way to accomplish this was to exceed our customers' expectations. We want to exceed their expectations and make them raving fans of Cintas. The answer is simple. We have run our business to satisfy the needs of our customers. We try to exceed every customer requirement every time. When making business decisions we always ask how this decision will benefit our customers.

That is the attitude required to successfully compete and at Cintas, we pursue it with a passion you can feel. We have only two kinds of partners at Cintas: those who serve customers, and those who serve the people that do. Our working partners realize that their paychecks do not come from Cintas; they come from our customers. And so, as I added key people, I saw to it that they were owners and partners in the business.

What is important, I thought, is what your piece of the corporate pie is worth, not what percentage of the pie you own. I needed people who could make my piece of the pie more valuable. I wanted them to think of themselves as partners. Everything else depended on how he or she performed. They got six percent of their profit after expensing all corporate overhead and local taxes, but not federal taxes.

We still do it that way today. So the six percent of profits yields a very nice income. Today, general managers at Cintas are by far the best paid in the industry and in many other industries as well. They are running a business. They report to a group vice president, who has other plants reporting to him or her. This vice president also has a modest salary and gets most of his annual compensation in the form of a bonus based on the profits of his or her group.

I kept saying to myself, I want everybody to be a Dick Farmer. That may sound like I was letting my ego get out of richard t farmer biography examples, but the point was that I wanted everybody to be in business for themselves. We obviously had to have some centralized rules and procedures, but the goal was to give everyone as much latitude as possible to run their business.

As a result we became much more performance-oriented in our compensation system than the vast majority of companies I know. We wanted each satellite's profit centre to be run by a general manager who had excellent local knowledgeproviding the sort of service that only small, local companies can. This would be a classic balancing act. We'd be a big company nationally—but a small company in each locality.

We had been growing so fast that we were hiring out of desperation instead of hiring meticulously… [We] put together a program to lower our employee turnover. The first thing we had to do was measure the turnover, by location and by job classification. The second thing we had to do was determine the reason some-one left. We did that by calling every single person who left to find out why he or she left.

We found the biggest reason people were leaving was because they were bad hires in the first place. For example, we had been hiring people with no transportation to get to work. We also had hired people who lived 40 and 50 miles away from our plants. They obviously wouldn't stay long. So we put together a list of specific hiring criteria. Our hires had to have certain characteristics.

I always had business on my mind 24 hours a day, seven days a weekwhether I was on vacation with my family or whether I was home watching TV. I always had a pen and pencil in hand to jot down business ideas as they came to mind. So we began putting teeth into it. We decided that no one could get a raise unless they did Customer Awareness Duty every year.

That means actually riding on a route with a service sales representative actually servicing our customers or going to a Cintas plant or facility and working with the partners there. It is almost impossible for someone to work with a customer, whether an external or internal one, and not come up with ideas on how to improve things. This process has been invaluable.

We've gotten some great ideas through this program. If we were going to be able to establish a national presence within the two-year time frame, we had to attract talent in a hurry. Work hard. Make sacrifices. Reinvest in the business. And go for the long term. We should all be on the lookout for barnacles, I'd say. When a new ship is put into the water, it has a clean hull.

Learn how and when to remove these messages. This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Richard T. This article reads like a press release or a news article and may be largely based on routine coverage.

Please help improve this article and add independent sources. February Career [ edit ]. Philanthropy [ edit ]. Associations [ edit ]. See also [ edit ]. References [ edit ]. Farmer, philanthropist and the founder of Cintas Corp. Archived from the original on May 7, The company moved its headquarters to a acre campus in Mason in Farmer served as CEO through and as board chairman through He served on the company's board until Farmer, when the father stepped down from the board; the son remains the company's executive chairman.

During World War II, Farmer's grandfather would pick up the young boy and his sister at school and drive them to work. While attending Miami University in Oxford, Richard Farmer continued washing, folding and counting towels for his father, Hershell. After graduating with a bachelor's degree in marketing inFarmer married and decided to strike out on his own and leave the family business.

As the only son, however, Farmer agreed to rejoin the family business, but he had a vision of aggressive growth. He heard about the growing uniform supply industry and wanted in. The only problem was his father's aversion to borrowing money. The two argued about the idea until one afternoon, his father said, "Dick, this thing just isn't working out," Farmer said, recalling the afternoon in his father's office.

As the year-old man braced himself for the worst — being asked to leave the business — his father instead asked him to take over. It is the major reason Cintas is different from competitors and other companies. It is our ultimate competitive advantage," Farmer once said. InFarmer received a key to the city of Mason because "his leadership and contributions are a tremendous asset to our community," said then-mayor Don Prince.

InCintas and the Farmer Family Foundation forged a partnership with Matthew Ministries to make a difference in the lives of the poorest of the poor worldwide with donations of fabric, finished clothing, first aid products and anti-bacterial soaps and other items to fight disease.