America's Favorite Sausage Brand Whose #1 Priority Is Doing The Right Thing

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Pause and enjoy a Keebler Sandies. And we continue with our American stories. And now it's time for our Do the Right Thing series about ethical dilemmas that's sponsored by the Daniels Fund.

And our own Alex Cortez brings us this latest edition. Ralph Stayer is the founder of Johnsonville Sausage. Back around 1980, Johnsonville was growing 20% a year and Ralph was excited, but no one else was. And Ralph realized that he was the problem. He had made it all about him with every employee reporting to him all 150 of them. Ralph decided to do a 180 and make it all about them. Empowering what they now call each other, team members, more radically than perhaps any other company. Ralph took himself out of almost everything. The Johnsonville team members decide whom they want to hire, fire, and work with. They created the system for the profit sharing pool that's around 30% of all profits. And together they created the number one sausage brand in America.

Ralph couldn't be more proud of the team and the ethical decisions that they've made. One day I got a phone call that our plant in Watertown, Wisconsin burned down. It was destroyed, so we needed to move as quickly as possible to get that new plant up because 25% of our total production was coming out of that plant. The great aside that other people and other plants stepped up, the people stepped up and increased production and worked extra shifts and weekends for almost a year to cover.

I mean, I can't say enough about people's attitudes. They just did it. There was just no question that was going to get done.

There was no carping or anything else. So we're looking at this plant and these people who don't have work. No plant, no work. And so I'm sitting in Florida and they call me up and said, you know, our leadership team calls up and says, you know, Ralph, we decided that we're going to keep everybody on. We're going to pay everybody 40 hours a week, even though there's no work. All we're going to ask of them is that they spend X amount of time developing new skills in any technical school or whatever, and we will fund the cost.

So they'll do that. Community service. They cleaned up the airport. They did all kinds of community service. So as long as you're doing those things and are actually doing something, not sitting around doing nothing, we're paying your salary.

We did it for a whole year. Now, a lot of people would say, oh, crazy. Wow. Who are those people?

Yeah. However, these are very talented people and we have invested a ton of money in them. We've been investing in these people all these years. You know, my mother, years and years ago, initially didn't understand where I was going and what I was doing, where we were going, what we were doing. Better statement.

Because there are a lot of us that built the Johnsonville Way. But she said, Ralph, what if you invest, you're investing all this money in these people? What if they learn all this and they quit and go somewhere else? I said, Mom, what if we don't invest all this money and they stay?

What's worse? Oh, never thought of that. And so the investment in those people is incredible.

These are incredible people, incredible talent. We had to build a plant there. And so if we didn't do it, we'd have lost a whole bunch of them and the startup would have been horrendous. The startup of the new plant would have been horrendous, training new people, et cetera, et cetera, and trying to find them and all that. So, yeah, the first response was we're doing it because it's the right thing to do. On the other hand, when you look back on it and we look back and say, heck, we got that plant going in 10 months. God provided a building for us that we didn't even know existed. We found it like right now. We were able to move in and redo it and all that.

And the day we started up, we went just like gangbusters. So it's an ethical dilemma, but it's the right thing to do. But the beauty of it is that decision was made.

No one called me. They did it. They made that call.

They informed me, but they didn't call and ask for permission. Even though they were spending tens of millions of dollars, the Johnsonville team members in Watertown did over 10,000 hours of community service during this year and their ranks even grew. From 120 team members before the fire to 155 in the new plant. And besides plants, Johnsonville has a pretty fun asset that Ralph is about to introduce you to. But like every asset in our life, there's constant ethical dilemmas about how to best use them. And you're about to hear how the Johnsonville team members keep the ethical principle of respect front and center, which can lead to an extremely viable business. We have these big taste grills that run all over the country, right, with our product on them. And they go to big events and we expose people to Johnsonville brats, you know.

It's hard for me to imagine, but there are people actually out there in the world that haven't tasted our brats yet. So anyway, when Hurricane Katrina hit, the next thing I know, there's video of our big taste grill down there feeding the relief workers the next day. Or two days later, whatever, feeding the relief workers.

How did that happen? Well, people decided that they were scheduled for events or whatever somewhere. People made the decisions. They sent it down there to feed the relief workers and the people who were homeless. And obviously there's no power, no place to eat. So we fed thousands and thousands of people. Then we did the same thing in Texas, Harvey and then Sandy. And people just do it because it's the right thing to do in our company.

And then there's a story about when the tornado hit chocolate. And Walmart's our biggest customer. And I've been invited down a couple of times to speak at their Saturday morning meetings about partnerships, explaining how we see it between supplier and customer relationships and the value of partnering. Then it's a two way street.

If you're going to beat people up all the time, then we're going to take our resources and put it someplace else where we get a better return. But you folks have been so great that you work with us. You get your best customer. You get our best number one call on everything.

OK, but that's how it works. So we finished this whole time. We showed the results of new products and stuff. It's a hockey stick.

It's a hockey stick of how much we've sold to them and how much they've sold because of our relationship. And afterwards, this fellow stays up. He says, you know, I hear all that. That's really good. But I want to tell you something about this company. I was in Joplin, Missouri, the day after the tornado and in the parking lot of the I'm getting chills again.

Just think about it. And in the parking lot of our Wal-Mart, which was totally destroyed, there was the Johnsonville Big Taste Grill cooking sausage, cooking food for all the relief workers, for all the people. They were there doing that.

I don't know. We didn't have any other vendors doing that. But there was a Johnsonville Grill serving everybody. And that's what I call a great company. And I feel pretty good right now because he's not only telling here, he's telling all over the world.

Because that's broadcast all over the world. And now we do business in Wal-Mart pretty much all over the world anyway. So there it is. So if you live your life the right way, these things happen. Does it cost money sometimes?

Yeah. But overall, overall, the blessings are unbelievable. But again, I didn't tell anybody to go to Joplin. There's no phone call from the CEO to go to Joplin. The people who are managing that Big Taste Grill went to Joplin because they knew it was the right thing to do. Made all the arrangements, got all the product, whatever it took. They were there passing it on, giving it away.

Giving it away. And a special thanks to Alex and to Joey Cortez for the work they did on this piece. And a special thanks to Ralph Stayer for telling this story. And as always, our Do the Right Thing series is brought to us by the great folks at the Daniels Fund. To learn about bringing their ethics programs to your school, business, police department, church, go to danielsfund.org.

That's danielsfund.org. And they have eight principles in their ethics initiative that they really drill down on. Two of the principles were at play here.

One was viability. And that's creating long term value for all relevant stakeholders. And my goodness, that was done here by keeping those employees in the mix, ready to go when that plant was rebuilt.

Our Do the Right Thing series, this time with Ralph Stayer of Johnsonville Sausage here on Our American Stories. With Lucky Land Slots, you can get lucky just about anywhere. Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to- has anyone seen the bride and groom?

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