Midwayusa Ceo Interview

I was born and raised in rural Missouri. My dad taught me to hunt and fish when I was just a kid. My name is Larry Potterfield; I'm the CEO of MidwayUSA, a small family-owned business in rural Missouri. We started in 1977 - and I was just out of the Air Force. Today, thirty-three years later, there are three hundred and fifty employees here. We've got customers all over the world, and they absolutely love us. Our primary business is being a catalog and Internet retailer for the shooting-sports marketplace serving the shooters, hunters, and outdoors enthusiasts. Our vision is to be the best-run business in America - for the benefit of our customers. MidwayUSA has always been a great business. But if you want sustainability in an organization, and you want to go from "great" to "really, really great", you've got to have some kind of a model ... and Baldrige is that model! And what I can tell you is that MidwayUSA has benefited tremendously from the Baldrige Criteria: Our sales are up over 20 percent per year over the last five years. Our profits are up over 40 percent per year for that same time. Customer satisfaction at 93 percent is at an all-time high. Employee satisfaction at 82 percent is at an all-time high also. All the winds are blowing in the right direction at MidwayUSA - and it's all because of our efforts in engaging the Baldrige Criteria.