A New Kind Of Salt Mine
How an idealistic M.B.A. used new age notions (Shared Values Thought, anyone?) to rev up an old-line business and turn a humble commodity into a premium product.
Beth Perkins
Salt Shaker Lifelong learning, passion, personal development…do these ideas make sense at, of all places, a salt mine? CEO Rhett Roberts believes they do.
Beth Perkins
Fire in the Hole Redmond’s miners drill holes into the mine’s walls, pack them with 1,000 pounds of dynamite, then haul out 1,000 tons of raw rock salt at a time.
Beth Perkins
Mine to TableFrom the mine, the chunks are sent to the mill, where they’re separated to be processed into road deicing salt or gourmet table salt.
It's 9:15 on a damp Monday morning, and a dozen men have gathered in a small conference room at Redmond Minerals, a company whose central asset is a two-mile-long salt mine in central Utah, to talk strategy. There's Kyle Bosshardt, who oversees mining operations, and Boyd Jewkes, who keeps the mill humming. Sammy Bates runs the warehouse while Rusty Bastian manages overall production. Most of them wear jeans and steel-tipped work boots, thermals poking out from under their khaki cotton shirts, and dusty baseball caps, the bills frayed from heavy use.
You'd think they'd get right down to business. It's been a challenging time for the Redmond team. Colorado and Washington, two of the company's biggest markets for its highway deicing salt, were walloped by major snowstorms early in the winter season. Redmond's towering stockpiles of salt practically disappeared as state and local transportation authorities called in rush orders. For weeks, crews had been hustling around the clock in subfreezing temperatures to blast rock salt in the mine, crush it into a reddish powder at the mill, and load it on 18-wheelers. There were still back orders for 70,000 tons to fill and critical equipment repairs and manpower shortages to discuss.
But first it's time for the Shared Values Thought. That's a Redmond tradition in which an employee is asked to provide an example of how the company is living up to its principles. Every meeting begins this way, and today it's Doug Anderson's turn to share. Like others at the table, Anderson, who manages the company's office, recently received an e-mail from Rhett Roberts, Redmond's CEO, that asked several questions: Was he passionate about Redmond and what the company stood for? Was he contagiously excited about where Redmond was headed? Did he look forward to Mondays--or Fridays? "Rhett's e-mail reminded me of Thinking for a Change," Anderson says, and a few in the group nod their head. They know the book, by leadership guru John C. Maxwell, too. It's one of several business classics that are widely read among the mine's work force. Anderson recounts a story from the book about Eratosthenes, the Greek mathematician who set out to calculate the circumference of the earth by measuring the angle of elevation of the sun. His peers said he couldn't do it, but he succeeded--because he had passion, Anderson says, just like the team at Redmond this winter. In an average quarter, he points out, the mine produces about 75,000 tons of salt. In January alone, it cranked out 90,000. "It was the same guys, the same equipment," Bastian chimes in. "Like Eratosthenes, we proved it could be done."
If a shared values thought sounds suspiciously like something dreamed up by a business consultant, that's because it was. The consultant in question: Rhett Roberts. In 1992, Roberts was a 27-year-old with an M.B.A. from Brigham Young University, a few months of experience consulting, and a head full of ideas about how to boost productivity and quality, when he was approached by the family owners of Redmond Minerals. Revenue growth at the company had stalled and the family was stumped. Would Roberts come by and take a look? Roberts spent four months analyzing the mine's operations and handed Redmond's owners a report. After a few months mulling over his ideas, the family came back with another question: Would he help implement them?
Hand your company over to a consultant? Especially one with no practical experience? Many entrepreneurs would find the idea foolhardy at best; some might consider it downright suicidal. Ask most business owners and they'll tell you that consultants are full of buzzwords and concepts picked up in business school, but when it comes to actually executing their big ideas…forget it. It's like the old joke says: A consultant is someone who steals your watch and then charges you to tell you the time. In the ongoing battle between book smarts and street smarts, most entrepreneurs will tell you that street smarts always wins.
Roberts had read plenty of books by the time he was approached by Redmond. He'd absorbed the leading theories on organizational development and could speak volumes about teamwork, passion, lifelong learning, and personal development. But while those concepts are enshrined in countless new economy-style businesses, could they really be relevant at a salt mine? Mining may be the oldest of old economy endeavors--dirty, dangerous, backbreakingly arduous, offering few obvious opportunities for anything resembling professional growth or "meaning" in the workplace. Roberts knew that bold ideas had the potential to transform the mundane into the valuable, that the right strategy could turn a lackluster business into a fast-growth enterprise. Could that possibly be the case with salt, perhaps the world's humblest commodity?
Truth be told, Roberts had never much thought about running a business, let alone a mine. But as he pondered Redmond's offer, he also knew that opportunities to put ideas to the test, to take abstract notions and make them concrete, seldom present themselves. Perhaps a salt mine, of all places, was just the place to be.
Roberts, a tall, soft-spoken man of 42 who favors cargo pants and untucked shirts, is one of seven kids who grew up on a farm in rural Salina, Utah. He studied Japanese and electrical engineering as an undergrad at Brigham Young, but decided along the way that he wasn't cut out for the solitary work of an engineer. After graduation, he went straight to business school, thinking an M.B.A. would broaden his career options. It was his first real exposure to business--if you don't count selling vegetables at a roadside stand as a kid--and he gravitated toward classes in operations, finance, and organizational development. When recruiters interviewed on campus, Roberts donned a suit like everyone else and got a few job offers, but none of them seemed particularly enticing. "Some guys come out of business school with the right personality and have all the recruiters after them," he says. "That wasn't my case."
