After graduation, while he pondered his next move, Roberts turned to consulting. He did mostly operational analyses, landing a couple of projects at the university and a few with small local businesses. At the same time, he continued reading the management gurus. Among the standouts: William Edwards Deming, an American statistician and the icon of the quality movement. Deming is widely credited with teaching Japanese companies about quality and aiding the country's economic recovery after World War II. His 1982 book Out of the Crisis discussed 14 management principles that he believed could save U.S. manufacturers from certain death at the hands of the Japanese. Deming argued, among other points, that quality improvement is the job of everyone at a company. And that the only way to engage everyone in the task is for managers to change the way they lead and give employees a say in how things are run.
Roberts talked up these ideas in his consulting work, but his recommendations tended to fall on deaf ears. In fact, most executives seemed insulted when he suggested that they might be part of the problem at their companies. "If that's not received well, then you know you're wasting your time," Roberts says. "That's the bane of consulting--so often, not much happens."
Roberts thought he might be headed for another dead-end consulting gig when he got a call in 1992 from Jay Bosshardt, who handled the books at Redmond. Jay's father, Milo, and uncle, LaMar, had started the business in 1960 when they were struggling to keep their family farm afloat during a severe drought. They knew the farm, located in Redmond, Utah, sat on top of a salt deposit. (According to local lore, it had been discovered by Fremont Indians who saw herds of deer licking the reddish soil.) The soil turned out to be sea salt, rich with more than 50 trace minerals that were captured in the deposit millions of years ago when the waters of an ancient sea retreated.
With nothing to lose, the Bosshardt brothers grabbed their picks and chipped away at the soil. They sold chunks of it as salt licks to local ranchers, and over time began processing salt for road deicing. On the side they launched a table salt called RealSalt. But by 1992, the business had hit a wall. Sales had been flat for five years, hovering at about $2 million annually. The Bosshardts thought their company had potential, but they didn't know how to take it to the next level.
Jay Bosshardt was also concerned about the company's future leadership. The third generation of Bosshardts was just starting to work at Redmond. Going forward, Jay worried that some family members might start expecting certain privileges just because their last name was Bosshardt. "I wanted the company to be built on correct business principles, not nepotism," he says. In 1990, Jay began urging the rest of his family to hire a manager from the outside, an idea they initially resisted. Jay kept at them, and by 1992, they agreed to his idea of asking Roberts to review their operations. Roberts knew of the family--he and one of the Bosshardt sons attended the same school as kids. But he wasn't familiar with their business and knew nothing about mining. Still, he agreed to check out their operations for a few months.
What Roberts found intrigued him. Redmond's wasn't just an ordinary salt deposit. The minerals in the salt gave it properties that competing products didn't have. But you'd never know it from the mine's marketing materials. Indeed, the company didn't even have a sales force. It relied on word of mouth to get new customers and secured contracts to supply deicing salt to state and local transportation agencies by being the lowest bidder. Roberts's advice was straight out of the new economy playbook: Position the salt as a premium product rather than a commodity. By demonstrating to customers how the chemical composition of Redmond's red salt made it superior to typical white salt, the company could charge more and stop competing on price. "It's a dilemma for most commodities--how to get out of the price-only, bid-only process," Roberts says.
Redmond certainly has stiff competition. Salt is a billion-dollar business in the United States, with more than 14,000 direct and indirect uses, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. Road deicing salt accounts for about a third of total sales and at least three companies chase every state and local government contract that is put out for bid, says Richard L. Hanneman, president of the Salt Institute, an industry group headquartered in Alexandria, Virginia. It's a highly concentrated industry. Three giants--Cargill Salt, Compass Minerals (NYSE:CMP), and Rohm and Haas (NYSE:ROH), which owns Morton Salt--control 90 percent of U.S. production, according to Hanneman. Compass, a leading supplier of deicing salt, produces 11 million tons a year in North America. Redmond, by comparison, averages 400,000 tons.
Competing with the giants would take more than a repositioning of the company's products. Pulling from Deming's principles, Roberts told the family that Redmond also needed to transform its management practices. Wages at Redmond were lower than wages at other workplaces in Sevier County, where the mine is based. And the Bosshardts' leadership style was traditional and hierarchical. Roberts proposed a radical reversal, similar to what he'd prescribed in other consulting projects: Put everyone in charge of running the business. If Redmond was going to thrive, he argued, it had to milk the potential out of every single employee, from the men running the crushers in the mill to the customer service reps taking orders over the phone. Instead of telling workers what to do, the company had to give them a voice.
