Larry Potterfield, founder of the shooting-supply company MidwayUSA, is obsessed with management excellence: quantifying it, developing systems to produce it, and spreading it far and wide.
Larry Potterfield's twin obsessions find expression in a couple of jackets. The gold one, presented to him by the National Rifle Association, honors decades of support for sports shooting. Potterfield's lifelong enthusiasm for guns carried MidwayUSA, a purveyor of shooting supplies and hunting gear, to $40 million in sales from its founding in 1977 to 2003.
Potterfield's blue jacket commemorates a different distinction. In 2009, Midway became the 18th small business to win the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, a kind of decathlon gold medal for organizational excellence. Potterfield's newly kindled enthusiasm for business processes helped Midway triple its customer base over the five years after 2004, when it started training to compete in Baldrige. In 2011, the company racked up revenue of $225 million.
Now this big-game hunter has in his cross hairs the most formidable quarry he has yet pursued. "We will be the best-run business in America!" Potterfield proclaims confidently in his amiable Midwestern twang. "And we will share the Baldrige principles that made us that way with communities all across the nation, so that America will be the best-run country in the world."
Potterfield, a silver-haired, sun-baked 62, is talking to me in his corporate jet on the way from Kansas City, Missouri, to Midway's home base of Columbia, Missouri. He is wearing his blue jacket today, having just delivered the concluding speech at the 2011 Baldrige Regional Conference, an educational event for organizations contemplating or embarked on what acolytes refer to as "the journey." With his face freshly furred ("I don't shave during hunting season"), he bears little resemblance to the beaming, grandfatherly persona beloved by the many fans of his instructional videos on the Outdoor Channel and YouTube. ("He's the wizard of gunsmithing. He's Harry Potterfield," reads a typical comment on a YouTube vignette about finding the balance point on a safari rifle.)
Flipping through a sheaf of color printouts, Potterfield shows me photos from recent hunting trips, identifying business associates in the background and deceased "critters" in the foreground. ("These are all MidwayUSA or Midway Foundation people that we took to Africa. Here's a zebra. That's the guy who manages the department that does all our videos. This is a kudu.") In addition to his frequent safaris, Potterfield travels once a month to preach the Baldrige gospel. He has spoken at conferences and to business groups in Florida, Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota, and Tennessee. Closer to home, he and his employees counsel quality-hungry organizations in Columbia and host monthly meetings at which local leaders delve deeply into Baldrige principles.
There are myriad business competitions, which companies enter for myriad reasons. Opportunistic CEOs slap together applications for every conceivable prize, hoping to show off their accomplishments or secure a PR payday. But no one undertakes Baldrige on a lark. The application for the award runs to 50 pages, with roughly 250 questions covering every aspect of performance, from strategic planning and knowledge management to work-force and customer focus to financial and market results. Each year, about 80 organizations apply. Of those, 13 to 15 are deemed worthy of site visits, and a handful receive the award. Honorees range from Ritz-Carlton and Federal Express to Pal's Sudden Service, a dogs-'n'-burger chain in Tennessee. Motorola's vaunted Six Sigma quality standard was revealed to the world in a 1988 Baldrige application.
But though few businesses apply for Baldrige, many thousands use the questions and the criteria on which they are based to evaluate their own processes. The experience of completing the application, even as an academic exercise, is akin to writing a textbook about your company or undergoing a business version of psychoanalysis. This course of self-evaluation and improvement requires that companies fling up their window shades, yank open every cupboard and closet, and see—really see—where their thinking is murky and their efforts inadequate or wholly lacking.
Potterfield loves Baldrige not because it is exhaustive but because he believes it is foundational. Recently, he and members of his executive team distilled from the criteria 30 principles—involving things such as communication, work-force development, and contingency planning—that he considers the immutable core of management discipline. To be the best-run company in America, Potterfield says, Midway must execute on all 30 principles, superbly, all the time. "Problem is, the world record for keeping balls in the air is five balls for 10 seconds. So how in the world do we keep 30 balls in the air day in and day out?" he muses. His answer: Three years after winning the award, Midway is "not letting up a nickel" on its pursuit of the Baldrige ideal. "It is our system for doing everything," says Potterfield. "We are the purest Baldrige colony on the planet."
Potterfield wasn't always such a grand thinker. He grew up like a Mark Twain character, born and raised poor in the countryside outside of Ely, Missouri. ("Population 26 before I left," he says.) One of six children, he hunted rabbits, squirrels, and quail with his father and inherited an older brother's single-barrel shotgun when he turned 13.
After majoring in accounting at the University of Missouri, Potterfield spent six years in the Air Force, where he started trading firearms. Straight out of the military, he opened a gun shop in Columbia with his younger brother Jerry. The company made a name for itself commissioning products unavailable elsewhere, notably 8 mm ammunition for Japanese Nambu pistols.
The store's mail-order component expanded, and by 1985 it had become the whole business. By that time, Jerry Potterfield had gone back to farming, and the company had ceased selling firearms and broadened its offerings for reloading, repairing, and customizing guns. Over the next decade, the Potterfield family started several complementary businesses, including Battenfeld Technologies, which manufactures shooting and gunsmithing products, and Midway Farms, an executive conference center.
Potterfield got his first taste of Baldrige in the mid-1990s, at a meeting of the Excellence in Missouri Foundation, a state Baldrige program. Over the course of a day, presenters laid out a methodology that Potterfield found at once intimidating and galvanizing. Baldrige breaks corporate management into seven categories, including leadership, strategic planning, customer focus, and, needless to say, results. Within those categories, applicants are required to explain their approaches to virtually every conceivable activity, from modeling ethical standards to managing customer complaints. The presumption is that even if companies are not doing everything perfectly, they are at least doing everything.
