The Art of Building a Legacy While Building a Company
The famous management consultant, Peter Drucker, once said that culture eats strategy for breakfast, meaning simply that any company will fail even if it has a great strategy but doesn’t build a culture that supports and encourages its people to make it happen. Rathburn Tool & Manufacturing founder, Jerry Rathburn, understood the importance of having good people in the company and a culture to support them from the beginning.
For one thing, Jerry started his company doing what he loved to do. Before founding Rathburn Tool, Jerry was a Chief Engineer for Dana Corporation and spent his free time after work building things, from tractors to street rods. “I did the exact same thing at work every day as I did at night if I got home and had some time off,” Jerry said. In starting Rathburn Tool, he continues, “I decided I was going to enjoy what I was doing.”
“We never anticipated having the building, the facilities, or the equipment we have today,” Jerry adds. “We started very small and built our reputation on the quality of the work we were doing every day. I wasn’t trying to get rich. I was looking for a way to create something for my family by doing good work with good people—and enjoying doing the work.”
That meant not only taking on certain types of work, but also making choices about the kinds of people who would be working at Rathburn. Jerry says he understood the importance of people from the very beginning. “We found that the people who worked best at Rathburn had a desire to learn, because the equipment we had at the time required the operators to do a lot of the mathematical calculations themselves. They didn’t have computers connected to them. You were the computer! And that attracted a certain kind of person.”
Jerry says that his time in the military taught him quite a bit about leadership. The Vietnam War veteran quickly learned that leadership isn’t about having a title, it’s about earning respect and then getting followers who believe in the person. “You’re a leader because people want to follow you,” Jerry says. “I’ve tried to portray that here. There’s nothing I asked others to do that I wouldn’t do myself, whether that’s sweeping the floor, taking out the trash, programming a machine, or delivering parts. It’s not about hierarchy. We’re all on this team.”
He continues, “We’ve never turned down jobs unless we absolutely couldn’t do them. Because we always believed in helping solve the problems our customers faced. Of course, that forced us to buy additional equipment and expand along the way, but that’s the kind of company we built from the start.”
For Jerry, working with people who are knowledgeable, skilled, and bring everything they uniquely offer to the job every day makes the work fun. “It’s not just about people doing a task. It’s never been about that. We’re great because the people here solve problems every day. They lean into the challenges and find ways to get the work done.”
And that helps Rathburn Tool find people who are looking for careers more than just a job. “We look for people who care,” Jerry continues, “because you can’t pay people to do that. We have a wide mix of people with all kinds of backgrounds, histories, personal stories, and skill sets. They make us better and make us the kind of shop companies want to hire.”
Company cultures are often defined and refined over time. For companies built to last, that culture contributes to the work environment every day just as much as it impacts the quality of the work getting done and, in the case of Rathburn Tool, the quality of the parts being produced. Thanks to the positive culture at Rathburn, the company has not only been able to thrive over its 40 year history, it is set for ongoing success for years to come.
Follow this series to learn more about Rathburn’s origin story, lessons in leadership, evolutions in equipment, and the importance of treating people well.
