Larry
Potterfield travels the world with a hunter’s passion, bagging big-game trophies from Alaska to Zimbabwe. His business acumen is as wide-ranging as his huntsman’s zeal; the 60-year-old CEO of MidwayUSA has built his shooting, hunting and outdoor supply business into a worldwide retail empire, recognized as one of the best-run businesses in America. This winter, Potterfield’s quest is closer to home. He has a vision for Columbia as a community of excellence. Bringing together a coalition of businesses and service agencies, Potterfield is quietly building an “Excellence in Columbia” movement, based on the principles in the business model of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Program. “We’re trying to adopt a mission statement for this vision: to be the best community in America,” he says. “Everyone talks about being the best, but you’re not going to be the best just by talking — you have to have a plan.” Potterfield’s plan is to get everyone on board the excellence bandwagon — participating in the Missouri Quality Award and the Baldrige National Quality Award programs, and using them as tools to assess and improve performance to drive business success. “Can you imagine,” he muses, “if we can get the businesses and manufacturers, schools, health care, services and nonprofits all united in a quest for excellence, and then it becomes a movement … “Oh. My. Gosh.”
At MidwayUSA, the pursuit of excellence is a lifestyle. “When you walk in the building, you’re living the Baldrige criteria,” Potterfield says. “We’re very passionate about it.” That passion led the family-owned catalog and Internet retailer to win the 2009 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award a year after the company’s 2008 Missouri Quality Award. The honors, although reaffirming, do not mark the end of Midway’s journey. The programs the awards inspire have created a blueprint for improvement that any company can use to implement best practices.. “There’s evidence that the Baldrige criteria improve an organization,” Potterfield says. “It’s a model. You have to immerse yourself in it. And the CEO has to embrace the overarching program.” The Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award is presented annually to recognize performance excellence in U.S. organizations in the manufacturing, service, small business, health care, education and nonprofit sectors. The program, administered through the U.S. Department of Commerce, is the nation’s highest presidential honor for organizational innovation and performance. Named after former President Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of Commerce Malcolm Baldrige, the program originally was designed in 1987 to help American manufacturers compete with Japan. Baldrige applicants submit a 50-page application that is judged on six performance criteria — leadership; strategic planning; customer focus; measurement, analysis and knowledge management; workforce focus; process management — and results. The criteria has become the world’s standard for performance excellence. Studies have shown that Baldrige award recipients, on average, experience a 500 percent growth in revenue within 10 years of going through the process. MidwayUSA began its Baldrige journey in 2006, not to fix problems but to maintain success. “The right time to manage is when you’re winning,” Potterfield says. “You can’t build on failures.” He cites some of the advantages the three-year process has brought to the company’s success story: • Helps improve and sustain results
• Creates a common business language and focuses all employees in the same direction • Creates direction through the mission statement and company goals • Provides a systematic approach to business operations and process documentation • Provides a leadership tool through volunteer opportunities as examiners for the Baldrige National and Missouri Quality Awards programs The most valuable part of the program may be yet to come — the feedback report from the October site visit by the Baldrige examiners, expected later in December. “The feedback report is an unbiased view of current performance, measured against rigorous standards,” Potterfield says. “It tells you what you’re good at and where you can improve.” The sprawling MidwayUSA complex sits only a few miles from where Potterfield began his business career “with a little bit of dream and a lot of circumstance.” In the summer of 1977, fresh from a six-year hitch in the U.S. Air Force, Potterfield and his brother, Jerry, opened Ely Arms Inc. — named for their northeast Missouri hometown (population 26) — in a 1,632-squarefoot shop on U.S. 40 that backed up to the Rollingwood subdivision where the brothers lived with their young families. The University of Missouri graduate brought to this venture an MU business degree and a love of hunting and shooting sports honed in his rural youth and military service. The brothers sold new and used rifles, handguns, ammunition, and shooting and reloading supplies. Their first six months in business, they took in $168,000 in sales. A year later, they changed the name of the shop to Midway Arms to avoid trademark issues with the similarly named Eley Inc. of Kynoch Industries, a division of Nobel. By 1979, Midway Arms had its first branded product, a .357 Magnum brass cartridge case produced by Starline Brass. Midway sold millions of rounds of the brass, leading the way to the bulk component business. Midway’s mail-order business opened in 1978. When brother Jerry opted to return to northeast Missouri, Potterfield and his wife, Brenda, bought him out in 1980.