Wilbur-Ellis: Cultivating The Past To Build The Future

Wilbur-Ellis President-CEO John Thacher

Wilbur-Ellis President-CEO John Thacher

Ninety-three years ago, Wilbur-Ellis Co. was founded on the principle of providing exceptional service to its customers over the long haul. And through the intervening decades of global and marketplace changes, the San Francisco, CA-based company has remained true to this vision.

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“If I had to pick one word that best describes Wilbur-Ellis as a company, it would be ideas,” says Mike Wilbur, vice president of data services & field technology. “We’ve had the company motto ‘ideas to grow with’ for as long as I can remember, and it’s truly how Wilbur-Ellis operates. We have relationships with our grower-customers that don’t just span two years or five years, but that are multi-generational. And that goes back to something my grandfather, Brayton Wilbur used to say: ‘Contracts are great, but we stand behind our handshakes.’”

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President/CEO John Thacher, also a grandson of Brayton, agrees with this sentiment. “Our ‘Ideas To Grow With’ tagline isn’t just reflective of our company, it works across many of our businesses as well,” says Thacher. “We started as a trading company 93 years ago, which is a business that is all about having to innovate at the customer interface. That hasn’t changed. The best ideas for Wilbur-Ellis as a company come at the customer interface and roll up. We are not, and have never been, a top/down company.”

As evidence of this, Thacher says one need only look back at the company’s history. Wilbur-Ellis was founded in 1921 by Brayton Wilbur, Sr., and Floyd Ellis. Initially, the then-fledging business traded in commodities such as fish meal, vitamins and oils. By the end of its first decade in business, Wilbur-Ellis had expanded its operations beyond U.S. shores to represent such companies as Dutch Boy Paints and Monsanto in parts of Asia.

Even then, says Thacher, Wilbur-Ellis was always willing to take risks as a company. “We were one of the first U.S.-based companies to start doing business in Japan just after World War II had ended in 1945,” he says.

It was also during the 1940s that Wilbur-Ellis took its first business steps toward the company that it is today. In 1949, the company established its first ag retail outlets in the states of California and Arizona.

Today, ag retail represents the lion’s share of Wilbur-Ellis’ $3 billion corporate sales. In fact, according to the 2013 CropLife 100 survey, the company ranks fourth among ag retail organizations in size with 167 outlets spread out across 24 states.

“In today’s structure, Wilbur-Ellis is a full value, high service retailer,” says Jim Loar, vice president, operations. “Ag retail is our heart and soul as a company. As the size and scope of ag retail has grown for Wilbur-Ellis, so too has the need to manage this part of the business differently.”

Historically, says Loar, the company’s ag retail branches operated “largely in a decentralized manner” with little formal interaction among one another. By 2002, however, Wilbur-Ellis’ ag retail group had grown large enough that management knew that structural change was needed. So, five separate regions were created — Western, Northwest, South Central, Northeast, Midwest. Simultaneously, functional experts residing throughout the organization were brought together in centralized, mission aligned Support Groups. “This allowed the company to leverage functional knowledge and expertise across all regions and branches,” says Loar.

Riding A Winning Streak

Of course, one of the reason’s Wilbur-Ellis’ fortunes have improved over the past couple of years ties directly back to how well the agricultural marketplace has performed overall. As anyone who regularly follows the market knows, commodity prices have been at historic highs since mid-2009 and grower-customer income has skyrocketed as a result. This has given ag retail customers plenty of capital and incentive to spend on the crop inputs and services needed to keep their crop yields high.

According to Dan Vradenburg, president of agribusiness, this economic environment for agriculture has greatly benefited a company such as Wilbur-Ellis. “The opportunity to continue this agricultural winning streak is there, but it’s not likely for everyone,” says Vradenburg. “Going forward, companies will have to deal with volatile markets, changing markets and a rapidly changing customer base. These will present some challenging risks. But if you as a company can commit resources, as Wilbur-Ellis has, the future looks very bright indeed.”

Naturally, part of this commitment is to the grower-customers themselves. “We as a company need to provide growers with unbiased advice on the many issues they are facing,” says Wilbur. “How can we at Wilbur-Ellis adjust to doing that?  There are lots of decisions for growers to make each growing season” Wilbur explains. “What technology should I be using?  Where do I go to determine the right seed traits for me? The challenge here at Wilbur-Ellis is for us to look forward enough to help our growers in all of these areas.”

According to Thacher many of these questions can be answered by Wilbur-Ellis through its field communication. “Across all of our divisions, we have a stellar group of employees to help answer questions like these,” he says. “You can always deliver the best solution at one given point, but how do you get that information quickly and seamlessly to the customer without it routing torturously through a long path to do so? In this day and age, customers will not wait for solutions that take too long to deliver.”

Part of the way Wilbur-Ellis is accomplishing this task is through the use of technology, including its own AgVerdict program. And according to Wilbur, the use of all kinds of technology will only become more important as the next few years unfold in agriculture.

“I think we are just scratching the surface on the technology that is available for us in agriculture,” he says. “When you look at the precision piece of the market, Wilbur-Ellis already has a big stake in that. We have experts in the field who are dedicated to helping growers with field technology decisions. But we still have to get to a place where we reduce or eliminate the manual entry of data. Data must be able to move around seamlessly from locations to locations, device to device.”

Playing The Acquisitions Game

Even as it looks to improve and streamline its interactions with grower-customers, Wilbur-Ellis is also working on improving the workings of its ag retail group. This has included the acquisition of several ag retailers around the country such as Poynter’s Ag Supply, Sawyer, ND, New Horizons Ag Service, Elgin, ND, Accu-Rate Services, Sedgwick, KS, and Advanced Ag, Creston, IA.

According to Vradenburg, this is all part of Wilbur-Ellis’ attempt to bring more value to its grower-customers and itself, while acknowledging some fundamental changes currently taking place in the ag retail marketplace. “By most estimates, there are around 9,000 physical ag retail locations nationwide,” he says. “Of those, roughly 1,500 to 2,000 represent approximately 80% of all retail sales on an annual basis. There are also approximately 2.5 million farms in the U.S. Of those, approximately 200,000 represent 80% of gross farm production annually. Given these facts begs the question: How many physical retail locations do you really need?”

So, he says, Wilbur-Ellis is making many of these acquisitions to not only increase the company’s geographic footprint in the ag retail marketplace, but to add value to these outlets in the process.

“To be involved in the ag retail market today, you have to be good at risk management and have the ability to re-invest in your facilities and equipment,” says Vradenburg. “Growers have increased in their level of sophistication and have more assets on their hands than ever before. The services many of them want fall outside the area of basic agronomy, which means they are outgrowing many existing retail locations. When we at Wilbur-Ellis look at our locations, we try to anticipate where that grower is going in that area, where they are investing and what skills and services can complement those needs.”

In Vradenburg’s mind, the hardest part of this acquisition strategy hasn’t been figuring out which businesses complement the Wilbur-Ellis footprint, it has been determining whether there is a right fit. “There is an integration of cultures we need to be cognizant of before we enter into an agreement with the seller. We go to great efforts to talk about what specifically will change and what will not to avoid any surprises,” says Vradenburg. “In the end, our priority is the people who are becoming a part of the company, not the assets we are buying.”

According to Vradenburg, one of the biggest disconnects Wilbur-Ellis has dealt with on this front is changing some retailers long standing practices to more standard processes the company is committed to operating as effectively as it can. “An example is establishing a credit line for each customer. We require a signed customer credit application no differently than anyone has to complete to obtain a credit card. Some retailers for decades have done business without any agreements. The handshake is still important to us but in today’s world some formalities are necessary and are just good business.”

As its ag retailer business has grown, Wilbur-Ellis has found itself making some important decisions on how to best move the company forward in the years ahead. One of these has been to relocate the headquarters of its Agribusiness Division from Walnut Creek, CA, to Denver, CO, by January 2015 as part of the company’s Alignment for Growth initiative.

This move will allow the Agri­busi­ness Division to be more accessible to relevant geographies and should enhance communication, collaboration and ideation among the division’s 2,800 employees. According to Vradenburg, “In the next several years, the agribusiness industry will experience volatile markets, more retirements, the introduction of new innovation and technology, coupled with unpredictable weather and other worldwide influences. Alignment for Growth will help us to be more responsive than ever to these changing industry conditions, provide greater value to our customers, automate processes for greater efficiency and pave a clear path for our future leaders as we continue to grow across the country.”

In addition to its corporate make-up, Wilbur-Ellis has also made a few changes to its ag retail operations based upon recent market influences. As Vradenburg relates, the explosion at the West Fertilizer plant in the spring of 2013 caused the company to re-think some of the products it handles. “We as a company elected to stop carrying ammonium nitrate after the Oklahoma City incident in 1995. And West, TX, convinced us to do a thorough review of our handling of anhydrous ammonia,” he says. “About one-third of our locations handle this product at the moment, but it’s still a potentially dangerous product to work with. It is equipment intensive and requires a lot of capabilities and supervision at each branch location to manage correctly.”

Wilbur-Ellis also joined the ResponsibleAg effort. “What happened in West, TX, reinforced our need to be a really good neighbor in the communities in which we are commited and do business,” says Vradenburg.

The People Factor

Another key concern at Wilbur-Ellis these days is the quest for good people. As Thacher observes: “Here at Wilbur-Ellis, we have a strategy for getting things done. But ultimately, that comes down to our people’s ability to deliver solutions to the customers.”

Yet, as Vradenburg points out, finding good employees can be a real challenge. To address this, Wilbur-Ellis implemented in 2006 a program called NextGen. “With NextGen, we planned to hire 20 young men and women each year to work for us, to build up our sales force and put them through our company training programs,” he says. “But after a few years of doing this, we ended up hiring way more than 20 people each year, contributing to a high employee retention rate we are proud of.”

As for the future of Wilbur-Ellis itself, the company plans to continue building up its ag retail base through more acquisitions and expansion. In the long run, says Thacher, Wilbur-Ellis remains committed to the ideals the company was founded on back in 1921 as it prepares for its 100th birthday in seven years.

“We want to be a vibrant and vigorous company that has an attitude of looking into and being excited about the future,” he says. “We want to be confident, not fearful, of the future and taking on new challenges along the way.”

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