How Alabama’s Only Billionaire "Yella Fella" Jimmy Rane Saved His Hometown | Forbes

[Music] Jimmy rain is the founder and CEO of Great Southern wood preserving based in Abbeville Alabama Great Southern is one of the country's largest treaters of lumber so basically they take raw lumber from other companies Sawmills primarily and apply chemical preservatives to ensure that it lasts a lifetime and based on great Southern's two billion dollars of 2022 sales we estimate that the company's worth about one billion dollars [Music] Jimmy actually took over the company when the father of his first wife tragically died in a car accident in 1970. he was a farmer and like what most Farmers he was playing rich but cash poor so the CPA that was advising the family said sell the tractors sell the plow sell all the personal property but don't sell any land and this little treating plant sat on six and a half acres of land next to the farm and so they did that they sold everything except this one little treating plant and they had one offer from Mr Ralph Reynolds here in Abbeville he was a pulpwood dealer he offered them 14 000 for the little treating plant and that and the six and a half acres that it sat on the brother wanted to take it my wife was trying to do what the CPA told her so they kind of got in a disagreement and I was in law school trying to mediate my first case so I came up with the idea that I would lease the land and sell the equipment so I made an offer to them well I'll buy the equipment for ten thousand dollars and I'll lease the land and everything will go away and I'll stay in law school and I'll finish so my father said Jimmy that's a very good idea but what happens if you can't sell it you're going to sign a note for ten thousand dollars but if you can't oh that I can sell it for sure I can sell it but what if you can't anyway he was right I couldn't sell it so now I've got a treating plant so I finished Law School and came back here and opened a one-room law office on the four and a half Square two black telephones this was Ring I'd say Jimmy rain law office this one ring I'd say Great Southern wood preserving so that's how I started me and one other fellow awesome Curry back then the company was doing less than a hundred and thousand dollars of sales so for action of you know what it does today the head no cash no money and money is the lifeblood of any business and I struggled for a long long time trying to run the business I would get up 4 30 in the morning and go out meet Lawson and we would get everything ready and start treating come back and take a shower could practice law until 4 30 then I'd go back and stay with him until we got finished things really started to take off in the mid 80s when Jimmy attended a Harvard Business School program for the owners and managers of family-owned private companies and he was inspired by a case that he studied there about how Frank Perdue used marketing effectively to turn commodity chicken into a household name every time I would walk into a building supply store and try to talk to them about my product the only question they asked what's your price and I knew we had the best product I knew we had the highest quality I knew the extent that we were going to to make a high quality product and to give service but it didn't matter so I needed some way to get the attention of that dealer I wanted to find some emotional thread that would weave through my area and that was college football Jimmy had this Insight based on his love of college football and the love of college football across the South that if he were to bring in the big college football coaches not only at his alma mater Auburn but at rival Alabama and others throughout the South if you were to bring them in as spokespeople that would you know really help grow his brand and that certainly turned out to be the case I had known Pat for a long time we became friends but when he got the job at Auburn in 81 and I went to Harvard in 84 85 and 86. and the idea came to me when I was at Harvard to try and use marketing to differentiate my product so I came back and I talked to Pat about it first and he'd say well we'll try it see how it works like this fence built most pressure treated pine from Great Southern wood the lumber with a 40-year guarantee speaking of extra defense ring in let me keep this so after years of doing commercials with the coaches he'd sort of actually created this own character and brand for himself and you could argue maybe at that point he didn't really need the coaches as much so when he was thinking about you know with his marketing team what the next phase of the company's advertising would look like he ended up drawing on his love for old westerns and created this character called the yellow fella who is a cowboy played by Jimmy when we first started we were using actors and nothing was catching on Marty Marshall was my marketing professor at Harvard and so I talked to Marty and he said well he said I think the problem you're having is that people are not connecting it's just another commercial I really didn't have any plans to be on camera but they walk in one day and had this uh storyboard for this cartoon cowboy and I said do you you really want me to do that it was really I thought hokey cartoonish and it sort of evolved into yellow fellow who are you Mr fella yellow fella [Music] fella I thought you were dead not hardly I wanted to replicate the Roy Rogers Gene Autry John Wayne figures of my youth being in your 60s and not playing Cowboys and Indians was a lot of fun I mean we were shooting these commercials in the location that John Ford and John Wayne used it was like being a kid again riding horses and shooting guns and I mean you just don't think about the other side effect said okay then when people see this they're going to recognize you so but that was kind of different for me I I said I came here to rebuild the town with Yellowwood best there is for building Outdoors Abbeville Alabama where Jimmy lives today and where he started the company and has kept it ever since it's probably not exactly where you would expect to find the richest guy in Alabama it's a small town of 2 000 people about a three hour drive from Atlanta Jimmy grew up there his family had been there long before he was born and he's chosen to keep his company there and live there today and I think a big part of the attachment that he feels is the critical role that his own dad of everyone in Abbeville knows as Mr Tony played in the town's development in the 1950s my dad was a real entrepreneur he came back here after World War II he wanted to open a nice restaurant than he did it was called The Village Inn well Mr Homer Carter was president of pepper Manufacturing in Opelika and so he used to come through Abbeville on his way to his Beach House at Panama City and he loved to stop at the restaurant and need to add spaghetti so Mr homwell came in one day and he started asking dad he said Tony he said what kind of town do you all have here what kind of water supply what kind of Mayor I've got a plant that I want to build and open it's a textile plant and I'm trying to find a location to to put it so they started talking and giving them all this information he said well can you get the president the Sam of Commerce and he said we don't have a chance he said oh well I'm sorry we can't come in a place they don't have a chance we'll get you one so they organized one and he became the first president and Mr Carter's decision was between Abbeville and Cuthbert Georgia and I always say that dad's spaghetti is the one that won it so he chose Abbeville and they came to town with 25 employees and they started sewing Uptown on the Square and they grew that plant from 25 to 1400. [Music] to live here and grow up here was idyllic I mean it was everything that you've ever seen in old movies and that was what it was like and then NAFTA came along and destroyed at that time that building set on 53 acres and 550 000 square feet on the roof huge plan I mean it was terrible and from then through the 90s if you rode through Abbeville in 1996 it'll lock the door and kept going it was burned out buildings and boarded up buildings it was just a devastated community So within the last few years that plant was still sitting empty and years ago to avoid it being sold to a salvager Jimmy bought the plant and paid years worth of taxes and an interest and the like before he could figure out what to do with it and then in 2018 hurricane Michael happened and demand for wood basically went through the roof and the company went to its suppliers the Sawmills and said we need x amount of wood and they couldn't meet that demand so in order to cushion the company against future situations like that Jimmy actually opened one of his company's first Sawmills at the old Pepperell plant in Abbeville in 2019 I think that was a moment of Pride for him he went from being the model for years to now we got about 110 people out there making an average of twenty two dollars an hour so that's been sort of a great inspiration to me that we were able to bring that back and bring that kind of prosperity back and it's made a big difference in the town when you look at our sales tax revenue and just the whole economy around Abbeville has really been improved because of that facility thanks to the success Jimmy's had he's been able to really give back to that community and he's spent you know millions of his own dollars to to revitalize the town to look like it did when he was a kid I wanted to build hugging mollies because it brought back a time for me that was very special when I was a kid I would go uptown on the Square to Central drug store and you'd go in there after school and you'd get a fountain drink so we tried to replicate Central drugstore with hugging Molly with the soda fountain in the stools and the carbonated water and the drinks most of the buildings downtown have been replicated back to the way they were originally constructed and rather than build one giant big office building we would put different offices in some of the buildings so it would bring the building back to life and it would bring the town back to life and we tried to go back and restore them as I remembered them in the 50s [Music] Jimmy started this foundation called the Jimmy rain Foundation which is education focused and funds partial scholarships for college students and the way that the foundation funds itself is primarily through a charity golf tournament but it runs every year one of our employees she had a daughter and a son and the little I knew both of them very well and the little girl was just such a bright shining child her whole life all she talked about was I want to be a doctor and she never wavered from kindergarten through grade school through High School so she went to Auburn her father ran a Thai store here and her mother worked for arts and accounting and at that time Auburn didn't have a great scholarship program but trying to help her and she got a small one I guess I became distracted I don't know but her father died passed away and before I really knew it she had dropped out of college because she couldn't afford it oh that just broke my heart it devastated me and uh I said this is not right but it's not right we can't we got to do something I don't know what we're going to do something so we decided right then and there that we were going to start this Foundation and we were going to make sure it was the best we could that wasn't going to happen again Jimmy has been able to draw on the relationships that he made over so many years working with the college coaches to you know bring in big names like Peyton Manning whose dad was in a commercial with Jimmy Herschel Walker who was you know a big name Georgia running back so his ability to bring those big names is really a big draw for people who want to pay to play in the tournament and as a result of that the foundation's been able to fund more than 500 partial scholarships to date in the first year we raised money we didn't have enough money to give a scholarship the next year we gave one and then the next year we get two and now we give over 50 a year and we've gone out over 560. and I said that first night I said I hope I'm standing here and we give out a thousand God willing I will [Music] foreign

Channel: Forbes

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Keywords: Forbes, Forbes Media, Forbes Magazine, Forbes Digital, Business, Finance, Entrepreneurship, Technology, Investing, Personal Finance, Jimmy Rane, Great Southern Wood Preserving, Richest person in the state, Richest person in alabama, Yellawood, lumber, yellafella, SEC, South Eastern Conference, advertising, perdue, Abbeville, Abbeville Alabama, Governor Kay Ivey, Matt Durot, billionaire, billionaires 2023

Id: 1Q5ARB_01wg

Length: 14min 42sec (882 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 05 2023