Bill Harrison recalls being awakened at 11 p.m. on April 15 when he was 16 to pick up tax returns from his dad’s office and get them postmarked by midnight. That was what growing up in a family of accountants was like, he said.
Harrison is the CFO of E. Ritter & Co. in Jonesboro, the parent company of Ritter Agribusiness and Ritter Communications. The two companies together employ 326, and working with “people who are always trying to learn and to be better” is fun, Harrison said.
E. Ritter & Co.’s revenue has grown from $139 million in 2012 to $201 million in 2015, he said, or an average of 13 percent per year. Harrison added that the company’s growth rate of 8 percent in the past year, “in a time of falling agriculture commodity prices and consumers dropping landline telephones and cable TV,” is higher than the averages for the industries it’s involved with.
Harrison, who also was a finalist for CFO of the Year in 2015, said he hires people smarter than he. “I rely on them to come up with the right answers. I ask them all kinds of questions. I’m a known devil’s advocate. … It can drive people crazy sometimes, but that’s what gets us to better answers.”
Harrison said he’s proud of building Dental One Inc. from five practices to 60 and selling it in 10 years and working with Chordus Inc., which he co-founded in Memphis in 1992. Chordus delivers office furniture from manufacturers to dealers.
He has helped Ritter transition from a family-run business to one run by industry professionals. As demand for landline phones has declined, residential broadband and cable TV services plus a business-focused fiber network have replaced revenue. Ritter’s farmland has increased by 20 percent as grain storage and distribution capacity have doubled.
The biggest mistake the Harvard Business School grad said he made was holding onto stock for emotional reasons. “It might have changed my life forever with what it was worth. Instead, I held it until it was worth essentially zero.”
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