A Company’s Constituencies (Gwen Moritz Editor’s Note)

Olivia Farrell accepts the Little Rock Rotary Club’s 2019 Business and Professional Leader of the Year award.

I was incredibly proud to take part in the nomination and celebration of Olivia Farrell as the Rotary Club of Little Rock’s Business & Professional Leader of the Year. “She’s my hero,” I gushed about the former CEO of Arkansas Business Publishing Group in the video that Chris Cranford and Shane Carter produced for the meeting at which Olivia was honored earlier this month.

Olivia took the opportunity to give a room full of Rotarians a short course in the business philosophy that she spent decades developing. I have had the benefit of her thoughts for the past 20 years, and I long ago bought into her ideas about serving the fivefold interests of readers, advertisers, employees, vendors and stockholders.

Having readers come first in a list of equally vital stakeholders has made my job easier and more fulfilling. ABPG’s publications — Little Rock Family, Little Rock Soiree, Arkansas Bride, Arkansas Next, Greenhead and many more — all serve niche audiences, and it’s my job to produce a mix of reliable, interesting news and data that will attract and retain an audience of business executives. I love having an audience that is simultaneously loyal and demanding; it gives the Arkansas Business staff the confidence to do our best work.

Every article and every photo that goes into an ABPG publication is crafted to attract a specific kind of reader that is valuable to the second constituency: advertisers. Olivia was barely in her 20s when she began selling advertising in the Little Rock market, so you’d better believe she values advertisers.

Part of valuing them, Olivia said, is treating all advertisers fairly by sticking with the published rate structure for each publication. She reminded the audience that the Arkansas Gazette lost its largest advertiser (Dillard’s Inc.) because of an unfair policy of discounting.

Every company gives lip service to the value of employees, but Olivia told the Rotarians what I’ve heard her tell the ABPG staff many times: “One of my most fervent dreams was to work with the very best people.” (If that’s just one of her sales techniques — the exclusivity is a powerful tool — it worked on me.)

To improve her hiring record, Olivia invested in a cheerful and comfortable office environment. And to retain the best employees, she has tried to pay top-of-scale wages. As Jim Collins made clear in “Good to Great,” “The purpose of a compensation system should not be to get the right behaviors from the wrong people, but to get the right people on the bus in the first place, and to keep them there.”

When was the last time anyone told a Rotary audience to stop using vendors as “low-cost banks” by deliberately slow-walking their payables? Goodness. At that point, Olivia quit preachin’ and went to meddlin’.

A company like ABPG is dependent on reliable vendors. Our company has no printing presses. Our office space is leased. We don’t even directly employ any photographers. Our payroll is processed off-site. To Olivia’s way of thinking, vendors are vital, valued partners who deserve to earn a fair profit and deserve to be paid promptly. The idea of vendors as opponents to be beaten into submission is foreign to her philosophy.

Olivia shared ownership of ABPG with a handful of investors, and they deserved a return on their investment. They got it when the company was sold in February to Mitch Bettis, who had been hired as general manager and publisher in 2013. He is still doing business under the ABPG brand, but his company’s formal name is Five Legged Stool LLC, a testament to his intention to continue operating Olivia’s way.

At the Rotary event, Olivia added a sixth constituency to the list: the community. This was always implied, of course, as her products are nothing if not community-oriented. ABPG has long had a community service committee, and Mitch has made clear that his top community service priority is the food insecurity that still plagues so many Arkansas families.

Another thing I mentioned in the Rotary video was how normal it is for women to be given management opportunities at ABPG. I would never suggest that’s the reason this company has been successful, but it clearly hasn’t hurt.

Email Gwen Moritz, editor of Arkansas Business, at GMoritz@ABPG.com and follow her on Twitter at @gwenmoritz.