Larry Potterfield, founder of the shooting-supply
company MidwayUSA, is obsessed with management excellence: quantifying
it, developing systems to produce it, and spreading it far and wide.
Larry Potterfield's twin obsessions find expression in a
couple of jackets. The gold one, presented to him by the National Rifle
Association, honors decades of support for sports shooting.
Potterfield's lifelong enthusiasm for guns carried MidwayUSA, a purveyor
of shooting supplies and hunting gear, to $40 million in sales from its
founding in 1977 to 2003.
Potterfield's blue jacket commemorates a different distinction. In
2009, Midway became the 18th small business to win the Malcolm Baldrige
National Quality Award, a kind of decathlon gold medal for
organizational excellence. Potterfield's newly kindled enthusiasm for
business processes helped Midway triple its customer base over the five
years after 2004, when it started training to compete in Baldrige. In
2011, the company racked up revenue of $225 million.
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