Hard work, focus drive Darr's empire

The philosopher Howard Thurman once remarked, "There are two questions that we have to ask ourselves. The first is 'Where am I going?' and the second is 'Who will go with me?' If you ever get these questions in the wrong order, you are in trouble."

Clearly, Springfieldian Bill Darr asked these questions and in the right order. The founder of a poultry and egg ingredient empire, employing more than 500 people in several states and doing business in 38 countries, Darr has resolutely followed his own internal compass and has been deliberate in choosing his associates. By forging long-term relationships with his associates, suppliers and customers, he built a $250 million food business.

Darr was born in 1931 on a farm near the southeast Missouri town of Ellington. His parents operated a beef cow operation, complemented with a few hogs, milk cows and chickens. His father also had a pond digging service for local farmers and ran a saw mill to supplement the family's income. Number three of seven kids, the young entrepreneur soon learned that wherever he was going, it was going to take hard work to get there. By the age of 7, he was selling seeds for spending money.

At Ellington High School, Darr met a young woman named Virginia Ralls, whom he would marry 40 years later. After graduation, he moved to St. Louis where he was employed at a White Castle restaurant until he was drafted. He went on to serve in Korea before being discharged in 1953. With the help of the G.I. Bill, he enrolled at Southwest Missouri State Teacher's College in Springfield.

Darr's major was in agriculture, and his adviser recommended him for a quality control position at Henningsen Foods' egg-dehydration plant on West College. Darr worked 40 to 48 hours per week while carrying a full load at SMS. Henningsen was impressed and offered him a job after graduation at its Malvern, Iowa, egg plant 40 miles outside of Omaha.

Darr graduated and moved to Malvern with his new bride June Hollingsworth, whom he met while attending Southwest Missouri State.

They settled into a converted school house, turned it into a home, and went to work. A year later he got a promotion and moved to Omaha where they raised their three children Marsha, Sherry and Doug. Darr moved up in the company to general production manager over the next 16 years before deciding to leave.

The law was changing and Darr saw an opportunity. The USDA was imposing stricter food regulations. Some egg product would no longer qualify for human consumption. Rather than throw it out, Darr saw an opportunity to use these eggs as an ingredient in pet food.

Darr was contacted by two investors regarding an egg-drying opportunity. A decision was made to locate in Jackson, Miss.

Darr became president of the new company, Pets and Such. "I ran 100 percent of the production and procurement and 50 percent of the sales," he said. Although the company prospered, Darr was frustrated at times over business disagreements with his two partners. He decided to sell out and go out on his own. In the words of his son-in-law, Tom Slaight, "Bill was going to drive his own bus."

Pets and Such would be the last deal where someone else controlled his destiny.

While waiting to sell his house in Jackson, he started a new business, American Dehydrated Foods Inc. (ADF) in a spare bedroom. One day a business acquaintance dropped by the house and told him about an opportunity with the Iams Pet Food Company.

Clay Mathile, an executive at (and later, owner of) the Dayton, Ohio, company wanted to increase the protein content in their pet food by removing bone fragments. Darr was aware of a product that could meet his specifications. It was called mechanically separated chicken. The process separates the chicken meat remaining on skeleton (the frame) after the breast, thighs and wings have been removed by knife-wielding factory workers. The final product has the consistency of ground beef.

Darr phoned Mathile and pitched his idea. The two men hit it off. Both were self-starters who grew up on farms and spent their lives in the food business. Mathile asked Darr to send Iams a frozen 50-pound sample for lab analysis. It met Iams' specs and Mathile ordered a truck load. At this point, Darr's major business assets were a desk and a telephone, but he was able to meet the purchase order as well as the ones that followed. It was the beginning of a 35-year-relationship between Darr and Mathile.

When he moved to Springfield a few months later, Darr rented a small office on South Campbell near Weaver Road. He moved in two desks and hired a secretary and began brokering eggs and meat for his customers. But he wanted to produce the egg and meat products himself, rather than brokering it. The money was better and that way he could control the quality. While he was working on a plan for an egg drying facility, he leased a meat facility in Aurora. A few months later, Armour Foods closed its turkey processing facility in Monett. Darr stepped in and leased that plant as well.

Personal tragedy

In 1978, June, who died in 1987, was diagnosed with leukemia. Then in 1979, he and June and family suffered a tremendous personal tragedy when son Doug was killed in an automobile accident the day before Thanksgiving.

Through it all, Darr kept his business going. By 1980 he was ready to open an egg drying facility in Verona. Interest rates were going up so it was hard to qualify for a loan. Darr convinced Gary Metzger, a young loan officer at Mercantile Bank, to lend him money to build a 9,000-square-foot egg drying facility in Verona. Despite a prime lending rate of 22 percent, Darr opened the plant in August 1980 and made money from the start.

During this time, Ron Terry, Darr's CPA and later CFO, had advised him to consider whether his ultimate goal was to build a business that could eventually be sold, or one that could be passed on to his family. Darr made it clear that his desire was to grow the business and pass it along to future generations of his family. It so happened his daughter Marsha and her husband Tom Slaight had recently moved to Springfield so Marsha could support her mother as she struggled with leukemia.

Slaight, with a degree in biology and environmental studies from Iowa State University, had accepted a job with an environmental consulting firm in Springfield. But the first day he showed up for work, he discovered the firm had gone out of business. While Slaight was looking for another job, Darr offered him a job at the Verona plant. Seven years later, Darr convinced his other son-in-law, Kurt Hellweg, to leave the Navy and join the firm. "He made me an offer I could not refuse," joked Hellweg, the current chairman of the board.

Darr's next initiative was to expand by selling ingredients for human consumption. In 1982, he formed International Dehydrated Foods Inc. (IDF). It would sell chicken broth, chicken fat, and dehydrated meat to national companies that repackaged the product under their own brands. Today IDF is one of the largest producers of chicken broth in the country, if not the world.

At the same time, the pet food company ADF was processing about 30 million pounds of eggs a year for pet food out of its Verona plant. To reduce transportation costs from suppliers in the Southeast, the next expansion was to build a plant 40 miles east of Atlanta in Social Circle, Ga. Now the two plants can produce up to 60 million pounds of dehydrated eggs a year.

"Bill was always saying "'What's next?'" remembers current president Mike Gerke. "He was like a juggler who keeps track of 16 things in the air at one time."

Throughout the 1980s the Iams relationship grew. In 1990, Mathile and Darr were having dinner. Mathile wanted to improve the Iams pet food formula. He was looking for a more consistent raw material. Plus it was expensive to transport product with a high moisture content. They formed a joint venture, named it FITCO for Food Ingredients Technology Company LLC, and built the plant in Anniston, Ala.

The new plant was designed to separate the chicken meat into three parts: broth, fat, and meat. The broth is sold to soup companies and the fat and dehydrated meat to Iams.

By operating the plant on a round-the-clock basis, FITCO controls the quality of the products produced in the continuous process. "It's like a blended Scotch where the quality does not vary," says former CFO and current board member Ron Terry. Today, depending on market prices, the fat can also be sold as an ingredient for biofuels.

Formula for success

Darr always aimed to exceed the expectations of the people he dealt with, whether they were suppliers, customers or associates. He is a very smart guy who cares deeply about his associates and his customers, Mathile said in a 2012 interview.

For his suppliers, he was picking up the chicken frames from the processing plant as soon as their workers had sliced the meat off the bones. He was transporting this raw material in refrigerated trailers daily. He paid suppliers promptly so as to get their best prices.

For his customers, Darr continuously strived to exceed specifications, and more orders followed.

For his associates, Darr established a pay, benefit and retirement package that beat his competitors.

In addition to exceeding expectations, Darr attributes his success to timing, good ideas, and attracting good people to his team. One of those individuals included Bob Bell, hired in 1983, who was instrumental in assisting Darr with upgrading production processes and product quality.

Darr's advice to others thinking of going into business for themselves? "Understand your business really well before you start sinking serious money in it."

Looking ahead

Darr sees a hierarchy of responsibilities in life. "After taking care of his family, he looks out for his associates, and now he helps his community," said board member Ron Terry.

Always thinking about what's next, he attended a seminar in 1993 at Missouri State on succession planning with Slaight, Hellweg, and Terry. Darr then decided to create an advisory board for his companies. The purpose of the board was twofold, to facilitate the transfer of Darr's control to the next generation headed up by Slaight and Hellweg and facilitate Darr's move into philanthropy.

By 2000, Darr was ready to turn over management of his companies to his sons-in-law and his long-term associates. He has since phased out the advisory board and expanded the board of directors to include non-family members. The companies are in good hands. Gerke is president of the companies and Hellweg is CEO and chairman of the board. Hellweg, Terry, Slaight, and Bell serve with Darr on the board along with three outside directors who were selected for their particular expertise.

For the first 30 years, Darr focused on operating the company well — not so much on making long-term plans. However, in the last few years, the business has implemented a strategic planning process. It hired Stephanie Lynch, former Global Market Manager for Dow Chemical's Food and Nutrition Business. Lynch, vice president of sales and marketing, now heads up research and development, marketing, and customer sales for IDF. Recently, ADF has formed a new joint venture headquartered in Springfield called IsoNova Technologies LLC with Rembrandt Enterprises, Inc., of Okoboji, Iowa.

The joint venture calls for research, development and manufacture of innovative egg products for the pet food and animal feed industries, Hellweg said. In addition to the IsoNova research, IDF also is underwriting research at the Jordon Valley Innovation Center with MSU Professor Paul Durham.

With the companies now in the hands of the next generation, Bill and Virginia have turned their attention to philanthropy. Slaight manages the Darr Family Foundation. The Foundation is well-known in Springfield for gifts to underprivileged youths. Darr and the Foundation support organizations like the Good Samaritan Boys Ranch, Boys and Girls Club, and Boys and Girls Town of Missouri. Darr is a past president of the foundation for Missouri State University and the Darr Agricultural Center was named after him in recognition of his support.

Bill and Virginia especially enjoy helping young people. They provide scholarships themselves to kids from their hometown in Ellington and to MSU students majoring in agriculture. Carol Silvey with the Community Foundation of West Plains says that Darr and Virginia embody the best principles of philanthropy. They stay in touch with the kids they give scholarships to. And whenever they are honored for a gift they always seem humbled and surprised, Silvey says. For Darr, he says his greatest pleasure is seeing people do well.

Bill Darr still knows where he is going and continues to give a lift along the way to as many as he can.

About this series

This is the fourth in a series of profiles of Ozarks business titans, written by a well-known businessman himself — former Springfield Mayor Tom Carlson. Many people might not know that Carlson has a bachelor's degree in journalism and worked at the News-Leader as a reporter from 1975 to 1976. In these profiles — one will appear every month or so — Carlson will delve deep into the stories of some of the area's most fascinating entrepreneurs.