Stories
Stories
Man with a Plan
By now, Jimmy Rane (OPM 11, 1986) is used to the questions. Wherever he goes, people ask, “Where’s your yellow shirt? Where’s your yellow hat?” Rane, the CEO of Great Southern Wood Preserving, told the Birmingham News (February, 13, 2011).
Therein lies the broad impact of his “Yella Fella” TV ads, in which Rane stars as the yellow-clad cowboy who saves the West from rotting wood with his pressure-treated pine, known as YellaWood. “They'll probably expect me to wear yellow shoes at some point,” he quipped. The ad campaign has been a game-changer for the Abbeville, Alabama–based wood company.
Rane was a practicing attorney in Birmingham in 1970 when he acquired Great Southern following the deaths of its founders, his wife’s parents, in an auto accident. While he moved to Abbeville, he continued to practice law and head the company for another 15 years.
“I had an undergraduate degree in business and a law degree, [but] I knew we needed help with managing our growing business,” Rane said in a recent interview. That’s when he decided to follow up on an invitation from HBS in 1983 to apply for the Smaller Company Management Program (today’s Owner/President Management Program). “What better place to look for those answers than Harvard Business School?”
At HBS, Rane recalled that two cases made all the difference for Great Southern. “The Browning Lumber case helped me realize that one of our biggest needs was infusing more capital into the business to help us manage the financial side of our growth. The second was a marketing case about Perdue Foods. The strategy that Frank Perdue initiated really resonated with me. We took a page from his playbook and decided to develop a consumer brand in the commodity wood segment. The Yella Fella character really came from the natural evolution of our advertising strategy.
“Had you asked me in the mid-1980s if I envisioned playing a cowboy character in our commercials, I would never have believed it. But it has turned out to be very, very successful,” he added.
Rane also gives the late HBS professor Marty Marshall much credit for what became the Yella Fella ads, since he “convinced me that consumers needed to connect with the owner of the business, someone whose word they could trust and whose products they could believe in.”
Today, Rane remains active with HBS, lending his experience to expert panels and staying close to classmates. Several key players at Great Southern Wood, including family members, have attended the OPM program as well. “HBS has been a central part of my professional growth and an integral part of how our family and our family business have matured over the years.”