A Partner In Shared Success: Retailer Of The Year MKC

With a mission “to create customer, employee and partner success to provide a safe and sustainable food supply” and a shared vision “to partner with customers to successfully navigate the complexities of modern agriculture and industry,” MKC has been named the 2023 Retailer of the Year, an award sponsored by Bayer Crop Science and supported by The Scoop. 

Formed in 1965, the cooperative and its 600-plus employees today serve 11,000 member-owners in Kansas and surrounding states. 

Simultaneously, MKC has grown traditional businesses and added new opportunities and services. 

“We’ve got businesses in the traditional sense of grain, agronomy, energy and feed and animal nutrition, but we also do risk management,” explains Brad Stedman, president and CEO of MKC. “We try to tie the whole thing together through how we help the farmer be successful. Our view from our customers’ and farmer-owners’ standpoint is if they’re successful, ultimately we’re successful.”

Company leaders echo, physical signage declares and MKC employees embody the tagline, “Shared growth. Shared success.” 

This statement of continuous improvement is tied to the purpose of MKC and is the intrinsic driving force bringing employees to work. 

“Shared growth, shared success is not only important to our customers and our strategic partners but also to employees and the rural communities we live and work in,” says Dave Spears, executive vice president and chief marketing officer. 

MKC sets its culture based on the four keys of safety, courtesy, image and innovation. 

“These four keys really drive how we show up in the market, how we treat each other, how we treat customers, strategic partners and ultimately how we drive our brand and innovate across our organization,” Stedman says.  

Four Core Values

Safety
MKC has established a safety-first culture for its business operations. Eight MKC locations have received certification through the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and its Safety and Health Achievement Recognition Program.

Courtesy
Company leaders say this is the backbone of customer service, and they strive to provide best-in-class customer service. 

Image
MKC has strived to create a high standard in not only the experience member-owners and customers receive but also the image that communities served have of MKC. 

Innovation
Team members are encouraged to embrace new ideas, be open to change and always learn. MKC offers support to them through a strong learning and development program that provides opportunities for growth, skill-building and leadership preparation.

Providing further fuel to the growth of MKC are the four pillars of its strategic plan: talent, brand, customer and profit.

Talent
Recruitment and retention are key tenants to MKC’s talent strategy. Hilary Worcester, manager of learning development, explains that the team aims to build pathways and development opportunities.  

“Building the pipeline of talent for MKC starts in educational environments through on-site tours and classroom visits for local schools. These experiences progress into job shadow programs and internships for students to experience real career options. The company recently launched an apprenticeship program to foster talent without a direct background in agriculture to find opportunities at MKC.”

To establish consistency, all employees attend in-person orientation on their first day at the Moundridge, Kansas, headquarters. Additionally, once a year, all operations staff attend training to maintenance protocols and standard operating procedures. 

MKC aims for high employee retention to better serve farmers with consistency and excellence. 

“Each employee has a set of goals and a development plan designed with their manager to ensure clarity of expectations and tie their work to MKC’s success,” Worcester says. “The next step is providing continuous employee development to grow our current team members into industry experts and accrue bench strength for when leadership opportunities arise.”

A newly established manager’s training program focuses on outfitting successful team members for the next phase of their careers. 

“We want to give them a hands-on experience, not only with our processes and tools but also with the way MKC thinks about management—not management of tasks but management of people and individuals through their career,” Worcester says.

To prepare managers for next-level leadership opportunities in the business, MKC has developed a proprietary program called the Strategic Thinking and Execution Program. 

“We’ve found it’s most helpful to structure these programs ourselves because it’s about teaching the MKC way of thinking about things,” Worcester says. “They’re all rooted in our four keys. They’re all rooted in our objectives. They’re all rooted in our vision.” 

Brand
Stedman wants farmers to view the MKC team as a solutions provider. 

“We employ an enterprise sales approach across the business. So when we show up at the farm gate, we’re looking at their entire business rather than just a segment of it,“ he says. “We connect our team of specialists together, so they can meet the enterprise needs of the farmer. By using risk management tools, like crop insurance and grain origination contracts, we are able to tie their grain outputs and crop inputs together. Ultimately, we want to help them maximize their revenue potential while creating a floor for future success. We think it’s really important that our customers think about profitability and tying it all together through our enterprise approach.”

From how the team shows up physically on the farm to what comes to mind when a farmer thinks of MKC, this perception-building is paramount to the business’ growth.

Spears adds, “What sets MKC apart from other competitors in Kansas includes our employees and their ability to service our customers and provide them a full range of products and services.”

As such, MKC has embedded more technology into its business to deliver value and instill relevance. They are on a digital transformation journey to automate processes, create efficiency and re-imagine the business for the digital age. The four areas of projects within this initiative are business applications, robotic process automation, paperless workflows and artificial intelligence and machine learning.

For example, MKC has invested in new customer-facing portals: MKC Connect and MWF Connect. These have created an improved online and mobile experience for member-owners and customers.

“We’re invested in a drone company. We’re invested in a robotics company,” Stedman says. “We’re not afraid to try new things and fail, and we’re not afraid to try new things on their behalf to figure out what is going to help them from an agronomy input perspective in the future to make their crops more profitable and more productive.”

Customer
MKC has surveyed its core customer base for the past six years. The results have improved year over year. In 2023, the overall customer satisfaction score averaged 87%, which exceeded the 85% goal. Since administering the survey, customer retention averaged more than 97%. 

“Customers choose us because we focus on bringing innovative solutions to their farm gate—whether it’s being a vanguard on the leading edge or supporting them where they are,” says Devin Schierling, vice president of sales. “They trust us to be a consistent factor throughout the entire process to help make a positive impact on their farm.”

MKC uses metrics to measure success for ease of doing business, customer satisfaction, customer and employee retention, regrettable turnover and profitability.

From the farmer survey, areas of positive feedback were as follows: 

• Friendly, trustworthy and knowledgeable people. 
• Investments made toward the continued improvement of services and programs. 
• Value and reliability provided by agronomic strategic account managers to the producers’ operations. 
• Reliability of the employees, products, programs and services. 

When asked to describe MKC, this customer group most often used the word “partner.”

What Farmers Have To Say About MKC

Dale Schmidt, DE Schmidt Farms, McPherson, Kansas
“They’re able to meet the needs that I have for service. Really, my business depends on their timeliness and having good employees showing up whenever I need them. MKC invests my dollars into the infrastructure for elevators, machinery, equipment, but also, they’re investing in good people, which is greatly needed.”
 
Derek Sawyer, Sawyer Family Angus, McPherson, Kansas
“MKC does a great job of getting their service people to the farm gate—from having crop insurance advisers that come out and help walk us through it to the crop protection specialists that actually get out in the field and quite oftentimes will tell me what’s going on before I realize it in the field and then the marketing guys or ladies that are a phone call away to help with marketing of the crops.”

Justin Mosiman, Mosiman Farms, Newton, Kansas 
“We have been with MKC for multiple generations. The service and the commitment they’ve had to us has helped us. Their willingness to innovate and try new things has helped us on our farm as well. We’re able to do business as friends, and we feel like we make decisions together.” 

Sara Hasty, Graber Grain Farms, Hesston, Kansas
“We consider our strategic account manager part of our team in our operation, and they’re a partner with our planning before the year even begins. Right before any busy season, we go through planning, and then it helps things go a lot smoother.”

Profit
Stedman credits the cooperative’s consistency to its strategic plan. 

“We’ve been very consistent over 12 years with our growth strategy,” Stedman says. “It has directed how we grow, making sure it’s core to who we are and who our customers are. As long as we focus on growth that is positive for our customers and our farmer-owners, that drives our success.” 

He says the team at MKC is committed to earning farmers’ business every day. Focusing on winning business on the acre and serving customers for the long term have yielded success for MKC. 

“Our approach isn’t about selling a widget. It’s about a mindset—a way of doing business,” Schierling says. “When you remove the noise of price and distraction in advertising, you get down to the question: How does what I do today impact the bottom line of my farm? From there, you expand that to look at managing operations on a multiyear basis.”

Advocacy

About 20 employees at MKC are actively involved in national and state associations. 

“I think policy and politics are not spectator sports, and we need to have everybody involved in it,” says Brad Stedman, president and CEO, MKC. 

The cooperative is a member and has employees engaged as leaders of the Agricultural Retailers Association, National Grain and Feed, National Council of Farmer Cooperatives, Kansas Agribusiness Retailers, Kansas Grain and Feed, Kansas Cooperative Council, Certified Crop Adviser Program and other industry groups.

Dave Spears, executive vice president and chief marketing officer, echoes how MKC has taken on a role of advocacy, “We advocate on behalf of our customers, our strategic partners and the entire industry as well.” 

• Annually, MKC hosts a Legislative Staff Day for congressional staff and state legislators at facilities to form personal connections. 
• MKC annually hosts members of the congressional delegation and regulatory agencies for tours and roundtable discussions at its facility locations. 
• At the Kansas state capitol, MKC attends Legislative Action Day each year and has for well longer than a decade. 
• MKC leaders and members of its board of directors make frequent visits to Washington, D.C., so they can meet with members of Congress. 

“MKC having a voice not only at the local and the state level but also the national level allows them to amplify the message of Kansas farmers like us, and also sing in harmony with the other ag organizations across the country to really put an emphasis behind those important priorities as we write the farm bill,” says Katie Sawyer, state director for U.S. Senator Roger Marshall (pictured above with Spears). “The freedom to operate is invaluable to the growth and prosperity of Kansas agriculture and agriculture across this country.”