When you look at the CEOs of America’s top businesses there’s always a lot of press and flash. Everyone knows who they are, where they live and all the other gossip that follows.
So you wouldn’t expect for one of the 100 richest men in the world to keep a low profile…
But Rick Cohen, chairman of C&S Wholesale Grocers, has quietly built his family’s business into one of the biggest companies in New England. So big in fact, that some experts are already calling it “The Biggest Company You’ve Never Heard Of”.
Now if you google his name, you’ll see things like:
“Secretive Billionaire Grocery Kingpin Found Living Modest Life In New Hampshire” –CelebrityNetWorth.com
“Richard Cohen, New Hampshire’s Invisible Grocery Billionaire” –Bloomberg
“Revealed, America’s most modest billionaire: Tycoon worth $11bn is so down-to-earth that neighbors don’t recognize him – on street where average home is $294,000” –Daily Mail
But Rick Cohen is the coolest (undercover) billionaire in the world. Down to earth and low key. He hasn’t given an interview in over a decade.
So it’s no wonder his company would also be low key.
You wouldn’t know C&S is a company at all, unless you worked for them or were one of the THOUSANDS of grocery stores that receive their products from them…
Their trucks aren’t emblazoned with the company’s name on the side of them…
They work out of a nondescript office park that was once slated to be the site of a new county jail in the town…
Making C&S one of the most unrecognizable Billion dollar brands the world has ever known.
In fact, according to Forbes, C&S Wholesale Grocers is the 10th largest privately held company in America – with approximately $30 billion in net sales in 2015!
This makes them the largest wholesale grocery distributer in the U.S – distributing more than 170,000 products to 6,500 supermarkets around the United States, including Hawaii.
Rick Cohen is the sole owner of C&S, and has a net worth of $11.2 billion, according to the Bloomberg index…
However, Mr. Cohen has never appeared on an international wealth ranking.
He’s the undercover Billionaire…
But how did he take his small family business and build it into a multi-Billion dollar a year juggernaut?
The road was harder than it looked…
But didn’t take as long as you would expect either.
Cohen’s grandfather, Israel, co-founded C&S in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1918. But after a flood destroyed his inventory in 1929, he opened a new warehouse, twice the size, on higher ground, a few blocks further from the city’s Blackstone River.
His son, and Rick’s father, Lester, expanded the business into supplying military bases after a tour of duty as a bomber navigator in World War II.
Rick joined the company in 1974, after receiving an accounting degree at University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton school – but it was a potentially debilitating incident that really opened his eyes and began to see the pathway to REAL profits.
A three-week union strike almost shut the business for good in 1975 prompting the new graduate to persuade his father to move the company to Brattleboro, Vermont, where it could build larger warehouses and hire nonunion workers.
Cohen took over as CEO when his father retired and moved the headquarters 18 miles east to Keene in 2003, after getting officials to relocate the county jail planned for the land he had his eye on, said Paul Miller, Executive Editor of the Keene Sentinel newspaper.
But the real secret to C&S’s success? Its workers. Well, how Cohen treats his employees is the REAL secret…
At C&S warehouses, self-managed teams of workers are responsible for meeting customer orders – picking the items from shelves, collecting and wrapping them on pallets and loading them onto trucks – on time.
Their incentive to keep things operating “like clockwork”? In addition to hourly wages, teams earn extra money for every order filled and suffer a wage deduction for every error.
A real performance incentive plan…
Cohen got the idea after C&S won the right to service A&P supermarkets’ and the extra work started creating chaos in the warehouse – as workers had little time to fill order and restock.
The new contract almost doubled the business but getting over the growing pains all came down to a quick decision…
Cohen implemented the self-managed teams after attending an executive retreat hosted by author and management consultant Tom Peters.
The incentive program began paying immediate dividends and the company hasn’t slowed down since.
It’s refreshing to read about a company that succeeds when they’re thrown a curve ball…
Through floods, unions and explosive expansion – C&S Wholesale Grocers has blaster through each of these roadblocks with the power of a cannonball.
It really is amazing what can be achieved when you really care about not only your product… but how your employees feel about the business as well…
If everybody feels like an owner – there’s nothing that can stop you.
Regards,
Ethan Warrick
