Sally Hargis is a Woman Who Means Business

Sally Hargis isn’t one to brag about herself or her achievements. She’s a firm believer that a business is only as successful as its team, so she’s always made it her goal to place focus on the employees at Ozarks Coca-Cola/Dr Pepper Bottling Company. In her experience, company growth organically follows suit when employees feel valued. According to her, this is a lesson that she learned from her father, Edwin C. ‘Cookie’ Rice, who is the current CEO of the family business. 

“When people would ask my dad, ‘How many trucks do you have?’” Hargis recalls, “he would say, ‘Well, I don’t know how many trucks we have, but I know how many employees we have. I know how many people we have driving them.’ That was really significant to me.”

This inherited value is one reason why she thrives in her role as chairman of the board. Through her current job, she helps maintain relationships within the communities the business serves. So in true family fashion, the growth-related number that Hargis offers for the past three years is increasing the company’s staff count from 225 to 730 employees. 

“The growth over the past three years has been really huge, and trying to maintain a family culture in that kind of growth takes effort,” Hargis says. “Our employees really are the ones who dedicate their lives to our business and to the brands that we serve. We want them to be proud of the brand and proud of being associated with the family company.”

To maintain a close-knit work environment through the growth, Hargis, Rice and the executive team regularly make trips together to the business’s branches. For example, they make an effort to attend the Thanksgiving, Christmas and Service Award luncheons at each of their six branches.

“It is really important to be in those workplaces with the people who are there every day, show them our appreciation and give them an indication that we really value their leadership, wherever they are in their career, whether they’re brand new or if they’ve been there 40 years. We need to give them the tools to go to win in the marketplace because that’s what they want to do.”

Her past five years at Ozarks Coca-Cola have marked some of her proudest moments. Alongside Rice and their executive team, they completed two franchise expansions in 2015, one in Joplin and one in West Plains. Most recently, in 2017 they expanded their franchise territory to Northwest Arkansas. 

Prior to working at Ozarks Coca-Cola, Hargis started her career on a very different path. She earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism and home economics from Mizzou and spent 10 years working at KBUG radio and KY3 in advertising and sales. Although she left her role at KY3 in 1990, she still finds that the relationships she developed there are important to her even today. 

“I think all business is personal,” she says. “When you can develop those personal relationships with people, you gain a better understanding of what their needs are and what they’re looking for. I was obviously selling TV ads at KY3, but what I was really doing was trying to learn about my client’s business well enough to know how to reach them. I think the same thing happens here at Ozarks Coca-Cola. We’re always learning as much as we can about our customers, and they are varied. We’ve got the mom and pop, the entrepreneurs and the giant businesses.”