At the heart of many great American stories is a leader who dared to do things differently. Meet Ralph Stayer, the founder of Johnsonville Sausage. Back in 1980, as Johnsonville boomed, Ralph realized his way of leading was holding everyone back. He made a brave decision: to flip the script and empower his team members, radically putting trust and decision-making into their hands. This unique approach didn’t just help create America’s number one sausage brand; it forged an extraordinary workplace built on shared values and mutual respect, proving the power of ethical leadership and employee empowerment.
But what happens when those values are truly tested? In our “Do the Right Thing” series, sponsored by the Daniels Fund, we explore how Johnsonville’s ethical foundation faced its toughest challenges. From a devastating plant fire that left team members without a workplace to the spontaneous deployment of their iconic Big Taste Grills during national disasters, these stories showcase incredible resolve and compassion. Discover how this company, built on trust and empowerment, consistently chose the path of integrity, demonstrating that doing the right thing isn’t just good for the soul—it’s a cornerstone of American business and community spirit.
📖 Read the Episode Transcript
Ralph Stayer is the founder of Johnsonville’s Sausage. Back around 1980, Johnsonville was growing 20 percent a year, and Ralph was excited. But no one else was. And Ralph realized that he was the problem. He had made it all about him, with every employee reporting to him, all 150 of them. Ralph decided to do a 180 and make it all about them, empowering what they now call “each other team members” more radically than perhaps any other company. Ralph took himself out of almost everything. The Johnsonville team members decide whom they want to hire, fire, and work with. They created the system for the profit-sharing pool that’s around 30 percent of all profits, and together they created the No. 1 sausage brand in America. Ralph couldn’t be more proud of the team and the ethical decisions that they’ve made.
One day, I got a phone call that our plant and Watertown, Wisconsin, burned out.
It was destroyed.
So, we needed to move as quickly as possible to get that new plant up because 20 percent of our total production was coming out of that plant. A great aside: that other people, other plants, stepped up. The people stepped up and increased production and worked work extra shifts
weekends for almost a year to cover. I mean, I can’t say enough about people’s attitudes. They just did it. It was just no question. That was a ton of little carping or anything else. But, so, we’re looking at this plant and these people who don’t have work: no plant, no work.
And so, I’m sitting in Florida, and they called me up and said, you know, our leadership team calls them and said, “You know, Ralph, we decided that we’re going to keep everybody on. We’re going to pay everybody. There’s 40 hours a week even though there’s no work. All we’re going to ask of them is that they spend x amount of time developing new skills in any technical school or whatever.”
And, well, and we will fund the cost.
So, they’ll do that community service. They cleaned up the airport; they did all kinds of community service. So, as long as you’re doing those things and are actually doing something, not sitting around doing nothing.
“We’re paying your salary.” We did it for a whole year.
Now, a lot of people would say, “Oh, crazy! Wow, are those people?” Yeah. However, these are very talented people, and we have invested a ton of money in them. We’ve been investing in these people all these years.
You know, my mother, years…
And years ago, we didn’t initially didn’t understand where I was going on, what I was doing, where we were going, what we were doing—better statement—because there are a lot of us that build the Johnson away. But she said, “Well, what if you invest? You’re investing all this money in these people.”
“What if they learn all listen, they quit and go somewhere else?”
I said, “Mom, what if we don’t invest all this money and they stay?”
“What’s worse?” “Oh, I never thought of that.” And so, I have an investment in most people. It’s incredible. There’s incredible people, incredible talent. We had to build a plant there, and so.
If we didn’t do it, we’d lost a whole bunch of them, and the startup would have been horrendous. The startup of the new plant would have been horrendous. Training new people, etc., trying to find them and all that.
So, yeah, the first response was, “We’re doing it because it’s the right thing to do.”
On the other hand, when you look back on it, and we look back and say, “Heck,” we got that plant going in 10 months. God provided a building for us that we didn’t even know existed. We found it like right now; we were able to move in and redo it and all that. And the day we started up, we went just like gangbusters. So, it’s an ethical dilemma, but it’s the right thing to do. But the beauty of it is that decision was made.
No one called me. They did it. They made that call; they informed me. They didn’t call to ask.
For permission, even though they were spending tens of millions of dollars. The Johnsonville team members in Watertown did over 10,000 hours of community service during this year, and their ranks even grew from 120 team members before the fire to 155 in the new plant. And besides plants, Johnsonville has a pretty fun asset that Ralph is about to introduce you to. But like every asset in our life, there’s constant ethical dilemmas about how to best use them, and you’re about to hear how the Johnsonville team members keep the ethical principle of respect front and center, which can lead to an extremely viable business.
We have these Big Taste Grills that run all over the country, right, with our product on them, and they go to big events, and we expose people to Johnsonville Brats. It’s hard for me to manage, but there are people actually out there in the world that haven’t tasted our brats yet. So, so, anyway, Hurricane contrite it.
Next thing I know is video of our Big Taste Grill down there feeding.
The relief workers the next day, or two days later, whatever, being the relief workers. How did that happen?
Well, people decided that they were scheduled for events or whatever. Somewhere, people made a decision. They sent it down there to be the relief workers and the people who were homeless, and obviously there’s no power, no place to eat, so we fed thousands of thousands of people. Then we did the same thing in Texas, Harvey, and then Sandy.
And.
People just do it because it’s the right thing to do in our company. And then there’s a story about when the tornado hit Joplin, and.
Walmart’s the biggest.
Customer. And I’ve been invited down a couple of times to speak at their Saturday morning meetings about partnerships and explaining how we see it between supplier and customer relationships and the value of partnering.
Then it’s a two-way street.
If you’re going to beat people up all the time, then we’re going to take our resources and put it someplace else where we get a better return. But you folks have been so great that you work with us, you get your best customer, you get our best No. 1 call on everything. Okay, but that’s how it works. So, we finished this whole time. We showed the results of the new products and stuff.
It’s a hockey stick. It’s a hockey stick of how much we’ve sold to them and how much they’ve sold because of our relationship.
And afterwards, this fellow stays up. He said, “You know, I hear all that, and that’s really good, but I want to tell you something about this company. I was in Joplin, Missouri, the day after the tornado, and in the parking lot of the…”
Getting chills again. I’m getting chills again just thinking about this.
And in the parking lot of our Walmart, which was totally destroyed, there was the Johnsonville Big Taste Grill cooking sausage, cooking food.
For all the relief workers, for all the people. They were there doing that.
“I don’t know, we didn’t have any other vendors doing that, but there was a Johnsonville Grill serving everybody. And that’s what I call a great company. And I’m sitting, I feel pretty good right now because he’s not only telling here, he’s telling all over the world because that’s broadcast.”
All over the world.
And now we do business in Walmart pretty much all over the world anyway.
There it is.
So, if you live your life the right way, these things happened. This path that doesn’t cost money sometimes, yeah, but overall, overall, the blessings are unbelievable. But again, I didn’t tell anybody to go to Joplin. There’s no phone call from the CEO: “Go to Joplin.” The people who are managing that Big Taste Grill went to Joplin because they knew it was the right thing to do, made all their agents, got all the product, whatever the buzz, whatever it took, they were there passing it out, giving it away, giving it away.
And a special thanks to Alex and to Joey Cortes for the work they did on this piece, and a special thanks to Ralph Stayer for telling this story. And as always, our Do the Right Thing series is brought to us by the great folks at the Daniels Fund. To learn about bringing their ethics programs to your school, business, police department, church, go to Danielsfund.org. That’s Danielsfund.org, and they have eight principles in their ethics initiative that they really drill down on. Two of the principles were at play here. One was viability, and that’s creating long-term value for all relevant stakeholders. And my goodness, that was done here by keeping those employees in the mix, ready to go when that plant was rebuilt. Our Do the Right Thing series, this time with Ralph Stayer of Johnsonville Sausage, here on our American Stories.
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