Investing for the Long Term and Putting People Over Profit
Price is celebrating its 75th anniversary throughout 2024, and our commemoration of this milestone will dedicate special attention to the 13 tenets of the Price Way. Each post in this blog series explores one of these guiding principles, giving our blog readers a closer look at its meaning.
In this post, we’ll be looking at what financial discipline means at Price.
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| Ernie Price working at his desk, circa 1955 |
At Price, we focus on investing for the long term. Compared to many publicly traded companies or private equity firms that drive solely for short-term shareholder profitability, this allows for a different style of financial discipline.
Investing for the long term means we’re willing to take risks and sustain losses to ensure we’re building foundation. This sometimes results in excess capacity and nonproductive assets, but it also ensures we’ll be ready when surge capacity is required. Some new ventures may take more than 10 years to produce good financial results, but this is necessary to stay ahead of the curve. Profits are not just measured over quarters or even years; they’re also measured over decades and generations.
Our decentralized, nonbureaucratic company structure is supported by business leaders who are detail oriented enough to spot areas for improvement and forward thinking enough to see opportunities for growth. We keep on top of the trends and concentrate on what we can control: serving our customers, ensuring capacity and innovation, and working with our partners on win-win strategies.
| Watch the video to learn more about the financial discipline tenet! |
Our leaders’ vision of maintaining a relentless focus on service requires continual investment in people, science, training, efficiency and plant capacity. While we keep the majority of our earnings to invest for tomorrow, we also give back to our communities today. Sharing our success with our customers, employees and community is a proud legacy that shows what we built, contributed and left behind. To quote a “Gerryism,” we will always put people over profit.
We invest for the future because that’s where our customers expect us to be. When you concentrate on serving, investing and innovating, the financial results will follow.
