Owner/employee

SPRINGDALE — SELF PORTRAIT

Date and place of birth:

Jan. 15, 1949, in Vernon, Texas

Family:

daughters Lauren and Lindsey

Occupation:

chief executive officer and chairman of Harps Food Stores Inc.

When I read

Friday Night Lights,

I thought

that the social life had really changed.

We weren’t partying like they were.

If you’re going to be a leader, you

have to be a model for people to follow. You have to have integrity and you have to care about people. A leader must inspire and motivate people to accomplish the mission.

At work, I tend to wear

a polo shirt with a Harps monogram. We’re casual.

In five years, I

hope Harps is a 100-store chain.

We’re working hard to become the friendliest and most-engaging grocery store in America.

When I visit other grocery stores, I’m analyzing their strategy and marketing. I’m also interested in how friendly their employees are.

The place I want most to visit is

Spain.

The last great book I read was

Unbroken.

The thing people would be surprised to find in my shopping cart is

Fritos.

If I had an extra hour each day I would

socialize more.

A word to sum me up:

determined

Roger Collins wasn’t willing to be merely an employee.

In 1986, Collins flew from Dallas to Springdale, interviewing to become the vice president of finance and chief financial officer at a small grocery-store chain named Harps. At the time, the Harp family owned the company, and they weren’t looking to change that.

Collins insisted that being allowed to buy stock was really important to him; he made it a term of his employment. When he got the go-ahead, Collins took much of his savings, as well as a loan from the bank, and bought into the company.

The way Collins saw it, it wasn’t just an investment in Harps; it was an investment in himself.

“It was the difference between being an owner and being an employee,” Collins explains. “I wasn’t just getting a paycheck, I was getting to share in the success of the company. So the more successfulHarps would be, the more successful I would be.”

The pride Collins felt as a result of his ownership - and the way it motivated him to make Harps a better company - weighed heavily on his mind 15 years later, when he led a dramatic transformation of the company.

In 2001, every share of the company’s stock, including the shares owned by the Harp family and Collins, were bought and placed into a trust. Harps subsequently instituted an employee stock ownership plan (ESOP), which meant that Harps became entirely employee-owned.

“He was probably the key person as far as us becoming an ESOP company,” says Harps president Kim Eskew of Springdale. “He spearheaded that effort and was immersed in it. I doubt it could havehappened without him.”

Collins, 63, the chief executive officer and chairman of Harps Food Stores Inc., was part of the first football team to ever win a state championship at Permian High School in Odessa, Texas, the program later made famous when it was chronicled in the best-selling book Friday Night Lights. Collins subsequently earned a football scholarship to Rice University, and still draws heavily on lessons from his football days.

He’s seriously competitive, someone who is driven to keep expanding Harps even though the largest retailer in the world, by revenue - Wal-Mart Stores Inc. - is headquartered just up the road in Bentonville. When Collins joined Harps in 1986, it had 16 locations; today it has 67 locations in three states, including numerous locations throughout Northwest Arkansas. (The 67 locations includestores it has purchased, which is why some stores in the chain are named Price Cutter and Food 4 Less; a few were named Price Cutter when Collins joined.)

He believes that a team functions best when everyone has an investment in the outcome, such as checkers who know that if they go out of their way to help a customer, they might shop more at Harps, which ultimately means more money in their pockets through the ESOP.

The longer employees are with the company, the more stock they earn, giving them a vested interest in the company’s performance.

“It’s a whole different deal than if you’re just an employee,” Collins says. “I don’t think any grocery chain in America should be more friendly and engaging than Harps, because of the competitive advantage we have with our ESOP.”

Collins’ competitive nature was at work when he was coaching his daughters in youth sports. Today they are grown, but the lessons of hard work he and his late wife, Marilyn, taught them are easily seen in their lives. Older daughter Lauren has a master’s of business administration, while younger daughter Lindsey is in a dermatology residency at Dartmouth University at Hanover, N.H.

Lindsey says she can’t remember playing on any team coached by her father that didn’t win a championship.

“He has always been competing, and he loves winning,” Lindsey Collins says. “The one thing that he instilled in both my sister and me is that there were no limits to what we could achieve in life if we worked hard. Both our parents taught us to dream big.”

THE LONG GAME

Texas wanted Roger Collins.

There were several colleges that offered Collins a football scholarship, but perhaps none were bigger than the University of Texas at Austin. For a teenager who had lived his entire life in Texas, the prospect of playing for the Longhorns was mighty tempting.

He decided to go to Rice University in Houston instead. The Owls couldn’t match Texas’ success on the field, but Collins was focused on more than football.

“At some point I wouldn’t be playing football, so getting the best education I could get was the most important thing to me,” says Collins, a member of Rice’s All-Decade Team for the 1970s. “I was looking at the long game.”

Born in Vernon, Texas, the Collins family moved to Odessa when Roger was around 10. Friday Night Lights was more than two decades away when Collins was playing for Permian, but there was no doubt that in the west Texas town, football was king.

The 6-foot-3 Collins played defensive end and tight end. He had some natural ability, but he weighed barely more than 200 pounds at the time, which meant that he had to compensate for his lack of mass.

Lifelong friend Paul Strahan of Tulsa was a teammate of Collins at Permian and Rice. He remembers the kid they called “Goose,” on account of his height and long neck, as someone who played a major role on the team that won Permian’s first-ever state championship in 1965.

“I don’t know if you can be a natural-born leader, but Roger was always a very strong leader,” Strahan says. “He was a very smart player; he could have gone to Rice on an [academic] scholarship.Roger always set a very high standard for himself, whether it was academics or football or anything he did.”

Strahan adds that Collins was someone who virtually never allowed an opponent to move him to the wrong place on the field.

That ability, to not get taken out of plays, was a testament to the influence of Collins’ parents, the late Joe and Ruth Collins. They expected their children to work hard in everything they tried, and they were big believers in education.

Even if Roger, the second of four children, had not earned a football scholarship, he undoubtedly would have gone to college, says his younger sister, JoRene Mills of Denver. Education was big in Collins’ family; his mother and paternal grandmother were teachers, and his mother’s family had moved to a larger town in the 1930s so their five daughters could go to school.

“Education was really important to [our parents],” Mills says. “Even when we were in elementary school, it was important to them that we did well. That made it a big priority, and they were very actively engaged.”

PART OF SOMETHING

Joe was a car salesman, an outgoing guy who never met a stranger.

Roger inherited his dad’s love of working with people, which Strahan says is plainly visible when he accompanies Collins through the Harps in Tulsa.

“You can just feel the love,” Strahan says. “They all call him Roger, and it seems like he knows everybody by their first name. He’s definitely a people person.”

After getting a bachelor’s degree from Rice in 1971, and then a master’s of business administration from Texas two years later, Collins went to work for the accounting firm Arthur Andersen.

He was with Arthur Andersen for close to four years, going into a lot of businessesand examining their numbers.

“I never really liked public accounting much,” he says. “I wanted to be a part of something you were working to make successful, as opposed to just looking at other people’s stuff.”

In 1977, Collins was hired to be the chief financial officer of Dallas-based American Graphics Press. He did that for nine years, but when the owners announced plans to sell most of the company, he decided it was time to move.

He interviewed with Harps, and was intrigued by the company’s growth potential, but insisted that he be given a chance to own some of the company’s stock. When he was allowed to do that, he moved to Springdale.

Collins was promoted to executive vice president in 1995, and in 2000 was named president and CEO. He added chairman to his title when Harps became employeeowned, and has since ceded the position of president to Eskew.

These days, he focuses on the company’s big picture, where it is today and where it wants to be in the future. When he has a big decision to make, he relies heavily on the advice of his five-person executive committee.

“He will consider all the facts before he makes a decision as well as anybody I’ve worked with or for,” says Eskew, one of the members of that committee. “He’s able to separate the business side from the personal side, and lets you know that, ‘Just because you disagree with me, I’m still your friend, and still on your team.’ It’s very rare that someone can do that.”

Harps has faced numerous challenges during Collins’ time with the company, none greater than Wal-Mart’s entry into the grocery-store business. In 1986, there were no Supercenters; today, they are all over the world.

Many companies have crumbled in the face of Wal-Mart, but Harps has thrived.He credits the ESOP, the emphasis on having a friendly culture and Harps’ success in perishables, particularly its acclaimed bakeries. Harps made news in late 2011 when one of its bakers won a competition on the Food Network.

“There’s a fine line between being average and being great,” Collins says. “If you can get everyone on the same page and develop a passion that everybody feels, then you can really do great things. Without that, you’re just going to be average.”

GOING ON

In the spring of 2009, Marilyn Collins was diagnosed with uterine cancer.

For more than two years, she battled the disease, undergoing chemotherapy and going to the M.D. AndersonCancer Center in Houston to receive treatment. She passed away in June 2011, having been married to Roger for more than 32 years.

Without his faith, he says, he is not sure how he would have gotten through his wife’s sickness and passing.

“It’s been the foundation for my life, ‘How are you going to live your life?’” he says. “Especially when Marilyn was sick, it helped me get through that. I’ve been really blessed with my family and at work. I feel fortunate in the things God has given me.”

Collins met his wife through church; he got her phone number in 1977 from a fellow churchgoer, the dean of the Baylor School of Nursing at Waco, Texas, which Marilyn attended. Shortly after moving to Springdale, the family joined Fellowship Bible Church, where for about 15 years he taught Sunday School to fifth- andsixth-graders.

“Roger’s faith is a huge part of who he is,” Mills says. “[It has provided] the inner strength it requires to get through the things he has had to endure the last couple years.”

Collins is still adjusting to his new life. He says he’s “hanging in there well,” but admits in the same breath that he really has nothing to compare it to. He walks and plays a little golf, picking up the activities he put onhold while he was caring for Marilyn. He’s involved with his daughters, even though neither currently lives near Arkansas, and he’s putting his best efforts toward building Harps.

One of Collins’ favorite things is to visit a Harps location and meet with a randomly selected employee. If that employee can recite the company’s mission statement, he and his boss each receive a $250 bonus.

“The mission of Harps Food Stores Inc. is to provide the best overall value to our customers, building a reputation for competitive prices, product quality and freshness, friendly service and cleanliness,” he recites proudly.

Similarly, before employees can receive raises, they must be able to recite the mission statement. The way Collins sees it, if Harps is going to be the kind of company he wants it to be, every employee needs to know what the company is all about.

“He says that more than anything else, he has a wonderful group of people to work with, and he’s so thankful,” Lindsey Collins says. “He loves getting up and going to work. He absolutely loves his job, and is extremely passionate about it.”