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| I was on the local elevator board 30+ years ago. My humble opinion is that in my situation I didn't get a different price (lower on the inputs or higher on grain sales) or get any other "special" deals than any other coop member received. I could not afford to "eat" the most of the time several hundreds of $$$s to do business with my local vs somewhere else. One of my first meetings, times were tough and we had to lay off a couple of young family guys and I offered a motion for no director fees until we got back on our feet. It was a mostly symbolic gesture as we only got $20-30/ meeting anyway. I was surprised how unpopular my motion was at first, but we did pass it. One of the young fellows had a daughter in my daughter's class in the local school. He was/is a very talented hard working fellow and was a excellent employee, but unfortunately for him was the last guy hired. To this day I cannot see him and not regret the tough decesion we had to make that night. We went a couple of years without any compensation.
My local manager complained to me about my selling grain to another company one time. I told him that I would take a personal check for $500 from him to sell my grain to the local. He informed me that he couldn't afford to do that. I told him that that's what he expected me to do, and I couldn't afford to do it either.
Another interesting question is "how big of a jerk" should you be or should you be a "yes man" while on the board? Our manager would tell us at each monthly meeting how financially the coop was doing, but we never asked him for documentation proving his statements. We would have a annual audit by outside accountants which always came out fine both before I was on the board and after I was off. But....
About 5 years after I left the local board we merged with several other local coops to form a large entity that was going to be better than sliced bread. Within 7? years of the merger, the whole operation went broke over a "Hedge to arrive" mess that management allowed some employees to implement and management not knowing how much was being entered into by the customers. | |
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Co-op board of directors conflict of interest
