Our Story.

 

It begins in the recession of the 1980s. At the time, SRC was one of the smallest divisions of International Harvester - who, for the past two years, had been laying off 1,000 employees every week. Jack Stack, the plant manager (and founder of SRC Holdings), knew the Springfield, Missouri, factory would be next on the chopping block. With a high unemployment rate and no job outlooks for any of its highly skilled technical workers, Jack and the other managers became desperate. In an attempt to save everyone's jobs, they scraped together $100,000 with the intent to buy the company and save their jobs.

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After being rejected for a loan by over 50 financial institutions, Jack and the other managers realized something. They were all taught how to build a great engine, but no one ever taught them how to build a great company. After each failed attempt at securing a loan, Jack learned more about business and financial statements and realized it wasn't that difficult to understand. If he had been taught the metrics of the business in the first place, maybe the facility wouldn't be in this situation. Finally, jack found a bank in Chicago that would grant them the loan they needed. The final deal - an $8,900,000 loan with a $100,000 in equity.

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Now that Jack and the other managers were able to purchase the company, they faced a new challenge: an 89:1 debt-to-equity ratio with an 18% interest rate. jack knew the management team couldn't tackle this on their own. They would need all of the employees to understand that meeting their loan payments was critical to their success, how to reach that goal and their jobs were at stake if they didn't. The key was open-book management with the idea that if everyone was working to build a great company, they would be unstoppable. 

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On February 1, 1983, Springfield Remanufacturing Corporation was born and vowed to do things differently. They would teach all employees the balance sheet, income statement, and cash flow statement and how each employee impacted those numbers. They created The Great Game of Business to serve as a tool for teaching these business metrics.

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SRC was more successful than it could imagine. Soon they had grown to one of the most successful businesses in America, and journalists from all over the world were flying to Springfield, Missouri, to learn more about this management system. Since 1983, SRC has diversified into countless industries, spinning off more than 60 individual businesses, and The Great Game of Business continues to be implemented in organizations across the world.