50 Years of Building Great Relationships
By: Emily Gardiner, Marketing Manager | email
To continue to reflect on the last 50 years Gardiner Thomsen has been in business, we would like to feature another one of our longest standing managers. Jim Carlson with First Coop has been working with Gardiner Thomsen for many years and we have been fortunate to develop a strong relationship with him. We asked Jim questions about his cooperative, his history and how he landed in this industry, and we asked him to share a memory of working with GT… this is his profile!
Jim Carlson,
General Manager, First Cooperative Association
Jim Carlson, General Manager of First Cooperative Association, grew up on a farm in north Central Iowa. He graduated from Iowa State University in 1974 with a degree in Agribusiness. When he made the decision to attend college, his father quit farming and started managing a small fertilizer plant for Farm Service in his hometown of Goldfield, Iowa. During the summers, Jim would help his dad at the fertilizer plant and it was there he discovered his real passion for the business. His hopes were to become a farm manager but when that seemed to be a challenging position to obtain, a job opportunity at Land O’ Lakes in Fort Dodge became available and it seemed to fit his background perfectly. He worked with Land O’ Lakes for eight years in total. Six of those years were spent working in fertilizer, supply, and marketing-tech areas, the last two years he worked as an agronomy salesman out of Storm Lake. He called on 18 different cooperatives in NW Iowa and was later hired at one of them as an Assistant Manager and Agronomy Manager in 1982. Gardiner Thomsen was working with Farmers Cooperative Company in Hinton, Iowa, and that is where the client relationship began - 32 YEARS AGO! In 1986, Jim became the General Manager in Hinton and has worked with Dan Gardiner Sr., Dan (Mark) Gardiner Jr., and Dennis Gardiner.
In 2000, Jim started with First Coop as their General Manager in Cherokee, Iowa (main office). They have 21 locations spread across seven counties in NW Iowa. First Coop is involved in grain and agronomy, feed, and energy products. They have about 150 employees and did just over 500 million in sales last year! Jim has had great success working with First Coop and Gardiner Thomsen has enjoyed being a part of that. Outside of the agribusiness world, Jim enjoys spending time with his family up at Lake Okoboji. He and his wife, Melodie, have two sons (residing in Sioux Falls and Des Moines) and one daughter (in Alta) and five grandkids! They love when the whole family can get together at the lake house and spend time on the boat. Jim also likes to spend some of his free time on the golf course.
When asked if he had a favorite memory working with Gardiner Thomsen, he immediately recalled a situation when Dan Gardiner Sr. was up working on an audit and called Jim into the room and slammed the door shut (he meant business). Dan expressed that he knew Jim and his team had just come back from a board planning session in Las Vegas and he asked Jim how they all had traveled. Jim replied to Dan that they went by plane. Dan then asked Jim who all was on that plane and Jim answered that the entire team traveled together… Dan didn’t like that. This was Jim’s first lesson on Risk Management with Dan and there would be more to follow. This made quite an impression on Jim and to this day, in certain situations, he will ask himself: “What would Dan think about that?”
Gardiner Thomsen is proud to put a spotlight on our clients’ managers as they have been great business partners of ours. We have thoroughly enjoyed creating this feature and learning more about people that have worked with us for over 30 years. Being in this business for 50 years, we have had the honor of meeting so many amazing people and developing great relationships. We look forward to doing more features similar to this one in our upcoming articles. We would like to thank Jim for sharing his story with us!
