Member Interview: Jimbo's...Naturally!
by Alice Shindelar
Mermber Services Manager
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Jimbo’s. . .Naturally!, owned by Jim Someck, has four locations on the sunny coast of southern california.
AA: How did Jimbo’s get started? JS: In 1984, after working eleven years in a worker's collective/co-op, I opened my first store. I subsequently sold that store in 1997.
Did you always see yourself going into natural foods? Well it depends on how far back you go. I started in the worker’s collective when I was 19 years old. So I guess it was something I felt pretty passionate about from the beginning. When I was younger I wasn’t thinking in that realm. I thought about being a baseball player, sports caster, a teacher or perhaps an accountant.
What is one of the biggest challenges you have faced as an owner? One of the biggest challenges I have faced is also one of the areas that has given me the greatest satisfaction. We’ve pretty much been true to what we started out as since the beginning even as we’ve grown from a single 4000 square foot store to four stores. We’ve been able to keep our focus on organic food, local farmers, and being true to our mission, bill or rights and vision statements. We’ve maintained our integrity over the years. At times it is a challenge, but we have successfully established ourselves as having very high integrity.
Have you had to make certain sacrifices to maintain integrity? I don’t know if it’s sacrifices per say, but sometimes we could have made more money if we had wanted to (ie selling products that don’t fit our high standards for product criteria). A lot of times the focus is on the bottom line but if you focus on other aspects the bottom line takes care of itself. We’ve donated a lot of money and been low key about it. I’ve always had a firm belief that it’s important to support the community that supports you. We’ve especially focused our efforts on school children---supporting them with donations and also providing nutritional and environmental education. We do a lot of other charitable work. At the end of the day I know that what we put in comes back to us.
What is one of the most satisfying things about owning a natural food store? The ability to grow with the organization and maintain our integrity, the ability to really grow with a group of people that believe in what you do. Our upper management team has been with me for anywhere from five to twenty years. I’ve got four kids and a number of years back I told my team that I have no problem supporting our growth but I’m not going to put fifty to sixty hours in a week to do that as I needed time to spend with my family. So I told my staff to take a larger leadership role and they responded.
What are you plans for the future? Well I’m thinking about jumping out of an airplane in a few weeks. It really depends upon the people in place and what they want to do. I have no qualms about the organization growing. We continue to look at new sites. I’m also a strong proponent of growing from within and providing opportunities to our employees. I also believe in not taxing our people. There is more to life than work. People need to go beyond working ten hours a day seven days a week. Hopefully they feel fulfilled when they put in a days’ work but they deserve to have personal time to balance that out. That is why it has been so important to me and the company that we have built a strong foundation!
Can you speak to being a founding member of INFRA? I go back to before the founding owners even got together. It was an idea that was brought to me by Albert Lusk. He was looking for a retail storeowner that he could run his ideas by. I was the guinea pig because he trusted me. We wanted to form an organization in which independent natural food stores could come together and hopefully with their aggregated sales have an influence in the industry, share ideas and concepts, pool our resources and ideas, etc. It was something that I felt was critical in light of the fact that there were aspects of the industry that were watering down the heart of the industry There were a number of stores that came together in the hopes of pulling this off. We had our ups and downs, but I’m proud to say, from what I can see, that the organization is on solid footing and more and more folks are looking to us as an organization that can represent their voice in the industry.