John Simon: Signet Mills is a fabric manufacturer. Specifically, we produce circular knits and warp knits.
Jamie Ray: Again, we're a Christian-based company, and John has put in a bunch of core values, execute excellence, embody productivity, and act with integrity. So we have a bunch of Christian ideas that we try to live by.
John Simon: We're called as Christians, as Jesus said, to do two primary things, to love God with all of our heart, soul, and mind, and to love our neighbors as ourselves. And if you're a business owner, you have a great opportunity to love others.
The journey started 12 to 13 years ago. When I joined C12, it was hard at first to embrace this idea of bringing in a very open commentary about how my belief in Christ could empower our company to be better. I would say that the most powerful thing that we did that really created the most inertia was the establishment of our caring team.
Jamie Ray: The caring committee is a way to care for the employees and our greater community.
John Simon: It's not important. It's imperative. What we do at our company is we tithe 10% of our corporate profits and that 10% of our corporate profits goes in its own checking account for the Caring Committee. And the Caring Committee stewards that money and decides how they want to invest it.
Jamie Ray: We do small things, we have birthday recognitions, we do Bible studies.
Sheila Hart: They help the community, they help our families when there's stuff going on. So just caring and looking out for each other.
Debbie Sherbert: If we have a hardship in our family, the Caring Committee is the first to step in and take care of it.
Jamie Ray: We get requests from local schools, local ministries to help. We do a lot of donations.
Debbie Sherbert: We have a school that we adopted and every year we buy earbuds for every child in this school.
Jamie Ray: Just gave a bunch of money to a local church to help send their youth to a conference.
John Simon: So they can invest that money into corporate chaplains. They can invest that money into different initiatives. It can be loans for employees, it can be a wellness center.
Jamie Ray: We keep our eyes and ears open, so if there's a need in the company, a need in the greater community, we bring it to Jody and we meet about that monthly.
John Simon: And when we establish the caring team, we started to really get input from our employees on different ways that we could care not only for people who worked here, but also for customers, for vendors.
Sheila Hart: They really show our employees and their families, and also our customers and vendors, how much we care about 'em and how important everybody is.
John Simon: God blesses us with a certain amount of profit per year. We give 10% of that profit to the Caring Committee. The Caring Committee is run by the associates to create ministry efforts and caring efforts for all stakeholders, which are vendors, employees, and customers, and the community. And they manage the money in whatever way they think is beneficial.
Jamie Ray: Here is like working for a big family. Everybody caress for each other. I think it makes us better employees as well.
Debbie Sherbert: The value you feel here is way above money, that's for sure.
John Simon: At Signet Mills, our ministry effort is just part of who we are, and we are an ISO 9001 2015 audited certified company, and we have multiple processes within the company that are part of our ISO certification. And ministry is actually one of our processes. So just like we have audited processes for quality, or for fabric engineering, or for management, we also have it for ministry. So it is one of these central processes that our company aligns itself with to function. So it's really for us, not differentiated from any of the other important processes for running our company.
Debbie Sherbert: All of our employees come and they don't leave. They stay. We form a special bond with everyone here.
Jamie Ray: So it makes the work environment here spectacular. I mean, it's amazing.
Sheila Hart: It makes me feel wonderful. It really does. Coming from a company where you feel like you're just a number to a company where you really feel like you matter, is a big thing.
Jamie Ray: When I came to interview here, I met four times with John. The first three interviews, we never talked about business at all. We talked about faith. So that was really interesting to me.
John Simon: We're doing what we're doing because we believe it is right, and we believe it's the appropriate way to run a business. It's just who we are. It's just the way that we do things.
