Rodkin Closer to Settling in With Home Buy
By Joe Ruff, Omaha World-Herald, Neb.
Aug. 12–After commuting to his home on the East Coast for nearly two years, ConAgra Foods Chief Executive Gary Rodkin has purchased a house in west-central Omaha.
He declined to say where it is — other than to say it is in a wooded area about 20 minutes from ConAgra’s downtown headquarters — or what he paid for it. The purchase was not yet on file with the Douglas County Assessor’s Office.
Currently living in an Omaha apartment at his own expense while the house is remodeled, Rodkin said he hopes to move in a couple of months.
Some ConAgra shareholders were critical of Rodkin’s decision against immediately moving to Omaha when he became CEO in October 2005, saying it indicated a lack of commitment to the company. They also questioned the cost of Rodkin’s weekly travel on company airplanes to and from Greenwich, Conn.
Rodkin’s contract allowed him to commute for up to two years.
According to ConAgra’s financial filings, in the seven months Rodkin was at the company in fiscal 2006, he received more than $135,000 in compensation related to relocation, temporary living expenses and personal use of corporate aircraft. He received $742,308 in salary, a $2 million bonus and stock options.
(ConAgra plans to issue its latest proxy statement, which includes such financial information, on Friday.)
Rodkin stopped accepting an allowance for temporary living expenses at the end of May.
In a recent interview with The World-Herald, Rodkin said he was aware that some people criticized his commuting, but he wanted his daughter to graduate from high school in Connecticut. He would not have taken the job at ConAgra without being able to allow her to do that, he said.
“I think it was the right trade-off.”
At the same time, he said, being in Omaha is important.
“It’s probably more important in a place like this than it is in New York or Chicago, only because it’s smaller, more visible. We’re one of five Fortune 500 companies here. The business community needs to support the community.”
Rodkin, 55, and his wife, Barbara, 53, have two children, 18-year-old Elizabeth and 22-year-old Jonathan. Elizabeth will be a freshman at Northwestern University near Chicago. Jonathan is looking for a job in Chicago after recently graduating from Carleton College in Minnesota.
Rodkin said his Omaha home has three or four bedrooms, depending how the couple remodels it, and is not overly formal. The Rodkins have two dachsunds, Charlie and Ginger.
“It’s not a mansion,” Rodkin said. “It’s pretty casual.”
A former top executive with PepsiCo who also had marketing and executive experience at General Mills and Tropicana, Rodkin came to ConAgra as the company looked for a chief executive with marketing and operational experience.
He said he works 65 to 70 hours a week, and leading ConAgra will continue to be his primary focus, but he expects to increase his role in the community as a full-time Omahan.
“I’m not going to be invisible here,” he said.
Rodkin said he is a sports fan who played high-school baseball. “I will become a Husker fan, too.”
ConAgra concentrates its philanthropy on child hunger and nutrition education, including America’s Second Harvest Kids Cafe program, which serves free meals to children. Rodkin said his wife, a former special education teacher, probably will get involved in those areas.
Rodkin said ConAgra has increased its funding of United Way, and he has been local co-chairman of the American Heart Association’s Start! campaign, a program to promote wellness in the workplace. As part of that program, ConAgra expanded walking paths and provided full public access to a 15-acre lake near its downtown campus.
ConAgra also is a leading sponsor of the downtown Holiday Lights Festival and this year will add a temporary outdoor skating rink to the activities. This year’s festival will be a fundraiser for the Nebraska Food Bank Network.
Rodkin is a member of the board of directors at Girls and Boys Town and leads a committee on strategic marketing and public relations.
He said he has met several Omaha business leaders. They include Warren Buffett, chairman of Berkshire Hathaway; Walter Scott Jr., chairman emeritus of Peter Kiewit Sons’ Inc.; Joe Ricketts, founder and chairman of TD Ameritrade; and Jim Young, chairman and chief executive of Union Pacific Corp.
Divestitures over the last few years have pared ConAgra from a company with $23 billion in annual revenue to one with $12 billion in revenue. With recent billion-dollar private-equity takeovers of public companies, Rodkin said he has heard some buzz about ConAgra from groups such as Kohlberg Kravitz Roberts & Co., whose latest purchase is First Data Corp.
“Nobody specifically has said, ‘We want to take you private,’ but I know folks in that world who run the biggest firms, and I’ll bump into them and they’ll say, ‘Whenever you want to do this, just tell us, we’re ready,’” Rodkin said.
Overtures have not gone beyond sharing business cards, however, Rodkin said.
“That’s what they do, that’s how they make their money. They’re always, always soliciting. I can tell you definitively there’s nothing out there where somebody has made a bid for us and there’s nothing that we’re doing other than trying to be the best public company that we can.”
Being a public company can be difficult because of the level of disclosure, scrutiny and regulations, Rodkin said. On the plus side, however, public companies can sell stock to raise money, while private companies might have to borrow funds, Rodkin said.
“You darn well better be able to service that debt.”
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