starting this morning we're in good company that's what we're calling our occasional visits to some business people who make it look easy with Lea Cowan we make it a clean start you might not recognize it as the bottles fly by in the assembly line but that's Windex the blue stuff that probably lives under your sink same with those swirling cans of pledge and you've got a canned puffs in with your dust rags along with your Drano some Scrubbing Bubbles and perhaps a bottle of shout remarkably all these products and shelves full of other brands come
from a single Wisconsin company one with a simple budget is oddly forgettable Maine SC Johnson a family company when I told people I said I'm doing a story on Missy Jones and they're like Oh Johnson & Johnson I'm like no no no SC Johnson do you get that a lot oh we get it a whole lot yeah yeah you know Johnson & Johnson is a good company so it's not a bad company to be confused with but but just in case on the back of every SC Johnson product is the CEOs signature Fisk Johnson as
if each was a signed greeting card from the Johnson family and in a way says Fisk himself it is me and my siblings grew up living and breathing this company I mean you know it was part of the dinner table conversation every single night the SC and SC Johnson was Fisk's great-great-grandfather Samuel Curtis he was a parquet floor salesman in Racine Wisconsin when he realized that there were more floors than there were products to keep them clean he mixed his first batch of johnson's wax in his bathtub and the rest is as they say history
so he just abandoned the flooring business and started selling wax all over the place and that was 1886 in all now five generations of Johnson's have led this now 10 billion dollar a year company making it one of the oldest family-owned businesses in America but while their products may be household names the Johnsons themselves prefer to keep a lower profile they don't trumpet themselves as a dynasty they rarely do media interviews and they have never considered allowing the company to be publicly traded never you know we get some of the best information about what our
competitors are doing from Wall Street and I'm sure they kind of look at us and just see kind of a bakbox out there which is a good thing its headquarters however is hardly a black box in fact for a company that likes to keep things private it makes quite a statement in downtown Racine there is nothing normal about this building Fisk's grandfather H F Johnson jr. commissioned architect Frank Lloyd Wright to design it the result was remarkable dozens of giant golf tee like columns soared two stories into the air they support the building's only real
window a glass ceiling which floods the huge open floor plan below with natural light at one time over 120 people worked in this room it makes you feel like you're kind of inside a forest looking up at the canopy Wright called it his corporate Cathedral he even designed the office furniture including these three-legged chairs which were very unstable and people were falling out of them right later replaced those three legged versions with four-legged ones that are still in use today and there now are the small fortune how much does it cost to keep this up
though I hate to tell you we believe it or not we just in the last couple of years we've put thirty million dollars into this building next door is the 15 story research tower that Wright also designed it opened in 1950 it's odd skeleton can best be seen at dusk it has a central core that's 13 feet in diameter like the trunk of a tree and all of the floors are hung off of that central core like the limbs of the tree Greg and Rick used to work for SC Johnson any later helped with the
towers restoration right again wanted to allow in natural light but instead of just plates of glass he decided to use glass tubes instead 17 miles of them and we hand cleaned every one of them I might point out that we used Windex to do that and they look sparkly and look great of course now looks much as it did when Bob O'Brien worked here it was always bright but you just felt like you're working in the snowglobe despite having to wear sunglasses while formulating his products he loved it but formulation is an art and I
would live in to work in these benches in this laboratory that was our canvas you know a canvas that Frank Lloyd Wright bill right you come in here you just couldn't help but feel inspired there was just energy the tower became integral to SC Johnson's success even part of its ad campaigns now from the famous research tower of johnson's wax comes glade but it was the womb for some of the company's most recognizable brands you'll be glad you you is Glade from Glade air freshener to a bugs worst nightmare oh no it's raid raid was
developed by Sam Johnson Fisk's father he'd killed bugs but not plants which at the time was revolutionary but it was also the first of Sam Johnson string of products that didn't contain any wax my grandfather said to him don't you know we don't make any products without wax in them and my father said as the story goes well we could put a little wax in it but I don't think that'll do any good Fisk knows his dad's are pretty big shoes to fill and no matter the Johnson who takes over after him he says they'll
probably feel the same way this is my great grandfather's office easy Johnson is Fisk's nice she's just twenty five she doesn't know if the baton would come her way and yet do you feel that sort of generational pull the company seems to have him in a pulled in a sense that it's something that I want to contribute to because it's something that I'm so proud of and has been so close to me for so long the Johnsons proudly wear family on their corporate sleeve and few places is that more evident than at the company's annual
holiday park it's a pretty elaborate event part family reunion part giant thank you this year will mark the 100th year they've been doing this and as it always has the party ends with bonus checks it's called profit sharing day it's a tradition and priviledge says fist Johnson it comes specifically from remaining a private family-run company the official winners here they are the way public companies are operating out there today in my mind is very dysfunctional they don't care about people they cut costs because Wall Street values short-term gains and you know they make a lot
of money in the process and then and then they move on there are bigger family companies with bigger payrolls but what FC Johnson has managed to keep alive is a sense of big business with a small feel it seems progress doesn't always have to mean looking ahead are you sometimes pledged Queens it's about remembering where it all started back to you can use pledge on leather marble metal
