As an MBA graduate of the CU Business School (Go Buffs), I was invited again last week to speak to the incoming freshman business school students. Nothing gets the butterflies going for me like the chance to speak in front of 350 students in one of those giant stadium-style multimedia classrooms. The kids always seem to enjoy hearing our very relevant seed paper shoe string startup story, and I love telling it.

This year I was asked to talk about social responsibility in the small business environment. While most publicly traded companies have responsibility primarily to their shareholders, we on the other hand enjoy a greater sense of responsibility, one that includes our community, our employees, our customers and our environment. We make every effort to offer a challenging, rewarding, fair, safe and clean work environment for each and every one of our valued employees.

Having our roots deeply embedded in Boulder, we are always looking to strengthen our ties to the community and the city we love. We employ differently-abled individuals from various agencies within Boulder and support all things local whenever we can. One recent project in which we have invested is Boulder’s new Valmont Bike Park. (My business partner Tom will be moving dirt this Saturday!) We have always felt a strong sense of responsibility to our customers (our partners), who are helping us spread the Bloomin’ word. We strive to deliver a product that does what we claim; specifically, they really do grow! We aim to meet and exceed our customer’s expectations on all fronts (print quality, delivery time and germination rates to name a few). We continue to operate at the forefront of environmental responsibility and are looking forward to our new solar power installation in the coming months.

If we remain vigilant to these principals, we will have the chance to honor a sense of responsibility to ourselves (the Bloomin entity), as well as ensuring we remain a profitable, viable, thriving and enduring company for many years to come.

Don Martin