Staubach Co. Featured In Best-selling Book

A best-selling new book by Keith R. McFarland called The Breakthrough Company puts a spotlight on Addison’s The Staubach Co., which was founded of course by the great Dallas Cowboys QB. A key tenet of the book, which profiles nine companies that have grown to $1 billion in sales or more, is that such firms spend more time building corporate character than fretting about corporate culture. And few, McFarland says, do it as well as Roger Staubach’s commercial real estate company. Jump to find out why.

McFarland says that, growing up in El Paso, he was a major Cowboys fan. So, researching the book, he couldn’t wait to interview Roger Staubach at the company’s headquarters here, which McFarland was sure would be chock full of Cowboys trophies and football memorabilia. When it wasn’t, he was surprised.

“I asked Roger, ‘Why don’t you have all that stuff?’ ” the writer recalls. “And he said, ‘Because we’re building something much bigger here than Roger Staubach.’ ”

Today The Staubach Co. has 1,600 employees and, Roger Staubach says, the same approach to business he adopted on its founding 31 years ago.

“I worked for Henry Miller Co., and Mr. Miller taught me a lot about trust and integrity,” Staubach said yesterday, following a talk by McFarland at Dallas’ Frontiers of Flight Museum. “Sometimes our industry is more about the fee–and ‘what’s in it for me’–versus the needs of our customers.

“Mr. Miller taught me a lot about doing the right thing for the customer,” Staubach continued. “So we’ve emphasized behavior, in terms of how we interact internally. Because if you don’t get that under control, you can’t transfer it to the customer.”

McFarland, who’s in the middle of a three-month tour for Breakthrough, will be back in DFW on March 19 to speak to the Irving Chamber of Commerce.