by Josh P. Crotzer
Once Terry Mallard accepted the job as president and CEO at Broad River Electric Cooperative ten years ago, he and his wife, Vickie, began packing up their Canton, Georgia, home. One of the items they came across was a metal serving tray bearing vintage rural imagery and the Broad River Electric logo.
“I have no idea when I would have gotten it,” Mallard says, “but I looked at it as fate.”
That memento was recently repacked. This summer, Mallard retires after 10 years leading the cooperative and will return to Georgia, where six of his nine young grandchildren await. Chad Armstrong succeeds Mallard as the president and CEO of Broad River Electric.
“I don’t think I’m retiring from anything,” Mallard says. “I just think it’s time for renewed energy and renewed focus to come into play here.”
Mallard had long admired Broad River Electric, having spent years working alongside its board as a consultant with the National Rural Utilities Cooperative Finance Corporation (CFC). When the co-op’s CEO position opened in 2016, Mallard’s financial acumen was exactly what the co-op’s board of trustees was looking for in their national search.
Board Chair Norris Fowler soon found out they got quite a bit more.
“We got somebody who understood how the whole system worked, not just the financial part,” Fowler says. “He understood the meaning of leadership.”
Mallard brought a unique resume—a music scholarship at Campbell University, a CPA, a stint in seminary, a county f inance post and five years at a North Carolina cooperative before his 17 years at CFC. He was shaped by those years of observing other cooperative leaders.
“I don’t think I have a lot of creative ideas,” he says. “I’ve just learned from a lot of different people and tried to take the best of what they did and implement that here.”
One of the best practices was to get the “right people into the right seats.”
“If you can have someone whose values are aligned with the organization, that is critical,” says Mallard. “I want every employee to feel that they have an opportunity to grow professionally and personally. From what I can tell, we’re close to that.”
Fowler saw the practice working at Broad River Electric.
“He created a culture that people really like working in,” says Fowler. “They knew he was honest and what he expected.”
That level of trust also grew with the rest of the board. In 10 years, every action Mallard proposed was unanimously approved. It wasn’t rubber-stamping. It was Mallard’s clear communication about what was best for the cooperative.
“If it wasn’t going to be unanimous, that was on me,” says Mallard. “It meant I didn’t explain it well enough.”
Some of those votes ushered in significant milestones for Broad River Electric: a new headquarters, a restructured residential rate and investments to bring new industry and jobs to the area.
“The decisions we made were always done with the members in mind,” says Mallard. “They may not always have seen it, but our ultimate concern is always our members.”
In a rapidly changing era when wholesale power costs have risen nearly 40% and material costs have more than doubled, Broad River Electric members have been shielded from most of those expense increases.
Still, Mallard isn’t interested in tallying achievements when reflecting on his decade with Broad River Electric. Instead, he relates his tenure to the job done by the people keeping the lights on.
“When a pole gets broken and the line’s down, you expect a lineman to go f ix it,” he says. “A lot of the things people might call successes—that’s just the job.”
For the members and employees of Broad River Electric, it was a job well done.