Jimmy Rane took over a tiny treated-lumber business and used his showman flair for marketing to transform it into a major player. The Yella Fella of Abbeville is now Alabama's only billionaire—and the lumberyard will never be the same
Sweet Home Alabama: Jimmy Rane has restored Abbeville to the way it looked when he was a kid. The Ford storefront is actually a mini-museum filled with antiques befitting its former tenant, Southern Bell Telephone and Telegraph
Image: Mary Beth Koeth for Forbes
You know what that means?” Jimmy Rane, the 76-year-old founder and CEO of Great Southern Wood Preserving, a lumber treating outfit, asks with a chuckle, picking up an axe in his Abbeville, Alabama, office and pointing at the letters GATA inscribed down its handle. “It means ‘get after their ass.’ And you’ll see that motto in every Great Southern building.”
The mantra was originally intended to fire up Georgia Southern University football fans back in the 1980s. Rane’s co-opting of the phrase is just one way the lifelong Alabama resident has tried to marry the public’s perception of his business to the South’s second-most-popular religion: College football.
(This story appears in the 05 May, 2023 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)