Meat+Poultry - August 2018 - 18
COVER STORY Rupp divides his time between his office in Dakota Dunes, South Dakota, and visiting the three beef plants he oversees. 18 carpentry. That's my outlet, I guess you'd say." He even worked as a carpenter as a side hustle back early in his career at the beef plant. From roofing to deck building to pouring concrete, Rupp had a gift and a love for construction and with a more predictable schedule, he picked up plenty of jobs requiring his expertise. When he was given the chance to take a promotion that didn't require hours of cutting meat at the plant, Rupp had to make the difficult decision to give up his extra job as a carpenter to focus on his career. The stepping stone into management began with Rupp being given the chance to start up a program for training new workers. This would include teaching new employees how to use knives, sharpening knives and any skills specific to the part of the plant they were hired to work in. As one of the first 12 trainers in this new initiative, Rupp found himself bored with the job after about six months. "It wasn't moving fast enough," he says, "so I went into a supervisor position," which was anything but boring. The fast and furious pace of this role challenged Rupp. It taught him to respect the supervisors as some of the hardest-working employees in the plants to this day. "That was a jolt to the system," he recalls of the rigorous and demanding work. After working as a supervisor for about nine months, Rupp transitioned to what was known as a MEAT+ POULTRY | 08.18 | www.meatpoultry.com floater, filling in for other supervisors and working on special projects. As he pursued the next rung of the corporate ladder, which was to be a general foreman, he was required to work as a training coordinator. It was then he learned something about himself and his skill set. "I'm a lot better at training people on how to cut meat than I am in a classroom training environment," he says, and at about the time he realized this, a night-shift general manager position became available, which he eagerly stepped into. The transition, he says, was natural and comfortable. In 1999, he applied for the operations manager position at the plant and got it. That was when he had to stop the side hustle. The Finney County plant wasn't growing much at that time, so Rupp moved to the mammoth Dakota City, Nebraska, plant just after Tyson acquired IBP in early 2001. It was a lateral move to be the operations manager there with the plan to take over as general manager in two years, filling the position of a retiring GM. The transition wasn't jarring from a volume standpoint, as both plants were about the same in terms of operating capacity. For a variety of reasons though, "the first year here was the toughest of my career," as he adjusted to a new plant in a different state, working with new employees after uprooting his wife and family to live in a community where they didn't know