Treating Them Right

The golden rule stands as MoneyTree's core principle.

By Myke Folger | July 2009 | FROM THE PRINT EDITION

Photos by Rick Dahms

List of winners in the Large Companies category

Moneytree Inc.’s co-founders, CEO Dennis Bassford (left), design director Sara Bassford (center) and executive vice president David Bassford have a a work environment that follows the company’s core ethos of treating the customer right.
Winner: Moneytree

At Moneytree Inc., it’s all about the corporate buy-in: Treat people how you want to be treated. That is the mantra, the foundation on which every other corporate decision at the quarter-century-old company is based.

As a result of that buy-in, amazing things have happened over the years at Moneytree. The Seattle payday lender has received 27 civic and corporate awards, including repeat turns as a finalist in the Best Companies to Work For competition. This year marks the second in a row Moneytree has won the award in the large-company category.

And the accolades keep coming, be they customer reviews from Yahoo! and Yelp.com or the Better Business Bureau, which gave Moneytree an A+ rating. Not bad for a 1983 startup in humble Renton headquarters with three owners, David Bassford, Sara Bassford (David and Sara are married) and CEO Dennis Bassford, David’s brother. The business has since spread to five states with 1,100 total employees.

And all of it from treating people well?

“It comes from the customer’s standpoint, what makes sense for the customer,” says David Bassford, the company’s executive vice president. “It sounds clichéd but it’s not.”

The company has 675 employees in Washington, and of the hundreds who responded to the Best Companies survey, most sang Moneytree’s praises in such wide-ranging categories as communication, benefits, training and education opportunities, and recognition.

“They gave me a chance when no one else would and I am so grateful to them for that,” wrote one employee. “I love this job and the company and the people I get to work with every day. Moneytree saved my life emotionally and financially and I will never forget that.”

Such loyalty has been infectious. At a recent companywide branch managers’ meeting facilitated by President Aggie Clark, the manager with the shortest tenure had been with the company for four years. With such low turnover, the corporate buy-in just solidifies and then becomes self-perpetuating. “They understand the [golden] rule as an intuitive thing,” Clark says.

This tendency among employees to think of others has generated ideas such as providing interpreters for non-English-speaking customers and