There’s a simple way Cap America (asi/43792) has built the foundation for its thriving workplace culture. “We’re big on ‘we’ and ‘team,’” says Cory Cissell, president of the Counselor Top 40 supplier. “There’s not a lot of ‘I’ in the building.”

It reflects an approach at the company that’s based on equality and togetherness, and a mindset that everybody’s work matters because it’s all interconnected. Even one break in the chain can lead to a failure to meet a customer’s expectations. “Every single job is important,” stresses Cissell. “And if that job wasn’t important, we wouldn’t have it here in the company.”

Cap America (asi/43792) employs roughly 350 people at its Fredericktown, MO, headquarters.

That culture of caring has grown out of Cap America’s four decades of family ownership, which continued this year when Cissell and Chief Product Officer Jon Page purchased the company from their father and founder Phil Page. “I love the fact that it’s family owned and operated,” says Chief Operating Officer Sarah Burgin, who joined the company over a decade ago. “I had worked for a corporation before, so it was quite different. Our owners are really involved in the day-to-day. They care about the people here. They’re very rooted in the community.”

Situated in Fredericktown, MO – a town in the Ozarks with fewer than 5,000 people – Cap America prides itself on helping its home turf. Most notably, the supplier pledged $1 million to the Fredericktown R-1 Education Foundation (a 10-year commitment of which it has paid $800,000 so far). It’s not always easy to fill 350 jobs by drawing from a small community. Still, Cap America prioritizes good people with a strong work ethic who derive gratification from solving problems. “We try to be picky about those attributes that I think are key whenever you’re in the service industry,” says Cissell, who worked at the company growing up but joined full-time in 2012. “A lot of that boils down to ‘I’m going to come in and do a good job today and make this company better than it was yesterday.’”

Turnover is a reality in manufacturing, which is why Cissell and other company leaders focus on retention. The supplier has a standard 90-day onboarding process for new hires, but they also get paired up with a trainer in their department who is friendly and welcoming. The trainers “create an environment where their doors are open. If a new person feels uncomfortable, they’ll come back to them,” Burgin says. “We just build that initially from the beginning. I know it sounds really simple, but for us it works very well.”

Over the last decade, Cissell acknowledges that the company has become vastly more transparent, including holding regular “State of the Union” meetings that outline the company’s current efforts and future initiatives as simply as possible. It’s made a difference. “Clean and clear information,” he says, “is very important for everyone in the building.”