returns on those investments.
Murphy is the fourth generation of his family to run the
company, which was founded in 1904. He did not initially set
out to become a warehousing executive. He earned degrees in
landscape architecture from the University of Minnesota and
Harvard University, and taught the subject at Syracuse
University and back at his Minnesota alma mater for 25 years.
That training and what he considers his family’s legacy
inform his commitment to sustainability initiatives. “The
Murphy family has always felt that as part of the communi-
ty, it was important to be a leader. Today, sustainability is
one of the areas where it’s important to do that,” he says. “We
want to show the business community what you can do.”
Murphy acknowledges that privately held companies
have one major advantage over their publicly traded coun-
terparts when it comes to investing capital in sustainability
initiatives. And that is that they have greater tolerance for
waiting out returns on investment (ROI). But he empha-
sizes that he takes ROI seriously. “Our perspective is a lot
longer than the publicly traded sector’s, but we still have to
have an ROI in a reasonable amount of time,” Murphy says.
“We still have to pay the bills and pay our employees.”
SEEING THE LIGHT
As for the kind of long-term investments Murphy is talking
about, one example is his decision to light his warehouses
with LEDs. LEDs (light-emitting diodes) cost twice as
much as state-of-the-art T- 5 fluorescent lighting but use far
less energy. Last year, the company conducted a lighting
analysis on one of its buildings, a 350,000-square-foot
warehouse built in the 1980s and purchased by the Murphy
Co. in 2012. At the time of the purchase, the building had
an antiquated high-pressure sodium lighting system.
