11 minute read
A Refreshing Perspective
In a world where work is often king, TMU grad Scott Mabs sees his role as a CEO as a profession — not his purpose
by MASON NESBITT
Scott Mabs never set out to be the CEO of an organic fruit company that’s based in one of the most productive agricultural regions in the world.
In fact, when Mabs graduated from The Master’s University in 1995, he says he still didn’t know precisely what he wanted to do.
What he did know was that he wanted a challenge. He wanted to learn. He wanted to apply the skills and abilities God had blessed him with in a way that would allow him to provide for his family. And to do it all while prioritizing Christ, the church and relationships.
By all accounts, Mabs has checked each of those boxes during a career that’s taken him first to Indiana — where he received a crash course in business — and then back to his hometown in California’s San Joaquin Valley, where he now leads Homegrown Organic Farms.
The company harvests and packages thousands of acres of citrus, blueberries and tree fruit on behalf of more than 100 farmers, selling the produce to retailers like Costco and Trader Joe’s. The business has continued to grow, and it falls to Mabs, as CEO, to set a vision for the future.
Still, he says he never saw this coming. His goal was only to be faithful.
“I really just took one small step after another,” he says. "I kept following the Lord, and I ended up here. But I didn’t write my story.” The San Joaquin Valley stretches north from Bakersfield up toward Sacramento. But the area’s agricultural shadow extends much further. According to a state report, the valley produced $36.5 billion in agriculture in 2019. “It’s the number one ag center, literally in the world,” Mabs says.
It was here — in tiny Ducor, California — that Mabs grew up on a citrus ranch. He spent many days spraying weeds and checking irrigation, with temperatures often reaching 100 degrees. In the process, Mabs learned two things: the value of hard work, and that farming wasn’t something he wanted to do forever.
It was also around this time that God revealed something else to Mabs.
For years, he’d wavered between following Christ and running after the world’s temptations. But after his junior year of high school, Mabs committed to wholeheartedly following Christ.
Scott and Christy met at TMU (then TMC) and got married shortly after Scott graduated.
As a result, he decided to attend The Master’s University to receive a firm grounding in biblical truth. The plan was to stay for a year or so. But because of the godly friendships he formed and the teaching he received, Mabs found it impossible to leave. He enjoyed learning about God’s creation from biology professors who were in lockstep about the age of the Earth and the way the world came to be. He began to submit to the Bible as the authority over every area of his life.
“I had ideas of going to a (state school) to get a diploma with a name on it that might be recognized in the world system,” Mabs says. “But really it came down to understanding that I just need to trust the Lord, and He’s going to provide what I need."
Something else kept Mabs at TMU, too.
During his sophomore year, he met his future wife, Christy. “After that, I wasn’t going anywhere,” he says.
Scott and Christy married shortly after graduation and moved to Indiana, where Christy’s parents lived. There, Scott landed a position at Endress+Hauser, a global instrumentation company. The job didn’t directly correlate to his degree at Master’s, but Scott found that he’d been equipped with a bevy of relevant skills. At Master’s, he learned to think critically and to problem-solve, and he’d navigated some of the school’s most rigorous classes as a biology student.
Endress+Hauser was more than happy to supply knowledge specific to its industry; Scott was ready to soak it up.
“College helps you learn how to learn. It helps you learn how to teach yourself,” he says. “It’s a discipline that’s so important.”
Over the next five years, Mabs worked in customer service, product management and business development. He earned promotions and positioned himself for further growth.
There was just one problem: the company wanted him to travel 40% of the year. With a wife and two young children, Mabs said that was untenable. He decided to trust the Lord and look for a new job — even if, by the world’s standards, that meant taking a step backward.
“Every time there’s a decision to be made,” Christy says, “it’s always been weighed in light of, does it line up with our priorities?”
As it turned out, the best opportunity for Mabs was in California. And by the time he returned home to the San Joaquin Valley, his perspective on farming had changed. He saw that there was a place within the industry for his business acumen.
After working for two companies that helped him understand the lay of the land, he came to Homegrown Organic Farms in 2008. He was thrilled to work for owners who ran things based on Christian values.
After five years as the director of sales and marketing, Mabs became CEO. Since then, the company’s yearly sales have grown considerably, and it now sells and markets organic fruit on behalf of 120 growers, representing roughly 7,000 acres of farmland.
The success hasn’t changed Mabs’ focus. After his promotion, he helped the company codify and communicate its mission statement. “Our mission is to exceed our customers’ expectations, to return the best money back to the grower, and to display the love and grace of Jesus to all,” he says.
Relationships are crucial to any business. But at Homegrown, they’re also a vehicle for the gospel.
“We have a job to do, you bet. We have expectations that we want our team members to meet,” Mabs says. “But these are people who need to understand who Christ is. Whether or not they believe in Christ as the Son of God, they have to make that decision. But I want them to at least understand who He is and what the gospel is about. Living out the gospel in our actions and helping people be thoughtful about that, that’s our task every day.” Mabs has also maintained his commitment to his family and the church. He serves as an elder, and he continues to prioritize time with Christy and their four children, two of whom have graduated from TMU, with another enrolling as a freshman in the fall.
Mabs encourages his employees to keep a similar lifework balance.
Mason Brady, Homegrown’s chief financial officer, remembers his first week on the job in 2014. At around 4:30 p.m., Mabs encouraged everyone to go home to their families.
“In the agriculture business, I’d never heard of that,” Brady says. “Scott really wants us to have healthy lives at home.”
What Mabs wants more than anything is to continue to faithfully pursue Christ.
“The only reputation worth having is for God to say, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant,’” he says.
WATCH AN ALUMNI FOCUS VIDEO HIGHLIGHTING MABS’ STORY AT MASTERS.EDU/TMU-MEDIA
Scott and Christy, far right, returned to TMU to watch their son, Trent, graduate in May.
MASON NESBITT is the communications manager at The Master’s University.
OF HIS RESEARCH AND EXPLAINS
WHY HANDS-ON EXPERIENCES
ARE SO IMPORTANT FOR SCIENCE
STUDENTS AT TMU
SOME VIRUSES CAN BE … GOOD?
by KAELYN PEAY
For the faculty in TMU’s biological and physical sciences department, research isn’t just something they did to earn their doctorates. It is integral to their lives as professors, and it is fundamental to what they teach and how they teach it.
Dr. Joe Francis, dean of the School of Science, Mathematics, Technology & Health, even started a dedicated research course in 2003. This class is designed to teach students how to perform their own research, as well as give them an opportunity to contribute to ongoing faculty projects. We’ve invited Francis to discuss one such undertaking.
Francis is a cellular immunologist and medical microbiologist. Basically, he does a lot of work with viruses, bacteria and the human immune system.
Q: Dr. Francis, tell us about the microbiology research you’re currently working on? A: So, the most numerous cellular organism on earth is bacteria, with an estimated 30 million species. And each species can grow into millions and millions of individuals. And researchers are thinking that every bacterium on Earth has an associated virus — and some may have five or 10 viruses. That means the most numerous creatures on Earth are the viruses. They’re everywhere. They are God’s most abundant biological creation.
If God made viruses to attack us, or if nature turned them against us, we would be dead. We really shouldn’t be alive. And this sort of contradicts the evolution story, which says that it took hundreds of thousands of years for humans to develop. Over that span of time, evolution would predict that viruses should have eventually mutated to become deadly and killed us off. It appears, then, that viruses actually weren’t designed to kill humans and animals. And based on how intricate some viruses are, I believe they were here before the Fall; they were part of God’s original good creation. My research has focused on viruses that may have good functions.
Q: Can you give us an example of a good virus? A: In our lab here we’ve been working on a project related to the human microbiome, which is made up of the microbes that live on us, including bacteria. The bacteria in your gut are part of the most dense ecosystem on Earth. There are billions of individuals from a thousand or so different species in a normal human gut. And if each one of those bacteria has one or two virus partners, that means we also have a tremendous number of viruses living in us.
But here’s an interesting thing: all bacteria actually have a toxic coating on them. If you took normal, beneficial bacteria from our microbiome, put it in a test tube, and broke it all open, the resulting toxins would be deadly. And that got me thinking, “Wait a minute. That means our system must have a way of sequestering that toxin, because otherwise it would kill us or make us very sick all the time.”
Then I remembered this virology textbook from back in my college days. It had these pictures of bacteria, including gut bacteria, with thousands of viruses coating them. And I thought, “Hold on. What if the viruses are actually hiding those bad particles so that they won’t be harmful when the bacteria break up?” Because most of those bacterial particles that make us sick are found on the outside of the bacterium. And I called this idea the cloaking theory. To study this theory, we’ve been trying some models in the classroom to grow these viruses and their associated bacteria.
Q: How do you get funding for your projects? A: Large institutions work by a federal grant model, but we don’t work that way. We’ve been making progress on a more private funding model. We’ve had private donors give to our research, which we’ve been really, really grateful for.
Q: Why do you involve your students in the research you’re doing? A: One big reason is the fact that medical schools recognize those experiences as important. Most medical school applications look the same — they’re always, “I took this set of courses, I got these high grades, I worked in my community,” etcetera. And that tells the medical school how well a student performs in class and in society. But in medicine, you have to solve problems in the heat of the moment. And research is one of the few times that an undergraduate student practices doing that.
Graduates of our program have written to me and said, “Now I understand the value of that experience.” It puts them in a place where they have to solve a problem without having a professor in the room and without having extensive background knowledge. We tell them, “Go figure it out,” and they think, “Oh my goodness, this is like the real world. I actually have to solve this.” And medical schools have recognized that.
Q: What other research goes on in TMU’s biological and physical sciences department? A: Dr. Ross Anderson is a biochemist, so he studies the interaction of molecules in the context of organisms. Students in Dr. Anderson’s lab have won awards for their research.
Dr. Matthew McLain is a paleontologist who has published work in geology and paleontology journals. His recent publication in the Journal of the California Academy of Science includes TMU students as coauthors, and it discusses the discovery of a sea cow fossil in Santa Clarita.
Dr. Joey Kim, a Caltech graduate, has done extensive research in the areas of chemistry, materials science and nanotechnology. Professor Michael Kornoff worked at USC on developing chemotherapeutic agents to fight cancer. Professor Dawn Okonowski has done research in rehabilitative physiology and is currently working toward her Ph.D.
For more information on TMU’s biological and physical sciences department, visit masters.edu/science.
KAELYN PEAY is a writer in the marketing department at The Master’s University.
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