IF YOU GO
* What: Chattanooga Area Leadership Prayer Breakfast* When: May 1, 7 a.m.* Where: Chattanooga Convention Center* Cost: $20 per person* For information: 423-698-0100 or cbrown@wingfieldscale.com
Mart Green quips that the first two employees of Hobby Lobby were under age 10 as he and his brother, then 7 and 9, were drafted by his parents to help start the business.
"My mom worked for free," he said in a telephone interview prior to a planned May 1 address at the Chattanooga Area Leadership Prayer Breakfast.
Green, the 57-year-old board chairman of the arts and crafts retailer, said the company that should grow to 850 stores by year's end was started by his family with $600 in their living room.
"It has come a long way since then," he said about Hobby Lobby, where revenues are expected to close in on $5 billion this year on double-digit growth.
In 1970, his parents, David and Barbara Green, took out a loan to begin making miniature picture frames. Two years later, the venture opened a 300-square-foot store in Oklahoma City.
The company, still family owned, is slated to open 55 to 60 stores in 2018, or about one a week, said the board chairman of the business that employs about 33,000 people and has a $15.70 per hour minimum wage.
Green said he plans to talk in Chattanooga about the idea that everyone leaves a legacy.
"That legacy outlives us," said the married father of four children and seven grandchildren.
Green said that finding a live-work balance is one reason his father started the enterprise and it's still a key factor in the business. Its stores are closed on Sundays and other days at 8 p.m., he said.
Employees can attend church on Sundays, Green said, noting that the Bible states that God formed the earth in six days and rested on the seventh.
In 2012, Hobby Lobby sued the federal government over a mandate that would have required the business to provide and facilitate four birth control measures in their health insurance plan against their religious convictions. Green said the concept that life begins at conception is "a deeply held religious belief."
"It was disappointing to have to sue the government, but we had to because we just couldn't take a life," he said.
The only options were to pay for the birth control or pay a $1 million a day fine, the company chairman said.
"Neither options were good for us," he said.
In 2014, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of Hobby Lobby, saying that government cannot require certain employers to provide insurance coverage for birth control if they conflict with the employer's religious beliefs.
"We took a position consistent with the history of our country," Green said. "We were thrilled with the outcome."
Tom Francescon, a vice chairman of the prayer breakfast's executive committee, said about 2,000 people turned out last year for the annual prayer breakfast.
He said the event has grown from an attendance of just several hundred the first year in 1978 when Charles Colson, the disgraced political operative turned Christian evangelical leader, was the speaker.
Contact Mike Pare at mpare@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6318.