Small Town Giant

JIMMY RANE took over a tiny treated-lumber business and used his showman's flair for marketing to transform it into a major player. The Yella Fella from Abbeville is now Alabama's only billionaire-and the lumberyard will never be the same

- Matt Durot

"You know what that means?" Jimmy Rane, the 76-year-old founder and CEO of Great Southern Wood Preserving, a lumber treating outfit, asks with a chuckle, picking up an axe in his Abbeville, Alabama, office and pointing at the letters GATA inscribed down its handle. "It means 'get after their ass. And you'll see that motto in every Great Southern building." The mantra was originally intended to fire up Georgia Southern University football fans back in the 1980s. Rane's co-opting of the phrase is just one way the lifelong Alabama resident has tried to marry the public's perception of his business to the South's second-most-popular religion: college football.

From the mid-1980s through the '90s, he sponsored several NCAA teams and hired nearly 20 college football coaches as pitchmen, including Florida State's Bobby Bowden (d. 2021) and Auburn's Tommy Tuberville. He even put two coaches on his company's board: Auburn's Pat Dye (d. 2020) and Alabama's Gene Stallings. Rane has a 1989 Southeastern Conference Championship ring of his own, thanks to his role as financial booster-and later a trustee-of Auburn, his alma mater.

The marketing blitz doesn't stop with NCAA Division I football. Rane also has an alter ego: The "Yella Fella," a crime-fighting cowboy he portrayed in TV commercials throughout the South from 2004 to 2012. Each ad was structured as an "episode" during the last four "seasons," complete with a cliffhanger, keeping viewers hooked. (The Yella Fella has since been replaced in ads by a team of clever beavers.)