Jim Osborne retires at the end of this year. When he does, a southwest Ohio propane company loses sixty years of memory.
That’s the count in the nomination that brought his name to Propane Insider, sent by the person who signs his checks.
“His name is Jim Osborne, Collett Propane Inc.,” wrote Tyler McCormick, third-generation owner of Collett Propane, in an email to Propane Insider. “He has been in the industry for 60 years.”
Every Job in the Building
Sixty. And not sixty years in one seat. According to his nomination, Osborne has worked delivery, he’s worked service, and he’s worked the office, the whole building at one point or another. Three generations of the same family have kept him on the payroll, McCormick being the third of them. Osborne, a U.S. military veteran, confirmed his service record with Propane Insider.
The propane trade tends to sort people early. A driver builds a route and knows it cold for twenty years. A tech gets good at service and stays with it. Whoever’s best on the phone gets kept on the phone. There’s nothing wrong with any of that, and it’s how most good companies run. Osborne’s nomination describes something rarer: the route, the service work, and the desk, all in one career.
A career shaped that way changes how a person sees a company. Someone who’s dragged hose in January knows what the route costs a body. Someone who’s also chased a service call down to its actual cause, then sat in the office fielding the callback from that same customer, holds a picture of the operation no single-lane career produces. Ask about a route and they’ve driven it. Ask about a complaint and they’ve answered one like it.
The Calls Nobody Sees
McCormick’s nomination is about accumulation.
“There are countless stories of him out in the middle of the night,” McCormick wrote — his description of the whole career, not one night.
Anyone who’s run a propane company knows the arithmetic behind a line like that. A no-heat call at 1 a.m. in February is a story to the customer. To the person taking it, it’s Tuesday, and there’ll be another one Thursday, and the tank on the far end of the county needs somebody in the truck by six.
Do that for a winter and you’ve had a hard season. Do it for sixty years and you’ve spent a life standing between other people and the cold.
Still the One They Ask
Osborne hasn’t spent his last years coasting toward the door. He works in Collett’s service department now, McCormick says, handling scheduling, answering customer questions, and running special projects.
And one more thing, in the nominator’s words: “He also answers a lot of employee technical questions when they come across things.”