Time Well Spent with Bermex Leaders

Time Well Spent with Bermex Leaders

by Brad Schroeder, Chief Financial Officer, ACRT Services

I recently spent time in Texas and had the pleasure of teaming up with Bermex leaders and support staff from several departments including financial planning and analysis, procurement, and fleet, for a day.

We got together to discuss and better understand business needs, learn how procurement has been instrumental in projects, and support the leadership team that has been instrumental in driving the business in a positive direction while pulling in profit.

During our visit, we challenged each other to respond to one (or more) of the following questions/statements:

What is your vision and hope for Bermex in 3 to 5 years?

When we paused to envision the future of Bermex, we imagined several ideas including doubling the size of and diversifying the business by growing, scaling, keeping brand consistency, and adding additional services for our customers, such as chips, AMI, project potential, etc. We also discussed the concept of “building the right team” by hiring and promoting from within. When we’re unable to do so, we should bring in dedicated experts, like Bermex recently did with Safety Manager Alan Ely. In a similar fashion, we talked about how successful Senior Business Development Manager (BDM) Dave Mack has been and the prospect of introducing an additional BDM to keep up with the demand. Exploring the advancement of our fleet was also envisioned. We discussed how there is a need to look at how fleet trends are changing and the infrastructure is modernizing. Is there room to advance our fleet? If we electrified our fleet, what would that mean for employees’ days – especially when they’re in the field?

What keeps you up at night? What concerns would you like to see addressed?

It’s easy to summarize and jokingly say “everything” but there were a few items of concern that seemed to repeat themselves throughout our discussions, including the safety of our employees, challenges within the supply chain and job markets, an awareness of productivity such as being behind on meter reading, and maintaining brand consistency.

If Bermex could do this _______________ employees and customers would never leave.

In the series of our conversations, we heard a desire to continue building relationships and figuring out what our customers want by keeping a positive mindset and hearing their pain points. Training was also a heavily discussed topic. By leveraging the strength of our Learning and Development team, we have an opportunity to make the concept of training proactive instead of reactive.

While it might be challenging to capture the passion and excitement of the room during our visit in a short article, I can say with confidence that there was a lot of excitement and commitment shown. These individuals make a great team.

Here are a few themes that were highlighted during our time together.

• Amazing maturity for a newer team of leaders
• High emotions about quality and reputation
• Innovative problem solvers
• Appreciative of the opportunity to visit with company leaders
• Openness to designing faster, cheaper, better solutions