& CONSTRUCTION PROFESSIONALS
April 2018
BUILDINGTOGETHER
NAVIGATING OUR BUSINESS MAP I have very vivid memories of growing up and going on family vacations. My Mom and Dad would pack the car with all the luggage and my siblings and I would bring books, games and papers to help pass the time. The last thing to get packed was the shiny, red, steel, Colman cooler loaded with drinks, ice and bologna sandwiches on white bread wrapped in waxed paper (which always fell into the cool water after ice melted). In the front seat, my parents had large state maps and their “TripTik” from AAA. If you’re not familiar with a TripTik, it was a custom made book of large scale maps that followed each segment of your route and it was manually highlighted by your AAA Agent. We had the big picture of where we were going, we had the state maps to see the overall route and we had the TripTik to know all the steps we needed to take to get to our destination. When I look at how we plan the Future of our company, it’s a similar process. Every three years, we work with representatives from all areas of the company to come up the “Painted Picture” of what we want to be and look like in 3 years. This is the destination of our trip. Right now, we are in the middle of our current Painted Picture “trip” which ends at the beginning of 2020. Every year, the Leadership Council works together to develop an annual business plan. The Leadership Council is made up of the Field Leadership Team (FLT), the Office Leadership Team (OLT) and the Executive Committee (EC). The annual business plan is like the State
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maps in road trip illustration? We have to pass through a few states to get to our destination but we can only travel through one at a time. The annual Business Plan allows us to know how far we will get to on our journey each year and what the route is to get there. However, if we only had the state Maps, they are zoomed out too far and we can’t see where the exits are with gas stations and hotels or where the World’s largest ball of twine is. The scale on the map is simply too small and we don’t have enough details of our trip. That’s where the TripTik comes in. The TripTik shows the details of our route on a much larger scale. For our company, the TripTik pages are the “Rocks” that we develop each quarter. “Rocks” are the more detailed things we need to get done each quarter to achieve the goals we want to hit by the end of the year. The Leadership Council had a retreat in mid-April to review the “Rocks” from the second quarter of the year and develop the third quarter “Rocks”. I’m happy to report that we are on target to reach our progress for the year on the way to our destination in 2020. I realize that the invention of the GPS has made my example outdated and made me look old. Unfortunately, there is not a GPS for business. But, I’m proud of all the effort that goes into planning where we are going and working together to make sure we’re following the right road to get there. We are on a mission to get to our destination.
Joe Novakoski, P.E. Vice President of Operations