President's Desk with Joe Harverson

This year has so far had its’ fair share of challenges. We are trying to grow the business in many directions both within and outside the nuclear material industry. We all have a role to play in meeting these challenges. The management staff must stay focused on growth and profitability, while the core of the company which is the first line staff, must focus on quality and performance. Some organizations and their members view challenges as situations involving, adversity, difficulty, confrontation, and the threat of failure. Challenges are sometimes viewed negatively as something management artificially creates to spur performance. Challenge sometimes means that change is going to happen and like all humans we are wary of change and tend to avoid it when we can. Sometimes we think of challenge in the sense of combat like a medieval joust or a duel. Challenges usually arise out some adverse condition or conditions that are changing or have changed the status quo. A relationship is failing, gasoline costs more and more, and that leak in the roof just won’t stop no matter how many times I have tried to fix it.

Adversity can precipitate challenge and challenges can certainly cause adversity. If adversity can create challenge and challenge can create adversity it seems that the loop is closed and we are doomed to the negatives we perceive. I would like to ask you to do away with the words challenge and adversity and replace them with the word opportunity. Think of the word opportunity and how you feel when you say it or someone says it to you. It is a powerful word. It contains hope, a positive outlook, and it speaks of a good future. If the status quo is changing and if the situation is not what we want, we are now presented with the opportunity to do something about it. If a relationship is failing we now have the opportunity to examine ourselves, our thoughts and our motives. We also have the opportunity to examine the other person’s thoughts feeling and motives. This new insight can be the catalyst for solid and honest communication which is the basic nutrient for a good relationship. If gasoline prices keep rising and rising and there is no way you can take that RV anywhere. You are now presented with the opportunity to meet your neighbors and host your friends. Just open the awning, fill the cooler, pull out the grill, send out the invitations and camp in the yard. Who knows what it may bring. If the roof won’t stop leaking, you are now presented with an opportunity for structural change. Consider a skylight in that location that lets the sunlight and starlight into your home or decide to add a second floor to the house. To follow my own advice this article should have started out with: This year so far has had its’ fair share of opportunities and we are excited to evaluate all of them.

The Buddhists have an attitude that there is no such thing as good or bad, just what IS. You have the ability to make any challenge or adversity into an opportunity.

Welcome,

In my first article I spoke about our identity and proposed a shared identity for Alaron. I would like to extend this idea of identity to three other concepts -- vision, mission, and strategy. There are little other tasks so hotly debated in business than how to craft these three concepts so they have an impact on an organization. Most companies have vision and mission statements, but most employees don’t know what they are or don’t use them in their everyday tasks. A good vision and mission statement, like knowing our identity, guides us in making decisions everyday. What is more important is that they guide us in making consistent decisions everyday. A clear strategy helps us make consistent more far reaching decisions such as what markets to enter and what projects to bid. I see the following for our company:

Vision: Alaron conducts its business such that its employees and their families become responsible citizens of the world.

This concept bears some explanation because it is so different. Although Alaron recognizes some responsibility to shareholders of Veolia, our first and foremost responsibility is to our employees. We want Alaron to be a stable business that prospers for many years in the future. That stability is transferred to our employees who now no longer have to worry about their jobs. They can concentrate on improving themselves through education, raising good families, and hopefully enjoying grandchildren. Stability allows our employees to invest in their futures instead holding back for fear of job loss. We reinvest the profits that we make back into our employees through education, skills acquisition, and financial planning. We also set positive examples on how to treat other human beings, regardless of their needs, races, creeds, or national origins with care and respect. We believe that these positive attributes will trickle down to our employees and their families and result in a much better world to live in. We are investing in a superior quality of life with the hope it will be contagious. Our vision is very long term. The vision can guide us in making good consistent decisions. For example, we are not interested in short term opportunities that jeopardize the company and our employees for the sake of a quick profit. We treat each other and the people we meet with care and respect. We care about ourselves and strive to learn and improve.

Mission: Alaron solves problems with professional solutions that we are proud of.

Please notice that our mission directly reflects our identity and it should. If our identity and our mission were skewed we could not be successful. This is where our employees are head and shoulders above the crowd. When we bring in a business consistent with our strategy and vision, our employees set about to solve all the problems in a professional way, that they are proud of.

Strategy: Alaron is a mutual fund of niche nuclear businesses that are characterized by low volume and high margins.

This has been our strategy since 1998, and it has served us well through the years. It allows us to weather storms in the market place. We focus on businesses that provide highly technical and complex services and support them in entering and staying in the nuclear business. We provide the infrastructure, permits, licenses, insurances, and expertise for other companies to succeed and grow in nuclear markets. We maintain a staff of cross trained employees that can freely move from business line to business line. We have Project Managers that can move from a schedule intensive waste transload project to a technology intensive metal recovery operation. We have built our facility and trained our employees consistent with our strategy. When we look at opportunities, we constantly compare them to our strategy and our vision and it helps us make good consistent decisions. This year we will be using that strategy to enter non-nuclear markets.

This is the first of many articles about Alaron, our employees and our customers. I will be exploring a wide range of topics that concern all of us. This blog type of communication is meant to stimulate thinking and provide an avenue to communicate your thoughts to me. It took some time to decide what to write about first. There are many issues and challenges that confront us in running this business together. I felt strongly we should start with an exploration of just who we are.

I take direction from Sun Tzu the author of the ancient text “The Art of War”. Sun Tzu maintains the following: If you know yourself and do not know the enemy you will be victorious in only half the encounters, if you know yourself and the enemy you will be victorious in all encounters, and if you do not know yourself and do not know the enemy you will not be victorious in any encounters. Clearly knowing yourself can provide a firm foundation for interactions with our vendors, customers, regulators and the community around us.

How should we define ourselves? Many people define themselves based on what they do for a living. I am a carpenter, I am a supervisor, I am a painter, I am a welder, I am a lawyer, etc. Although these titles tell the world what you are doing now, they provide little information as to who you are. What if you started out life as a welder and then went to law school? I maintain that there are core values that you have inside that are independent of your chosen method to acquire this world’s goods and that is your identity. This would lead us to the conclusion that in our collective identity of Alaron there are some core values that we all share. What could those values be?

When I look back over the past 12 years some things come shining through. We are quite good at solving problems, all types of problems. I remember when we thought we would be lucky to load one rail car a day, and through our ability to solve problems we ended up loading fifteen a day. We are truly concerned about our customers and provide them the best possible service experience that we can. We are professionals. Consider the project we just finished for Dominion. An event occurred during an outage at Surry that damaged one of their reactor coolant pump motors. We were given the challenge of repairing this motor as rapidly as possible. Surry expected that the time for us to repair would cause them to exceed their outage schedule. We not only beat their proposed schedule but, allowed them to beat their own outage schedule. We sincerely want to do top notch work that we can be proud of. We have incredible pride in our work products. Our coating business is a clear example of pride of workmanship.

With those three things I would like to propose an identity for Alaron. We are group of truly concerned professionals who provide solutions to our customers that we are very proud of. If we agree on that identity it can guide us in making everyday decisions that will reinforce that identity and make Alaron a company that will prosper into the foreseeable future. I am very interested in how you, “the people that make Alaron go”, see yourselves and our identity.