President's Desk with Joe Harverson

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.