In November, I announced three new exciting initiatives. Our vision statement, our strategic plan and a new employee incentive program. In case you missed my townhall (you can see a recording of it HERE), I wanted to recap them here for you.

1. New Vision Statement – A vision statement is a short sentence a company uses to help define where it wants to go in the future. A vision statement, if done well, shows employees what they are working towards and inspires them to want to be a part of the company for years to come. After working on ours for many months, our leadership team and I have come up with a statement where every word has meaning: Be the national leader at peeking communities moving. The first four words state that we will be the leader (in size, in number of customers, in contributions to our industry) across the country in our space. “Keeping” denotes the importance of our companies’ histories – we have been serving and delighting customers for decades and we want to keep doing that. “Communities” means many things – our towns, our customers, our colleagues at work for example. And “Moving” also means many things. It means we want to keep people moving by servicing the equipment they need to fuel their vehicles. It means we want to help our customers move forward and grow in their businesses. It means we want to move into the future and adopt new innovations. And it means we want to have wonderful work environments and keep moving with the changing needs of new generations who come to work for us. We hope you find this vision statement as inspiring as we do.

2. New Strategic Plan – Once you know where want to go with your vision statement, you have to create a plan about how to get there. That’s what a strategy is for. At D&H we have three important elements to our strategy. 1) We want to get better at the basics of running an installation and service business. This means better IT systems (see Mike Ramirez’s article in this newsletter about our new ERP system), better processes to invoice and collect, better processes to estimate and execute on installation jobs, and more efficiency at getting service and compliance jobs done throughout the day. 2) We want to hire, retain and train the best people in the industry, and this includes keeping them safe each and every day. We have huge growth aspirations and we can’t do it without building a large and trained workforce. 3) We want to invest for future growth in installation, service and compliance but also in digital technologies and alternative energies (like Electric Vehicle charging).

3. New Employee Incentive Program – We also announced two new programs to show how serious we are about building and investing in the best people in the industry. As you know, we are a Private Equity (PE) owned company and typically PE firms sell companies every 3-5 years in their portfolios. We have set aside millions of dollars to allow our employees to share in the value creation at our next PE sale. If our investors realize 2x on their initial investments, then all employees who have been with the company for more than a year at sale will get a cash reward. Additionally we are allowing our employees to invest their own money into owning stock of D&H United. Please reach out to me for more information if you would like to invest.