As we finish up October and the celebration of our 40th year in business, we take a moment to reflect on all we’ve accomplished in the past decades as well as this year. We’re also looking forward to what’s coming in our plans as a team.
Over the past few months we’ve shared stories from our founders and our team leaders, but each and every one of our team members are part of what makes us who we are and the stories told reflect what each individual has made happen.
There are a few themes running through the conversations we’ve posted here.
Kathy and Larry Fisher founded the company in the early 1980s with a mission to conserve energy, based on what Larry had learned at other jobs. It was bare bones to start but they were confident hard work would lead them down the right path.
He felt energy conservation was the direction in which he was headed and felt he could make a difference. Using his knowledge of electrical engineering, Larry and Kathy began the new business, Energy Conservation Techniques, in their living room. They had a card table, a couple of chairs and a phone. Eventually they purchased a (pre-Microsoft) computer to get things organized.
You can read that full story here.
The one thing Kathy and Larry knew from the beginning was that “It’s the people that make a company, not its owners.” This philosophy has stuck all these decades later. Our current CEO, Jeff Murphy, has said from the beginning “This isn’t just a group of people with a ‘job’ but everyone is part of the team and contributes to it growing, developing and scaling.”
The people who are on this team work hard to keep relationships with customers strong.
One of our longtime customers, Computershare, feels so comfortable with the ECT Services team that many times they are not even onsite. That’s the kind of trust and credibility that can take years to build and at ECT, it’s precisely what makes us who we are.
Our team leads like Tom Barrett, VP Service Operations, John Arnold, VP Security Ops, Scott Kohler, Director of Sales, and Dave Stumler, VP of Operations, shared thoughts over the past few months and the running theme was about the commitment to the team, the philosophy of the company and the relationship with the customers that led to people staying with us for a long time. Of course, no one said it better than Kevin Brookshire, our longest-running teammate who said, “A career is something different than a job,” Being a part of ECT has been a major part of his life. “I’ve had a child and a grandchild all while sitting at the same desk.” What started as a job for Kevin nearly 28 years ago certainly bloomed into a full-fledged career, and more.
Our team is focused on the future now and how integration between systems is moving to the cloud and brings a new set of security details to work through. And we’re on it.
We capped off the anniversary with a commemorative coin that all team members (and many of the guests at our September celebration) received. Our CEO says often “It’s amazing what happens when you show up.” And we’ve been showing up for 40 years. We intend to keep showing up as time marches on.
