Huge organizational milestones can be reached when you step away from your day-to-day operations to evaluate your firm’s past and plan for the future.
Founded in 1996 by Karen Purcell, P.E., PK Electrical has grown from a small local Reno business to a nationally recognized, thriving electrical engineering firm with two offices and a staff of 33 talented engineers, designers, and support personnel. As we celebrate 26 years in business, we attribute our growth and success to our commitment to high-quality designs and providing an exceptional experience for our clients. Our focus is to cultivate trusted partnerships and we are beyond proud of the fact that we continue to serve the same clients that started the firm more than two decades ago.
PK Electrical’s managing principals understand that company culture and building a cohesive team is the foundation for employee satisfaction and retention as well as the overall growth of the firm. Although we live out our core values of trust, integrity, accountability, enthusiasm, and adaptability on a daily basis, we find it is essential to revisit our values once per year as a group to reenergize and remind ourselves why these attributes are so important to us as individuals and as a collective group. PK Electrical participates in an annual company alignment retreat, bringing together our Reno, Nevada, and Denver, Colorado, office staff to bond as a team and ensure a united vision. Zweig Group’s strategic planning team led our most recent alignment treatment in Las Vegas, Nevada, to focus on planning for our future.
In preparation for the team alignment event, a survey was issued to a list of our clients as well as all PK Electrical staff members. Zweig Group collected and compiled all feedback and presented to management and staff the data yielded from responses. We knew that in order to be the most trusted partner and be truly authentic to our core values, we needed to be open to hearing it all – the good, the bad, and the ugly. Clients and staff alike provided useful information regarding their experiences with PK Electrical. We were beyond pleased to find overwhelmingly positive feedback, yet there were still a few areas of improvement suggested. And with our newfound awareness, we now have the opportunity to make PK Electrical an even better firm for our clients and our employees. The results of the survey were reviewed and discussed as a group to facilitate transparency and teamwork, and action plans for client follow-up were created.
Four strategic initiatives were established and presented to the group: growth, operations, clients, and people. We broke out into smaller cohorts to discuss and brainstorm ideas for improvement in all four areas, including input from staff in all levels and positions in the company. We included goals and specific action plans to achieve the items we listed and established set timelines for completion. We found that the varied perspectives of employees in different departments enriched the conversation and overall outcome of the exercise.
Next, the team reviewed our current mission and vision statements created with the inception of the firm in 1996, and reviewed most recently in the mid 2000s. Although we still stand by the original messages, we agreed that it was time to update and simplify our statements. With our core values reestablished, we wanted to ensure that our mission and vision statements captured the same sentiment. We challenged each person to state their “why,” or their purpose for doing what they do. With the help of Zweig Group’s strategic planning team, we were able to hear from all voices in the firm and solidify a more marketable and succinct vision and mission statement. Together, we brainstormed our company’s current trajectory and how we all envisioned the company in the future. From this we were able to establish our new vision statement: “Visions achieved. Communities empowered.” Through additional deliberation and conceptualization, we decided that we are defining the standard in many ways – in electrical engineering and low voltage design expertise, in client experience, in loyalty and professionalism, in employee satisfaction, and in company culture. From this, our mission statement was clear: “Defining the standard.”
Having the opportunity to gather in-person as a group to bond, socialize, and brainstorm shows the commitment to ongoing success and improvement by our firm’s leadership. Huge organizational milestones can be reached when we step away from our day-to-day operations to evaluate our past and plan for the future, especially when we allow every team member the chance to have a voice and sense of ownership in the firm’s strategic growth.
Amanda Hartman is business development and marketing lead at PK Electrical. Contact her at ahartman@pkelectrical.com. Hannah Rico is a marketing coordinator at PK Electrical. Contact her at hrico@pkelectrical.com. Jules Ackerson is a business development and marketing professional at PK Electrical. Contact her at jackerson@pkelectrical.com.
