Good to Great

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                                                                       Rich Miner

When I was given the tremendous honor of becoming THOR’s Chief Operating Officer (COO), our CEO Johnny Walker said to me, “THOR, is a very good company, but I want us to be even better.” It was at that point we began to ask ourselves – what exactly does it mean to be “even better,” and how exactly do we get there? 

We knew we had great people doing great things for our customers, so we already had the most important ingredient for a great company in place. What we needed to do was to continue to enhance the environment around our great people, to enable them to be their very best. Essentially, we needed to figure out how to move THOR from a good company to a great one.

So how does a good company become great? The Greek Philosopher Aristotle once said, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.” This incredibly simple, but amazingly profound quote is the foundation for our recent strategic renaissance. We needed to do, think and act the way a great company does. 

Our journey began by developing a detailed strategic plan for 2019 that involved three aspects: who are we now; what do we want to become; and how are we going to get there. As part of this effort, we refined our company; Mission and Vision, and developed a company motto that de­fined our company’s focus in two small words - Fleet First.

The Executive Steering Committee (ESC) rolled out a set of Operating Principles that defined how we wanted to do business as a company, followed by a Cor­porate Culture statement that outlined how we wanted to do business together as team members. Then, we streamlined our Key Service Lines to narrow in our focus and remind ourselves and our business partners who THOR is. Finally, we restructured the entire company, es­tablishing an internal ESC which would provide the balanced, focused leadership and communication necessary to drive the success of a diverse and dis­persed THOR workforce. With the ESC at the forefront, we identified financial “success” metrics, charting out a path for deliberate, sustained growth. We also began to identify ways to do things more efficiently.

THOR identified enhancements that we would make to our internal communi­cations tools and systems; we identified corporate policies that could be en­hanced to provide better, clearer policy and direction to our employees; and fi­nally, we found opportunities to stream­line and enhance our employee recogni­tion and benefit programs. With the help of the ESC, we converted these oppor­tunities into tangible actions, assigned them to key members of THOR leader­ship, and scheduled their disciplined execution. In essence, we developed a tangible road map to success.

Now comes the hard part – getting it all done. The ESC has established aggres­sive goals with aggressive timeframes in which to complete them. It will not be easy, but if we maintain our inertia and keep charging forward, we will succeed. We have already made tremendous pro­gress thus far in 2019, thanks in large part to our outstanding personnel who continue to go above and beyond the call to support our evolution and growth while still delighting our customers. 

I look forward to continuing the journey and promise to work tirelessly for the betterment of THOR solutions. We are well on our way to becoming GREAT!