ETTER Engineering is pleased to announce the following additions to our growing team; Steven Ballou joins ETTER Engineering as Purchasing Agent. Steve joins ETTER from Eppendorf Manufacturing Corp where he was a Buyer. Steve has extensive experience in purchasing, logistics, shipping and receiving and he served our country in the Marine Corps. Steve will head up our Purchasing, Shipping and Receiving and Inventory team. Robert Therrien joins ETTER as Field Controls Technician. Bob joins ETTER from the South Central CT Regional Water Authority where he was an Instrumentation and Controls Associate. Bob will be leading our field controls effort and expands our capabilities into SCADA, Data Acquisition and Data Reporting. Alyssa Adler joins ETTER as Sales and Marketing Assistant. Alyssa recently graduated from Union College with a degree…
Archives
Visiting Master Distributors – One of my favorite things!
At ETTER, we manufacture six (6) different product lines and we sell our products through a network of Master Distributors. We have MD’s in New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore/Washington, Denver and Indianapolis. We are looking to expand to Ohio and Kentucky as well. This week, Jon Moore and I made a visit to Ohio and Indiana to visit with new potential Master Distributors and to visit with an existing MD. As distributors ourselves, we know how annoying it can be to have to host a manufacturer at your facility, so we work to make our meetings as focuses and productive as possible! We met the principals of two great companies in Ohio – One in Northern Ohio and another in Southern Ohio. Both great companies with…
ETTER – An American Growth Story – Part #5
In Parts 1-4, we talked about Goal Setting, Building a Plan, Setting your KPI’s and Creating Culture and Building your Team. The fifth part of building a great business is building a system of accountability to ensure that you stay on track and keep focused on the plan. Building an accountability system is key to your success. In my experience, this is where most planning efforts fail. You go off to a strategic planning session, make great progress, develop a plan and then fail to put the accountability and discipline in place to ensure the plan is achieved. At ETTER, we hold Leadership meetings twice a month and they are built around accountability to the plan. In addition, we hold quarterly company meetings where the strategic…
ETTER – An American Business Growth Story Part #4
In Parts 1-3, we talked about Goal Setting, Building a Plan, Setting your KPI’s. The fourth part of building a great business is creating your company culture and building your team. First, start with your culture. It is important to understand the current culture of your organization, your shortfalls and what behaviors you want to encourage in the workplace. At ETTER, we created the ETTER Way. It is a set of 4 behaviors that we want all of our team members to model on a daily basis. 1. Make it bETTER – This speaks to continuous improvement and striving to be part of the positive environment, not the negative. We are looking for Victors, not Victims. Victors make it better, victims make it worse. In…
ETTER – An American Business Growth Story Part #3
Earlier, we talked about setting a goal and building a plan. Part #3 deals with measuring success. At ETTER, we have created our Key Performance Indicators or KPI’s. KPI’s are measurements that we track against every month – we set a goal and track our progress towards the goal. One person owns the goal and is responsible for the achievement, which leads to accountability and success. Our KPI’s for 2015 are; Sales Revenue – Kind of a no-brainer, but we track our sales revenue by client and against our budget and last year. On-Time Delivery – Because of how we process jobs, our on-time delivery metric cuts across our Sales, Project Management, Engineering, Purchasing, Production, Testing, Quality Assurance, Shipping and Accounting areas. We have a…
ETTER – An American Business Growth Story – Part 2
In Part 1, we talked about the importance of having a goal. A goal without a plan is just a wish. You need to have a solid plan behind the goal to ensure that you are doing the right things necessary to achieve the goal. We have the following plans; 5 year plan 1 year plan 90 day plan 30 day plan We look at the business in the following categories; Grow the Business – These are our Sales and Marketing Strategies Drive the Economics – These are our Cost Containment and Expense Management Strategies Build a High Performing Team – These are our People Strategies Make it bETTER – These are our Operational Improvement Strategies Create Raving Fans – These are our Customer Strategies…
ETTER – An American Business Growth Story – Part 1
In 2015, ETTER Engineering celebrates our 75th anniversary. Founded in 1940, we have endured a World War, survived 13 Presidents of the United States and made it through 13 recessions. In 2013, ETTER was named to the INC 500|5000 fastest growing private companies in the United States. We think it’s pretty cool…. So, how does a 75 year old manufacturing business, headquartered in the worst ranked state for business, make the INC 500|5000 list in 2013, 2014 and we are pretty sure we are going to be on the list for 2015? This is the first of a five (5) part story of how ETTER accomplished this feat….. Part #1. It all started with a goal. In 2007, Tom Etter and Jon Moore, owners of…