It’s really difficult, and not that productive, to try to drive your car in reverse looking through the rearview mirror. That is what we believe many businesses do as they begin each year. Reviewing the past year’s performance to budget, costs, and sales. At MDI we are not immune to that behavior, but we try to focus our energy on celebrating our past successes, and understanding our past failures to inform our work going forward.
We have many things to celebrate in relation to 2017. Our business, our employees, and our customers continue to grow in concert with each other. That growth has helped to, once again, create an environment where “great people choose to work.”
During 2017, we embarked on some strategic planning work to understanding, both internally and externally, what makes us tick? What are we really selling? In synthesizing the results, we began to understand that MDI stands for a tangible product to the customers, and a pillar in manufacturing to our employees. However, the real magic is that we provide PEACE OF MIND.
For our customers, this translates to a feeling that no matter how big or how small the project, or customer, or order, MDI will provide a great product, on time, at a reasonable cost. The feeling begins with our sales group in the field, to our engineers working on projects and to our customer service team taking in orders, through the manufacturing group working productively to ship product on time with great quality. In general, our customers, the engineers and the buying team, want to know our parts will be there and work, and they don’t want to have to worry about it. Business is unpredictable and hectic so it is important that MDI strives to provide PEACE OF MIND in an ever changing world.
For our employees, the foundation of what MDI stands for, and why they choose to work here, is that we collectively work every day to create PEACE OF MIND for each other. Especially in today’s economy, with low unemployment, great people who want to work hard have many choices. Companies offer all kinds of gimmicks to attract and retain employees from expresso bars to on-site work out facilities. At MDI we have come to realize that great employees want to know that they are safe, secure, reasonably compensated, have a nice work environment, are challenged, are recognized, and have some level of job security. Our controlled growth strategy and continual improvement process, together with our incredibly diverse customer base combine to provide the PEACE OF MIND that our employees crave.
It’s always interesting to review the past as you look to the future. The turning of a year on the calendar is a natural time to do that. To be grateful for what has been and hopeful for what will be.
