A Moment to Look and Listen…
We are almost done the first quarter of the year, and at the same time are a couple of weeks away from closing our 2025 books and financials. It has me thinking about where we have come as a company and more importantly where we are today as a company vs a year ago.
A year ago, we were just starting to onboard the SWO team and starting to look at ways we could bring ACUTE together with our other SafetyCo businesses. We were still figuring out how we could get our partnership with Safety First to work and started working on how we could make that investment with Mary. Jeff Thorne had not joined the team to unify our Training and Consulting businesses, and Laura had just recently joined as our first HR Manager in the company. Zoho was in its infancy, and we were still figuring out how to integrate our digital platforms for a more fluid user experience.
Even though 12 months does not seem like a long time, the company we were in March 2025 seems like a generation back of the company we are today. Today we are a company that is focused on making all aspects of our company better and are investing the time and resources into making our employee and customer experience the best we can. We’re focusing our efforts on improving the smaller details, those moments that can be frustrating or limiting, and finding ways to strengthen and enhance them across every level of the organization. At times this seems like a dauting task, but we have committed our focus together over these first 6 months of 2026 to revisit and rethink how the company needs to look, feel and act in the next chapter of SafetyCo.
I guess to simplify the message, we are looking to align all aspects of the business together for a stronger today and tomorrow.
We are also looking to put some focus on the projects that always seem to get pushed out, based on priorities, our customers or the urgency to solve a short-term issue or challenge. These efforts include initiatives such as introducing a simplified organizational structure and updated visual org chart, unifying our employee handbook and policies, revisiting our Values and Vision, and simplifying the company so that we can make decisions simpler and quicker.
As the company is working on all these internally focused initiatives, we are looking to bring in the next group of team players, leaders and game changers for us to constantly add to our winning team. We are hiring new roles in Operations, Marketing and Sales, and at the same time are adding to our WorkForce field operations, and adding Trainers in Ottawa, Central and SWO. Additionally, we know we need to significantly upshift our technology platforms, and more importantly strategies, and in such we are hiring an advisory role to focus on this upshift and implementation. We are looking to expand and invest in our team in the North, and at the same time integrate the SafetyCo North team into our current structure instead of it feeling like a different business unit on its own.
We are also listening and hearing all the great feedback from the team across all roles and parts of the business. For those who have provided formal feedback and for those who constantly jump into conversations in an office, we want to say thank you.
We have also heard some of the feedback that says we need to do better.
We need to communicate better, and we need to focus on creating great places to work every day physically and culturally. We need to act faster and simpler to fix some of the things that create friction for the team daily. We have also heard we need to create more space for our team to grow, to feel empowered and to feel like they have the alignment and autonomy to make decisions, take some chances and as I have said in the past “break some eggs”.
I have also heard the feedback from the team that at times I am a roadblock to the company getting to the next level; that at times, I need to get out of the way and let our leaders and team members excel and thrive by creating more alignment and then letting them lead. And you know what. They are right.
In the coming few months we will take all this feedback, and all the new ideas and initiatives, and look to communicate howe we can be a simpler, more unified company. An even better company to work at, and our customers want to work with. Our leaders and team players will get more clarity versus confusion, and more autonomy vs. agreement. We will also double down on how we can become a stronger High Performance and High Support (HP/HS) company, and start to work with our teams, business units and leaders to help them understand how our HP/HS looks and shows up in their everyday roles and teams.
We have also heard the feedback that we want to feel like the company and brand of SafetyCo is bigger and bolder. That the team wants to feel proud working for the brand and have people recognize the brand more in our cultures, communities and with our customers.
The team wants to rally behind one SafetyCo. We LOVE it and we have heard you.
We are still just getting started.
– Mark
