Page 33 - Peterson 85 Years and Going Strong

values, having good communication, and knowing how to treat our customers and each other,” ex- plains Duane Sr. “How we treat each other and our customers is what defines how well we’re going to do as a company. That’s our competitive edge.”
CATALYST FOR CHANGE
Today, Peterson is a big company trying to act like a small company, according to Duane Doyle Jr., president of the earthmoving division, and Peterson’s fourth-generation heir apparent. Over the past eighty-five years, Peterson has assimilat- ed fifteen different companies into its fold. Each has brought a different culture with it. The last twenty-five years alone have seen major changes in Peterson’s makeup, with the acquisition of Cresco (1997), Papé-Cat (2003), SITECH (2009), Hal- ton-Cat (2010), Bayshore International (2011), BuildingPoint Pacific (2015), and Brattain In- ternational Trucks (2018). The influx of new em- ployees, product diversity, and the sheer volume of business have demanded a new platform of unity in order to succeed.
“The last two Cat dealer acquisitions [Papé and Halton] were very large and had very different cul- tures from our own,” says Erin Sorgel, Peterson’s CFO. “It was apparent from the beginning that we needed to find a common language in order to serve our customers well. We needed a baseline to be able to say, ‘This is how we’re going to conduct ourselves. This is how we’re going to do business to succeed’. Brand Ambassador is part of the founda- tion for that.” It is the driving force behind Peter- son’s culture change.
The other catalyst was the strategy work done in 2009–2011, which laid out Peterson’s values and vision. The challenge then became how to teach these values. How do we embed them? How do we make sure people understand what they mean and how to use them on a daily basis? That’s a big part of what Brand Ambassador does. “Brand Ambas-
Erin Sorgel/CFO, helped develop the Four Communication Principles taught in Brand Ambassador.
sador is about values,” says Sorgel. “As we continue to grow as a company, we get further and further away from the family feel. In order to maintain that hometown atmosphere and still get excel- lent results, we need to be able to see people for who they really are and give them grace. That’s the kind of relationship that gets things done.” That’s straight out of Brand Ambassador.
FROM NO TO GO!
The evolution of Brand Ambassador at Peterson began with a course called Leading High Impact Teams that Tom Bagwell and Eric Martin (then president of Peterson Power Systems) attended at Northwestern University in Chicago. One-third of the attendees were CIA; another third was FBI. “One of the teachers was an old white guy, overweight, disheveled hair, dressed all in black,” recalls Bagwell. “He started off by saying, ‘Every employee wants four things: they want to be seen, to be heard, to make a contribution, and to be rec- ognized for the work they do.’ Through a series of exercises—like curtain up / curtain down, self-por- trait envelopes, and others—I saw the entire mood in the room shift. In the beginning, the CIA and
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