Page 39 - Peterson 85 Years and Going Strong

CORE VALUE: FUN
CHAMPIONSHIP BLING (2014)
Peterson teams across the company have been holding JumpStart meetings every week since Brand Ambassador kicked off. But nobody has done a JumpStart quite like Portland’s PDX Truck Shop. In late 2014, a couple of truck techs came up with an idea that took it to a whole new level—a champion-
ship level. “We’d all been through Brand Ambassador that year,” says Jason Billings, who initiated the concept. “So we started talking about what we could do to honor the guys in our shop, like having a Technician of the Month and giving them a better parking spot. Then it evolved into tying it into the core values.” Out of that came the PDX Truck Shop Core Values Champion. The purpose was to honor the truck shop employee who best exemplified the company’s core values for a given month and to encourage participation in their weekly JumpStart meetings. Jason Billings and fellow truck tech, Tim Clark, fine-tuned the idea and formalized it with a set of rules to make it official.
THE BLING
Billings also proposed a prize-fighter style championship belt to go with the title. “I always wanted an excuse to buy a championship belt. The idea came from the Piston’s 2004 Championship when Rasheed Wallace bought all his teammates championship belts so they would have something a bit more substantial than a ring,” says Billings. “I always thought that was pretty funny.” After finding an online company that could pro- duce customized belts at a decent price, Billings passed the idea up the chain of command. They all thought it was a great idea.
The belt Billings and Clark designed looks just like a championship wrestling belt made of leather and met- al, with adjustable snaps to fit different size people. Across the top it reads “PDX Truck Shop Core Values Champion” with the Peterson-Cat logo at the bottom. All five of the core values run across the sides: Custom- er First.Integrity.Excellence.Teamwork.Fun.“It’s actually pretty nice,”says Clark,who has been with Halton, and now Peterson, since 1999. “I wore it to the 2015 Christmas dinner, and some people thought it was kind of funny. But I told them, ‘Hey, I’m the Champion. I was voted in by everybody out in the shop.’ It’s a sacred thing to us; we take it very seriously. Everybody sees you get the belt and you take charge of the JumpStart meetings and get involved a little bit more with everyone,” says Clark. “I think some people strive to be the best and try to do a little extra in order to be the Champion.”
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