At a recent ESOP shareholder meeting, CEO Darin Anderson spoke to Salas O’Brien’s employee-owners about how the company’s core values impact our growth, and what that means for the future.

Why Grow?

While growth can be a worthy goal in itself, Salas O’Brien believes that growth has never (and will never) prevent us from living out our core values. In fact, because of our commitments to setting and achieving ambitious goals, continuously improving our delivery for clients, and encouraging the growth of our employee owners, we could not be true to our values if we didn’t grow.

Many of our clients are national, and our expansion across the country helps us deliver faster service and greater depth of local knowledge—all with less travel cost and downtime. Adding new team members brings us new expertise while at the same time increasing our capacity to give our clients the kind of service we’ve always prioritized.

How We Grow

From the beginning, we’ve had the long-term view that satisfied clients are more important than short-term gains. That’s why we put leadership, accountability, and relationships first—it’s what’s best for our clients. And when our clients succeed, we succeed.

We believe growth happens when you are doing three things well:

1. Taking great care of your clients. They will keep coming back to you, giving you more work, and telling other possible clients about you because of their enthusiasm and support. This growth happens when your reputation is outstanding.
2. Telling your company story through good communication to new clients (and team members) that fit our profile and values.
3. Investing in like-minded organizations that can help us accelerate our growth by adding leadership, project depth, and industry experience, as well as new geographies.

What We Look For

When we consider new firms to bring into the Salas O’Brien family, we look for very specific culture and factors. We look for committed, engaged, caring leaders and teams who are skilled and passionate about what they do. We look for firms with similar values and an actual commitment to living out those values. We look for companies that demonstrate accountability and have the kind of long-term, committed client partnerships that accountability brings.

While these kinds of people and organizations are hard to come by, we will always choose to “grow right” and will never compromise our values. That’s why our goal is not to become the biggest. We just want to be the best.

When we merge with companies who already share our way of doing things, it transforms the integration process. New leaders and teams continue doing what they’ve always done well, and new relationships—in business and in life—are built on respect, trust, care for one another, and excitement for the opportunities that we will create together.

Benefiting Clients & Creating Opportunity

The way we’ve grown and will continue to grow benefits our clients and creates tremendous opportunities for our employee owners. And we wouldn’t trade that for anything.