Lasting Memory

How long is your memory?

How long of an impression do my actions last for?

Last week I can across three incidents that give us the answer to these questions.

The first incident happened in Fairmont, NE. I was in this small town to watch my son play basketball. He is on the boys JV team and that means from time to time they play at a site away from the regular school. That day’s opponent was Fillmore Central. Their high school is in Geneva, NE but this game was in the neighboring town of Fairmont.

Fairmont used to have a high school of its own. But like many small towns in the Midwest it has been consolidated into a larger district with other small towns. Now it only has a middle school and a rack of pictures of people that went to Fairmont High. (These people all looked silly since the last class was in the early 90s. Lots of big hair and some mullets.)

When the game was over and we waited in the hallway to exit the building I noticed a plaque on the wall and went over to read it. The plaque talked about the 1981 addition and on it was a
list of contractors that did the work. Under electrical contractor was Willmar Electric.

I pointed it out to my wife and she said “aren’t you glad you didn’t make fun of the lighting.”

Other parents asked if I remembered the project. I had to tell them “no, in 1981 I was 12 and I didn’t know which projects Willmar Electric was doing, I was just glad my dad had work!”

The next day I interviewed a guy that wanted to come to work at Willmar Electric. 22 years ago he worked at Quantum Electric. We found 3 of his former co-workers and asked them what they thought of this guy. They all said he was a good worker and that we should interview him. They also relayed an embarrassing story about him from a Christmas Party over 23 years before.

That same afternoon Cory Lownsbury and I went to Kearney, NE to meet with a project owner that wanted to hire us to design and build a project with them. The representative of the owner had worked with us over 16 years ago on a project in Willmar, MN and wanted to work with us again.
They liked our work from 16 years ago, nearly 500 miles away and wanted to work with us.

Seems that what happened 16, 23 and 32 years ago can leave an impact on today.

Seems it is important that we live up to the core value of meeting the customers’ needs and treating others the way they want to be treated if we want to have future success.