How did implementation of the Gold Card change the way you do business at Strang Corp.?
Many of these things are things that we were already doing, things that the company believed in, and we just wanted to write it down for people. In 1990, our business grew dramatically, and we were bringing a lot of new people on board. We felt like our values and our culture were getting diluted by people’s last employer. If you increase your number of managers by 50 percent in a year and they bring in baggage from their last employer, you begin to see people handling situations that aren’t consistent with what your values and beliefs are. We wanted to get everybody on track for what we expect: How they’re expected to treat their employees and their guests. The way they did it in their last job may not be what we expect here, so we just want to clarify what that is, and if this isn’t the way they want to conduct business, then don’t come work for us. There aren’t a lot of people who are going to look at this Gold Card and say, ‘I have a problem with this.’ There are managers in our (i
