Character: A Core Reason We’re Able to Celebrate 100 Years
John Wooden, the legendary college basketball coach who won 10 national championships at UCLA, once famously said, “The true test of a person’s character is what he does when no one is watching.” This description is one that describes our notion of character well, and one that we give much credit to for being able to reach our 100th anniversary as a company this year.
Character – which is what we call one of our “Four C’s,” along with Competence, Considerate and Community – has served as a pillar on which we’ve built our company’s success on, going all the way back to 1923. Defining character isn’t easy, but character has always been a core quality to who we are at Kimmins. If we had to describe what it means in its simplest terms, we might break it down as follows:
Be honest above all else.
Always give the best you have, every day.
Treat everyone you met with respect, regardless of status.
We feel so strongly about these principles that, as part of our 100th anniversary, the Kimmins team put together our thoughts on what character means to us in a short video. Putting this in perspective for today, here is how character continues to shape the ways we work:
For Customers - We always do the right thing. We own our mistakes. If something isn’t working properly, we fix it and make it right, no matter how long ago we installed it.
For Employees - We look for people with character, not people who are characters. We strive to have only the most talented people, and once we get them, we work hard to keep them. This is why the average tenure of our 300-plus team members is nine years.
For Communities - We strive to be good neighbors on the job site and in the community. We partner with local minority contractors. We host apprenticeship programs to cultivate the future workforce. And we invest in philanthropic programs to give back.
As we celebrate our 100th anniversary throughout the year, we’ll continue to look at the role of character and our other Four C’s that have enabled us to be successful.