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| The Morse Group: Perfecting Excellence |
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| Written by Eric Slack | ||
| Sunday, 30 November 2008 23:00 | ||
 “Our president has a sign in his office that says ‘Perfection is our goal; Excellence will be tolerated.’ You can’t always be perfect, but if you shoot for that you will be excellent,” said Don Morse, CEO. Today, the group has permanent offices in Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa, and Nevada; runs projects nationwide; and has a network of member companies with roughly $150 million in annual sales. The Morse Group can provide commercial, industrial, institutional, hospitality, and utility markets with complete energy solutions and brings specialty engineering, construction, automation services, and project development under one banner. In all, there are nine companies under the group’s umbrella: Amp Electric, Amp Systems, Automation Solutions of America (ASA), EcoEnergy, Industrial Electrical Engineers (IEE), Morse Electric, Morse Energy, Oracle Systems, and The Rockwell Group. Strategic expansion The reason for this diversification boils down to the old saying that necessity is the mother of invention. Throughout the history of the group, as market conditions have fluctuated and customer needs have changed, one thing has almost always remained constant—only once has Morse ever had a year when sales declined, and the company has never had a loss. By expanding its construction and engineering capabilities in response to customer demand and increasing the size of its territory, Morse has more leverage when negotiating for jobs simply because it can do more than most of its competitors. While part of the group’s expansion has come about through acquisition, about 95% of its growth has been internally generated. Companies acquired by the group haven’t been large. According to Morse, there are two reasons to buy a company, and neither has to do with overall sales. “We never bought companies for sales; we bought them for their people and their customer list,” said Morse. “Acquisitions are a small part of what we’ve done, and the last acquisition was a drywall company about six years ago.” Some of the recent moves the group has made include ramping up activities in its energy division and opening up a new office in Las Vegas. Spreading out around the US has helped the group deal with slowdowns in the construction market, and Vegas was specifically chosen because of its high volume of union jobs (Morse is a union contractor) and proximity to larger jobs. In the past, much of Morse’s work was jobs of less than $500,000. Today, the group is targeting jobs in excess of $5 million, and its two largest jobs are $55 million and $42 million, respectively. “If all the jobs you are doing are valued at around $500,000, it isn’t worth it to go to Pennsylvania or Nevada or other places for those kinds of jobs. But if it is a $10 million job, then it is worth doing,” Morse said. “There is less competition for larger jobs, and there are a lot of jobs like that in and around Las Vegas.” As for the energy division, getting involved in projects like wind farm construction, spearheaded by Shawn Gaffney, president of EcoEnergy, seemed like a natural complement to its original business in electricity. Morse Energy and EcoEnergy are both involved in the development and construction of these types of projects from the beginning of project conception. This means the Morse Group can do everything, including putting up test towers, leasing the land, bringing power companies onboard, building new roads, pouring concrete, installing electrical components and wind towers, and site engineering, making the development of a full-scale energy division a natural fit for who and what the Morse Group is. Supporting growth As the group has expanded its geographic reach, during the last seven years or so it has focused on finding good people who are willing to travel. While individual divisions and companies have their own hiring policies and procedures, Morse said one good way to know you are making a good hire is whether or not a prospective employee is someone a manager would want to spend several days traveling with in a car. The group has also taken some of its more experienced people and moved them out to places like Vegas to work with new people from the area to create a new Morse Group center of excellence. What distinguishes the Morse Group from the crowd of businesses trumpeting their own customer service success stories is a willingness not to impose its expertise on clients. Although the group and its companies have the experience, only the customer knows what they want out of a project. Morse listens closely to its customers to find out what they are hoping to accomplish with a project and then uses its accumulated knowledge to come up with the best way of meeting their goals at the best price possible. “We never delay jobs. We pay our bills on time, and that created a good external reputation and also makes people proud to work for us,” said Morse. Now, with larger projects, Morse finds that more customers want bonded work. This means the group needs to make enough money and keep enough cash in the business to meet the bonding companies’ criteria, but Morse believes that despite the challenge, the group’s infrastructure is set up enough to handle double or even triple the work it is currently doing. Vendors are supportive of Morse’s efforts because of the group’s reputation for paying on time, and despite its mentality and history as a family-grown business, the Morse Group is very much a meritocracy, which gives employees with the drive the chance to reach as high in the company as they can. “None of our company presidents are actually part of the Morse family, and great examples of our exceptional leadership are Lou Rotello, president of the Morse Group, and Brian Scott, CFO of the Morse Group and president of The Rockwell Group, among many others. The next generation doesn’t get special treatment, but they can earn opportunities just like anyone else,” said Morse. “Our employees like that. They share my family’s ideals of wanting to maintain an excellent reputation and run a successful business, and they have been crucial to our success.” |