President's Message

As I started to think about the message I wanted to convey in this edition of the MESA On-line newsletter, I reflected that perhaps the name of this section of the newsletter is incorrect – a more appropriate name would be “Team Leader’s Message”. For 25 years, I have had the privilege of being the Team Leader for MESA Products.

If anyone questions why I see myself as Team Leader rather than President, the reason is quite simple. Many MESA employees have been with me since I started the company in l979. As a matter of fact, with all employees combined, MESA has over 400 years of experience in the cathodic protection industry. The average tenure of MESA employees is over seven years with many over 15 years. Our company has grown to be the quality and service leader we are today because of the efforts of the entire team of dedicated MESA employees, not because of the efforts of a single individual.

Along with the impressive statistic of 400+ years of experience on the MESA team, this group can also lay claim to a 25 history of consistent, profitable growth. While these are great statistics for us as a company, what do they mean for our customers?

The strategy of MESA since our inception has always been to be “quality focused and service driven”. You will see these words representing our philosophy utilized throughout our company – on our website, business stationary, business cards, company literature and located throughout our facilities as a daily reminder of our company strategy. The CEO of Levi Strauss Company, Robert Haas, once said, “A strategy is no good if people don’t fundamentally believe in it.” At MESA, our entire team believes quality and service are the cornerstones of the stability we have achieved over the past 25 years and will continue to be our focus for the next quarter century.

MESA recently completed a site visit as part of application for the 2003 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. The site visit is only given to a very small number of companies who apply for the award and the entire MESA team felt they had achieved a significant accomplishment by getting to this level in the award process. While we would be honored to receive the actual award, what we are most excited about are the improvements in our business processes gained from the application experience. Don Olson, sales representative for MESA sums it up pretty well: “Applying for the Baldrige Award is all about looking to the future, the improvements we will see in our business down the road. It all comes down to the bottom line and I believe the efforts we are making in applying for this award will pay off huge dividends for our customers because we will be a more efficient company.”

Just like Don, all MESA employees understand we are looking to the future with this simple equation in mind:

Quality + Service + Stability = Reliability