I have known for many years that my company was full of very good people. Everyone was constantly giving 110% and doing everything they could for the success of the business. I had assurance that, come hell or high water, we would make it, and we managed our employees to be the best. The problem that I realized was that we could only do so much; we had hit our limit.

Every employee was consistently in a reactionary mode and spending the majority of their time putting out fires. We grew accustomed to this and accepted that this is the way a construction company had to run because our industry is full of surprises. What we were missing was that most of these fires were preventable.

Even before Cogent started our project, they developed insight into who we were and the problems with our structure. Our organizational and financial foundations were not built correctly, leading to a lot of mismanagement and misinformation that we once again thought was normal.

Cogent started the project with our financial foundation to correct the way that we viewed problems and successes. This alone was an earth-shattering realization. Now that trust was built on the information side, we could predict certain outcomes. The next part was to fix the way we viewed each other and their individual talents. Via Job Descriptions and a written Organizational Chart, alignment was made for true transparency into roles and responsibilities. This clarity brought overlaps and holes into the open so they could be fixed.

Strategic planning has now taken over our manageable day-to-day responsibilities instead of reacting to the previously unknown circumstances. I can not say that we are finished after this last 6 weeks but we now have a foundation and structure to continue to build from. Our people know and can see personal and company progress on a daily basis and strive to be stronger, more profitable and grow.

Thank you Cogent for your help to date and continued help in the future!

Andrew Zombek
President
Martin-Zombek Construction Services, Inc.