The Rust Construction Team held its first ever “Vision Day” on Friday, January 26th, 2024. Rust Orling Architects generously allowed us the use of their conference room space. The entire team was in attendance and we took the full day to review where we have come from and where we’d like to take the business.
Tonya Bruin, the owner of To Do Done, a remodeling company in Ottawa, Ontario facilitated the meeting and offered much needed perspective. She had recently done a “Vision Day” exercise with her company and generously offered to help guide us on our first foray into company-wide strategic planning.
In the past, we have eschewed the value of things like vision, mission, and core value statements because we saw them as corporate mumbo-jumbo that were at best shallow attempts at creating culture, and at worst marketing ploys that didn’t reflect the reality of the business they purported to guide. If asked, we might have said something like, “we have been doing this a really long time, longer than our competition. We know who we are so why would we need to take the time to do this?”
Recently, we’ve come to realize that these baseline statements are needed to provide a moral compass for our company. These statements when done right are an important step in building a great company and making the implicit, explicit.
An important part of the evolution in our understanding is our involvement with a roundtables organization called Remodeler’s Advantage (RA). Twice a year we meet in person with a different company in our group of about ten businesses from all over the country to do a deep dive on the host business – including employee interviews and visits to the host company’s shop or office space, as well as a standardized audit of each of the other participating businesses.
The exercise takes three days and is facilitated by someone from RA. The experience is exhausting, emotional, and surprisingly intimate. It can feel like the soul of the business (and by extension our own self-worth) is being opened up for evaluation. We leave exhausted and excited to implement the lessons we learn.
From this experience, we know that the rock star remodeling companies out there, the ones that are great to work for, are in in high demand, and do incredible work, are ones with (among other things) thoughtful, meaningful vision, mission, and core values statements that their employees believe in and use for guidance. It’s through RA that we met Tonya and got her to help us with our own Vision Day.
—
Here are the results of our work:
Mission Statement
The mission of Rust Construction is to responsibly design and build functional and beautiful spaces for living and working to last the next 100 years. We deliver the highest quality of customer service and project execution by hiring and retaining the most talented people and building a culture of collaboration, growth, and joy for our work.
Vision Statement
Rust Construction is the most trusted and in demand remodeling company in the Washington, DC region.
Core Values
- Be a contributing Member of the Team with a Positive “Can Do” Attitude
- Ecstatic clients
- Accountability, Integrity, Honesty
- Craftsmanship
- Efficiency
- Collaborative and fun team culture
- Continuous improvement
- Healthy and safe workplace
—
We look forward to making the Vision Day exercise an annual event, as we work to implement the results of our first Vision Day.
