Looking forward to a great year ahead

With every new year comes a fresh start and an opportunity for a renewed focus both personally and professionally. Individuals often promise themselves that they will exercise more, eat less or quit various habits. Companies, on the other hand, evaluate their performance for the past year and create a plan of action for the next 12 months.

At DPR, we spent the last several months of 2004 taking an honest look at our achievements, successful and less-than-successful projects, and where we added the most value for customers to help us create a clear direction for the future. Part of our reflection involved revisiting Jim Collins’ “Hedgehog Concept,” in which what you are deeply passionate about, what you can be best in the world at, and what drives your economic engine all intersect to provide a strategic barometer for companies making the leap to greatness.

The DPR Hedgehog

What are we passionate about? We are passionate about so many things at DPR—our people, customers, projects, culture, core values, mission and purpose. We are passionate about creating injury-free environments, measuring results, continuous improvement for improvement’s sake, and ongoing training that pushes us to be “bullet smart” builders providing better service to customers. We love what we do at DPR, and hopefully that is reflected through the people who work hard every day, our projects, and the relationships we have been fortunate enough to build over the last 14 years.

What can we be best in the world at? DPR was founded as a technical builder, and although we have built many different types of projects—large and small, straightforward and highly complex—we continue to truly excel on the technically challenging jobs that require a higher level of expertise, extensive preplanning and strong attention to detail. In fact, customers in our core markets of advanced technology, biotech/pharmaceutical, corporate office and healthcare ranked us 14 percent better than “Best in Class” based on more than 90 end-of-construction in-person customer satisfaction surveys conducted in 2004. Building the technically complex projects that we love to build is not easy, and we do it better than anyone else, according to our customers.

What drives our economic engine? Passion and performance, with a dose of discipline, have proven to be our strongest economic drivers. DPR has been profitable every year since our founding, and our robust sales and operational efforts indicate that this trend will continue. In his book “Good to Great,” Collins said it best, “It takes discipline to say ‘No, thank you’ to big opportunities. The fact that something is a ‘once-in-a-lifetime opportunity’ is irrelevant if it doesn’t fit within the three circles [of the Hedgehog Concept].”

By sticking true to our purpose, core values and what we love to do best, we have accomplished some great things despite a tough couple of years and have laid an even stronger foundation—with the right people in place—to guarantee an exciting road ahead.