Episode Details

Connect with Ray Brown

Email: Ray Brown@Escogroup.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ray-brown-23b65622/

Lisa Ryan: Hey, it's Lisa Ryan. Welcome to the Manufacturers' Network Podcast. I'm excited to introduce you to our guest today, Ray Brown. Ray is the President of Esco Group. Esco Group provides electrical construction, electrical engineering plant automation, Arc flash analysis, and electrical safety services to various commercial and industrial clients, primarily within the food and beverage manufacturing agriculture and municipal markets. Ray likes to say that they provide engineering construction services from seed to table. Ray, welcome to the show.

Ray Brown: Hello Lisa, thank you for that warm introduction on Esco.

Lisa Ryan: Well, it's so nice to have you here. Tell us a bit of your background and what led you to Esco.

Ray Brown: You bet. You know it started in grade school. No, I'm just kidding. I'm probably one of the very few folks out there that this was my first and only job. I'm a graduate from the University of Northern Iowa up in Cedar Falls in 1992, with a CPA BA in accounting. Little did I know this was to become my life's purpose and passion. Esco Group and our family have over 300 employees. We're very proud of saying that this has been my only job, and I'm grounded. I have a great family. My wife was my high school sweetheart. We have over 25 years together and two wonderful kids - Ethan and Natalie. I'm honored to be on your show, Lisa.

Lisa Ryan: Well, it's great to have you here. One of the things that we were talking about before we got started was this whole year that we've gone through with COVID and some of the effects that it's had not only on us but on our employees. It's bringing up things like depression and dealing with mental illness. It's a topic that many people are not comfortable talking about - they don't know how to talk about it.

What are some of the things you've experienced? How have you worked with your employees this past year to help them get through all this?

Ray Brown: Before we get going, I think, with like anything that we tack on Esco, you have to start somewhere, whether the safety or mental illness and, as I share, what we're doing at Esco. We don't draw a line in the Sand. This is where we want to be today. We focus on growth from one day to the next. One of the things I recognized for myself going through this past year, half of our workforce, we have around 300 employees, about half of those hundred 50 or so, give or take, actually are in manufacturing.

Manufacturers continue to be super successful every day, navigating not just the Covid challenges but other manufacturing challenges. Half of our workforce is engineering office space, so they're all working from home, so we had a pretty diverse background this last year of folks that when you talk about what their new normal look like, that didn't change construction electrical construction professionals. They showed up on the job from day one lot much like manufacturing professionals out there, and then our engineers working in that hybrid model.

There are a lot of different challenges around isolation, and that was me as well. I think there's a stat out there I share with the Esco family - one in four of us went through some depression this last year or continue to maybe suffer from some of that. I felt that one of the things that we started this year at Esco group, we have dynamic teams that help. I strategically partner with our three engagement teams, focusing on building mutual commitment and making it fun and around that flow experience. Then we have an employee ownership team that helps us share the principles of employee ownership, but the three-team that we'd like to call them partne