Today we marked ten years with the company for two people: Stefanie Martin, our Risk Control Manager, and Joe Valdez, our Territory Manager.
There was a banner, a crystal award, a model dump truck, and rather more balloons than either of them probably wanted. That felt about right.
Ten years is not nothing
Trucking and construction are industries people move around in. Companies get bought, territories get redrawn, and a good manager is always one phone call away from a competitor's offer. Somebody choosing to stay ten years is a decision they made repeatedly, not once.
It also means something specific for the people we work with. A customer calling about a territory this month is speaking to someone who has covered it for a decade. Ten years of knowing which pits run short in August, which sites are difficult to get a loaded truck into, and who actually answers the phone at four o'clock on a Friday.
That knowledge does not live in a system. It lives in people, and you only get it by keeping them.
What they do
Stefanie manages risk control — the company's insurance and claims, the safety standards we hold ourselves to, and the requirements our customers set on their sites. It is work that is invisible when it goes well and extremely visible when it does not, which is a difficult way to spend a decade and she has done it without fuss.
Joe manages a territory, which in practice means being the person customers call and the person who has to make the answer true. Matching what a site needs to what the network can actually deliver, and being straight about it when the two do not line up.
Neither role is glamorous. Both are the reason this works.
From all of us
T. Disney Trucking has been family-owned since 1980, and one of the quieter measures of whether a family business is being run properly is whether people stay. Stefanie and Joe staying ten years says something we would rather demonstrate than claim.
Thank you both — for the decade, and for the way you have spent it.
Here is to the next one.
