Tim Manatt

I’m looking out my window and seeing a beautiful day. It must be the start of another construction season, but I thought this a couple of weeks ago and then we got another foot of snow!

We did our annual plant and truck maintenance through the winter and all of the northern plants are now open. We’ve got a good core of people coming back ready to deliver concrete for a wide variety of construction needs. We have some city paving to do in Independence, several hog confinements at various locations, a new school floor and a Super Wal-Mart floor to do in Waterloo.

Housing construction looks like it will be good this year in the Waterloo/Cedar Falls area and also in Jesup. However, as is the case each year at this time, we could use quite a bit more work to fill up our year.

All of my managers are back this year: Larry Keller at Waterloo, Scott Shimp at Denver, Dale Ott at Readlyn, Danny Brunscheon at Oelwein, Bruce Suckow at Independence, Al Streittmatter at Jesup and Darrell Brunko at LaPorte City. These guys are doing a great job of managing their plants, taking the initiative to do what needs to be done, and working together when they need to. I can remember a day when some managers weren’t very cooperative, I’m glad those days are behind us!

Manatt’s is doing a major push this year on SAFETY. My managers and drivers take great pride in being leaders within the company with respect to safety. Even with that said, we’re continuing to make improvements. I’m a firm believer in the fact that just talking about working safely is a very valuable tool. Even if the topic of discussion doesn’t pertain to the particular employee, it makes them think about safety. So keep talking SAFETY. But more importantly, keep doing it SAFELY.

On April 17th, John Manatt, Denny Thier from Bard, Larry Potts and Todd Eckhart from United Concrete, Larry Ford from Ames, Curt Manatt and I will be meeting at United Concrete in Elk Run Heights to start our ready mix “Best Practices” focus group. These “Best Practices” discussion groups are a great opportunity to share ideas and methods of doing something at your work place that you think might be beneficial to everyone else. Or, if you’re having problems in a particular area, this is a great opportunity to ask others how they deal with that particular problem. In the end, it makes all of these separate operations a better company or division.