As my work anniversary rolled past in July, I was reflecting on my experience as an Engineering Manager here at DISTek over the last 3 years. Since joining DISTek, I’ve been able to work with a lot of great people, clients, and projects. I started out working solely with teams providing engineering services for our largest client, utilizing my knowledge, contacts, and past relationships within that client, after previously being employed with them for 17 years. This brought a lot of comfort and ease into starting my new role, as it already felt “familiar”. I was able to utilize this knowledge and those relationships to understand where we could provide more value to those stakeholders and help grow our teams through adding new projects and increasing the number of people on existing teams. And grow we did! For example, our onsite presence for one client in Fargo more than tripled in size during my first year. This helped allow DISTek to grow to over 100 employee-owners for the first time and then to continue to grow to over 150 employees the next year.
Over the last 3 years, I’ve been able to learn a lot from my fellow employee-owners here at DISTek, as well as share my advice and learnings with them from my own experience over the last 28+ years of my career. I’d like to think I’ve been able to give back to this wonderful company as much as I’ve gotten from it. As an employee-owner at DISTek, I’ve really enjoyed the workplace culture, and personally rank it as the best I’ve ever experienced. I’ve worked for companies ranging from as small as 10 employees to a company currently ranked in the Fortune 100 with roughly 70,000 employees, and several sizes in between, in a variety of different industries. The sense of ownership, cooperation, trust, and inclusion I feel at DISTek tops them all.
Over the last year or so, I’ve been able to expand my client base within the industries we serve. This has allowed me to further expand my understanding of the overall business and learn and practice additional skills to develop new relationships, while assisting my teams in meeting their needs. It has exposed me to different techniques of negotiating, developing proposals, and working closer with our Sales Team, to meet both the clients’ and DISTek’s needs. This has been a refreshing change from my past experiences and has taught me a range of new skills, as well as further honing others.
Until recently, DISTek has experienced a long period of rapid growth. This has caused all of us to scramble at times to accommodate a rapid hiring period and be even more fluid in our actions than in the past. This has been a good experience for all of us in terms of personal and professional growth and has caused us to look deeper at refining our internal processes and the way we do business. The recent slowdown in the target markets we serve has also affected us, as is to be expected. When our clients’ businesses experience a downturn, we feel it, too. This has caused us to again reflect on how we maintain the flexibility and the high level of quality service that DISTek has long been known for.
Now, as we are preparing for the market to return to “business as usual”, DISTek continues to evaluate current and prospective clients, projects, industries, and technologies to ensure that we are poised to provide our current and future clients with the high-quality software development, testing, and implementation that they have come to expect. Somedays, things feel kind of tough, which can leave us all feeling a little anxious about the future, and understandably so, but from my seat in the ballpark I see the company revving its engines, waiting for the right opportunity to take off and get back into the race. The internal process improvements, reflections, technology research, and actions being taken now, will have us well poised to continue the legacy of great service that our founder, and chairman of the board, Matt Dickinson, instilled (and continues to instill), in all of us.
I feel extremely grateful that I was able to join such a great company and am looking forward to moving into the future with the rest of the great employee-owners here at DISTek.
