As The Drum Turns…

It’s no secret that the market has been volatile over the past year. In fact, it is also no secret that a lot of people with investments have been trying to figure out the best way to protect their savings.

One proven strategy to help achieve pong term retirement security is to give careful consideration to the benefits of a well balanced and diversified investment portfolio.

This simply means allocating your money among different types of investments to help achieve a favorable rate of return while minimizing your overall risk of losing money. This results from market or other economic conditions that cause one category of assets to perform well often can cause another asset category to perform poorly.

If you invest more than 20% of your retirement savings in any one company or industry your savings may not be properly diversified. While diversification is not a guarantee against loss, it is an effective strategy to help you manage investment risk.

No single approach is right for everyone because individuals have different financial goals, different time frames for meeting those goals and different tolerances for risk.

It is important to periodically review your investment objectives and the options available in our Plan to help ensure that your retirement savings will meet your retirement goals.

It has long been a focus of our company to provide quality products to our customers in a responsible way. This means paying close attention to the way we produce our products and ensuring that we take the necessary and required steps to preserve our environment.

Producing a quality product has always been a focus from selecting the highest quality raw materials, employing the most qualified people and establishing processes and programs that ensure our products are reliable and meet or exceed the expectations of our customers.

Protecting and preserving our environment while producing our products has also been a focus. We meet and often exceed the regulatory requirements for protecting the natural resources required to make our product and minimizing the impact of our processes on our surroundings.

While we view these as our basic responsibilities of conducting business, it is always gratifying when our efforts are recognized by external organizations.

 2009 Environmental Excellence Awards

Our Salisbury plant along with the Madison plant recently received the 2009 Commitment to Environmental Excellence Awards for their outstanding contributions to protect the environment and maintain sound environmental management practices in their operation. 

The awards were announced at the recent Concrete Works conference held in Indianapolis with over 300 people in attendance.  Madison was recognized as an Honorable Mention winner in Category A for plants producing < 25, 000 cu yds while Salisbury was a winner in Category B for plants producing 25,000 – 50,000 cu yds. 

The plants were 2 of only 24 plants recognized for these awards nationally.

NRMCA Producer Excellence in Quality Award

For the third time in 4 years the company received this award that recognizes producers from across the country who maintain some of the highest quality standards in the industry.

With results measured in seven categories including Management Commitment, Customer Focus, Human Resources, Production Facilities and Equipment, Materials Management and Testing, Specification Review and Mix Design and Measurement Analysis, awards are given to entries that score 75% or higher.

We were one of only two companies to receive this honor in Category B (production between 250,000 and 1million cu yds) and one of only eleven companies to be recognized nationally. Many thanks to Eric Misenheimer, Corporate Technical Services Manager for coordinating the application process and for helping us establish the standards to achieve such high recognition.

All of these awards are the result of the collective efforts of many people and are further proof that we have some of the best people in the ready mixed concrete business.