Extended Family
The Mantheis common commitment comes from a faith that lays a foundation for both their business and personal lives. They acquired it from their parents.
“One of the things that they [our parents] found is that they had to start with God,” Dan Manthei revealed. “They had to start with His principles.”
“The principles of integrity and honesty are principles that are biblically based. They come right out of the Bible,” Tom elaborated. “The book of Proverbs talks a lot about integrity; it states that a good name is more valuable than silver and gold. That’s a core belief of ours. We’d rather have a good name than an extra paycheck. Our name is very important to us in the community. And in our industry our name is very important to us. We work very hard at keeping a good name, and we do that through the principles of giving good service and being honest.”
“Do everything you say you’re going to do,” added Tim. “It’s a really simple message but it’s a hard one. But if you follow that principle then contracts are going to be kept. Your relationships with your vendors are going to be a lot better because you do what you say you’re going to do.”
“God’s principles are opposite from man’s principles,” Dan expanded. “Man has a tendency to want to gather, and get, and hold. God’s principle says that if you give then you’ll get; love man and serve him. In serving man there will be a return that comes back to you for that service. We serve our customer. In serving our customer we build up loyalty with that customer. The customer comes to us when he has a need because he knows he will get the service back.”
“Recently we were awarded the largest job we’d ever had as a company,” Ben offered. “We were not the low bidder nor were we the most qualified but they gave us the work. Afterwards we asked them why they decided to give us the job. They told us, ‘You guys have a reputation of doing what you say you’re going to do.’”
The Mantheis apply these principles to everyone in their company. It’s a family operated business that treats employees as if they are part of the family.
“Our strongest asset in the company is our people,” Tom stated. “We have a lot of other assets in our company; we have financial assets, we have good machinery, but our number one asset is our people. So, we do our best to treat our people with dignity and respect.”
“The first people we hired thirty years ago are still working for us,” Jim illustrated. “We have a pretty strong loyalty factor. That’s because we treat people well, pay them a good wage and try to take care of their needs. We have several people working for us who have worked for some of our competition. One company is three times our size and they work employees an average of eighty to ninety hours a week. When you work those kinds of hours you have no family life. We have a fairly long waiting list of people wanting to come to work for us even though they may earn less money. Our family is more important that chasing the dollar all over the state.”
Each member of the Manthei team makes sure their own families come before the business as well. They all walk the talk.
© 2012 Philip Kassel
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