ForeRunner News

Second Quarter 2007

Business News

ForeRunner Named 13th Best Company to Work for in Colorado

By Shannon Lewis, HR

In keeping with our desire to make ForeRunner a great place to work, we participated in the "Best Companies to Work for in Colorado" program. This program is designed to recognize outstanding places of employment in the state of Colorado. The process evaluated over a 100 different companies as an employee friendly workplaces.

As part of the program's process, all ForeRunner employees are asked to complete an online survey administered by third party agency ModernThink. ModernThink was solely responsible for tabulating the confidential ratings. ModernThink is a company that helps you leverage the power of people and their experiences to build a great organization. They have been in business since 2004.

It is with great excitement and pride that we wish to announce that ForeRunner has been named a finalist in the "2007 Best Companies to Work for in Colorado"; an award sponsored by the Colorado Society for Human Resource Management. ForeRunner placed 13th in the recent competition to be named the "Best Company to Work for in Colorado — 2007".

One of the four key elements of our Business Plan for the next five years is our commitment to making ForeRunner a great place to work. Progress toward such a goal is difficult to measure. This competition provides a solid measure of ForeRunner's progress toward that goal. While we are a little sad to say that we didn't place first in the competition, we finished ahead of any other company similar to ourselves. Utility Engineering and Merrick were also companies finishing in the top 20, but we finished well ahead of them both.

From the CEO, Bill Groskopf — "On a personal note, I must admit to a mixture of pride and humility on this award. I am proud that the employees of this company have achieved such a high level of teamwork and openness that allows us to place this high in the competition. At the same time, I am humbled that you, the people that I work with and am privileged to lead, think as highly of this company as you do. I view my position as the leader of this company as a trust, something that is both an honor and an obligation to serve your needs as human beings."

GIS Technology Strengthens ForeRunner's Commitment to the Four Corners Region

By Sandi Mitchell

The Cartographic Team in Durango has changed the way survey and mapping data is processed by leveraging the capabilities of ArcGIS, ER Mapper and AutoCAD Map to improve data access and expedite projects.

About a year ago I identified several work flow processes where GIS would protect the integrity of our surveying and mapping work. With the assistance of Christian Stoddard, Jeff LaFrenierre, Lynnae Betselie, Heather Maisch, and Melissa Vessel, the team set out to build databases of surveyed monuments, corrected land grids and ownership parcels. The new interactive GIS database replaces the AutoCAD Map tool previously used for tracking this information.

Populating the master GIS database with accurate section corner locations became a high priority since these corners are used as reference points in plats, alignment sheets, and all survey work. This intelligent data base enables easy identification of known control points that our field crews can utilize, as well as identifying the accuracy level of the data (since older control may have been surveyed with sub-meter accuracy and source/accuracy information had not always been captured).

These corners were pulled into an ArcGIS map and the BLM grid used for project work was corrected to the found corners. Next, a reference corner file of all other corners was created and ownership parcels were corrected as necessary. Lastly, GIS & CAD standards were written to include work flow tasks, Forerunner and client procedures, standard naming and display formats, samples and QA/QC checklists.

By integrating our spatial data using ArcGIS the cartographic team is able to focus on drawing production and meeting tight deadlines rather than re-creating data. A secondary feature of GIS is graphical indices and project tracking tools available for project managers and clients through Arc Reader. Also, several map displays previously done in AutoCAD are now being produced in GIS more efficiently and we are able to deliver geo-databases to our clients.

GIS has also proved invaluable for raising the quality of our work, answering questions and streamlining our survey crew field work by eliminating redundancy, identifying valid survey control points (known section corners, for example), and information gaps beforehand.

ForeRunner Welcomes Annemarie McDermott

Annemarie McDermott comes to ForeRunner as the new Director of Strategic Services. Annemarie comes to us with a strong background in what it is that ForeRunner does, i.e. engineering and projects. In addition she has compiled a record of success in sales and marketing, as well as business development. In her previous position she managed an office with profit and loss responsibility, leading a solidly profitable enterprise.

At ForeRunner she will assume leadership of the Strategic Services group, reporting directly to Bill Groskopf, CEO. Strategic Services includes responsibility for all of ForeRunner's sales marketing and business development functions. It also includes ForeRunner's Project Controls group.

Our Business Plan put forth to the company earlier in the year noted that we would be increasing the resources devoted to marketing. We also put a solid corporate commitment behind the establishment of a strong Project Controls group in the company. We also said that in doing so, we would retain the ForeRunner way of doing things. Creating the Strategic Services group and hiring Annemarie to lead it is another step in the successful realization of that Business Plan.

Art of Finding Employees in this Boom Market

By Joe Vickrey

ForeRunner decided this year that to help with the problem of finding employees in our current market that we would take control of it ourselves by hiring our own in-house Recruiting Manager. Joe Vickrey comes to ForeRunner with over 10 years of recruiting experience. Joe joins us to support the growth and vision of ForeRunner with a particular focus in maintaining the culture and environment of our company, while strengthening our ability to deliver superior engineering design and construction to our clients. There are 2 divergent focuses of the recruiting office. They are similar in nature but very different in purpose. They can be classified in simple terms as strategic and tactical.

The strategic ways of a company are longer term in focus and more visionary in nature. As an example, the executive branch of a company may see a new marketplace or industry sector, where profits are sure to be earned, but current company personnel may not have the needed education or skills to service that market. To grow in that direction a company must have the ability to strategically acquire the talent needed to service that new marketplace, without disrupting the current business in process, integrate those services, and subsequent people into the existing business. The recruiting office has the responsibility to assist the company in identifying the skill gaps, and the people who can fill those gaps effectively.

Tactical hiring addresses short term overload, specific niche project expertise, and longer term ongoing needs of the project teams and company. Through the recruiting office we can "contract" that help either through our own database of consulting professionals, or via businesses that provide short term professionals or contract staff. In this case Joe will act as a broker for the department or Project Manager to ensure the requirements or necessary skills sets are met to accomplish the tasks at hand. In other cases the need may be created by continuous expansion of a certain discipline or project type. These positions require us to develop and maintain a database of resources and contacts that can allow us to find potential candidates. Joe has maintained years of contacts in the engineering market in Colorado and on behalf of ForeRunner will develop and maintain contact with potential candidates and networking resources to ensure that when we have a need we have the ability to select the right person. The final component of Joe's responsibility will be to know what the key positions and skill sets are that constitute the bread and butter of ForeRunner's marketplace, and bring those people that are uncovered in the daily activities to the attention of the department managers and make sure that we never miss an opportunity to add to our ability to deliver services or projects for our clients.

Recruiting is all of the things described above, but in addition Joe will be directing other initiatives for ForeRunner that will indirectly allow us to attract and then acquire new and talented people. Some of the things Joe will be active in include Branding, Outreach, College Recruiting, Market Place Expansion and several internal process improvement projects. These process improvement projects will include development of a recruiting applicant tracking system, position identification and approval processes, interviewing and hiring best practices, on-boarding and career tracking and development for internal employees. The purpose is to ensure that as we grow we maintain the character and culture that is ForeRunner. We want to accomplish the long term strategic vision of Bill and Creg, and balance that with the short term requirements of the projects, staff and clients.