Doing the Right Thing
/Mother Nature’s Moment
October/November 2015
Lesley Bruce Smith, ISA Certified Arborist
This fall I received a startling reminder of one of our core values as a company. I drive a Volkswagon Jetta TDI, which was sold to me as a clean diesel engine with fabulous gas mileage. For the last four and a half years I have been happily driving my car, thrilled with the sense that I was not polluting the air and getting terrific gas mileage of around 40 mpg. This month’s news has been saturated with stories about VW making choices over and over again to “do the wrong thing”. To cheat, to lie to their customers and their dealers, and to the governments in the countries where they sell their cars. Yikes...what were they thinking?? This week as I found out, along with millions of other VW owners, that we were lied to and that our vehicles are miracles of German engineering designed to cheat and deceive, instead of perform and serve...it just made me feel icky. Another example of the sad truth that not everyone does business with integrity and a desire to tell the truth. Certainly they could have put all that energy to work to get their cars to be what they claimed they were!
Which brings me to my original point. We have spent the last three decades working hard to always do what was right. Do what was right by our customers, our staff, our vendors, and the government. It is not always the easy thing but it is the right thing. As we care for your trees, we desire to do the right thing for the environment, for your trees, for your family and for you and the communities in which we all live. We do this for a lot of reasons but maybe the most important one is the fact that we recognize that the single most important thing about our business is our trust relationship with our clients and we will always seek to treat that with the gravitas and respect that it deserves. It is not enough to know the right thing to do, you need to be intentional about DOING the right thing.
