October 26, 2022 Frank Hopkins

Growth, Culture and Safety

Electricity is essential to our lives, and it’s becoming smarter. Excellerate and our FTI sister divisions are striving to ensure our company is leading the way in providing energy solutions to our customers. Time is of the essence, and we continue to streamline how quickly and efficiently we can get electrical projects up and running.

Starting with the conceptual design, we take supply chain, logistics, installation and optimization into consideration, engineering products to be assembled in Excellerate’s climate-controlled environment. This dramatically reduces hours required in the field, maximizing quality and increasing efficiencies at every corner.

Construction manufacturing is the future, and we are creating sustainable growth, culture and safety with this approach. In the last five years, Excellerate has gone from two 30,000-square-foot facilities to five facilities in three states and over 1 million square feet of manufacturing capability. We’ve broken ground on a new 430,000-square-foot facility and are finalizing the design of another large site. FTI has had a vision of the direction of our industry and the need for electrical innovation, and these facilities are putting our long-term goals into action. Through our vertically integrated end-to-end process across our diverse organization, the more value we can provide to our customers. The strength of our team allows us to decrease marketplace risks that are out of our control.

Leading the charge in a rapidly growing industry takes an incredible team, and our growth provides more opportunities for our employees. FTI’s culture promotes innovation and rewards individual and team successes that align with our company vision. Our Culture of Care program is just one piece of the positive environment we provide. There is no conversation that is too hard, and leaders strive to have the doors open to talk. I recently did a quick survey of 15 random employees on what they like most about working here, and 13 responded that it’s the people and the culture. Some of these people have been here less than a month and some have been here for decades.

Our culture and our people are the main ingredients in our safety efforts, and we are leading our industry with our safety metrics and initiatives. We took the lead in instituting a “no knives” policy across Excellerate’s and FTI’s job sites to curb one of our most frequent safety incidents: lacerations. The custom tooling needed to replace a utility knife is minuscule compared to the safety gained. After some initial perceived inconvenience, with the support of leadership and our safety teams, our field teams have embraced the effort. Through this and our overall uncompromised focus on safety, our Excellerate facilities are nearing the 1,400-day mark without a recordable. This is a remarkable achievement, especially knowing that we are anticipating nearly 1 million hours to be worked in the next year.

When you have the right vision, great teams and a focus on employees, amazing things can happen. Stay tuned for more information on Excellerate’s growth and future focus in upcoming blog articles.