The Lawson Group has been around since 1978, and although a lot of people know who we are, many don’t know exactly what we do. It appears we’ve done a really good job of marketing ourselves to the community so they know we exist, they just don’t know what it is that we do.
It’s difficult to explain everything that we do concerning workplace safety services in New England, but generally, we tell people that we offer services to keep their people safe and healthy on the job. I often tell people that we’re in the “white horse” business–we run in to save the day and we’re always trying to rescue people from themselves.
I’m an Industrial Hygienist by education and training, which means my background is in worker health and safety with more focus on the “health” side of that equation. Some people think that an Industrial Hygienist has something to do with people’s teeth, but it doesn’t–it has to do with exposure to health effects on the job such as noise, chemicals, radiation, heat stress, indoor air quality, mold, and bacteria, lead, asbestos, or any of a myriad of problems we deal with every day.
Everything we help companies do regarding health and safety is what they should already be doing for the benefit of themselves and their employees. This is typical because workplace health and safety are usually managed by “exception.” In other words, if nobody is getting hurt, “we must be safe,” until somebody does get hurt and then everyone pays attention until no one is getting hurt anymore and people resort to their old habits.
Through our health and safety consulting work, we attempt to get our clients to focus more on safety as an essential part of a business that is no more different than sales, shipping and receiving, and quality. It must be paid attention to constantly if a company is to be successful when it comes to safety–just like all those other aspects of a successful business.
The whole idea is to make sure that people are satisfied that when they come to work each day, they’re not in harm’s way. When we originally started the business in the late 70s, most of the worker health and safety issues we addressed were in situations where employees were exposed to significant levels of noise and chemicals at work. At that time, most people considered it just part of the job and were not necessarily very concerned about it. Today, there are very few significant worker exposures to high levels of noise and chemicals and yet workers are more concerned than they were 50 years ago about what they are exposed to and is it safe! Today, there is much more awareness amongst workers regarding what they are exposed to and we see our role as trying to document the lack of significant exposures instead of measuring excessive exposures that had been happening for years.
Our goal in all the things that we do is to be your business partner and help you run your business in a safer, more profitable, and sustainable manner so you will be around to serve future generations as well as, or better than you do today.
We’re a family-owned business. We’re based here in Concord, New Hampshire. We have lots of family members who have come through here over the years. We have some of our employees that we can sit here and take a look and say, ‘I can remember when they brought their kids in carriers when they were infants, and now they are going off to college.’
It’s a huge responsibility to take on the fact that we are actually supporting 40-something families in terms of all their wants and needs. We’re helping them pay their mortgages. We’re helping them make car payments, helping send their kids to college. It’s a huge responsibility for us as a company to be able to be in business long enough and provide them with the income that they need to be able to make that work.
If we were to tell our total story, it’s probably a three-hour mini-series to go through the past 40 years in business. Not a lot of people accomplish what we’ve been able to accomplish here. The business has grown to 40 or 50 people that are on the phone with customers every day. They’re out on customers’ facilities every day, and we give them the credit for the reputation and the success that we have.
We’ve been able to do it for 40 years and we certainly think we’re going to be able to do it for another 40. Our whole goal is pretty simple: it’s to come to work every day, do a good job for our customers, try to have fun while we’re doing it, have good people that we work with, and end up at the end of the day being able to come back and do it again tomorrow.
