Since we’ve been around for 40 years, the types of businesses and industries that we serve is pretty far-flung. I always say I’ve personally been in, I’ve lost count, but well over 5,000 different establishments in the last 40 years practicing what we do. It’s all over the board. We’ve brought our employee safety plans to New England hospitals, schools, nursing homes, colleges and universities, governments, both city, state, and local, the federal government and on occasion, we’ve worked outside of New England. We’ve worked in 26 states around the country. We’ve worked for some of the big car manufacturing companies. We’ve worked for oil companies inside the Arctic Circle in Alaska. We’ve been in thousands of different kinds of facilities and businesses, and the bottom line is pretty much the same thing when it comes to the New England employee safety and health services that we provide. We’re still working with people, and you find that people are pretty much the same no matter what state we go to or where they’re at, that have behaviors that allow them to work in an unsafe manner.
We spend a lot of time trying to work on their behaviors. How do we get them to think and act in a safer manner? There’s a whole science of what’s called “behavior-based safety” that we try to encourage people to participate in, where you try to catch people doing things right from a safety and health standpoint, as opposed to catching them doing things wrong and writing them up or disciplining them. There’s a strong segment of the safety and health profession that believes that this “behavior-based safety” practice is a much better one. However, [in New England and North America] tends to run out of gas if you don’t continue to promote it, and it’s very expensive and very time-consuming to promote it.
In terms of the other services that we provide, obviously in the workers comp space, we’re in lumber industries and manufacturing companies all over the place. In terms of a lot of the asbestos management that we do, it’s in a lot of the different trades whether it’s property managers, or real estate people, schools and hospitals. So we touch almost everybody that’s out there in all those different industries, and if we haven’t, there’s precious few that we haven’t actually provided employee safety plans in New England the last 40 years.
