Skip to content
Chapter 5: From Mother to Son
Let’s continue our journey into ROC Carbon’s history. This month sees current CEO, Curtis Sager, step into the family’s shoes. After that learn how ROC Carbon values protecting their client’s most precious asset – your information.
Things were running smoothly at ROC Carbon through the 90s and Y2K, but tragedy struck the country one year later. After 9/11, Pam was able to keep the company going until she couldn’t when, half a year later, the bottom fell out from underneath the company. It came down to surviving, and Pam did all she could to keep the family business going. The stress from everything started to take a toll on Pam and her health. She had developed high blood pressure due to the stress of running the family company. Pam knew that her time was running out. Pam looked to the past before looking to the future – she went to her Mother.
She knew as her Mother did before that all good things must end. As great a leader as Pam had been, she knew that her time was coming to its fruition, and she had to start thinking of either finding a successor or selling the business.
Like Al Turala before her, she just had to look right in front of her – her son, Curtis. Curtis had been with Toshiba Motors for seven years and was doing a great job, and Pam didn’t want to derail anything that could happen there, but she knew she had to try at least. She knew that the family business should stay in the family and that Curtis was the right man for the job. But how to bring him on?
Now, Pam showed for over 20 years that she was nobody’s fool and knew that before she even asked Curtis, she couldn’t just hand him the company; no one would respect him. He would have to come in and make it his own. But first, Pam would have to ask Curtis if he wanted to go and run things.
Lunch Sets the Stage
So one day during lunch, Mother and son had a lunch that would set the course for the future of ROC Carbon. Would Curtis take over? Or let the company his grandfather built, the company his grandmother and Mother run, fall to the wayside? Of course not, but he knew that he had to return correctly.
Curtis looked at his birthright, saw a company still in survival mode, and instantly recognized how to make it a tighter, faster, and better business. For Curtis, it was as simple as math to him. Instead of waiting, It was really about automation and not wasting time because time equaled money.
Focus on the Business
The actual process was a little convoluted, you had to set up three printers, and you would print part of the sales order. Then you would take out the paper and put another piece of paper and print the other part of the and then you had to go into the document vault, and that doesn’t even include the drawings. This whole process was enough to drive anyone crazy, and drive Curtis crazy it did. He would bring ROC Carbon into the 21st Century and revitalize the family company. While Curtis saw this as “getting his feet wet,” jumping into the deep end can be daunting. He knew that the benefits outweighed any drawbacks.
By going full force and expanding this process, Curtis saw it growing and expanding, and eventually, it covered all the aspects of the company, so they can now do a lot of analysis. We can streamline, looking up past orders much quicker than what we used to be able to do.
To Be Continued…
By streamlining the process, the valuable information was able to be that much more secure which leads to our featured item of the month: Protecting your valuable information.
Protecting Your Valuable Information
Customers have trusted ROC with their intellectual property (IP) for decades. Either through formal contracts such as Non-Discloser Agreements (NDA) or simply by our word. We emphasize protecting our customer’s information.
This process starts with employee training. We train our customer service group to handle sensitive customer IP such as payment information, drawings, specifications, and approved materials. Knowledge of this nature belongs to the customer, and our staff is trained to follow our policy that a customer’s information is only used to fill their orders. Customers who have asked us to sign an NDA have the added protection of an “NDA Agreement” watermark automatically placed on all electronic documents and software applications when a document or record is retrieved.
ROC maintains current operating system updates on all workstations and servers. We utilize the recent, stable significant releases available to ensure protection against known vulnerabilities. We have implemented anti-malware services from email servers to web browsing to workstations and servers to strengthen our systems further. Employee training in cyber security is conducted in monthly meetings and promptly as potential threats arise.
Backups are critical to protecting our electronic systems from a loss of data. This may happen by cyber-attack, user error, machine failure, natural disaster, or theft. Our backups are automated and performed daily and include multiple copies off-site. To verify the backups are performing accurately we test them every month.
Data encryption is the best way to ensure backup data is secure. ROC utilizes encryption to protect all data on-site as well as off-site. Protecting your intellectual property is vital to you and ROC Carbon. All these measures are put into place to protect not only ROC’s information but also the information of our customers as well.
When you order from ROC, you can trust us to safeguard your valuable information.
