Our company recently completed articulating our five core values:
- Prioritize People
- Love the Problem
- Be More… Do More
- Celebrate Uncommon Genius
- Cultivate Beauty
These values are fundamentally outward-focused, culminating in the final value, in which we commit to pursuing truth, goodness, and beauty. We believe our business interactions should leave our employees, our clients, and our communities better than we found them. In that spirit, I intend to celebrate these values wherever I find them, both within and without our own organization. This is the first in what will be an ongoing series of those celebrations, in which I invite all my contacts to consider what some amazing people are doing around us.
Each year for the past 14 years, our own Bill Howard has organized what we have come to call the ‘Spirit of Christmas,’ during which Bill works with local parishes to identify families in need and then organizes a Christmas drive to provide Christmas trees, gifts donated by our employees and others in the area, and other items (one year, we were able to fund the provision of a nursing certificate to a single mother who needed to shift into a new career). The drive culminates on a Saturday morning just before Christmas when Santa Claus and his elves deliver the gifts to the respective families. By 2017, the program had grown so popular (we had over 80 volunteers contribute gifts from UNCOMN (formerly Aegis Strategies), Trident, CSRA, and USTRANSCOM), that we were able to support 19 family members across 6 different families, requiring two Santas, as you can see in the picture.
For the past 11 years, a great organization has partnered with Bill: Weekends Only Furniture & Mattress. Weekends Only is a locally-owned business with which many of us in the St. Louis area are familiar. For 11 years running, they’ve donated several rooms of furniture that have helped change lives in the Metro East. In some cases, the generosity of Weekends Only resulted in entire apartments being refurnished.
One of UNCOMN’s core values is ‘Cultivating Beauty’ in that we pursue Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, believing our business interactions should leave our employees, our clients, and our communities better than we found them. It is rewarding to partner with other great companies who also reflect these values. In the picture, below, we present to Weekends Only’s CEO, Tom Phillips, and President, Lane Hamm, an appreciation for their many years of Cultivating Beauty in the region. Consider giving them your business!
