My brother Brian, far left, me, and our friend Tom Cooper in front of a clubhouse we built on our own, encouraged by our father to “be creative.”
With Memorial Day coming up, I often find myself thinking about our father, Ernie Stahl. He was a World War II Veteran who served in the Pacific and our family is very proud of his service (my brother Brian also served our country). But when I ran across another old photo, it got me thinking about how our father taught us some very important values. In fact, many of the values our parents taught us are the core of the corporate culture here at Stahls’. For example:
- LEARN BY DOING AND HAVE FUN DOING IT—In spite of being a hard worker, our father always knew how to have fun, and he encouraged and allowed us to have fun as well. He built a cement swimming pool for us and an enormous sand box, where we were allowed to build our own clubhouse, which leads me to another lesson:
- BE CREATIVE—Our father supplied the wood, poured a cement foundation, but let us build our own clubhouse. It was a lesson in creativity and learning by doing.
- EMPOWERMENT—The fact that our father put so much faith in our abilities to build a clubhouse empowered us to tackle even more difficult construction and work-related projects, each time with greater and greater success.
These are just a few of the values that we continue to try and foster in our children, grandchildren and in our larger extended family of GroupeSTAHL team members. We’re working on a more complete corporate culture document and I look forward to sharing more of it with you in the very near future.