Jeff Gorman – [President]
We are proud to be celebrating our 40th year of being a technology company in the performance improvement business. At some point in our recent history, if you have joined us at a Keller Schroeder event, you have seen and heard us promote our even larger purpose of making positive, personal impacts. We seek to exhibit that behavior among employee-owners, with our clients, and in our communities. While the value of making positive impacts on clients and employee-owners is probably not hard to discern, it occurred to me 
people might wonder why we feel as compelled to consistently focus on making positive impacts in the community.
In its simplest form, the answer is the best way to work ‘on’ a community is to work ‘in’ the community. We are proud of the local community, and we hope to see it continue to grow and offer greater opportunities for everyone. Just like a business, though, the local community cannot improve by simply having people wish for improvement. If its members want it to improve, they must be willing to get involved and make it what they want it to be. Keller Schroeder does not view the communities in which we work as disconnected entities from our company; we view our company as an integrated part of the community. In that capacity, we have an obligation to find ways to make positive impacts on and with organizations who are helping our families, our friends, our neighbors, and others who are dealing with significant needs.
Some make the case the responsibility for community involvement lies with the individuals of a company rather than with the company itself. Their stance is to keep the company focused on profitability, remaining socially neutral, while allowing your employees to support causes which matter to them. Our view is that our company, as a collection of employee-owners, has a responsibility to be an active member of the communities in which it exists. Our employee-owners also have their own individual causes and contributions they can discern, but their activities do not preclude the company from its responsibility of working to make the community better in a way that balances both our value and our values.
We look forward to continuing to find ways to celebrate and support the communities where we do business, and we hope to have the opportunity to join up with you in that pursuit sometime soon. The better our communities become, the better the environments are for our businesses, our employees, our families, and our future.
