Article contributed by Mike Berman, COO, Day & Nite/All Service, with Tia Tassava
Today marks Tia Tassava’s last weekly Total Food Service column. She joined the Day & Nite family of companies rather immediately after graduating from the State University New York-Canton to serve a critical role in a newly formed Client Advocacy department. Tia is moving on to explore exciting new career opportunities outside the hospitality industry.
But this is not a story of someone fleeing hospitality due to its current and anticipated challenges. Rather, it is a reflection of contributions, professional growth, and opportunity; a career version of Bruce Springsteen’s encouraging “Grab your ticket and your suitcase; Thunder’s rolling down the tracks.”
During her Day & Nite/All Service/Popular Plumbing career, Tia was more than a firsthand witness to the company’s commitment to the values and principles shared in these weekly columns. She has played a considerable role in shaping them and, in many respects, being shaped by a rather unorthodox mix of fundamentals and innovation. Whether in more normal or crisis conditions, becoming the nation’s preeminent commercial cooking, refrigeration, HVAC, and plumbing installation, maintenance and repair services provider requires operational and mental flexibility to support a most solid foundation. Anything less would be grossly insufficient for any business-to-business professional services organization. For the Day & Nite family of companies, that solid foundation is the company’s commitment to Balanced Scorecard philosophies.
Adherence to Balanced Scorecard allows all Day & Nite business units and employees to deliver consistent extraordinary internal and external customer experiences regardless of overall market factors while simultaneously inventing and innovating for all company stakeholders’ benefit. Naturally, this cannot be achieved without Gumby-like professional flexibility. At any given moment, the stress of these demands may redefine unappealingly, but over the arc of a career, these most challenging incidents always prove out as invaluable. Balanced Scorecard is foundational in design and practices. In design and practice it is liberating; many would find it structureless to the point of confusing. B2B services excellence depends on a fully empowered staff, poised to take action decisively—essential qualities to effectively support the high-stakes hospitality sector as Day & Nite/All Service/Popular Plumbing does. Fully trusting people to do the right thing can be scary for both management and staff. Still, no organization can execute at the rates, pace, and consistency discriminating customers expect without it.
In this type of environment, constant change and routine come fast, and all at once, not everyone can handle this work-life version of drinking from a fire hose. Nobody understands this better than hospitality professionals, making it all that more imperative companies and representatives down the industry’s supply chain can practice the same with equal calm, focused, yet visionary excellence hospitality is known for. During her Day & Nite/All Service/Popular Plumbing tenure, Tia not only bore witness to the company’s launching several proprietary new technologies and vital service lines like the Day & Nite Performance Solutions – the company’s innovative highly engineered indoor environment, workplace health & hygiene and food safety unit—she played a most active role urgently bringing these dynamic solutions to today’s biggest problems to the marketplace. Magic happens when empowered people with a sense of purpose rise to the most serious occasions; highly successful careers follow these individuals. So, as we bid farewell to Tia Tassava, we do so knowing she is a reflection of a greater whole and system, again perfectly captured by Springsteen “This train dreams will not be thwarted; This train faith will be rewarded.”
After all, if we do not live in The Land of Hope and Dreams, why bother?
