A homebuilder watches a house grow from a footing and foundation into a roughed-in structure and finally a finished home ready for occupancy, deriving satisfaction day by day from watching the transformation. A dirt-moving firm finds pleasure in reshaping a motley stretch of ground into an exacting right-of-way for a new highway or residential complex.
But how does a technician wielding an electromagnetic locator find pleasure in spraying paint on the ground to mark a subterranean pipeline? There's not much to show for the work, but the owners of Baker Utility Partners in Arcadia, Indiana, quickly dispel any idea that locating work is not inherently satisfying.
“Really the satisfaction for me is having the work done well,” says Dan Baker, company president. “My greatest satisfaction is having good employees, happy employees, who enjoy coming to work. And loyal customers who come back to us for more work. We routinely do audits and get feedback that the work was well done, very professional, with no surprises. To me, that always is satisfying.”
Aaron Reitz, vice president of business development, has more concrete examples of satisfaction that come from the company’s work.
“There are a lot of things that happen because of us,” he says. “Buildings go up. Campuses are created. None of those things would happen without us. We’re on the ground floor of those projects.”
One high-profile example of that is the Indianapolis 500.
“Every year we are out there at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway,” Reitz says. “It’s a giant facility and they need to erect grandstands and set up tents, but they can’t put a stake in the ground until we go out there and do our work.”
Read more about Baker Utility Partners in the May/June 2021 issue of Dig Different magazine.
