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Semco team managing through change New Enstar management team will focus on customer service, company President Barrett Hatches tells Alliance Kristen Nelson PNA News Editor
In the late 1990s, a new management team brought changes to Southeast Michigan Gas Co., including a new name, Semco, selected by the company’s employees. Beginning this year, Barrett Hatches, formerly vice president for human resources and public affairs at Semco, is bringing changes to Semco subsidiary Enstar Natural Gas Co.
Hatches, who took over as president of Enstar Jan. 1, told the Alaska Support Industry Alliance Feb. 4 that one question Semco is always asked about the Enstar acquisition is why a company in Michigan would want to acquire operations in Alaska.
“And our response is always the same,” Hatches said. Like Alaska, the upper peninsula of Michigan is “very, very cold and it’s sort of isolated.” People there “appreciate that isolation,” he said. “They enjoy being left alone, and operate the way they want to operate. They just want the tools that they need to get the job done and they want to know what Semco expects of them.”
In addition to isolation, he said, the upper peninsula of Michigan isn’t easy to get to. “If you fly you have to go to Wisconsin or some other state to even get to the upper peninsula and you can’t go from Port Huron (in southeastern Michigan where Semco is headquartered) right there.”
It takes 7 or 8 hours to get to the upper peninsula by air he said, and 12 or more hours if you drive. On the other hand, Semco officials can fly to Anchorage from Detroit in six or six and a half hours.
“So we thought, really, no big deal. This is a lot closer.”
Changes at Semco Changes at Semco, Hatches said, were driven by the need to position a 50-year-old utility company to deal with the introduction of competition into the utility business. Semco was the first utility in Michigan to open parts of its system for customer choice, Hatches said. The utility gave a small percentage of its customers, across the system, an opportunity to purchase gas from anyone.
Michigan is in the middle of legislation right now, he said, to make choice the order of the day. “I don’t know how far away we are from it, necessarily, but it’s coming very rapidly. And so we opened up our system and allowed a percentage of customers to chose different suppliers,” Hatches said.
Changes were made, he said, to position the utility to get ready for that, “because traditional utility companies, as you know, believe in keeping things the way it has always been — for the last 50 years at that company.”
Enstar Semco’s first utility acquisition Semco owns some 14 other, non-regulated businesses in 10 states, Hatches said. Enstar is the company’s first utility acquisition.
Hatches said Semco looks at some 15 to 20 companies a month as possible acquisitions and when they looked at Enstar, he said, “we knew right away that we would be a good fit.” Semco felt “very, very comfortable about operating a gas utility because we know that is the one thing that we do very well,” he said.
“And we’ll stack up, we will stack ourselves, our leadership team, our organization, against any other utility company in the country and say we absolutely understand what it takes to manage a gas utility.”
Semco’s vision for Enstar First of all, Hatches said, “we are not going to make Enstar a Semco.”
“We’re going to be Enstar and we’re going to be the Enstar that you have always known — we’re just going to be more of that Enstar.”
He said that Semco wants to be “more public about what we do,” wants “our employees involved in everything that we do” and wants “our employees involved in our community.”
Semco has a track record on corporate citizenship in Michigan, a “very excellent track record,” Hatches said, “and I hope very shortly that people will talk about us here the same way.”
Semco management feels, he said, that Enstar is “a company that was similar to the company that we moved into in Michigan. It’s a very good company. Enstar’s a great company. A lot of wonderful people. They’ve done all of the right things as a utility company.”
So the goal, he said, is not to change everything at Enstar. “We’re not going to do that,” Hatches said. “We want to expand on the things that Enstar has already done.”
Customer appreciation, community involvement “I want to make sure that as an organization we are continuing to say to all of you as customers of Enstar how much we appreciate who you are and the value that you have for our organization,” Hatches said.
One way the company will do that is by being involved in the community, by encouraging employees to be active in community organizations and by supporting employees participation.
“We want to say to our employees that if you’re involved in United Way or Red Cross or whatever the organization is, and that organization meets once a month, from noon to 2 o’clock, we’re going to give you the time to go and do that,” he said.
Enstar is also talking about forming a political action committee, he said, “so that our employees can be involved in the political process.” He emphasized that Enstar will not be copying everything that Semco has done, but he said that a PAC is something that has been done at Semco in Michigan.
Growing the company Hatches said Semco wants to grow Enstar.
“We’d like to have natural gas every place that’s possible in this state. And we want to look at all those possibilities.” He said he recognized the fact that other have looked in the past, and that others are looking now.
“Just because it did not work 10 years ago does not mean we shouldn’t look at it again this year. So we’re going to continue to look at every opportunity possible to run natural gas into every home in the state of Alaska and anyone who wants to pipe it out of here.”
Enstar wants to continue to have good relationships with the companies it does business with, “to be good business partners.”
And Hatches said he wants “to make sure that the primary focus of Enstar is to its customers.”
“It is our purpose for being here to serve you. And if we’re not doing that, we want you to tell us. And this does not necessarily have to be me — it can be anyone in this organization — we want to know if we’re not meeting your needs. Because that is why we are here.”
“We’re going to be a very open organization. We’re going to be a very customer focused and very customer friendly organization. We’re going to be growth oriented. We’re going to grow our business in every way that we can. We absolutely want to grow it.”
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