Les Burch: A Visionary Leader Who helped Make Sashco Successful.
Our spotlight today is on the President of Sashco, Les Burch. Les took over as president a few years ago (ahem…in 1973) and remains at the helm to this day.
What is Sashco All About?
Every week it seems, I learn about something else that technology allows us to do with the touch of a screen. Yet, that amazing technology often puts us alone in a crowd. People still want to know who they are dealing with and if anyone is listening on the other end of the phone. For a little help on that score, we invite you to take a behind-the-scenes look at Sashco. If you have more questions, contact us and you’ll get a real answer with a real person behind it.
What Do We Do?
The people at Sashco manufacture and market sealants, caulks, and stains for housing; some for frame homes, some for log homes. Sometimes they are used to remodel and repair and sometimes to build from scratch. We manufacture all our products ourselves, in Brighton, Colorado, a suburb of Denver.
What’s the Motivation?
That is what we do, but it isn’t why we do it. We’re driven by several passions. One is making the best performing products we can. That gives us energy. Personally, I hate products that don’t work. We’ve all bought them – toys that break, screw drivers that bend, cutters that don’t cut, and stickers that don’t stick. Things that work poorly aren’t worth our time and trouble.
We’re inspired by the motto Collis Huntington carved in stone in the early 1900’s and placed in front of his Newport News Shipyard, “We Shall Build Good Ships Here; At A Profit If We Can, At A Loss If We Must, But Always Good Ships.”
Our byline, “Products That Work”, carries the same determination and spirit. We want you to have great experiences with Sashco products. You will not find a “good, better, best” quality range of products from Sashco. What you will see are products that are the best at the jobs they do. Things like patching a roof leak, sealing a window, or protecting your log home, each job has its own special brand best suited to fix the problem.
Who is Sashco Really?
You know what we do, you know why we do it. Now how do we go about it? “How” gets to the core of who we are and that is wrapped up in our relational values. Several years ago, all Sashco team members met weekly in many small teams to reinvent how we managed.
Out of those groups came our 5 key values: truth, trust, care, forgiveness, and respect.
Then we asked, “Who do we have to demonstrate these values to?” As one of our sage members put it, “We’re asking who we have to be nice to!” Just ourselves, customers, vendors, our neighbors? The obvious answer was yes, to all of these.
Values built from the ground up by the team members themselves make a deeper impact than missions plastered on the wall by a small group of planners. We have a great team of people that believe in and do their best to live them. Our values can never be completely achieved but they are always our north star, what we want to be. If we live them well enough, perhaps our legacy will answer this question:
Can you run a successful company and hold to integrity? We’re out to prove that you can.