In this episode, you’ll hear about Darren’s unlikely journey to becoming the President and CEO of the SESCO Group where he transformed a humble company and prepared them to take over the world through his executive leadership. Darren started with SESCO in 2013 with 14 employees, and now manages 50 employees in multiple offices and across multiple states.
He has learned that passion only goes so far and at times it can be detrimental. As CEO, Darren became his people’s ambassador and champion and leveraged the skillsets he had while also investing in himself even more to become great at his job.
For the first two years, he spent time creating more customer satisfaction and rebuilding customer relationships while also building a collaborative and trusting work environment for his team. Through commitment, passion, and transparency, Darren helped the team overcome what they were and transformed into something they are proud of today.
He empowered his team by letting them know that they could fire any client at any time if their request was not what was best for the company and its clients. And, although the relationships were genuine, Darren did have to come to terms with the fact that as the boss, sometimes you lose the depth of relationship with your employees.
“You better not like your boss 100%.” – Darren Reese
He realized that sometimes you have to “be the jerk” when it comes down to it. Which is oftentimes a hard transition for leaders.
The question is this: will you be like ice cream and be liked by everyone, or will you be a leader making decisions that are best for your business and your team?
Here are Darren’s Leadership Lessons:
- Be less intolerant of other people’s styles
- Brainstorm how you as a team can do things better to ideate changes and management modifications to better the company to move towards quick change or new better ways to do the work you are currently doing.
- Have a social media style tool like Motivosity to create better appreciation, communication, and brainstorming in your team
How to become a more entrepreneurial, strategic, and focused leader:
- Make sure you are reading and learning what is going on in your industry. Take control of your own learning.
- Get professional certifications to advance yourself
- R&D stands for rip off and duplicate. Listen and borrow other’s ideas. Use their mistakes and learning to advance your own
- Find a way to differentiate what you are doing from the next person
- Risk starting over if you get it wrong, but get started
- Be willing to step in to take advantage of the opportunities in front of you. Be prepared to step up your game and be prepared to take on all of the consequences of that decision, while also saying no when you know intuitively that you shouldn’t take on the opportunity
Most of all are you willing to start messy and make a mess as you go along? Are you willing to make a mess?
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About Darren Reese
Darren is the President and CEO of SESCO Group. The SESCO Group is a full-service consulting firm, providing investigation and remediation, redevelopment, environmental engineering, infrastructure, and EHS compliance services. They are a client-focused company with over two decades in business. Together, they have hundreds of years of real-world experience and most of their staff are advanced-degreed with extensive experience. Augmenting their degrees, SESCO has multiple staff members that hold professional certifications, including Licensed Professional Geologists (LPG/PG), Professional Engineers (P.E.), Certified Environmental Professionals (CHMM, CSP), and a real estate broker with a Master’s Degree from IU’s SPEA.
At SESCO Group, they deliver the best solutions for our clients’ unique environmental engineering, investigation, remediation, EHS compliance, redevelopment, and infrastructure needs. Restoring peace of mind. SESCO Group is made up of scientists, geologists, engineers, adventurers, and environmental experts. SESCO Group’s mission is to deliver on its goals of Restoring Peace of Mind through a business culture that is supportive, collaborative, and client-focused. SESCO’s current and future clients know that SESCO is the firm that will create the right solutions, in the right way to give them peace of mind.
