Bob Adams fell in love with business while a student at the University of Alabama in Birmingham (UAB); however, he didn’t fall in love with school. Bob left UAB to put in to practice the theories he learned in the classroom. He didn’t know exactly where that would lead him, but he knew he wanted to run his own company “someday” and that day came sooner than he thought. After being fired for talking about starting his own business, at not quite 30-years old and with nothing to lose, Bob started Revere Control Systems in his garage with not one customer nor another employee to keep him company. He started with a simple goal to stay in business one more day, an idea and a dream to create a company that built trust among its team, where its people were engaged and focused on creating new and better ways to do good things for its customers.
Forty years later, Revere has more than 200 employees located in five offices across the Southeast with headquarters in Birmingham, Ala. Today, Revere is known across the world as an electrical engineering and control systems powerhouse. In fact, every high rise in New York City has a product made by Revere. And still Bob is driven to stay in business one more day. Bob has plans to expand its footprint and technology into new markets.
A Revere key objective communicated from its management team to all employees is to deliver results safely, on time and on budget. The first tactic in this strategic objective is to have zero incidents and since 1992, Bob has entrusted the safety of his employees to the Alabama Self-Insured Worker’s Compensation Fund (THE FUND).
“We joined THE FUND because all of the standard carriers had left Alabama and every employer in the state was scrambling to find workers’ compensation coverage. However, I quickly learned that as a member of THE FUND, I had control over my workers’ compensation costs and THE FUND gave me the tools I needed to create a safer work environment for all of my employees. As a member, I feel like my company is part of a club where we work to make everyone better,” said Bob. “We haven’t had a loss time accident since 2015 and that’s important milestone to us!”
In fact, Revere’s safety committee is employee driven and makes recommendations on how to do jobs more safely. Tom Adams, vice president of Safety, Quality & Compliance, is tasked with instilling a culture of safety within the organization and constantly analyzes how to create a safer environment for employees.
“Safety is on all of us,” he said. “When it comes to safety, we believe accidents are preventable and work diligently to educate our team members, so they are well equipped to safely provide the services our customers need,’” added Tom.
Bob believes that he, along with every employee and partner, is on this journey together and by working with people who share this philosophy he will be in business another day and THE FUND will be beside him protecting his business and his employees for each of those days.