Compassionate Giving | Building the Foundation for Your Manufacturing Company Reputation
By: Meaghan Ziemba, Marketing Communications, MakingChips
Running a successful business is more than turning a profit. In today’s hyper-competitive, digital world, you must put people first and think about the community that you are in as well.
“Here at Advanced Machine & Engineering (AME) we have been very blessed and believe in paying it forward,” says Dietmar Goellner, CEO and Industrial Entrepreneur. “Paying it forward”, or repaying kindness, to those less fortunate can grow your company’s reputation and open the door for long-term opportunities within your industry that were not available before.
AME is able to evolve its emotional capital by placing Compassionate Giving as one if its core values.
Looking at the Bigger Picture
As Gary Vaynerchuk, Chairman of VaynerX, CEO of VaynerMedia, and 5-time bestselling author stated in a recent article ‘The Best Business Strategy No One Talks About’, “If you give value to someone else first in business, you have the leverage.”
Willy Goellner, Chairman and Founder of AME lives by that example on a daily basis.
“Years ago, my dad wanted to give money to help build a church in East Europe,” explains Willy Goellner’s son, Dietmar Goellner. “We did not have the money, and we weren’t really making money at that time, but my dad was insistent on giving sacrificially. While I was too concerned about the health of the company, my dad saw the bigger picture and knew that God would take care of us.”
Willy Goellner continues to earn the immediate respect of others in the Rockford community just by how he lives through his ability to compassionately give to those in need. “His focus in life seems to be not how much do I have, but how much can I give,” says Chris Rindels, Chief Mechanical Engineer at AME.
Giving Back to the Community
Over the years, the Goellners have donated and volunteered at various community organizations, including:
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Chicago chapter of the ALS Association
AME also participates in educational events surrounding National Manufacturing Day and National Engineers Week. Each event helps attract younger generations to engineering and manufacturing through hands-on educational experiences and gets the students familiar with various companies in the Rockford area.
What comes around definitely goes around, and that one person you are compassionate towards may acquire an influential position that could benefit your company somewhere in the future.
As Vaynerchuk states in his article, “You never know what opportunities you’d get behind your back by being a good person. You’d never know what kind of opportunities you’d lose by being a bad person.”
Read more about our Core Values