A Firefighter Mentality

CNWR’s Understanding

Espousing a firefighter mentality is a key core value at CNWR.  While nearly all companies have a rapid response team and SLA’s for response. At CNWR, we take responding to trouble seriously.  Whether it’s a security incident, hardware failure, software issue, or personnel problems with technology, we maintain a readiness, willingness, and ability to respond.  Regardless of weekends, holidays, or outside business hours, our staff is dedicated to quickly engaging and remaining engaged to help you solve problems.

How We Live It

If you’re our partner – we go the distance.  Whether it’s the need for overnight maintenance or something serious such as a security incident or technology outage, we will support you for the duration.  The depth and breadth of knowledge within our engineering group is excellent.  We have the resources and ability to bring our best talent to assist with troubleshooting, problem solving and recovery.  For example, when our client needed to perform a database migration and inadvertently corrupted the system, we engaged with three technical resources to assist in recovery throughout the overnight and had the system fully functional before the start of business the following day.

If you’re our vendor – we will work with you to support our client.  Reliable, consistent, and accurate feedback are essential to quickly resolve our client’s issues.  We are committed to following vendor processes for submitting support tickets and providing timely responses and feedback.  We will act on behalf of the client to shorten the troubleshooting cycle and provide hands on support for remote vendors.

If you’re our competition – we’re a local company too.  Sure, we’ll compete head-to-head but we’re not cutthroat.  Information Technology is a driver for practically every business in our community.  When businesses thrive, our community thrives.  If you are up against the “wall”, we are willing to support you to the best of our ability.  We can sort out the details later, we have a team that can assist with the heavy lifting. 

If you work for CNWR – we hired you because you possess this personality trait.  Our culture embodies the principle of do what’s right.  This means being willing to step in and go the distance.  We will not run from a challenge and will work the problem to resolution. We work collaboratively, as a team each contributing to support the effort on behalf of the client.

A short story to relate:  

When the company was young, we were a local Internet Service Provider (ISP) offering dialup internet service.  It was uncommon for small, local ISPs to maintain an around the clock operations center and we were unstaffed on weekends.  One summer Sunday afternoon, power went out at our facility unexpectedly.  I was at home and realized the systems were down and decided to drive downtown to find out what was going on.

Upon arriving, I found two of our employees already onsite checking on the system.  A third arrived shortly thereafter.  While it’s not unusual for a team to show up to help with problems, what made this situation unique is that no one contacted anyone else prior to heading in.  Every person realized on their own there was a problem and took it upon themselves to head into the office to see if they could assist.

That experience made me realize that having a team that would drop what they were doing on a summer Sunday and come to work to assist with an unknown problem was one of the most valuable parts of our culture.  The fire fighter mentality embodies almost everything we do and is a major factor in contributing to our success.