Whether in our individual or corporate lives, time often gets away from us and before we know it, we are saying “We can’t believe it’s been fifty years!” The pace of business today leaves little time for reflection, but significant anniversaries and milestones deserve to be an exception. ERS celebrates 50 years in business this year – complete with a brand refresh – which certainly merits a pause and a few words about our growth, lessons learned, and what comes next.
Founded in 1971 as Electro-Test, Inc. (eti), we were dedicated to improving safety practices and ensuring the safety of workers in industrial settings. Our unwavering commitment to safety is one aspect that has remained unchanged over the past 50 years. Even as we have expanded and added services and areas of expertise, that focused devotion to worker safety is the foundation of everything we do.
In its early days, the company provided much-needed independent electrical safety testing in response to rapid industrial growth and increased reliance on high-voltage electrical equipment. Shock and arc flash were significant hazards at the time, as they still are today, even after the introduction of NFPA 70E and OSHA standards in the late 70’s, aimed at improving electrical safety in the workplace. We are better equipped today than ever before to understand and prevent arc flashes and electrical accidents, thanks in large part to the work ERS has done for the past 50 years.
Recently, our ERS family celebrated and took some time to reminisce about “the good ol’ days” and share stories about friendships and connections made along the way.
- We shared stories about saving the dolphins at a California marine park when the system that oxygenated their dolphin pools went down. We had a narrow 6 hour window to identify and resolve the issues on a Friday evening. We became local heroes that day.
- Our team talked about participating in standard-making committee meetings and spending long hours debating semantics to ensure no one would misread the intent of the safety standards.
- We laughed about the time a couple of us had to drive all night to present at a conference because the navigator held the map upside down and we were 300 miles further away than we should have been! Our speaker made it and the show went on as planned.
- We fondly shared stories of how we supported our colleague get their masters PhD degree in the evenings by editing and typing their college papers back before there was spellcheck and computers.
- And as we helped our customers bounce back from the impact of storm devastation, we also remembered how we pulled together as a family to support our own team members who were personally impacted by those very same storms.
This is who ERS is as a company and why we have been in business for fifty years.
Today, we have more than 20 service centers across North America and experience that stretches far beyond electrical testing and maintenance. Today, ERS designs, engineers, commissions, and services complex electrical systems for everything from manufacturing facilities to hospitals to data centers and more. We are the preeminent experts in industrial, high-voltage electrical systems and safety, with a reputation earned through adherence to exacting standards and practices over the past five decades.
All of that begs the question: why re-brand now? It’s a fair question, and frankly, a brand refresh was probably overdue. As mentioned, our services, capabilities and geographic reach have significantly expanded over the years. Since 2016, ERS has been an independent brand and subsidiary of Vertiv and benefited from its financial strength and global reach. And, as this post demonstrates, milestones such as a 50-year anniversary tend to encourage important self-reflection. As we looked back – and just as importantly, forward – it became clear the ERS branding needed to reflect who we are today, who we want to be tomorrow, and an awareness of how the industries we support have changed around us.
In my role as director of marketing for ERS and HVM, I have worked closely with a large team of both internal and external stakeholders, including individuals from across the company, outside brand experts, trusted partners, and customers to refresh our look and feel with three clear objectives in mind: (1) to better represent our broad capabilities and the professionalism of our people; (2) to reemphasize our connection within the Vertiv family of companies; and (3) to reinforce our ongoing commitment to safety and expertise in the electrical industry. I feel we’ve succeeded on all those fronts with our refreshed branding and new logo.
As we look toward the future. I hope you’ll join me in celebrating 50 great years and the promise of many more.
