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P R O F I L E
Balance: Blake Calvert President and CEO of CORE Consultants, Inc. (Littleton, CO), a professional services firm with a unique culture that empowers its people to thrive at home, at work, and in their community.
By LIISA ANDREASSEN Correspondent
C alvert leads the charge at CORE and advises, “Love what you do, and do what you love. Work hard, play hard, innovate, learn, and challenge yourself every day. The CORE way!” This philosophy has been paramount to CORE’s success and exponential growth. A CONVERSATION WITH BLAKE CALVERT. The Zweig Letter: How has COVID-19 impacted your firm’s policy on telecommuting/working remotely? Blake Calvert: Thankfully, our company had made remote working technology investments (VPN upgrades, Zoom, Teams, Intranet) in 2019. At that time, we just thought the technology would help some employees with work-life balance and significantly improve productivity companywide when Denver gets some of its nasty snowstorms. Little did we know it would pave the way to move very quickly in March of 2020. We had 100 percent of people working out of the office the week of March 16. As many companies found, utilization and productivity picked up significantly with fewer distractions. At this
point, we see no reason to rush back to the office with limited productivity impacts on the business. Here is the paradigm shift: Our company has been performing so well with remote working, we are planning on significantly broadening the use of it in the future for all employees. CORE and our employees will benefit from increased productivity, profitability, more family time, and more personal time. Lessons learned: Empower your employees and proactively invest in technology! TZL: You became CEO of CORE in 2013. How did previous jobs prepare you to take on this role? What were the most helpful skills? BC: With more than 25 years of industry experience, two of the greatest things I’ve learned are: 1)Never stop learning. Learning comes in so many different forms, but I’ve found that observation is powerful. Over the course of my career, I’ve observed great things firms accomplished along with challenges faced. Observing and analyzing the good and the bad gave me a good roadmap for what I wanted to do when I started CORE at age 43. I joke
THE ZWEIG LETTER JU
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