Bison President and COO, Rob Penner, officially announces our new Mission and Core Values.

A New Year often brings fresh new beginnings and hope for a bright future. This New Year, Bison resolves to freshen our direction as a business, culture, and industry leader and ensure that there is strategic alignment with the work we all do every single day.

Our Mission Statement and Core Values are intended to guide our decision-making, problem-solving and priority setting as we deliver each load, serve each customer and colleague, maintain our equipment, and ensure we return home safely. They define our purpose and our actions. They are the reason we come to work and what we stand for.

About a decade ago our leadership team published a new Mission Statement and Core Values. At the time we had a fleet of 500-600 trucks and operated centrally from Winnipeg, with small satellite terminals in Mississauga and Calgary. Our operation included truckload business only, and we were just beginning our growth into new services, like refrigerated, intermodal and logistics. Since the mid-2000s, our Mission Statement and Core Values have served us very well, providing the foundation that has fostered an award-winning culture; a workplace we should all be very proud of.

Needless to say, our business has grown and evolved significantly since then. In the spirit of our commitment to continuous improvement and challenging the status quo, we felt it was time to ask ourselves: What defines our purpose and our actions today? Why do we exist? What are our guiding principles? How do we want our people to act and engage on a daily basis? And do our Mission Statement and Core Values accurately reflect those things and provide us the direction needed to thrive as a business moving forward?

Each year our leadership team gathers at our management summit to enhance our business through topics aligning with our corporate strategy. This year our focus was to evaluate our strategic direction as outlined in our Mission Statement and Core Values by asking those very questions. As you can imagine, this led to engaging discussions about who we are, how we got here, and what’s next. Together we learned that our Mission Statement and Core Values were far from broken, but it was time for a refresh. In the weeks that followed, a couple phases of sub-working groups further refined the work completed at the summit. The result? A product that blends the familiar and trusted language that has helped define who we are with a renewed focus that will guide our future direction.

Today, we are excited to announce our new Mission and Core Values. Our Mission Statement will set the future direction of our company, driving our continued growth as a leader in the transportation industry:

Our Core Values - Safety, Spirit, Service, Sustainability and Success - are at the forefront of everything we do at Bison and will continue to serve as our guiding principles:

As an organization, we are excited about our future and look forward to continuing to build on our culture's strong foundation. I am confident that our renewed focus will result in sustainable success. Here’s to a prosperous 2016 and beyond – Happy New Year!