If you haven’t met yet, let us introduce you to David Hargrove, our Foster Lake & Pond Management Eastern NC Branch Manager. In the video below, David gives us an inside look at what it takes to manage our successful Triangle Branch. We all want to extend a huge thank you to David for his years of hard work, dedication, and leadership! Watch the video to hear his story, or read the transcript below.
Video Transcript
I’m David Hargrove, the Eastern Branch Manager for Foster Lake and Pond Triangle Branch here in Raleigh. I’ve been with the company for almost 24 years now. I started in 2002.
Close to 25 years ago, my new wife and I were looking to move up to North Carolina. We were living in Florida. I was working in pond management, so I looked up the different pond management companies that were up in the Raleigh area. I probably, back then, looked it up on AOL. It was dial-up AOL, I think is how I looked up the pond management companies. There were two or three that came up, so I gave them all a call, and Johnny Foster was by far the most accommodating. Pretty soon thereafter, he hired me.
The branch manager role has diverse responsibilities. Generally speaking, I’m trying to guide the production and growth of the branch. Again, day-to-day looks very different. A general thread through each day, though, is checking in with the different divisions of the branch, so with our construction and repair services division, our fisheries division, and our maintenance division, and helping those managers with any issues or problems they may be having, and also checking in with our leadership team. And then after that, every day is different. Every day has its own unique challenges.
There have been multiple people who’ve inspired me internally to the company. Some of my contemporaries who helped shape my career would be Mitchell Morton and Ryan Stanley. And then outside of that, there are people who are revered in the industry, like Johnny Foster and Bo Burns, recently retired Bo Burns.
My favorite part of working for Foster Lake & Pond is really twofold: It’s the people. There are relationships that I’ve had with some of the folks at Foster Lake & Pond that go back decades, so it really is a team or family culture. Second to working with the people, would be solving problems for customers. What we do is pretty unique. We have a unique skill set, so when we’re able to solve customers’ problems, that’s a pretty good feeling.
There’s few people in our industry who come out of school thinking that they’re going to build careers around aquatic management or stormwater management. So I would say just give it a try, see if it’s a good fit. The work is somewhat unique.
It can be physically demanding, but at the same time requires a level of scientific thinking. So if that’s a good fit, then I would say give it a try. Some of the aspects of culture with Foster Lake & Pond align with personal values, so striving for the best customer service and the best quality of service and getting the job done right, not just getting the job done, those are values of Foster Lake & Pond.