In this episode of 21st Century Water, we speak with Ken Waldroup, Executive Director at Cape Fear Public Utility Authority (CFPUA), about his career journey, the challenges of coastal utility management, and the proactive steps taken by his team to lead in water quality and infrastructure modernization. Ken brings a unique perspective as a nuclear engineer turned water utility leader, and we explore how that technical foundation combined with public administration and business training has shaped his approach to utility leadership.
We begin with Ken’s transition from nuclear engineering to water, driven by a passion for clean water and real-world experience at a treatment facility. As his career evolved, he leaned into leadership roles, eventually stepping away from pure engineering into administration and strategy. His move from Raleigh Water to CFPUA was driven by the complexity and forward-thinking approach of the Wilmington-based utility, which was already grappling with emerging contaminants like PFAS years before they hit the national stage.
We dig into CFPUA’s business structure and governance model, which includes a board with a heavy business background. That model has driven a utility culture centered around proactive service delivery and investment, rather than regulatory compliance alone. Ken discusses how this influenced his decision to pursue an MBA to better align with board expectations and sharpen his ability to speak the language of business.
The heart of our conversation revolves around CFPUA’s rapid and independent response to PFAS contamination. In 2017, CFPUA learned their primary water source, the Cape Fear River, had been compromised by GenX and other pollutants from an upstream chemical facility. Instead of waiting for federal intervention, the utility invested in a $43 million granular activated carbon facility, delivering results ahead of future EPA regulations. This solution, now a national benchmark, showcases how customer trust and local leadership can drive transformation.
We also discuss the scale of infrastructure investment needed—over a billion dollars in capital over the next decade for a 200,000-person utility—and how Ken’s team prioritizes those projects using risk-based matrices, strategic partnerships, and alternative revenue streams. From utility acquisitions to economic development projects, the approach remains grounded in business fundamentals.
Climate resilience is another major theme. Located on a coastal peninsula, CFPUA is already seeing the impacts of sea-level rise, groundwater depletion, and storm intensity. Ken shares strategies such as elevating lift station electronics and planning new plants above the 500-year floodplain. These external pressures also demand increased insurance coverage and a shift toward self-insurance, which impacts available capital for infrastructure.
Innovation, for Ken, is as much about people as it is about technology. CFPUA has invested in workforce development, incentivizing both technical certification and higher education. Tools like machine learning and AI are being explored to support smarter capital planning. But the emphasis remains on equipping staff to leverage those tools.
Finally, we explore Ken’s servant leadership style—delegating authority, celebrating team wins, and continuously investing in people. As he enters the final stretch of his career, his focus is on embedding sustainable management systems that will continue to deliver value long after he’s gone.
More:
Cape Fear Public Utility Authority – https://www.cfpua.org
City of Wilmington – https://www.wilmingtonnc.gov
Chemours PFAS Information – https://www.chemours.com
Voiceover (00:02):
Tremendous challenges and opportunities exist right now for our nation's water infrastructure. In this podcast, the industry's top leaders and innovative minds share their knowledge and insights for ensuring our water systems are operating safely and efficiently.
These discussions are designed to motivate and create vibrant 21st century water systems and the innovative workforce required to lead and operate them.
This is 21st Century Water with your host, Aquasight founder and CEO, Mahesh Lunani.
Mahesh Lunani (00:34):
Well, good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Today, we're joined by Ken Waldroup, Executive Director at Cape Fear Public Utility Authority in Wilmington, North Carolina. Ken brings over 30 years of experience in the water sector, including leadership role at Raleigh Water, one of the largest utilities in North Carolina.
As a licensed professional engineer, a background (mind you, this is nuclear engineering) and a master’s in public administration, Ken combines both technical depth and strategic vision. He's also been active at state level water policy, including serving on the North Carolina Environmental Management Commission.
I'm so excited to have you, Ken, on the podcast.
Ken Waldroup (01:20):
Well, I really appreciate being asked to participate, especially after seeing some of the folks that you've had conversations with in the past.
Mahesh Lunani (01:29):
Really looking forward to it.
I want to dive into the discussion on what path got you into the water sector, especially given your background in nuclear engineering 33 years ago, right?
Ken Waldroup (01:44):
Yeah, that's right. A primary engineering school here in North Carolina is North Carolina State University. I wanted to be an engineer for a long time. Nuclear engineering seemed to be my future because I lived on the border of North Carolina, Tennessee, and the Tennessee Valley Authority, which is a primary utility in my region, seemed to be the final destination.
So, I studied nuclear engineering, found out I actually like the clean water aspects of that field. And I was surprised to learn not too long ago that I'm not the only nuclear engineer in the water business. Mike Borchers, a good friend of mine with Greensboro Water Resources here in North Carolina, is also a nuclear engineer.
We have an interesting career path together, but clean water is very important in that field, and I drifted into this, especially as I was working in a water treatment facility while in college.
Mahesh Lunani (02:45):
Well, that's outstanding. So, the intersection of nuclear and clean water got you into the water sector. Now, you also have an MBA. How did that shape you?
Ken Waldroup (02:55):
Well, the first half of my career, I think I was taking the standard career advancement path up through organizations focusing primarily on the engineering projects, but I kept finding myself being pulled into the administrative side of the world.
And about halfway through my career, I had risen up through organizations to be an assistant director, and a mentor of mine suggested that I needed to polish my human skills, my organizational skills. He said I'd be a great engineer, or I could be a really good public administrationist, but I couldn't be both.
I'm not sure I believed that at the time because he was a public administrationist, but I kind of diverged about halfway through my career and drifted away from project management, and into the softer side of utility administration.
Mahesh Lunani (03:55):
Polish is the word I always hear when we talk about MBA, and us engineers, perhaps we're not polished. So, I want to talk about Raleigh to Wilmington. Raleigh is about 600,000 residents, Wilmington, 200,000 residents. Not only how do the systems compare but what opportunities brought you to this role?
Ken Waldroup (04:17):
Well, first of all, Raleigh Water was and is a fantastic utility to work for. I had 15 years in Raleigh Water working myself up from project manager to assistant director, to what essentially was the chief of staff from working behind the scenes in finance, budgeting, the HR-related activities, and I felt like I might actually end my career there because it was a fantastic utility to work for.
Then I learned that my predecessor here at Cape Fear was planning on retiring. There's a couple of positions within North Carolina that everybody finds fascinating: working for Raleigh Water, working for Charlotte Water, working in Asheville, and then also on that list is working down here on the coast in Wilmington. So, it was a difficult opportunity to pass on.
This is a fascinating utility, it's about one third the size of Raleigh, but it has all of the complexities that the Raleigh utility has and more. At the time CFPUA was dealing with being on the cutting edge of the PFAS issue that is now rolling out nationwide.
So, in our state, CFPUA was known for being at the forefront of addressing contaminants of emerging concern as well as implementing some of the newest technologies in water and wastewater to address those issues. So, it became irresistible in terms of applying, and I was fortunate enough to be selected.
Mahesh Lunani (06:01):
You just needed the challenge, looks like, Ken, and that's outstanding as a leader who wants to take on newer and bigger things to make water safe in the community you serve.
I want to dig deeper into Cape Fear. It's about a $130 million budget, a massive replacement value for the infrastructure in billions. And I was researching- there's over a hundred active capital projects.
Ken Waldroup (06:26):
That's right.
Mahesh Lunani (06:27):
How is this business being run, and how do you manage this stuff?
Ken Waldroup (06:30):
Well, the Cape Fear Public Utility Authorities, CFPUA is one of maybe a dozen actual authorities in North Carolina. It's a special purpose unit of local government created by other local governments to focus on just water and wastewater. And it has an 11-person board, half appointed by the city of Wilmington, half appointed by New Hanover County, one jointly appointed to cover that odd number.
And it functioned, from inception about 17, 18 years ago, to try to operate as much as possible like a business. So, there's a lot of business practices that have been incorporated into our day-to-day processes, and I found that fascinating.
As a matter of fact, I found it so fascinating that I went back to school after the first year here and just finished up my Masters of business administration so I could have some common language with my board, most of which are business-centric, business owners, business majors themselves.
And we've had quite a focus on service delivery, but also ensuring that we're managing our aging infrastructure. On the business side, they call it PP&E, (Plants, Property, and Equipment) and we look at this infrastructure as an investment for the future.
So, as you mentioned, we have 104 projects underway, almost $600 billion in those projects. Nearly $200 million of that has already been spent or encumbered. On top of that, we have another $600 million worth of projects scheduled over the next 10 years.
For a utility that has 200,000 to 250,000 people, a billion-dollar expenditure over a 10-year period is pretty healthy, and that reflects the business attributes that our board brings to this concept investing in the future.
And what I like to say is our fathers and our grandfathers and our grandmothers gave us this wonderful gift of infrastructure and it is now time for us to renew it as a gift to our children and grandchildren.
Mahesh Lunani (08:57):
A hundred percent, and very well said. And what really was fascinating based on what you said, is that you have your board full of business people, which is kind of rare in this industry because most of them are environmentalists or they are some consulting firm engineer, et cetera, and you had to upskill yourself to have the right conversations. That is a great storyline because I haven't had that here on this podcast.
You talked about public health and PFAS, and also something I heard during research about Generation X topic in your research or GenX. They're two very different topics, but I want to know what is a practical action plan you've done in this space?
Ken Waldroup (09:45):
Well, I first need to state that I'm standing on the shoulders of giants. I came into this organization in 2001 and many very difficult decisions around contaminants of emergent concern had been made, implemented.
In 2017, this utility discovered through local university research that its primary water supply, the Cape Fear River was polluted with per and polyfluoroalkyl substances, PFAS. Primarily, at the time, GenX was what was noticed. And in 2017, there was an article in the local newspaper, Toxics Tank Local Water Supply.
Our community leaders came together, and again; I think it's that business centric mindset that we're so well known for. They looked at it, and they realized that there was a crisis of confidence with their customers.
So, instead of waiting for the federal government or the state government to step in, our board and our community leader said, “We are going to address this issue, this crisis of confidence, we're going to remove this pollutant from our water supply, and we're also going to hold the polluter accountable.”
We discovered around that timeframe that there was a PFAS manufacturing facility about 50-some miles upstream, and they had been discharging this pollutant for 30 years. So, our board charged staff to begin studying the technologies that were available at the time to remove this pollutant, and we spent about a year evaluating the various technologies.
We selected granular activated carbon because that made sense to us. It fit very well with our existing treatment technologies; there are other options. And then about a year of design, our board authorized a construction project, a $43 million granular activated carbon facility that would hold nearly 3 million pounds of granular activated carbon.
During all of this, by the way, the pollution story was unfolding. We were discovering it wasn't just one type of pollution, it wasn't just GenX — but right now, we're monitoring 67 types of PFAS, many of them unique or nearly unique to the Cape Fear River because of our upstream neighbor Chemours, the polluter.
So, our facility had to be flexible enough to address not just the types of pollution that we were able to discover at speciate during design, but to address these emerging PFAS contaminants that we were speciating, that we were learning about, that were in the water, but science is just catching up to the ability of us to not only identify it but treat it.
And fortunately, my predecessor, who was a great utility director and our board gave us this fantastic facility, and it went online in October of 2022. And shortly thereafter, the Environmental Protection Agency rolled out their proposed national primary drinking water regulations for PFAS for six types of PFAS.
And our facility, which was envisioned and designed before this was available, was able to easily manage those contaminants plus others that were unregulated that were coming from this polluter. So, we unfortunately found ourselves at the cutting edge of the problem, and through what I think is very prudent, proactive, problem-solving by our local leaders, put in place in five years, an engineered solution.
And now, that solution, in the two or three years that we've had it online, we've had nearly a thousand visitors come in from other utilities and from academia and from engineering firms, looking to see how we solve the problem and how they might take those ideas and improve on them, and take them back to maybe 5,000 other utilities in the nation that have to do the same thing.
Mahesh Lunani (14:11):
Oh, fantastic. You know what was interesting to me is that you didn't wait for any regulation. Your board, which you mentioned is already businesslike, said remove the pollutants and find the pollutant. Your team, or your predecessor’s team, just went ahead and took the action, and now, you're like a benchmark in the industry. I think that’s leadership.
To me, that's utility leadership, that's board leadership, that's the folks within the utility that just went ahead and took the challenge, and I think it's a great story. And I think this can happen in many other spaces within our sector, not just in PFAS. I believe this kind of framework and mindset without waiting for regulations to come about.
Ken Waldroup (15:01):
And understanding that yes, we are a natural monopoly as a utility, as a business, but customer confidence is fundamental to any business. There are substitutes, customers can go buy bottled water, customers can drill wells. We want customers to have confidence when they cut the tap on.
And that confidence took a hit in 2017, and we worked very hard to restore it. And it's a story I think that our fellow utilities should look at and consider in their own context. Customers should be at the forefront of what we do, not the second or third thought.
Mahesh Lunani (15:48):
Yeah, no doubt and that's a big driver for what you did with PFAS. You talked about the generations before you build this great infrastructure, you feel responsibility to build the next generation infrastructure so your successors are living (with) the same fantastic service that you've inherited.
So, you talked about $600 million, a hundred projects. How are you prioritizing your programs? I mean, how do you funnel them through, and what kind of framework you're using for long-term investments?
Ken Waldroup (16:18):
Well, there are a lot of best practices associated with evaluating all of the capital projects that any utility has in front of it. We use a risk consequence matrix and evaluate each potential project through a business case analysis, and that matrix itself, we recognize like any utility that we didn't get into this situation overnight.
I will be the first to tell you that our utility and almost every utility in the nation is in what I would call an infrastructure deficit. We have under invested in our infrastructure for 20 or 30 years so there's a lot of work to catch up in that infrastructure deficit.
All good utilities prioritize based on risk and consequence, and how much we believe that we can reasonably ask our customers to pay over time. We've shared with our customers this vision, this idea that we have infrastructure to replace. We try to liken it to their personal story.
We ask the customer to think about their own home and imagine having to save and invest to replace the roof on the home or to replumb a very old home, or to replace the electrical wiring, what a burden, what a challenge that would be for them today.
And we are very much in the same situation. We're going to replace significant parts of our community asset, and that means we're going to have to find ways to pay for it. That's rate increases- and we've had rate increases both in the past and we're projecting some in the future, but it's also looking for alternative revenue sources.
We've been very successful here in pursuing state and federal funding, and even local grant funding, growing our way out of it. So, we're trying again to treat this like a business. We've recently negotiated the acquisition of a neighboring utility that brought positive revenue for both utilities. We've taken some of our precious funding, and are investing it in partnership with New Hanover County who are matching us dollar for dollar, installing water and sewer infrastructure to support and maybe even accelerate growth in structured parts of our service area.
So, we have our $97 million project, that's an economic incentive, an economic development project that reasonably could yield $30 to $35 million in reoccurring revenue when fully built out, and $160 million in developer driven system development fees. All of that would go a very long way to helping us replace our aging infrastructure.
But like every utility, we have a very high mountain to climb. We have 170 miles, if I remember correctly, of waterline that is more than 70-years-old. And that's a relatively small number when you think about what needs to be done nationwide, but the cost of replacing that is north of $80 million. So, those are the investments that we have in front of us.
We have a wastewater treatment plant, 50-years-old, it has reached the end of its useful life while the replacement cost of that plant is running north of $400 million. So, we have to educate our community, we have to seek alternative revenue sources, we have to ensure the community that they're getting value for the dollar that they're spending with us today.
Mahesh Lunani (20:14):
Yeah, it's a business problem, isn't it?
Ken Waldroup (20:15):
It’s a business problem.
Mahesh Lunani (20:17):
And clearly, the pricing power in this industry is very limited even though it's monopolistic because you can't just go ahead and charge whatever you want, you still require a tremendous amount of public discourse.
So, with what you described 170 miles, greater than 70 years, 50-year-old plants, I mean, this bill can pile up very quickly if somebody doesn't control the situation, and just one disaster away from a major nightmare.
So, I sympathize and it's clear to me the way you are describing so eloquently that you are looking at it in not only strategic way but in a programmatic way to execute while being ready for the future.
Ken Waldroup (21:05):
And you and I have talked extensively about how do we refine and improve that process, it's a human process. So, we've had conversations about bringing machine learning and AI tools to CIP prioritization because that's our major expenditure.
Probably, the major expenditure for every utility and helping take the prioritization process, which is somewhat subjective — it is data-driven but still also relies heavily on the professional judgment of seasoned engineers, and feeding into that more information only helps us refine that prioritization list. And we absolutely don't want to replace a piece of pipe before we get all the life out of it.
We can, but we don't want to wait so long that it's emergency repair and it costs two or three times what it would have under a planned repair. So, data is what's going to help us refine and improve that process.
Mahesh Lunani (22:07):
Yeah, a hundred percent. And in addition to that, you said something that's really critical here. And I always believe that the second most important job of a utility leader is to take care of the assets, because the replacement value of assets is in hundreds, if not in your case, it’s in billions. So, if you have to replace this putting the business hat on, you’d need $7, $10 billion to replace what you got right now.
Ken Waldroup (22:34):
That's right.
Mahesh Lunani (22:35):
You got any asset that's worth $7, $10 billion in a business world, that's a massive, massive responsibility. And I think besides the water service, this is a very big hat and a very important hat to wear. And as a leader, you need at your disposal really the best decision-making tools in this space. So, for that, I'm a hundred percent aligned with you.
I want to talk about climate resilience, especially being on the coast. What are the unique risks, climate changes, storms, sea level rise? First of all, how is it impacting and how are you future proofing your infrastructure for it?
Ken Waldroup (23:20):
Well, unfortunately, our service area is in a very at-risk location. We have water on three sides of our service area. We're actually in a peninsula where we have the Atlantic Ocean to our east and we have the Cape Fear River to our west and to our south, and we have to some extent, another river, the Northeast Cape Fear River kind of curving back.
We are a low-lying area. Put it in perspective, we have 166 wastewater lift stations, so we have to move wastewater here in the flatter coastal areas quite a bit. And that puts in perspective, it's how many lift stations do have. And we absolutely need to be prepared for climate change and expect variability.
I'm not going to argue the ideas of costs. We are seeing changes in severity of storms, unavailability of water, our primary water source. We're seeing our groundwater resources becoming depleted, and that's actually impacting through subsidence our service area. So, from all of those things, we need to be cognizant that mitigation and adaption are part of our future capital improvement plan.
Every capital project's got to be seen through the lens of armoring, adapting and mitigating for more severe storms, for example, for the possibility of rising oceans or subsiding land masses. The ocean didn't rise an inch. Much of the east coast is slowly subsiding because we were overtaxing our cretaceous aquifers.
So, wastewater treatment plants like the one that we are building now, we're going to ensure that it's above the 500-year flood plain, and that our lift stations, as we build lift stations, that we're ensuring that we're placing them out of the flood plain and floodway where possible. And the lowline ones, believe it or not, we're placing the electronics of those lift stations up in elevated buildings that look a little bit like lifeguard towers to ensure that if they're inundated by a hurricane, then the electronics component remain safe and dry and operating.
We are constantly looking at how we might manage our deployment, how we might manage our insurance risk. That's a big part of this changing world; actuaries and insurance companies are themselves acknowledging certain areas of the United States are at greater risk and we're all seeing increases in insurance coverage.
I think CFPUA has seen an insurance increase of at least $250,000 each year in the four years that I've been here, three or four years, it's gone up every time. And in some places like Florida, they're losing the ability to insure a facility.
So, self-insurance is going to have to become part of the portfolio, which means we're going to need to keep larger fund balances than previously planned. And that has a direct impact on rate payers and on how much we can spend to replace infrastructure. Think about it as a dynamic model. Climate change is driving a need to self-insure and hold greater funds. That means you have less money available to armor yourself against climate change.
Mahesh Lunani (27:18):
Just listening in the last 20 minutes, I don't envy your role. I mean, it's a tough job because these externalities — keep aside the fact that you have to run a service, upgrade your infrastructure, and you can't just price premium your way through these problems. And on top of it, you're dealing with externalities that are not in your control and you got to self-insure yourself to face that. That is really leadership to me. Something to learn from not just me as a person but for the whole audience that are listening to it, and I really want to make a note of what you just said.
I want to switch the topic to innovation because every aspect you've been talking about in some respects, is of business innovation. But talk about innovation also in the perspective of tools, technologies, approaches; what is it you've done that you're proud of, but what exactly you feel you will do that you're going to be even more proud of?
Ken Waldroup (28:21):
To address these externalities that are driving systemic change in our business, I think we have two tools, and they're both equally important: our people and our processes, and the tools that they use. So, I feel very strongly that we need to invest in people and we need to invest in technology to give them greater and greater advantages.
If we're talking about the information technology world, I think it's divided in terms of information technology and information systems, IT and IS. The technology tools that we all talk about are machine learning and advanced instrumentation control systems, advanced SCADA systems, various levels of artificial intelligence, but you have to marry that with the information system, the people part.
So, investing in the people to me is just as important, and they have to go hand in hand. You can find all the best knowledge in the world, but if your staff is not prepared to exercise and use it and understand it, it will stay on you. Stride will stay on the shelf, as we say. So, we're actively looking at various technologies, talking to our peers about how to improve business processes, and we're also looking at the human side.
An example of that is we added a position that's called a workforce manager. Her sole job is to look at the individual and try to help them reach their ultimate potential, whatever they think that might be. We've created education stipend programs so we can send people back to school here at UNCW or elsewhere, so they can add additional graduate level or even bachelor level, associate level training.
And then for our blue-collar workforce that may not want to explore higher education, we've implemented incentive for certification programs. So, we want to pay them reoccurring stipends of greater and greater amount for acquiring certification in technical aptitudes, in technology applications, in the better utilization of equipment that we have for them today.
The idea is we march up the complexity ladder together with both the equipment and the tools and the people to use it. That's the solution that we are pursuing.
Mahesh Lunani (31:04):
What I think is really interesting, the way you described it, you essentially are using tools to augment the workforce and create a high-performance team to deal with all the challenges you just described, and that's kind of the mindset you have. Which leads me to the question on your leadership style, and I am personally interested in learning about it.
You run an organization with over 300 people; how do you approach your leadership? What's your style, and what's one thing that you felt at some point in your career saying, “Whoa, this one I'm really good at in the way I run teams sort of manage people?” Because we always do, we learn, and then we figure, “Oh I'm actually good at this, I want to do more of this.” What would that be?
Ken Waldroup (31:53):
Well, I'm the beneficiary of an opportunity to observe some of the best utility leaders in the past 20 years. So, I've been in an executive support role for two thirds plus of my career. So, I've seen some great utility directors, and I've tried to learn from the best and learn where they've made mistakes, and a few things came out to me.
One is the great utility leaders are servant leaders. They're there to serve their staff, they're there to serve the public. They want to make sure that the people around them have everything that they need to be successful at work, to be happy at work, and that they have a focus on service and being a public servant to our customers. So, that, to me was a kind of a foundational stance.
If that's your attitude when you come into work, you're thinking about what is best for others, not for yourself fundamentally. And you're thinking about what's best for the customer, then the better utility directors that I've observed seek to make others successful. They want others to get credit, and I really want my staff to be empowered, I want to delegate to them.
And that's one of the management strategies that I implemented when we first got here, a strategy that I grew up under, thankfully, in Raleigh Water where the utility director delegated 80% of operational decisions to a small group of leaders telling them all they needed to do was to come to consensus. If you can't come to consensus, bring the problem to the utility director, and then he or she will help you work it out.
And the utility director that I have in mind (who is no longer with us) would then celebrate every little success that the team made. And if there was a mistake, the mistake was a team mistake or his mistake. And if there was success, it was always the team's success, it was always the individual success. So, he spent a great deal of time building up the people around him, and I wanted to emulate that.
I feel strongly that by serving others and building them up, they give their best to their own staff. They give their best to the customer. That discretionary commitment is what we're looking for. A passion and love for what you do, foster it, foster it.
The research suggests that if people leave a job, probably 60, 70% of the time, it's because they don't enjoy the person they work for. So, I ask myself almost every day, “Am I doing things that I would want my boss to do? Am I approaching this in an empathetic yet firm and respectful way so that we can succeed together?”
Now, I'm an amateur at this. I will be working on it the rest of my life to be the perfect servant leader. I'll never be one, but every day, it should be a refocus on the people. and then everything else flows from there.
Mahesh Lunani (35:11):
It's very interesting because our Chief Operating Officer, he's also a servant leader type of mindset, and I learned what that is because I'm a different type of leader, I carry different attributes. But the more I learned about it, the more I said, “Okay, I want to be piece of that. I may not be, but I want a combination of leadership.”
But it is really, really interesting what you learn from others, and how you are evolving. So, I want to ask this question, what is it you want to achieve in the next three years, and what do you want to be known for when all of this is done?
Ken Waldroup (35:51):
Well, I must admit that I've regarded this as kind of my seminal role. I'm here at the end of my career and I had a five-to-seven-year plan, I'm walking into year five. The first year was about listening and learning.
Listen to my staff, learn from them, empower them. And then the next three years was we developed a strategic plan together, turned it over to the board, the board made it their own and proved it, gave it back to us, and then we as a team worked our strategic plan. It should never sit on the shelf.
Strategic plan should be something that transforms an organization. So, you need to have targets, you need to have measurements, you need to have goals and objectives. And I'm very proud that we as an organization are wrapping up year three of our strategic plan. And we've implemented or put in place a lot of great tools. So, years five through seven are now to build on that success and to accelerate, to accelerate.
As part of the strategic plan, we created a small working group of strategy and performance managers for the first time that were focused just on the strategic plan implementation and upskilling our staff.
We created that workforce development manager position, and we decided the first part of our strategic plan would be project-based. We complete a project, celebrate — complete a project, celebrate. Now, it's time to take all of those experiences and skills and start really focusing on improving process, so we already are good.
If I was giving you an example, I'd say, hey, we're collegiate level basketball, but it's time to start playing in the majors. It is time to start playing in the NBA. So, it's not building new skills, it's polishing them, and turning our skill sets into synergy, making something more than we would've had individually. Management systems, management systems, management systems, it's where my mind is for the next three years.
Mahesh Lunani (38:09):
Outstanding, outstanding. So, as I wrap up this conversation and just stitch everything you talked about, a nuclear engineer who heavily intersected with clean water is inspired by the board you have that's business-centric and you went ahead and got an MBA so you can communicate with them, your organization has been a bellwether when it comes to PFAS, didn't wait for any regulations. You went ahead and made the investments, and you are very actively, strategically replacing the infrastructure to build for the next generation.
And it's very interesting how you're dealing with external forces that impacts your utility in negative way and how you're trying to self-insure yourself, and what you mean by innovation primarily to augment your workforce, to create high performance teams and this style of leadership, which is servant leadership style.
And the fact that in the next three years as you kind of wrap up this role, you want to create management systems that are sustainable. I mean, that is a great story as far as I'm concerned. I learned so much hearing you Ken, and I hope the audience have learned even more hearing you. I appreciate you being part of this podcast.
[Music Playing]
Ken Waldroup (39:33):
Well, thank you for letting us tell our story.
Voiceover (39:34):
Join host and Aquasight founder and CEO Mahesh Lunani for another episode of 21st Century Water produced by JAG in Detroit Podcasts.