Our primary task as portfolio managers is to lead through collaboration. Our value as owners is realized through advocacy, strategy, and guidance to unlock the growth potential of each of our companies.
- Collaborative Partner Philosophy
- Profits with Purpose
- Friends as family
- Advocacy & Autonomy
- Strategize for the long-term
- Servant Leadership
- Communication is a two-way street
We serve our operating companies as advocates, strategists and guides. We look for ways to optimize business processes, leveraging the lessons learned across our portfolio. We are collaborative partners, supporting our companies while allowing them to continue to be the experts in their fields.
In order to be good owners and collaborative partners, we’ve defined our approach and use it as a guide. Click on the tabs to explore the tenants of our philosophy.
Although we are a for-profit corporation, we have a social mission. We think of our shareholders as owners, our businesses as partners, and of ourselves as managing partners. Chugach was founded to create economic self-sufficiency for Alaska Native shareholders through profitability, celebration of our heritage and ownership/protection of our lands. Unlike publicly traded companies, Chugach shareholders are not faceless members of an ever-shifting crowd. Rather, they are family members, friends and colleagues who have entrusted their assets (as well as their children and grandchildren’s assets) to us for the remainder of their lives. We make every decision with this responsibility in mind. That includes setting financial targets and managing expenses to optimize shareholder benefits, operating company profits and long-term value creation.
Our companies become our partners, our colleagues, our friends; at CCH, we treat friends as family. Our businesses operate in a variety of industries across the United States and several countries, and we embrace the features that make each of our companies unique. As owners, we respect and preserve the differences that make each individual business successful in their respective industry or region. And as good family friends, we are connected by Chugach’s social mission, and a set of core behaviors that guide how we act in the best interest of shareholders, employees and customers:
- We do things the right way
- We create meaningful value
- We empower people
- We build community
- We leave things better than we found them
We energize and align our businesses through principles, not exhaustive rules. Chugach’s flexible operating model doesn’t work according to a paint-by-numbers design. Excessive rules limit our business leaders’ autonomy and can’t possibly account for every situation. Instead, this set of principles offers boundaries that all of our businesses must operate within. We will empower business leaders to develop strategy and drive growth for their companies and hold them accountable for results. Our Corporate structure is lean by design, because we entrust our leaders to drive the day-to-day execution of their business strategy. Additionally, we guide and advocate for our companies so that, benefitting from the best practices across our portfolio, each company can unlock their growth potential. This is our unique position as owners, to step out of the minutia of the day-to-day to be able to help drive the big picture.
While other companies focus most of their energy on quarterly and annual performance snapshots, Chugach is looking ahead to the next 100 years. Great businesses aren’t made solely on short-term gains or one-off transactions, nor built on employees who constantly come and go. We have spent 45 years building our businesses and are constantly looking ahead to consider how the decisions we make today will impact our business 10, 20 and 100 years down the road. All of our work and effort is played with the long game, and we encourage our businesses to adopt this mindset. While annual performance is important, we believe that if we have good long-term expectations and outlook, this will create more sustainable and meaningful value for the Chugach people. We will not incentivize or pursue business activity that creates short-term gains at the expense of long-term value.
At Chugach, we are all in the customer service business. It’s natural that our businesses think of themselves as customer service organizations because their financial success relies on customers purchasing services or products from them. The parent company has an equally important customer service philosophy – where our customers are our businesses, employees, Board members and shareholders. We try to bring a service mindset to every interaction and touchpoint with our businesses to be our company’s “vendor of choice.”
Communication and reporting should always be open and candid. We try our best to communicate with our businesses the way we would want them to communicate with us if the roles were reversed. We are always striving for continuous improvement, so the ways we interact may change over time, but the importance of consistent and transparent two-way communication with our businesses is critical to our success.