A Message from our President and CEO

Henrik Slipsager
President and CEO

Welcome to the website of ABM Industries, Incorporated.

I’m sure that many of our first time visitors are coming with limited knowledge of ABM Industries or perhaps exposure to only one or two of our operating companies. In that case I encourage you to fully explore the site and discover our truly diverse capabilities in the field of facilities services. You will find that our companies represent not only a wide range of service capabilities, but also extensive experience in virtually all types of facilities. When this is coupled with our national infrastructure and our technological and managerial abilities in service bundling and single source service, our favorable positioning becomes apparent to both potential customers and investors.

Our operational and financial strengths are fully explained in the appropriate sections of the site, but I would like to give you a glimpse into the soul of ABM; our vision and our values, our hopes and our dreams for the future and how where we have been affects where we intend to go, as well as how we intend to get there.

One of the first things you may have seen upon reaching our home page is the phrase “Traditional Values, Visionary Thinking.” This is more than a catch phrase; it is a concept that we always keep in our hearts when planning for the company’s future. Founded in 1909 as a one-man business, ABM is rapidly approaching one hundred years of age. All of those years of exceptional growth and success are a tribute to our founder, Morris Rosenberg, his sons, and those who followed. As we stand here today, a Fortune 1000, New York Stock Exchange listed company with $2.2 billion sales, we must always keep in mind the values that allowed us to reach this level of success. These values - integrity, trade competence, respect for people, whether they are  customers, employees, stockholders or the general public, and recognition of our responsibilities to these people - will always be the cornerstones of our operations and planning.

But “Traditional Values” does not imply traditional structure or traditional processes and methods. The world of today has changed in many ways from the world that Morris Rosenberg faced in 1909. Corporate outsourcing was an undeveloped concept, single sourcing on a regional or national level was not practical, technology and communications were limited and the demands placed on organizations by government regulation were far less extensive. Had the past “visionaries” of ABM not recognized the need to evolve, it is unlikely that we would exist as a company today. Indeed most of the companies that ABM considered major national competitors as recently as the 1980’s do not exist today.

As I look into the short-term future, I see the rewards for a great deal of visionary thinking coming into fruition. Outsourcing continues to grow and expand into greater service bundling and more single sourcing on a regional and national level, justifying our investment in infrastructure. This same infrastructure positions us to integrate acquisitions more efficiently. Our creation of ABM Facility Services and Family of Services recognized the need for greater organizational flexibility in the face of more complex and extensive customer needs. Our investments in technology have positioned us to be responsive to the steadily increasing customer demand for information and faster communications. This investment has also enabled us to be more structured and responsive internally, as we grow larger and as government regulation, such as Sarbanes-Oxley, requires more sophisticated controls. At the same time, our time-honored values, like corporate integrity, are even more valued in light of the corporate troubles we seem to read about far too often. 

But we must continue to rethink the future. We must continue to evaluate the trades that our service companies provide and how they fit into the future that we envision. We must become more responsive to the evolution of differing corporate cultures and tailor our services to those differing cultures and needs. This means less rigid trade focus and a more flexible structure that has more focus on customers, their culture and their needs. We must listen to our customers and where they are going, so that we may walk with them, more likely run with them, and serve them.

The ABM of today is vastly different from the ABM of 1909, or the ABM of 1959. And considering the speed at which the business world is evolving today the ABM of 2020 may be unrecognizable in many ways. But it is our task to ensure that you do recognize the value system.

Henrik Slipsager
President and CEO

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