A repeat performance on the Best Places to Work survey reflects a culture that values and invests in employees

Getting to the top, wherever it is, isn’t as tough as staying there. So when we learned that we were back on the list of Best Places to Work by the Memphis Business Journal for a second consecutive year, we were thrilled, but also humbled, as continuous improvement will always ask us to try even harder.

ER2’s Memphis location is home to 32 of our employees, and like it’s bigger sister in Mesa, it provides new and refurbished gear to schools, and partners with Fortune 1000 companies to manage their IT assets. Make no mistake, however, it’s far from small by any stretch of the imagination, as its growth has been exponential over the past 5 years.

Based on scoring from our employees, 73 percent said they were highly engaged, with the remaining 27 percent feeling moderately engaged. Employees also gave high marks to senior management, with 92 percent saying they value people as their most important resource. The continued success that this survey illustrates the commitment to our people that ER2 has maintained.

“We believe that each person has been created uniquely and has incredible gifts and it is our job to cultivate and help them grow so they can become all they were created to be,” said our CEO Chris Ko.

In the wake of 2020, which saw huge challenges, it’s been our culture that has allowed us to grow, as our partners have felt the difference in working with a company where people genuinely love where they work, and the people who work here are carefully chosen.

As one team member said in the survey, “It’s hard to recommend ER2 to friends or colleagues, not because, I don’t love us or what we do, but rather because we have such a selective culture that you can’t just hire anyone off the street, but someone that has to care as deeply as we do about our team members, community, environment and our partners.”

The goal has never been to have the most employees, then, but the right ones. It’s what we’ve built our practices around, and it’s helped us not just retain great people, but also to attract great people to do business with. It’s a model that we intend to repeat as we grow across the country, and planting the seeds in Memphis in 2016 have yielded great results.

We stumbled across a fun fact about Memphis while putting this piece together, and its name means established and beautiful. It’s a fitting way to describe our crew in Memphis, and we’re so proud of just how rooted in this culture they’ve become, and the beautiful impact they’ve had on their community, this company, and each other.