Tag Archives: Employee of the Month

Just another Friday at ABG

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It looks like everyone made it through another week! To celebrate that accomplishment, let’s chat a little about what’s been going on at ABG Capital.

We first want to announce that we’re still looking to fill a few positions within ABG Capital and our Portfolio Companies. I mentioned these open positions last week, but we’ve listed them here again for you. If you think you might be a good fit for any of these positions, please email your resume to our HR Manager, Sharon Kolesar, at sharonk@abgcapital.com. She’ll be able to get you more information.

  • Technical Services Representative – VoIP Innovations
  • Customer Service Representatives – InspiraFS
  • Website Designer (with a concentration in website coding) – ABG Capital
  • Java Developer – ABG Capital

Now let’s see what’s been going on with the ABG Capital blog since we had two great articles posted this week. The first explored how Big Data can improve the customer experience. Whether you’re searching for something in Google or buying something from Amazon, you’re contributing to Big Data. When business owners and marketers explore Big Data they can find valuable information that helps them get to know their customers and cater to their needs. If you visit the article, you’ll find out more information on Big Data and your customers.

The second article that we posted this week was to help business owners find the perfect health plan for their employees. Having a great health plan, not only makes your current employees happy, but it’s something that potential employees are also looking at. The article is full of tips and useful information that can help any business owner narrow down a health plan that fits their business and best serves their employees.

Next week on the ABG Capital blog, we have a post on improving employee skills through MOOC’s. MOOC’s, or massive open online courses, have become extremely popular in the last few years. Hundreds of universities now offer thousands of courses to millions of participants worldwide ranging from business development to jazz appreciation.

Since it’s the end of May (can you believe how fast it’s gone??), we have some announcements to make from our company-wide Month End Meeting that was held today.

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  • May Honorable Mentions: Shannon Hogan and Chris Wallet (Inspira Customer Service Reps)
  • May Spotlight: Rhonda Taylor-Boles (Inspira Customer Service Rep)

 

On top of those awesome achievements, we’d also like to announce a promotion!

Trichelle Barish, a former Porting Representative at VoIP Innovations has only been here for a few months, but she has been standing out from the crowd. Her new position will be the Porting Coordinator and according to Barry Yancosek, the Provisioning Manager, she will be his “right-hand man”. She will continue to keep up with her porting responsibilities, but she will also start to train new employees, delegate workloads, interact with customers and vendors and help to maintain the overall department standards.

Congratulations to Trichelle for her amazing accomplishments in such a short amount of time! Keep up the great work and we know you’ll succeed at ABG Capital.

The last announcement that we have to make is that we are starting another office-wide Biggest Losers Competition! It will kick off on Monday, June, 2 and it will last for 8 weeks. The winner will receive a Grand Prize for losing the largest percentage of body weight and there will also be smaller prizes given out for weekly challenges along the way. We want to create a healthy office and this is one step closer to achieving that! Make sure you leave some supportive words in the comments section below!

Thanks for stopping by for another weekly edition of Just another Friday at ABG Capital. Have a great weekend!

Just another Friday at ABG

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Welcome back to this week’s Just another Friday at ABG Capital! Today we want to share some things that were announced in our month end company meeting. But first, we want to once again give a huge thank you to Sara Warhold, our Office Administrator, since Wednesday was Administrative Assistant Day! Sara is a fantastic employee and makes our office run smoothly. Thank you for all that you do for us, Sara! If you missed this holiday and didn’t get to thank your Administrative Assistant, then stop what you’re doing and go thank them right now! We all know that they are one of The Most Important Assets You Have!

As for our Month End Meeting Announcements, we’d like to congratulate the following people on their dedication and passion for their jobs and for ABG Capital.

ABG Capital Employee of the Month

Joe Aponick and Sharon Kolesar!

  • March Employee of the Month – Joe Aponick
  • April Spotlight of the Month – Denise Breide
  • March Honorable Mention – The VoIP Innovations Team

Also in today’s meeting we had to congratulate our Lead Systems Engineer, Tim Linn, on qualifying to be a member of Mensa! In January he took their “at home” practice test and scored pretty well. After reviewing his score, Mensa suggested that he should take the actual admissions exam to see whether or not he is eligible for membership. In mid-March he took the test and was notified that his score qualified him to become an official Mensa member. This is a fantastic achievement and we’re happy to spread the great news about one of our ABG Capital employees! Congrats, Tim!

We also want to take a minute to recognize and share the message of another employee. Jessica Young is planning to participate in the MS-150 Bike Ride in June to raise money for the Multiple Sclerosis Society. The route is a 150 mile trip from Pittsburgh to Lake Erie and she is hoping to raise $500 for the National MS Society through generous contributions from friends and family. If you’d like to help Jessica reach her goal, then please visit the National MS Society, Western Pennsylvania Chapter website and make a donation!

Since ABG Capital has been rapidly growing, we need to be on top of the rules and regulations for employers and employees. We just recently exceeded 50 employees and one of the new things we need to get familiar with is the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA). A few members of our executive team attended an all-day training workshop yesterday to learn the ins and outs of FMLA so we can be the best resource for our employees if they have questions about it.

That wraps up this week’s Just another Friday at ABG Capita! We’re glad you got to stop by and read about the great things happening in our office. Make sure to check back next week for another great post.

Just another Friday at ABG

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Happy Friday! October is right around the corner and that means that we have some announcements to make from our Month End ABG Capital Meeting that was held today. We first want to congratulate Jake Crisman on being voted the Employee of the Month for August. Here’s what the team had to say about Jake:

Jake from ABG CapitalWhen you hire a new employee the biggest issue you have upfront is how long is it before that employee can start to contribute. Well when Jacob Crisman, started he “hit the ground running” and never looked back. He started to contribute from day one and continues to both please and amaze us. Early in his start here, he helped the IT Services with our implementation of the Office 365 deployment.  He has been well received by both staff and management and has greatly helped Steve with the day to day IT tasks.

In our meeting today we also discussed some of the exciting training sessions we have coming to the office this fall. Here’s the list of things we have to look forward to:

  • Sunny Bridge Natural Foods will be coming to do a workshop on health and wellness.
  • We’ll be having CPR training for people who need re-certified and also for those who want to become certified.
  • Halloween is coming up so that means we need to think of costume ideas for our costume contest and pot-luck lunch.
  • We’re getting ready to plan our annual Turkey Bowl Flag Football Game in November.

The build-out project is getting to close to complete and our office decoration committee is working hard to come up with ideas to make our office reflect our culture. The committee is planning come HUGE things and since we’re planning for our Open House to be November 1, you’re going to start seeing some pictures of the design process soon! That wraps up this weeks rendition of Just another Friday at ABG Capital and we hope you have a great weekend!

Just another Friday at ABG

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From everyone at ABG Capital, Happy Fourth of July! This week has gone pretty fast, but there’s been a lot of excitement. Last week we had our month end meeting where we recognized our May Employee of the Month, Spot Light of the Month and Honorable Mentions. Today I’d like to introduce those employees who have been outstanding for June: Geno Zuccaro is our Employee of the Month and Kathy Scheidelmeier is our Spot Light of the Month. Jake Crisman and Denise Breide also deserve some recognition for being our June Honorable Mentions.

While we’re making these monthly announcements, we want to give a shout out to all of our July anniversaries and birthdays. The anniversaries are Jeff Tapolci on July 7th (16 years), Sharon Kolesar on July 19th (2 years), Jaime Doyle on July 25th (2 years) and Joe Golubski on July 26th (3 years). Congratulations everyone!

The July birthdays are Justin Cornish on July 2nd, Jaime Doyle on July 9th, Jennifer Williams on July 13th,  Jerry Eddy on July 19th, Lowell Smith and Ryan Rice on July 21st, Collin Ballantine on July 24th, Eric Butler on July 30th and Bruce Smith on July 31st. Happy Birthday to you all!

In other news, ABG Capital is going through a network evolution project that will move ABG Capital and its portfolio companies’ network resources to the world of virtualization. One of the first pieces was installed this week when we added our brand new SAN (Storage Area Network) to our ACM Co-location.

ABG Capital SAN

Lastly I want to mention that we are currently undergoing a website reconstruction. The look and feel will remain the same, but we’ll be adding more of our own pictures and refreshing the content. We’re looking to have Phase One completely by the end of July. We’ll be making another announcement when it gets closer to the unveiling.

Just another Friday at ABG

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How was your week? We’re excited to be ending another great one here at ABG Capital! The biggest thing that we had going on this week was our Month End Meeting. All the employees gathered around and got to hear the latest ABG Capital news.

We recognized our Employee of the Month, Terri Sams, who works for Inspira. She was nominated by Nate Rupp and Ryan Rice for her exceptional work. We recognized two VoIP Innovations employees, Justin Cornish and Randy Stegner, as honorable mentions for all the hard work they’ve been putting in. We also have to mention Eric Butler and Dustin Campbell, from VoIP Innovations, because they received some pretty awesome feedback from a customer. Caricatures of them are now hanging on our ‘Atta Boy board.

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Eric (left) and Dustin (right)

At this meeting, Jeff Tapolci, CEO of ABG Capital, announced that profit sharing has officially been approved by the Board of Directors! This is great news for all of the ABG Capital employees because they’ll be able to get some extra cash in their pockets at the end of the year. Profit sharing was something that’s been on everyone’s minds for a long time now and we’re excited to see that it’s actually happening!

Now that we got all that good news out of the way, it’s time to get down to business! We’ve recently entered the Social Madness competition organized by The Business Journals. It’s a competition that measures the amount of social engagement you have with your fans and followers, not the growth of your network. The local competition kicks off this Monday, June 3, and the winners will be announced on July 9. From that point, the winners from each size category will move on to the national competition, which starts on July 16, and then the entire competition ends on August 20.

This is a competition that involves everyone and we need YOUR help to make sure we move on to the national round and win for our category. As a winner, we would receive a national editorial write up and have $10,000 donated to a charity of our choice. This competition is not about seeing how many likes we can get in the time frame; it’s about your engagement with our sites. That means liking, commenting and sharing the things we post. Show us some love people! The competition will focus on our Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ pages. Even though the competition only covers these four sites, we’re also on Pinterest, YouTube, Instagram and Vine (search for ABG Capital).

I planned on the Social Madness explanation being the last part of this ‘Just another Friday’ post, but I couldn’t resist sharing this picture with you. Our air conditioning unit is right above Ian Hambleton’s desk. He comes in later in the day and it wasn’t too long after he got here that he realized there was a problem… Water was leaking right onto his desk! He grabbed some bowls and is STILL waiting for the dripping to stop so he can get to work. Good luck Ian!

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