Elizabeth Crow is the CEO of OnPoint Industrial Services, a company that services every aspect of your industrial project, ensuring its smooth execution and the safety of your workers. Tom Fox welcomes her to this week’s show to talk about OnPoint’s work, how it helps people, and the future of safety within ESG.
How OnPoint Manages Turnarounds
Tom asks Elizabeth to define turnarounds and how OnPoint facilitates them. A turnaround is a concentrated maintenance event where activities that cannot be conducted while the facility is online, such as cleaning, inspection, and repairs maintenance, are undertaken. A turnaround takes up to 6 weeks and thousands of people come on-site to do the work. Elizabeth describes OnPoint as a turnaround support services provider. She says, “The biggest part of OnPoint’s business is around safety, providing permits, providing safety attendants…. everything except the work itself is what OnPoint does.”
The Relationship Between ESG and OnPoint
Tom asks how ESG has affected a company like OnPoint. Elizabeth explains that since ESG has become more popular, the private equity firm that owns them, Cap Street, has been focused on instilling ESG priorities into the portfolio companies they manage. However, due to the nature of the services OnPoint provides, it is difficult to focus on ESG in its entirety. Their work tends to focus more on the social and on the governance components of ESG than on the environmental component. “By the nature of what we do we can’t impact the environmental footprint,” she remarks. She explains that they are concentrating on ensuring the safety of the workforce and maintaining their safety standards and compliance.
Safety Requirements During Turnarounds
Safety has always been a key component of ESG. Elizabeth believes that it has been pivotal to OnPoint’s success, since the increased emphasis on safety means companies recognize the value of having a professional safety provider. While some companies that are conducting the turnaround will hire anyone to ensure safety, Elizabeth tells Tom, “we [at OnPoint] train [people] to a specific standard and when we send somebody out, it’s treated as a professional service so you get a much higher quality from that.” This work aligns with the social aspect of ESG, caring for their rights.
Looking Ahead
Elizabeth believes that in the future more customers and stakeholders will be interested in more aspects of ESG, as the world is progressing in a direction to create safer work environments. Additionally, with the increasing threat of global warming more industrial companies will focus on the environmental aspect of ESG.
Resources
Elizabeth Crow | OnPoint Industrial Services
