A Conversation With… CTEH President, Chase Selby

Their emergency response team held their strategy meeting at Morgan’s…and the strategy paid off

Before we talk about Morgan's at The Little Red, could you tell me about CTEH and your role within the company?

CTEH was founded in 1997 by four toxicologists from the University of Arkansas Medical School. They shared a mission to provide clients and communities with unbiased toxicological and risk management consulting services. Over the past 27 years, CTEH has evolved from a small practice mainly serving the railroad industry into a well-known name in the emergency response field, now serving clients across the oil and gas, transportation, chemical, manufacturing, and maritime industries.

Today, our ~250 experts across the United States support clients, communities, and governments in preparing for, responding to, and recovering from emergencies and natural disasters.

I joined CTEH in 2008, right out of college, as an environmental scientist. Through the mentorship of CTEH’s founders and past leaders, I grew within the business to assume leadership roles that ultimately led me to my current role as Senior Vice President of Operations where I oversee all CTEH personnel, finances, and operations.

So, I understand that you and your team did a retreat at Morgan's at the Little Red in late September and you had a pretty good crowd of folks with you—something like 35 people.

Yes, we brought people from all over—Colorado, California, Texas, New York, Pennsylvania, Florida, and Louisiana. We typically have these big episodic events that lead to large-scale transformation within our business. Historically, we’ve done a startup to address the new area of work—we call them businesses, but they're just operating units within CTEH. And we see what works. You can do that maybe once without a really solid plan. But what we've learned is as our business has grown more complex, as the regulatory environments have grown more complex, and as we've grown in numbers and geography, we’ve got to do yearly strategy and tactical review meetings with all the decision-makers in our company.

We start with a SWOT analysis to identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, and we tend to employ an aggressive model where we're challenging one another. Friction and argument are good things. We're all scientists; we’re supposed to argue. So, that process starts at the bottom and works its way up to the director level. We go into a room, and everyone presents their SWOT analysis for their individual lines of business, and we shoot holes in it. A strength is not “I have the best team.” Everybody in the world thinks they have the best team. A strength might be, “We have a team of toxicologists on call 24 hours a day and a jet coupled with 2,000 master services agreements with HAZMAT chemical companies.” That's a strength. But, in fact, identifying our weaknesses is probably more valuable than looking at our strengths—at least at the top of the food chain. What weaknesses do we have that could open us up to threats, and what are our opportunities?

So how important is a meeting facility in helping you and your team have a successful meeting?

Honestly, for me, it's the hardest part about doing a meeting because the setting is crucial. When we were a small team, we were able to do it at a couple of our lake houses and that really worked. We like to mix about half business and half pleasure on these things because it’s important for us to be able to hang out, solve the world's problems at night, rant a bit, and have disagreements about whatever the day's meetings were about. That's how you build a team. So, I personally think setting is the most important aspect to having a successful meeting. We look for places where we can have privacy.

We've been to Vegas, the Bahamas, and Big Cedar Lodge in Missouri. We struggle with too many activities or cabins too far apart, which causes the team to be spread out and go in their own direction.

If you want to do the real thing, which is build relationships and get true consensus, you’ve got to be together. It's got to be intimate. And ideally, your access to distractions, including to other people outside of your organization, has to be limited.

We've looked for a place like Morgan's for years. There's a reason we're always trying something new. We can't find a place that we can realistically essentially rent out, that's very private, and that’s in a pretty setting. We’re scientists—we like nature. So, I was so happy when we found Morgan's at the Little Red.

And how did you find it?

We’d literally had a giant argument over where we were going this year. I can find tons of places that will accommodate 15 people. I can find tons of places that will accommodate 300. I cannot find anything that'll accommodate 30 to 50."

Our HR Director used to work at Acxiom, and he said, "Hey, I think Charles Morgan is building a conference center at the Little Red River." I immediately told him to call up Charles, and within five minutes, he came back with the details, and we were immediately sold on the location.

Two months before you arrived, that whole high-tech room where you actually had your meetings was just a line drawn in the lawn. Those people worked their butts off to get it ready for you.

When we got there, the landscaping had just been done, and it was obvious. We loved it.

And I'll say another thing. The food was better than some of the million-dollar retreats we’ve had at our corporate level. The food is never enjoyable, and it doesn't matter where you go. But Lauren Brown, who handles Morgan’s catering, was fantastic.

In fact, we planned to go off-site to a restaurant one evening and ended up changing our plans so that we could enjoy another one of Lauren’s meals instead.

Great, so I take it you would give your visit a good rating….

Every project we do, we follow up with what we call “a hot wash.” That’s when we get together and talk about the good and the bad, and we do that for our retreats as well. Again, part of it is just teamwork and camaraderie, just hanging out. And it was unanimous. Every person who went—even the people who had to travel all the way across the country agreed that we needed to return to Morgan’s next year. So, it's already in the budget.

Charles will be happy to hear that! And next year, the big conference center—The Lodge—will be open. But because the Brandimore Conference Center where you met was brand new, what did you think about it?

I liked that it was just the right size. It wasn't too big and it wasn't too small. It was just the right size for a good strategy meeting. And frankly, a little bit of size limitations is not a bad thing. It makes you think, Okay, who really does and doesn’t need to be here?

And you had your golf carts, and you could all be at Brandimore in three minutes.

The golf carts gave us such flexibility and elevated the experience. Every night, we spent time together on the back patio at the conference center until at least midnight.

I think some people did go play golf the first day before we got started. And we all went fishing off the dock at The Little Red a couple of afternoons.

Catch any fish?

Oh, absolutely! The dock was big enough for all of us to just hang out there too.

Well, I'm assuming when you're talking to your fellow business people, you'll tell them about Morgan's at the Little Red—or are you going to keep it a secret?

That’s the million-dollar question! Actually, I'm very much pro-Arkansas business. We chose to build our business here, and that's where we're proud to be. So, we're already talking to our C-suite and our board of directors at our parent company about a trip down. They want to do a board meeting here in Arkansas, and it's important to me when we bring people from out of town that we show off Arkansas and all that it offers. Morgan’s at The Little Red will be great for that.