One of the magnificent gems shining in the global corporate world, Jesse Pletts, the President and CEO of Superior Optimization Ltd., is an innovative and highly adaptable business leader. He has established himself as a trailblazer and is widely recognized for his problem-solving skills, bold plans, and motivating multicultural teams to meet organizational objectives.
Jesse Pletts is a high achiever and multi-talented leader. With his strong determination, dedicated hours, continuous learning, and constant innovation, he joined Superior in 2021 to lead the turnaround and growth efforts needed for success. Jesse holds years of expertise in key executive positions and has led people since joining the Marine Corps in 2002 as a combat arms officer. From 2002 to 2015, the visionary leader served in various leadership roles, with five combat deployments as a Marine Artillery Officer and later as a Marine Special Operations Raider. These experiences helped shape his professional journey and prepared him for small-business leadership, allowing him to successfully transition from a professional setting to entrepreneurship and achieve success. In 2015, at the rank of Major, Jesse Pletts left the Marines to pursue his MBA. This brought him into “private equity,” where his leadership experience could add value to privately held, lower-middle-market, service-oriented companies.
Academically, Jesse Pletts graduated with honors from Jones Graduate School of Business with a Master of Business Administration (M.B.A.). He earned a Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) from the prestigious State University of New York.
The Company Preface
Superior Optimization’s journey is a testament to its adaptability and growth. Established in Texas in March 2002 as a small oil and gas integrator, the company has evolved significantly to serve diverse industries. Its strong sales culture, centered on the purposeful and persistent engagement of current markets and other sectors in the present geographic areas, has been a key driver of its success over the years.
Jesse’s Take on Assuring Excellence in Services and Solutions
Superior Optimization is committed to excellence and customer service. The company’s core values, which are routinely reviewed, emphasize the importance of providing high-quality service. This commitment is reflected in the company’s leadership traits of ‘make quality personal’ and ‘make customers the priority.‘ Superior’s passion for excellence and pride in the quality of its work, no matter how mundane, sets it apart and ensures it remains vigilant against complacency.
The Superior team strives to provide value by understanding consumer demand, acting in their best interest, and finding solutions to satisfy those demands. They regularly interact with the clients to find out how they are doing, what they could improve on, and what additional services they would like to see offered.
Jesse’s Secret Behind Keeping Employees Aligned with the Company’s Objective
Superior uses core values as a tool to identify culture fit in potential new hires and as a performance management tool to ensure consistent alignment throughout the organization. Furthermore, they succeed or fail as a team, which means “practice blameless problem-solving,” where the focus is on finding solutions rather than assigning blame. They hold each other kindly accountable while assuming good intentions with their teammates. By doing this, they find areas for growth based on lessons learned, make process adjustments, and develop as a team.
Leveraging Data Analytics and Technology to Streamline Processes
A company has to be agile to be competitive as a service organization. Contrary to popular belief, being process-driven helps Jesse and his team improve agility rather than slowing them down. Their professionalization journey was rooted in the belief that systems and processes would allow them to gather better data, improve their operations, become more productive and profitable, and ultimately ensure that they offer their clients high-quality service. The world offers a lot of technology and applications to support lower-market businesses like theirs without committing to an end-to-end ERP. They allow them to improve consistency, gain efficiency, and improve performance once adopted, tested, and embraced by the team. The key is incremental progress and a commitment to becoming just 1% better daily.
Navigating the Distinctive Challenges and Opportunities
Jesse Pletts acknowledges Superior’s history in the SW US onshore energy industry, which brings with it special potential and difficulties. He is optimistic about the business despite potential obstacles since, in the wake of COVID, the maturation and professionalization of the major operators signal longer-term health. As clients become more sophisticated and value consistent growth over boom-bust cycles, service providers are compelled to follow suit. They can flourish in this climate by diversifying their industrial services and professionalizing their service and approach.
Well-Endowed Innovation
The core value of “agility” and the associated Leadership Trait of “innovate” allow the team to identify the wave and paddle to get in place and catch it at the right time by adjusting as needed. They push themselves to find methods to enhance their processes and goods to serve all stakeholders better. They are willing to bring something different and consider “what if” instead of being comfortable or satisfied with the “status quo.” As a team, they are “proactive” in solving problems before they occur. Engaged leaders set the standard for success by foreseeing future problems, evaluating possible courses of action, managing risk factors, making backup plans, and executing a strategy. Their ability to do so fosters the right culture and allows them to remain competitive in the market.
Operational Excellence and Ethics: The Key Factors of Jesse’s Leadership Philosophy
The cornerstones of the culture and leadership style are operational excellence and ethics. The leading man ensures these values are embedded in the culture by emphasizing leadership traits such as “Do the Right Thing, Always,” which means an unwavering commitment to doing the right thing, especially when no one is looking, regardless of the consequences. Furthermore, he constantly revises every facet of the company to identify improvement methods, living according to his motto, “Seek Improvement in Everything. He encourages his team to engage in critical analysis and strive to be just 1% better today than they were yesterday. This approach allows them to build and sustain successful growth by ensuring a culture of excellence and accountability is alive and well in the organization.
Nurturing a Culture Focused on Collaboration and Communication
At the heart of Superior’s culture, Jesse Pletts ensures that the most valuable assets are employees. Since collaboration and communication are essential for fostering high-performance teams, Superior operates with cross-functional and multicultural teams across the markets, both internally and externally.
Communication can be one of the most challenging things the team does daily, but is often the most critical. They “Embrace Diversity” by being inquisitive, accepting, and aware of the unique qualities that set each person apart. Including people with different experiences and points of view fosters a variety of thought, which improves decision-making by allowing several considerable points of view centered around a single objective. Furthermore, they prioritize “communication skills,” defined as the team’s capacity to identify issues and circumstances, offer clear direction, and articulate complex concepts easily to the audience.
A Glimpse into the Future
Superior is already an established turn-key service provider specializing in automation, communication, electrical, powerline, SCADA, control panels, and fiber-optic solutions. It is known for its steadfast dedication to safety, accountability, excellence, quality control, and customer service centered on sales. Superior’s commitment includes immediate and clear communication, proactive leadership in the event of problems, accurate and timely billing at competitive market rates, and unwavering client loyalty.
Looking ahead, Superior envisions becoming a well-profitable, $100 million+ business by 2030, operating nationally with a focus on the Southeast and Southwest, and providing reliable products and services to support the electrification and automation of the oilfield, midstream, industrial, and infrastructure industry sectors within its markets.