Creating the Future Since 1973

MAU was founded on the principles of creativity and the belief that it is possible to create something significant from scratch. In 1973, at 48 years old, Bill Hatcher Sr. found himself unexpectedly unemployed. Despite being an HR manager throughout his career, he possessed a valuable skill: the ability to hire exceptional individuals. Driven by desperation to provide for his three children and cover their basic needs, he took the leap and established MAU with a vision of catering to the manufacturing industry.

A Foundation of Family | Making Lives Better | Pivotal Breakthroughs | Expanding Horizons

The Family Legacy

“The entrepreneurial spirit of my father birthed an innovation spirit in the company.”

— Randy Hatcher

The Entrepreneurial Spirit That Started It All

Well before a fledgling company named Management, Analysis & Utilization, Inc., or MAU for short, first opened its doors in a tiny office in Augusta, Georgia, William (Bill) G. Hatcher Sr.’s irrepressible entrepreneurial spirit began to manifest in a steady stream of new ideas, enterprises, directions and solutions. He explored and ultimately rejected a litany of new business concepts, including selling ice cream “samwiches,” opening a bike shop, and selling corn dogs.

As in every tale of entrepreneurial success, there came a moment when his enterprising spirit blossomed into a great idea for a business, with the potential to grow and prosper through intense creativity, hard work, and dedication.

For Mr. Hatcher, it began with $500 and an idea for a staffing and recruitment company that would one day grow into an industry leader in innovative staffing, workforce analysis, outsourcing, recruitment, and cutting-edge technology solutions. His work ethic, steadfast determination, and entrepreneurial vision planted seeds that would grow exponentially in scope and breadth, launching new business concepts, new offices across the U.S., successful acquisitions, and new technologies that MAU’s founder could never have imagined.

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1988—Turning a Corner Toward Innovation

As MAU grew, with son Randy Hatcher taking the reins after Mr. Hatcher’s retirement, we were able to pivot from our entrepreneurial beginnings to an increased focus on growth, expanded service offerings and innovation. As a leader, Randy has brought a different skill set and mindset to MAU, taking what Mr. Hatcher created and building powerfully on top of it.

Randy notes that the entrepreneurial spirit his father brought to MAU “is still very much alive today in the business plan when you look at how the company has grown.” The company Mr. Hatcher started “in this one tiny, tiny little office” has grown to include large-scale staffing, outsourcing and more. “Those were innovation, design, organizational building blocks,” Randy says. “And then he brought in … my brother and me and a couple of other people. That’s the entrepreneurial spirit.”

It took both the original entrepreneurial spirit and the drive to innovate on that vision to build MAU into the wide-ranging, influential enterprise we are today as we celebrate our 50th year. From the humble beginnings of Ms. Power and Ms. Temps and first major client Kimberly-Clark to the acquisition of FutureStaff, 3Ci, and Doozer, MAU continues to fuel our growth and ability to meet future challenges and opportunities for our clients, employees, and partners.

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“It’s not the Hatcher story; it’s not the Hatcher family story,” Randy says. “It’s the MAU story, and we’re all part of that.”

Lessons Learned from Mr. Hatcher

Here are a few words of wisdom from Mr. Hatcher, according to Randy, that helped identify MAU’s entrepreneurial culture in our early days:

Spend less than you make.

Be conservative in your spending.

Don’t increase your fixed cost too quickly.

If you take time to care about the needs of people, that will be some of the greatest validation of the worth of your work.

Taking care of people is exactly what Mr. Hatcher was all about. The lessons he passed down continue to guide his son Randy, grandsons Adam and Baker, and MAU as a whole, and his founding ethos lives on today and drives MAU forward.

Family Leadership

Different Generations, Different Styles

In MAU’s early years, Bill Hatcher Sr.’s powerful vision drove the enterprise’s growth, direction, and product offerings. Mr. Hatcher had his own style of management: down-to-earth, personal, demanding, and notoriously frugal. Mr. Hatcher’s penny-pinching is the stuff of corporate lore, including buying reams of pink paper at a steep discount and picking up and reusing bent nails as MAU moved from our old location to our current office in downtown Augusta, Georgia.

The notion of “Consider it Done” is very much in keeping with Mr. Hatcher’s philosophy and entrepreneurial style. Understanding that he was running a service business, he knew he had to provide a more compelling service promise to build client trust and differentiate MAU from the competition. Adam Hatcher recalls talking to his grandfather about his recipe for success: “He always said, ‘If I give you my word, I’m going to keep it. If you give us these things to do and I tell you I can do it, we consider it done.’”

Chief Marketing Officer Carl Henson recalls one notable way that Mr. Hatcher passed that lesson on to his sons Randy and Billy Hatcher. “He sat Randy and Billy down when he hired them,” Carl says, “and he said, ‘If I hear that you go to a client and you say you’re going to do something and you don’t write it down and you don’t deliver, I’ll fire you. I don’t care if you’re my son or not.’”

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The transition from Mr. Hatcher to Randy was a natural one based on trust and the recognition that Randy could drive MAU forward as an organization and a service provider.

While Mr. Hatcher was focused on establishing the business, Randy has focused on the building blocks of MAU’s growth—learning from others, seeking out mentors, concentrating on new ideas and services, pushing into new geographies, and building organizational structure as MAU has entered our second generation of family ownership. Randy has built on the culture and work ethic his father pioneered from the beginning and helped take it to new heights of productivity, always focusing on the ever-evolving needs of our growing list of clients.

The Next Generation

Where it was almost a fait accompli that Randy and his brother Billy would join MAU upon graduation, Randy set forth a more deliberate path as his sons Adam and Baker pondered a career at MAU. In a personal letter written to his children, Randy identified important criteria that they must meet first: Earn undergraduate and postgraduate degrees. Work outside the organization first to have the opportunity to prove themselves. Earn a promotion or significant recognition. For Randy, it was important that the next generation build a reputation for themselves and in the eyes of MAU employees, allowing them to contribute at the highest level. Today, Adam and Baker continue to show themselves to be thoughtful, groundbreaking leaders in the company.

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Advice to the Next Generation

Just as Mr. Hatcher had advice for Randy as he navigated his career and eventual leadership of MAU, Randy offered heartfelt advice to guide his children toward a life of successful decision-making and resiliency:

“Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and love your neighbor as yourself. Because but for God, I would not be the leader that I am today and a lot of the things that have happened in the company would have never happened if my faith had not matured. I shudder to think about some of the decisions I might have made and different paths I would have gone down if I didn’t have a God that was bigger than me and smarter than me and loved people more than I love people to keep me in the game.”

Making Lives Better: At Home

Surrounded by the MAU Family

From the start, the MAU family has come together to support colleagues and partners when they are at their most vulnerable, stepping up in the midst of personal struggles and tragedies on all scales. In all offices and divisions, at all levels of the company, it’s in MAU’s DNA to support families and individuals when they need help—and it proves that MAU lives up to our promise of making lives better for all each and every day.

Supporting Amanda

In April 2022, while MAU was hosting the Masters Tournament in Augusta, Georgia, employee Amanda Neshan suffered a devastating family tragedy: the loss of her 17-year-old daughter. Though her team was heavily involved with the tournament, they immediately stepped up with “love and support far beyond what I had expected,” Amanda said. “MAU was represented in completeness at my daughter’s funeral…The representation, the support, the love was overwhelming.”

In August, just a few months later, Amanda lost her husband as well, and once again MAU stepped up to support her. “I was given all the grace and space that I needed,” Amanda says. “I got a handwritten letter from the CEO of the company, [Randy,] and when I finally got to meet him, he immediately recognized me, knew my name, and gave me a hug.” Once again, many MAU colleagues attended the funeral, providing an outpouring of love, support, and connection at such a challenging and unfortunate time.

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Our aim of making lives better starts with our own people—on the best days of their lives and the worst. “It solidifies that MAU does care,” Amanda says. “It’s become a family. You stick with family.”

Front-Line Caregivers to MAU Employees and Their Families

MAU partners with Marketplace Chaplains, the largest and longest-continuing provider of workplace chaplains to companies throughout America, to provide care and support during challenging times. MAU employees and their families have depended on these professional chaplains to help them navigate cancer deaths, car accidents, and other tragedies, whether by providing home counseling services and ministry or bringing food to funerals.

Other resources available to the MAU family are Coweta FORCE, which provides recovery and support services to individuals and family members impacted by addiction, and a local women’s ministry that helps women who are domestic violence survivors, single parents, experiencing divorce or otherwise disadvantaged by reconnecting them to the workforce.

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A Little Ice Won’t Stop MAU!

Adam Hatcher tells the story of the massive 2014 ice storm in Augusta and how MAU worked together to help our people and community.

“When we had the ice storm hit Augusta … we got three-quarters of an inch of ice,” he says. “You can imagine that debilitated us. And we got people to this office safely. We had a generator on the roof. We were dropping electrical cords off the roof with extension cables to hook up the computers downstairs to power so that we could process payroll to take care of our employees. And then anybody who wasn’t doing that got in people’s trucks, and we started driving around Augusta cutting up trees.” He laughs: “So I’m not the guy you wanted, but I was hauling trees.”

Making Lives Better: On the Job

“I have never worked for an organization that has taken those tenets, those foundations of making lives better, as seriously and really put the action behind the words as MAU.”

— Channell Swain

Lifting People Up Every Day

What happens when you build an organization that works hard to find people better opportunities, supports them in times of need, contributes to their personal growth, and finds ways to promote their success and happiness? You become known as the company that’s dedicated to making lives better for employees, colleagues, and clients every day.

Throughout MAU’s 50-year history, there are countless stories of how our people have stepped up to improve the lives of candidates and ensure they are getting the support they need to feel safe, recognized, fulfilled, and successful.

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A Major Shift

Jennifer Brown, MAU’s regional operations manager in Anderson, South Carolina, has a lot of stories about how MAU makes lives better. In response to one longtime client’s request, for example, Jennifer found a candidate who “was only making $10 an hour and had three children—just a super nice lady, obviously had great work history and everything.”

Jennifer was able to convince the client to provide the woman with full-time employment as a direct hire at $17 an hour with insurance and other benefits. “That was life-changing for her,” Jennifer says. “That was a great day. That’s the most fun part of my job.”

Making lives better doesn’t always mean dramatic change—sometimes it’s about small but significant improvements. For example, when a candidate is working “a shift that really doesn’t fit their family life,” Jennifer says securing them a position with a schedule that fits their needs is a great feeling.

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Something she particularly enjoys is hearing from candidates she’s helped further down the line. “I could just go on and on,” she says. “Getting text messages two and three weeks after people start, and saying ‘Thank you so much for your help, I really love this job.’…That just creates good energy.”

A Strategic Approach To Making Lives Better

In 2022, when employers were having difficulty persuading people to come back to work after the COVID-19 pandemic, MAU conducted a jobs-by-market analysis that proved some clients were offering less than what the market required to fill jobs. In many cases, we were able to convince them to raise wages to recommended levels to help bring people back to work. “We had 45 clients over the course agree to raise wages to the point we recommended, which gave us the ability to fill the jobs, get production out the door, so their life was better,” Doug Duncan, VP of recruiting and staffing, explained. “We took people from, in some cases, $10, $11, $12 an hour to $15, $17, $20 an hour.”

“My desire is that anybody that works with us can actually provide for their family—they’re not the working poor,” he adds. “And that was a major milestone last year, a strategy to make lives better in all three: our clients, the MAU family, and our associates.”

Making Lives Better: In Our Community

From the very start, MAU has focused on finding ways to improve lives in communities where our employees and clients live. Whether that means participating in Habitat for Humanity, volunteering at food pantries and senior centers, or establishing the MAU Cares Fund to help people in emergency situations, the MAU family steps up
to help.

Excellence Through Education

The Making Lives Better Diversity Scholarship is one way that MAU works to “really make lives better,” 3Ci Director of Culture and Inclusion Channell Swain says. With the aim of ensuring that all students can graduate college and form long-term relationships that will help them have successful careers, the scholarship is just one way that we help people and communities move forward by supporting educational opportunities that last a lifetime.

One recent application that stood out came from a first-generation college student interested in psychiatry. “She recognized that in her community there was such a deficit for good mental healthcare for her community, so she was really passionate about that,” Channell says. “We were just so moved by her commitment to her education and making sure, regardless of all the obstacles that she encountered, that she wanted to provide this service to her community post-graduation.” MAU wanted to be a part of helping her achieve that goal and, in the future, pay it forward.

“We just strongly believe in kind of wrapping our arms around the entire person, understanding that it’s not just what you’re doing today but how things that are happening in your life affect you going forward and how you kind of come out of that adversity and how you make things better for other people,” Channell says. “It just warms your heart to be a part of that type of generational change.”

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Paying It Forward

“It’s not just about what’s happening in the here and now. It’s what you’re going to do in the future, which is so much of the MAU culture.”

— Channell Swain

A critical part of the Making Lives Better Diversity Scholarship’s mission is to discover students who not only want an education but also hope to make lives better for others as they move forward in their careers.

“It’s not just the typical scholarship where we make an award and that’s the last time we hear or see from that person,” Channell says. “The main focus of the grant is to make sure that we are awarding these opportunities to people that want to pay it forward.”

With a goal of granting 10 scholarships a year, MAU is committed to ensuring that our program will continue to uplift students who are inspired to learn, share and ultimately lead in their communities.

Pivotal Wins

Starting with our first major client Kimberly-Clark, each new client we’ve won—including BASF, Milliken, Bosch, GE and so many more—has challenged and transformed MAU and helped us grow into the company we are today. Each win represents an opportunity for our teams to work together toward a pivotal and exciting result, but few have been as sweet, or as surprising, as BMW and Michelin.

The Race for BMW

“Who doesn’t want BMW as a client?” CEO Randy Hatcher says. MAU’s 2006 opportunity to bid for BMW’s new U.S. plant in Spartanburg County, South Carolina, was hard-won, according to Chief Marketing Officer Carl Henson, who says it took four years of “blood, sweat and tears” to come about. Indeed, who wouldn’t be excited to compete for such significant business as a small, regional player against all the multinationals and internationals?

And so the hard work of thinking, innovating, problem-solving, and practicing began. “We worked hours and hours and days and days responding to their bid,” Randy says. Senior VP of Operations Rod Hutcheson agrees: “We practiced [our presentation] for, I bet, a million hours.” According to Randy, the MAU team made our final presentation to about 20 people in a huge conference room, detailing the dynamic approach we would take to fast-track the enormous number of new hires the BMW facility would need to run successfully. Toward the end of the presentation, Rod remembers thinking: “We’re going to get this business. I don’t know how, but we’re going to get this.”

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One of MAU’s biggest assets, according to Randy, was that “we had stories of people’s careers that we had changed that I think touched some of their hearts,” as well as the processes and tools to manage a project of that scale. When the MAU team asked BMW at the end if they had any questions, Randy says, they looked around at each other and said: “We really don’t have any questions. You answered everything.”

It was a pivotal win, Randy says, for MAU “to be awarded that contract when they could have picked anybody in the world.”

MAU was originally bidding for the opportunity to place 700 people. Since then, we’ve partnered with BMW to provide tens of thousands of employees over the span our relationship with them, and our winning bid stands as one of the defining stories that launched a new era of success for MAU.

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Winning Michelin: MAU Orange and Butyl Blue

Finding a way to pitch Michelin took more than a decade of discussions, RFPs, and other opportunities that seemed to go nowhere. But at the beginning of 2015, MAU was able to break through and prove that we had the expertise, knowledge, tools, and processes to bring success to Michelin’s US1 plant in Greenville, South Carolina. Choosing a dramatic, break-the-mold presentation approach, we created Gemba boards, visual management tools often used in manufacturing, and hung them on the walls of the room using blue painter’s tape.

Before the presentation even started, however, the site manager let MAU know we were breaking one of the plant’s cardinal rules: Nothing in the facility could be blue other than butyl rubber. As VP of Operations, Tradd Rodgers remembers: “He was such a sport about it. I was like, ‘What, do we just need to go ahead and exit right now? Have we just got so many demerits we don’t need to continue?’ They all just laughed about it. Then the rest of our team just absolutely knocked it out of the park.” Less than an hour after the meeting, Michelin reached back out to us with questions and ideas. The pitch was a success, and Michelin has been an MAU client ever since. Today, we continue to grow together as MAU now operates in eight Michelin facilities.

Pivotal Challenges

Throughout our 50-year history, there have been moments when MAU has had to overcome what seemed like overwhelming challenges and rise to the occasion, finding solutions that not only blazed a path forward but also made us stronger, smarter, and more resilient.

Confronting the COVID Challenge in Real Time

No one could have predicted how the COVID-19 pandemic would change the lives of MAU employees, clients, and the associates we placed in factories and companies throughout the country. In the midst of the unthinkable, we advised clients, employees, and families to search for solutions as the pandemic closed down the world. MAU leaders got together, created response plans, and partnered with clients to help businesses and communities navigate COVID-19.

MAU’s story of resilience, courage, and caring is best told through the recollections of the team members who lived it day by day.

Jared Mogan: “Ultimately, we had to make really tough decisions about people’s jobs, internally at MAU and our associates. And I think while that time was very difficult and challenging, I think we handled it very well. We had great care for the people … and that speaks to what MAU is all about: making lives better. … How do you do that well? I think it’s ensuring that you are, as best as possible, securing the dignity and value of an individual.”

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Lindsay Stevens: “The thing that impressed me about MAU was just the speed and adaptability in which we had to do things. … MAU leaders got together, figured out a response plan, and we partnered with our clients to be nimble, to adapt, to come up with safety protocols, to come up with work incentives, to really help us adapt as much as we could in a global pandemic. And in some cases, we were even seen as some of the leads and asked to lead webinars for our clients and many organizations across South Carolina and Georgia and professional organizations.”

Tradd Rodgers: “We as a team sat around and talked about all of these hundreds of employees that were not at work because our customers had closed. The pandemic was in full tilt. So I remember all of us sitting around saying, ‘You know what? The only way to minimize anxiety is we need to have calls with all of our employees once a week.’ … The number of employees that said: ‘Thank you so much. … I at least know I can talk to you and I at least know that there is a path forward.’ That was one of the things that I will always remember.”

Adam Hatcher: “We had thousands of people [at BMW] go out of work overnight. … We made sure each notice had a person and a cell phone number you could call to talk to if everything that we provided didn’t help you figure out what in the world was going on.”

Jared Mogan: “While it was very dark and challenging to have to make those reductions and for people to lose their jobs, we sprung right back. … At BMW … we had 96% of the associates who were reduced already brought back. And on top of that, we brought back another 750 in 10 days, which is just unheard of.”

Expanding Capabilities

Automation. Digital transformation. Industry 4.0.

Technological advancements and changing workforce trends light-years ahead of what was considered possible during the majority of MAU’s history are transforming the ways that we thrive and grow and will continue to do so in the future.

How does a 50-year-old company stay true to its original vision of workforce solutions for industry while adapting to meet the demands of a disrupted, constantly changing, tech-driven world? By changing our mindset, challenging the status quo, and exploring ways to acquire the skills, people, strategies and tools to meet clients’ new requirements and rise to future opportunities.

Launching a Future Framework

In 2019, MAU started having internal discussions around Industry 4.0 and smart manufacturing. Studies from companies like McKinsey and Deloitte presented eye-opening statistics on automation and the changing workforce. “How would we, as an organization, pivot to meet the ever-changing workforce that is changing because of digital transformation?” 3Ci President Rob MacLane says. “I’m not sure we have the exact right answer yet, but we have another arrow in our quiver because 3Ci is providing consulting technology services as well as staffing.”

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Rob points to “the Hatchers’ foresight in wanting to acquire a technology services company” as something that will help position MAU for the future and help us stay ahead of and capitalize on the future workforce and technology trends. He also cites MAU’s unique, in-depth process of evaluating potential acquisitions to make sure they have compatible cultures and values. “We do a lot of research on the front end,” he says, “and we’re pretty thoughtful in making sure that we’re going to acquire an organization and people that are going to be a good fit for us culturally.”

Pivoting Toward Sustained Growth

MAU expanded into technology solutions via the thoughtful, deliberate strategy of adding software development services to our legacy staffing services, allowing us to be more competitive and provide a deeper pool of services in the long term. Today, thanks to our strategic tech-forward acquisitions of 3Ci and Doozer, we are able to partner with clients and create tech and workforce solutions that align with new technologies and trends across a wider spectrum of industries. This way, MAU can not only serve clients but also be a leader in bringing them ideas and solutions that they may not have even known existed.

MAU Synergy: Greater Than the Sum of Our Parts

Each of MAU’s acquisitions has added critical knowledge, clients, geographic coverage, and expertise that we need to aggressively grow the organization and our people.

The acquisition of 3Ci in 2018 brought technology staffing into the MAU mix. It also introduced MAU to Atlanta, offering us access to new opportunities in our home state’s largest city. From the very start, MAU and 3Ci have been able to grow together by leveraging operational abilities, new relationships, and geographic reach.

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Finalized in 2022, MAU’s acquisition of Doozer has allowed us to not only meet the future head-on but also provide leadership and solutions for our clients. Doozer provides end-to-end project work, software development, enterprise data solutions, technology consulting services, and staffing as we help develop and design systems that are transforming clients in manufacturing, retail, banking, and more.

Doozer continues to help build MAU’s tech portfolio with software development that provides solutions that go way beyond traditional staffing. For example, Doozer has helped O’Neal Steel with a new online portal to help with customer satisfaction and retention, modernized and upgraded decades-old Blue Cross and Blue Shield legacy systems with cutting-edge technology solutions for security, efficiency, browser compatibility and more, and continues to help energy provider Southern Company with maintenance and enhancements to its load forecasting system, which crunches 300,000 or 400,000 discrete pieces of data every hour.

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Thoughts on MAU’s Expanding Capabilities: In Our Own Words

“Our team loves what we do, and we enjoy solving really complex problems for people. … We look for a very different kind of individual here than the average software company does. We look for people who are tinkerers, that enjoy looking into problems, taking things apart, putting them back together.”

— Ron Perkins, VP of Software Solutions, 3Ci-Doozer

“The biggest step was we bought 3Ci, one of the top technology companies in the state of Georgia. That’s an investment on technology and an investment on the future.”

— Doug Duncan, VP of Recruiting and Staffing, MAU

“We like to use the old Wayne Gretzky adage of ‘Skate to where the puck is going.’ Things in technology are changing so rapidly, and we want to be ahead of our customers in terms of exploring new tech, becoming subject matter experts in new tech.”

— Rob MacLane, President, 3Ci

Expanding Culture

As MAU grows, both organically and through acquisitions, it’s more important than ever to preserve our enduring founding principles and supportive, caring culture. How we value people, invest in the development of all employees, demand the highest commitment to safety, and work tirelessly to make lives better for employees, associates, and communities is what will ensure MAU’s sustained success well into the future.

Of course, MAU works incredibly hard on behalf of our clients, but another great way to stay true to ourselves is to find reasons to celebrate employees, partners, and clients.

MAU and The Masters

In Augusta, there’s nothing bigger than the Masters Golf Tournament, and MAU has historically celebrated the most iconic golf event in the country by bringing important clients and our team together to witness the action and find time to connect and recharge. The VIP event is capped off with a party at Randy Hatcher’s house, where the Hatcher family, MAU leaders, and clients celebrate together and share stories, creating a sense of camaraderie and belonging.

“Randy for years—well, his dad actually started this—has always welcomed everybody and would host them in his house. We’re finally getting back to that since before COVID this year,” Alana Davis, Senior Director of Marketing and Revenue Operations, says. “When he does that, either one or both Adam and Baker are there; his wife is there. He talks about his dad and his dad welcoming people in the past. It creates this very familiar feeling and sense of belonging that I believe is very different than you would see in many organizations.”

The tradition continues and will remain a fun and exciting part of MAU’s culture and history far into the future.

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The Doozer Annual BBQ

New ways to celebrate come from all corners of MAU’s expanding family, and Doozer’s annual barbecue is a much-anticipated way for employees, family members, clients, friends and vendors to gather, relax and enjoy incredible down-home Southern-style cooking. Vice President of Software Solutions Ron Perkins and Director of Client Services Heath Wade spend almost an entire week preparing and cooking for more than 300 guests. “I’ve got a big smoker rig and we bring it in. … We normally do ribs, chicken, pulled pork, candied bacon,” Ron says, showing off photos from years past. “I think there’s like 38 slabs of ribs there.” Taking place in the Doozer parking lot, the festivities start at 4 p.m. and last “until people leave.”

Though like many events, the barbecue was interrupted by COVID-19, Ron says people are “still ready to get out” and have fun with their colleagues, whether it’s by playing trivia at a local taphouse, taking a craft cocktails class, having game nights at the office, or learning to cook pizzas. But nothing compares to the barbecue, which regularly has a turnout in the hundreds.

“We definitely love to work hard and play hard, that’s for sure,” Ron says. “We have a couple of kegs of beer out there in the parking lot, and we just relax and really let our hair down.”

Expanding Influence

In recent years, MAU has worked tirelessly to move faster and stay ahead of ever-accelerating changes in manufacturing, technology, and the workforce. Today, there is an urgent need for thought leadership and solutions that help companies adapt to these changes and provide insights based on an unparalleled understanding of and vision for the future.

MAU has always been ahead of the curve, however. In Randy Hatcher’s book, “The Birth of a New Workforce,” published in 2010, he says: “Never in any of our careers has there been a better time to consider new ways to operate our businesses and … to consider new workforce concepts and partnership models.” Today, we continue to offer groundbreaking ideas and proven solutions to help transform organizations and make them more competitive.

MAU also applies those ideas and solutions internally to ensure organizational and strategic alignment as we continue to grow and change. “We’re just at an interesting size right now where, to go from where we are to where we need to be, we can’t get there doing business the way that we used to,” Randy says. “And so this is a needed change and a needed focus, and it’s not easy.”

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Vision of the Future: Solutions Development

Recognizing the need to be at the forefront of innovation and industry trends, MAU has a dedicated Solutions Development division focused on keeping us at the forefront of the industry and creating innovation that we can then bring to our clients. “You want to be in front of them, to understand: What are some of the challenges they’re foreseeing in the next five to 10 years, and how can we be a part of that now?” Chief Marketing Officer Carl Henson says. With that information, he says, MAU team members can “ideate over what we could develop or build and then go back to them with some ideas that we could pilot with them now. Build a prototype that we could pilot in a division that we could replicate and expand throughout the plan or the entire company.” It’s about bringing a product development approach to what has traditionally been a service-based industry.

Embracing New Technology and Tools

As technology rapidly changes, MAU continues to demonstrate our leadership in exploring new tech, becoming subject matter experts on behalf of our clients, and creating the tools of the future. To provide vital thought leadership and innovate new and different ways to solve problems, we have embraced emerging technologies to build secure, scalable systems for clients like Chick-fil-A.

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Growing Influence and Sales Geographically

Since MAU opened our very first office in Augusta, Georgia, expanding our geographic reach has been an important and effective tool in our strategic growth. In 2016, we were a dominant but local player in Georgia, South Carolina, and Tennessee. Since then, we’ve expanded our footprint to Texas, Indiana, Kentucky, Alabama, Utah, Connecticut, North Carolina, and California. Thanks to our expanded technology and solutions-focused offerings, which have no geographic limits, there are truly no physical boundaries to MAU’s ability to serve clients and compete across the country. Today, the sky’s the limit. As Randy Hatcher says in his 2011 book, “The Birth of a New Workforce”: “Dream on. Dream big.”

The Future of Industry 4.0 and the Global Workforce

Rob MacLane, President, 3Ci

“Everything that I’ve read [about Industry 4.0] says that it will be a net jobs gain to the overall economy, globally, and not a net jobs loss, but that jobs that are very manual processes—that are done by a human, that can be automated—might be eliminated. But new job opportunities, maybe higher wage-paying opportunities, will emerge in the economy, and I think that’s exciting. The global challenge is upskilling, reskilling, or skilling the next generation to be able to complete those jobs and those tasks.”