Employee Number Five Retires: Mike Peck after 36 Years
January 7th, 2019
Last week, HRP Associates said goodbye to one of its longest serving employees, Mike Peck. Before leaving for retirement, Mike was kind enough to sit down for an interview on his time at HRP.
Q: How long have you been working here/when did you start?
Mike: Technically 35 years this August, but really 36. I began as a contract employee. I was the field guy and I did draft, by hand. Back then I did just about every job that anyone has ever done.
Q: You’ve been with HRP for pretty much its entire existence.
Mike: I was employee number 5
Q: What made you feel like now was the right time:
Mike: I knew it was time because the number of people I started with have gone away. I’ve been here forever, some employees here I’ve been working with since they were 17!
Q: How has the company changed since you’ve been here?
Mike: It was truly a family back then with a lot of personality. There’s only one person you can trace that back to, Mark Possidento [one of the three founders of HRP]. We were all young and stupid and… young and stupid! Back then it was such a tightknit group. You can’t fake that kind of thing.
My son was the first child born to an HRP employee and Possidento’s first nephew. The day my son was born we shut the company down, all 6 of us, and went to celebrate. Mark’s the same guy now as he was then.
Q: How do you feel about where we are now? With things more corporate, safer, more professional.
Mike: I’m very proud of where we are and who we are now. It’s incredible how much this place has grown since the beginning.
Q: What will you miss most?
Mike: The spontaneity, the craziness! Work used to just show up at the door. The competition is intense these days.
Q: What are you looking forward to in retirement?
Mike: Not coming into work every day. Doing what I want to do when I want to do it. Give myself 6 months to get my feet on the ground. My brother in law has a boat that we’ll rebuild in the Spring. We’ll have to learn how to do that but you know, there are YouTube videos and the marina has Wi-Fi so, there you go.
Q: You’ve been here, you’ve been successful and you’ve made an inestimable contribution to HRP. What advice do you have for those of us at the start of their HRP careers?
Mike: Work someplace else! Don’t let this be your first job. There’s no other way to know how good you have it here. If you put in a few years at another spot and come back, you’ll know how great this place is. I’ve worked at places that were cut throat. If your billable hours went down you were out the door. HRP is still here and that place is long gone.
It’s great to see how we’ve kept the best parts of those times while becoming the professional, serious company we are today.
Tom Simmons, Corporate Marketing Administrative Assistant at HRP Associates, Inc.
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