Congratulations Ron Helterbrand on your Retirement

GeoComm would like to congratulate our Territory Sales Manager for the South-Central Region, Ron Helterbrand, on his retirement. Thank you for your 27 years of service in the public safety industry. We asked Ron to reflect on his time here at GeoComm and these are his thoughts. 

What is your biggest achievement while working at GeoComm? 

Truly, there have been several. One achievement that stands out is working with the Commission on State Emergency Communications (CSEC) in Texas who became a GeoComm customer right around the same time I started working here. The CSEC has been a very important partner of mine during my 27 years of working in public safety, and I appreciate that long-standing collaboration. 

Our initial contract with the CSEC was with the Council on Competitive Government (CCG), which was a state contract with the governor’s office. Two years later, it was transitioned over to the DIR (Texas Department of Information Resources) and was sponsored by the Texas Natural Resources Information System (TNRIS) that is run by the state GIO. Now, CSEC has been a GeoComm customer for eight years and they just signed another 2-year contract with GeoComm.  

Another big achievement involves a short period of time when Florida was added to my territory. During that brief period, we were able to add several GeoComm customers such as Indian River County, Highlands County, Osceola County, Orange County, and Collier County, all who utilized GeoComm’s public safety GIS services, solutions, and mapping applications. During this period, I spent more than a third of my time in the State of Florida and as a result GeoComm added another salesperson that lives in the State of Florida to help better serve the Southeastern region of the United States.  

What is one piece of advice you have for new employees? 

Prove your value immediately!  Find something that you can do that will make a positive difference for the company. For me, it happened on my first day at GeoComm which was the opening day of the Texas Public Safety Conference. I arrived at the vendor hall early to meet my new manager to set up our booth.  

In the afternoon, when the vendor hall opened, I learned about a client who was experiencing an issue with their GeoComm mapping application implementation. I explained the situation to my new manager, and we immediately put together a plan to resolve the problem. Over the next couple of weeks, a project reset plan was formulated. The reset plan was well received, the mapping application implementation went smoothly, and to date they are a happy GeoComm customer acting as a GeoComm reference for over six years.  When you’re able to accomplish things like that, it feels pretty good. 

What is your favorite memory while working at GeoComm? 

There are too many to mention, but I really enjoyed working on the early key account meetings. It’s kind of like the story above; it was about creating references by helping our customers plan for their future. 

Do you have any exciting retirement plans? 

Absolutely. Besides riding my bike, spending time with my son in Boulder, Colorado and my daughter in Austin, Texas, I also plan on traveling around Europe to visit friends and family, while I figure out what I want to accomplish next. Over the past few months, in my free time, I’ve helped contribute to a friend’s book that was published by the Oxford University this month, so maybe I will write a book myself.  

Why did you choose the public safety industry? 

Throughout my 27 years of collaborating with the public safety industry and helping clients resolve their 9-1-1 issues, I have grown to understand how GIS is the key foundational element for Next Generation 9-1-1 call routing and identifying caller location. It has been great to spend the last eight years of my career at GeoComm working with new location technologies and solutions which advance our customers’ abilities to locate 9-1-1 callers faster in their time of need. 

Ron will be at the 2022 Oklahoma Public Safety taking place October 2-5 in Tulsa, Oklahoma and the Arkansas APCO/NENA Conference October 23-26 in Paris, Arkansas.  If you are at the conferences, be sure to stop by our booth and wish him well in his retirement. Ron will officially retire at the end of the year so if you won’t have a chance to connect with him at these two conferences, please reach out to him directly by e-mail to wish him congratulations!