Schlitt measures success in a way that does not photograph well.
The company has never published a ranking, and does not intend to. It has never described a project as finished, because the commitments it accepts do not finish. It has no interest in a record of achievement that could be reproduced by an institution which merely announced the same things.
What the company has instead is a record of remaining.
Recognition
Schlitt is known to the parties who need to know it.
Regional authorities responsible for difficult material bring that material to Schlitt. Communities living beside coastlines the company has stabilised continue to live beside them. Counterparties who have worked with Schlitt on one obligation return with another, which is the only form of recognition the company regards as informative, because it is expressed in commitment rather than in commendation.
The company is occasionally invited to describe its methods to others in its sector. It generally accepts.
Continuity
The firm has never withdrawn from a site.
That sentence is the whole of the company's operating record, and Schlitt considers it more meaningful than any account of individual projects. An institution's character is not visible in what it undertakes. It is visible in what it is still doing after the conditions have changed, the attention has moved, and the original reason for being there has been forgotten by everyone except the people who live nearby.
Schlitt is still there. In every case, without exception, the company can be found at the location where its obligations arose.
Presence
Schlitt does not operate through intermediaries.
Where the company works, it holds the land, staffs the facility, and answers for the outcome. It does not license its methods to operators it cannot supervise, and it does not accept an obligation that it intends to place with someone else.
This has made the company slower to grow than firms that have chosen differently. It has also meant that Schlitt has never had to explain the conduct of a party acting in its name, an exposure the company regards as the most common and least defensible in its industry.
Judgement
The company's most consequential successes are not visible, because they consist of work Schlitt declined.
Schlitt has turned away obligations it could not have held for the required duration, sites where the necessary access could not be guaranteed to future inspectors, and arrangements that would have required the company to depend on a counterparty's continued existence. None of these decisions produced an announcement. Several produced a competitor's project.
The firm's view is that an institution which has never declined anything has not been exercising judgement, and that a record consisting entirely of things done is not a record of discrimination but of availability.
The standard the company holds itself to
Schlitt asks one question of its own work, and asks it of every commitment the company has ever accepted.
If someone were to arrive at the site unannounced, in a season when nothing was expected of us, would they find us there.
The company is satisfied with its answer.