Our Spotlight on Super series highlights the SRC team members who help keep SRC a great place to work and grow. For this installment, we sat down with Mihret Kabilovic, a 7-year SRC employee who currently holds the title of Inside Sales & Support Supervisor at SRC’s Richmond, Virginia division.
Q: First off, where are you from? Where’s home?
MK: I was born in Bosnia – in a town called Srebrenica. My family and I left when I was a baby, and we moved to Slovenia at first. At that time, it was pretty apparent that a war was going to break out, and my dad had the foresight to get us out of the country before things got really bad. There was actually a genocide committed in my hometown after we left.
My dad had to stay behind due to military responsibilities, and so we were in Slovenia for four years at a refugee camp and didn’t know what was going on back in Bosnia. I don’t remember too much of it, but it was my mom taking care of my three sisters and me on her own, all without hearing from my dad for sometimes months at a time. Sometimes he would find a phone and be able to call her, but basically, I didn’t really meet my dad until I was around five years old.
It turns out he was captured and held as a prisoner of war, and after the war ended, the people who were in the POW camps were given a choice for relocation, and one of the choices was the USA. That’s where my parents chose and after a few months we were all back together, but it was a new country and it was pretty tough at first. At first we settled in Northern Virginia, and I think there were only a handful of other Bosnian families at the time. But, later we came to Richmond, where there’s actually a relatively big Bosnian community.
Q: How did you come to work at SRC? What’s the story there?
MK: I had a couple buddies from high school who had taken jobs in the drafting department at SRC and when a role opened up in systems support, they recommended me and I joined the team pretty soon after that in 2018. The interview was great. You could kind of say it was love at first sight as far as my first impression of the company.
Q: What were you doing before coming to SRC?
MK: I was working in retail at a big national pharmacy chain as an assistant manager. I worked there part-time in college and one of my friends who I’d worked with ended up being given a store of his own to manage, and I joined him as an assistant store manager for a few years after I graduated. I was working a lot of hours, and it was definitely good practice, but after a while the workload just got to be too much. I definitely probably took on more than I could reasonably handle, but the work needed to get done. I just wasn’t seeing much in the way of long-term prospects after a while.
Q: What was your role when you first joined the company and what is the nature of your current role?
MK: Originally, I was brought in for a role called systems support. Basically, there were a few departments that had processes and tasks they didn’t have the capacity to manage with the staffing they had. I was brought in to help fill some of those gaps. I got exposed to a lot early on, which was a lot of fun and a nice change of pace.
At first, a lot of the need was in purchasing – especially with the quality and receiving portions of our coil coating process. I also worked on order entry, customer service, managing our engineering change notice (ECN) process, things like that. From there, it started branching out and growing, and now my role is Inside Sales and Support Supervisor. As the company’s gotten bigger, we’ve had some large customers where managing their ordering cadence is basically a full-time job, so now I’ve got a team of four and we help manage pretty much everything on the inside sales and support side of things – project management, entering orders, giving updates on shipments, that sort of thing.
Q: What do you like about working at SRC? What is it that’s kept you around?
MK: It’s been great. I really enjoy the people I work with. I feel like I’m appreciated and that my effort and contribution are recognized, which definitely isn’t super common in my experience.
Q: In your time with the company, what are some of the traits you’ve seen among people who are successful at SRC? What sorts of people tend to do well here?
MK: You’ve definitely got to be comfortable working in a fast-paced environment. It’s hard work for sure, but if you’re a team player and a hard worker, you’ll do just fine here. Multitasking and adaptability are big, too. Sometimes priorities can change quickly, and you’ve just got to be able to roll with the punches when they do. It’s a lot of fun, though. There’s a lot of variety, and I’d say SRC is a perfect place for people who don’t just want to do the same thing every day.
Q: What about Mihret the non-SRC employee? How do you like to spend your time when you’re not at work?
MK: Well, my wife and I have a two-year-old daughter, so most of the time, I’m spending time with them if I’m not at work, just living the dad life. She’s hilarious (and frustrating), but it’s the best. I’m a big sports fan too – soccer and basketball mostly.
If you’d like to know more about working at SRC, be sure to stop by our Careers Homepage to learn more about who we are, what we make, and where we work. And stop by our job listings page to see our open positions. Manufacturing experience is preferred, but not required. If you’ve got a positive attitude and a good work ethic, we’d love to hear from you. Thanks for reading.
If you're in the market for heat exchangers, let's work together to get you just the right tool for the job.
