The idea behind this magazine from the beginning was to help keep safety professionals informed, helping them ensure the people in their workplaces go home to their families and loved ones at the end of each day.

The more we do towards this end, the more we realize how difficult and important the safety professional’s job can be, and we never cease to be amazed by their skill and expertise.

With the great responsibility they have, we feel a great obligation to be professional and diligent in our efforts to keep them up to date on the issues facing the industry.

Chief among those issues is the thought that without effective environmental, health and safety programs, a company’s reputation and overall business could be shattered. This was a sentiment discussed at the 47th annual Executive Summit held at the American Society of Safety Engineers’ Professional Development Conference in Las Vegas last month.

“If you take care of the small stuff, the big stuff won’t happen,” Anil Mathur, CEO of the Alaska Tanker Co. of Beaverton, OR, told close to 2,000 ASSE members at the summit, a panel of corporate executives discussing how safety is an important component of their organization.

Also at ASSE, OSHA Administrator Edwin G. Foulke Jr. underscored this theme. “Safety and health will be one of the main business drivers in the future… It is so important — and will be even more so in future — that the safety and health professional is involved. You can’t put a price tag on somebody’s life. In every speech I give, I talk about the bottom line. More than anything else, all we care about is that workers go home safe and sound to their loved ones. If they do that, the financial bottom line will take care of itself.”

If you don’t provide a safe and healthy work environment you will lose employees to other employers, it will be harder to recruit employees, and your business may be in jeopardy.

We want to help prevent this, and our approach has been a simple one: Give readers something they can sink their teeth into in a form they can present to their crews in succinct, easy to understand terms. No one is perfect, but judging by the comments we received at our booth at ASSE’s exhibition last month, the magazine is being received well by ASSE members and our 30,000 subscribers. Thank you!

Our mission at Facility Safety Management is to provide safety managers the most up to date, relevant information available on a daily basis, and if you’re not yet visiting our website, www.fsmmag.com, each day, we hope you can place us in your favorites folder. Or sign up there for our weekly email newsletter, a recap of industry news items posted to the website that appear in the email inbox of 12,000 subscribers each Tuesday afternoon.

We look forward to bringing more information services to our readers in the future, and I’m sure you know we have an open-door policy, and would like to hear from you on how we might be able to make your job easier. Please let us know.

It’s still hard to believe that we’ve been publishing for five years now, but what’s abundantly clear is that without our readers and advertisers, we wouldn’t be here. Our success depends on them, and we’d like to thank the professionals in this industry for giving us the opportunity to be a part of it. I’d also like to recognize the industry member organizations, such as ASSE, NSC, NFPA and AIHA, who have helped us enter and stay apart of the industry. We wouldn’t be here without their support and partnerships.

I’d like to recognize the efforts of our staff – editorial, sales, circulation, administrative and production, as well. They are the heart and soul of OTI Communications, and I sincerely appreciate all their efforts.

But most of all, I’d like to thank you, our reader, and let you know we are here for you. Should you ever have a comment, complimentary or critical, you’d like to share, I want to hear from you. My e-mail is ian@fsmmag.com.

Here’s looking forward to another five years of Facility Safety Management.

Thanks and good luck.