Seven years…what can you do in seven years? Well, let’s see. You can age a nice bottle of wine, have a Seven Years’ war that really lasts closer to nine, progress through grade school at a painfully slow rate…or…you could do nothing.
Nothing? you ask. Yes, you heard me. Nothing. You know, hangin’ out, watching hours upon hours of reality TV, staying up until 3 a.m. playing angry birds … actually, scratch the reality TV. But you get what I’m saying.
Sometimes nothing sounds awfully appealing, it’s just…well, nothing’s not really my style. See, when you’re a business owner—a small business owner at that—doing nothing is akin to rolling over and exposing your throat to a rabid dog. With as many as 50% of new businesses falling off the map in the first year and 90-95% shutting their doors in the first four, you’ve got to have your head in the game if you don’t want “Selling $4 cups of coffee” to be the next entry on your resume. Businesses don’t run themselves and money doesn’t grow on trees and all that.
No one sets out to fail. There’s no “7 Habits of Miserably Ineffective Failures” or “How to Score Enemies and Make People Hate You” books in the self-help section of Amazon, but sometimes things just don’t work out how you expect.
Fortunately, it goes both ways.
When Jason and I bought this business nearly eight years ago I thought “Cool. This will be something fun we can do together in our free time.” Don’t laugh. Oh what the hell, go ahead and laugh. It was a ridiculous notion and something I’d like to force into the back of my memory right alongside the teal eyeliner and acid washed jeans I so adored in junior high.
I scarcely imagined he would orchestrate six product redesigns (three of them major), work 7 days a week starting at 5 a.m. until 9 or 11 p.m., and be out of town so many weekends that waking up next to him on a Saturday felt like an early Christmas. Even more startling, I never could have predicted how important—how ingrained—that little clump of plastic and metal would become in our lives.
Big companies are lucky. They can float those people who yawn during sales lectures, take off early to miss traffic, and roll their eyes reciting the companies mission statement. Those people who want to fly under the radar and work just enough to pay their mortgage and take a trip to Disney World once a year.
Small companies? Well, they face a different challenge. You either live, breath, eat, and sleep the vision, or you shut the doors. You employ people who add value, or eat ramen and go without shoes to pay their salary. Okay, maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration…shoes are kind of a necessity.
The moral of this story is…well, I guess there is no moral, but I do have a point. My point, bold as it may be, is that we didn’t get to where we are today by slogging through life with a ho-hum attitude expecting a money pony to come prancing along carrying God’s gift to writers in its mouth. We got here because we do have a clear vision of who we are, where we’re going, and how we want to get there. And most importantly, we care. Truly.
Seven years…what can you do in seven years? Well, you can read all about what we’ve already done here, on our About Us page. As for the next seven? I don’t want to spoil the fun and give it away, but we look forward to dragging you along (kicking and screaming if we must) for the ride.
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