Twenty-seven years in, I am supposed to write something this week about strategy or growth or AI. Not this week. The week before Thanksgiving I want to do something different.
I want to say thank you. To you, to the owners I have worked alongside, to the people on my team, and to the one person at home who has been the steady hand under all of it. This is not a polished essay. This is the truth, written by an owner who has been doing this long enough to know that the work is mostly people, and the people are the whole point.
If you have ever signed the front of a paycheck, this one is for you. Most people will go their whole life without doing what you have done. They will get the paycheck and never understand the math behind it. They will not understand what it costs to be the person who makes it possible for someone else to feed their family. You do.
The first client
I still remember the first client I ever closed. I had no business getting it. I was seventeen, running Design Extensions out of a corner of my parents' house, with business cards I had printed myself on a perforated sheet from the office supply store. The proposal looked like a high schooler had written it. Because one had. I do not know why they signed it. I think the owner liked the idea of giving a kid a shot.
That client paid me real money to do real work, and they treated me like a real adult while I was figuring out how to deserve the role. He probably has no idea I still think about him. The first person who hands you the keys, before you have proven you should have them, changes the course of everything that comes after.
The owners I want to acknowledge most this week are the ones who became long-term clients. The ones who stayed for a decade or longer. The ones who called with a hard problem instead of looking for a new vendor. Long-term client relationships are not loyalty. They are mutual respect, accumulated over hundreds of small interactions, most of which neither of you remembers individually. I am more grateful for those people than for any single contract I have ever signed.
The team that became leaders
The other group I want to thank publicly is the people who have spent the longest stretches on my team.
A team member who stays five years is not staying for the salary. They could get a higher salary somewhere else. They are staying because something about the work, the people, the mission, or the trajectory feels worth their best years. That is a serious gift, and I have not always done a good job of saying so out loud.
If you are reading this and you have been on a team I have led, thank you for staying. Thank you for the years when the company was smaller than your ambition. Thank you for the years when it was bigger than my ability to run it cleanly. Thank you for the hard conversations you initiated when I needed to hear them. Thank you for covering my weaknesses without making me feel weak.
Some of you grew into leaders inside the company. Some of you grew into leaders and then left to lead somewhere else. I am thankful for both. The Lord did not give me five kids so I could only think about my own family. Apparently He did not give me a company so I could only think about my own roster.
- Who took a chance on you when nobody else would, and have you ever told them?
- Which team member has stayed long past the year they could have left?
- What has the person at home actually carried that you have never said out loud?
I will be back next Monday. Until then, happy Thanksgiving from my house to yours.
