“The person who thinks they can and the person who thinks they can’t are both right!” –Confucius
To the Unconquered —
As the Holiday season rapidly approaches, I always take this time to reflect upon what has occurred this past year and perhaps what I/we can improve upon going forward. When I started Invictus in August of 2014, I told people it would be very, very hard the first few years. Some believed me…some didn’t…but within a year “everyone” believed it was hard. I do remember distinctly one of the things I told the first Invictus employees that I still tell our people today…and that is that we have to act like we are a multi-billion-dollar impact company who can change the world.
Upon reflection, I essentially was taking a page from Confucius without knowing it. I was essentially trying to create a company mantra that said…no one is better than us…nobody can do what we do….and we rock…so look out world. My mindset was that even though we were a small business startup…we were not going to act like a small, but we were going to present to our clients and business partners a level of professionalism and panache that even the multi-billion-dollar beltway giants would envy. The result, we thought we could do it and so we did it! Confucius would be proud!
We maintained high aspirations of what we could be and we stayed the course…day after day…week after week. We brought in highly talented people who liked us and trusted us and we made sure that we never failed them. Those people in turn brought in like-minded Spartans who also wanted to help Defend the Gates. The word spread across the Intelligence Community and the military services that the Unconquered were a force to be reckoned with and you wanted them at your side, as your lead or on your team.
I tend to be an optimistic person personally but a very pragmatic person on the business front. While it was VERY hard for me to convince the early employees to act like we were a billion-dollar company, once we started leading teams of twenty or more on very complex proposals and then winning, the excitement and pride in wearing the Invictus logo became real. Our Spartans, our families and our peers respect us and truly understand and believe we can and will do anything we set our sights on.
The result of our team’s efforts is that today we are #103 on the INC 5000 list of fastest growing companies in America and #2 on the Washington Business Journal list for fastest growing companies in the area. Now reflect back to those days in August of 2014 and imagine if we started out by saying “we can’t do that, we’re not ready for that…we’re too small!” I imagine the results would be much different but that Confucius, in his wisdom, would still have been right.
The ancient quote speaks volumes on what one can or cannot do in life…
I am very proud of you all!
God Bless and Remain Unconquered,
Jim