300...

What is in a number? Many times it is little things. Many times it is big things. Many times it is hard to see things. 300 is all of those to me. Today, RocketPower hit 300 employees. We have just over 300 employees on all 6 inhabited continents (if global warming continues we WILL be in Antarctica) in over 26 countries with over 16 mother tongues spoken, supporting over 40 clients. Pause. Reflect. Celebrate.

The last 24 months have been the most intense 2 years of my career. Exiting 2019 we had just ended the 3rd straight year of 3x plus growth and had lofty goals. We called it “100 by 25”. Our goal was to hit $100M in revenue by 2025. We felt that was an achievable goal. We felt that would put us in a good place to get to our 8-year goal of growing RocketPower to a $500M business. Then Covid hit. Most importantly, Covid has caused millions of deaths globally and sickened scores more. For businesses like RocketPower, it was catastrophic. Many of our peers went out of business. Many of our peers decided to sell. It was extremely hard times for businesses like ours.

For RocketPower we made a very conscious decision to lean in. I personally had lived through the “dot-bomb” and the 2008 crisis. I learned a lot from those times. I wanted to lean in but I was nervous. Fortunately, my leadership team around me gave me the confidence to do so. First and foremost we wanted to make sure every employee at RP had a soft landing. We allowed clients of ours to convert our employees for either greatly reduced rates over what they were contractually obligated to or for free. We asked those that were still with us to go on furlough or take restructured comp while still paying for their benefits so that we could do what we could to take care of them. I personally worked harder than I ever had in my career and all the while RP was losing money. 2020 for RocketPower, like many companies, was a down year where we lost significant money. However, those decisions were thoughtful and designed to put us in a place where, when the turnaround did come, we would be in a good spot to capitalize. We strongly believed that businesses like ours would see 3-4x growth in the back half of 2021 and we were making decisions based on that.

Then August 2020 happened and we signed a few new big clients, then each month through the end of 2020 we had small wins that added up to modest growth. By the end of January 2021 we were on pace to make 20% more than we made in 2020 and we had just over 50 employees. Today we are 300….

There is a lot behind the growth from 50 to 300 in less than 9 months. There are so many people that helped make this happen - those still with us and those who were instrumental in our survival of 2020 that are no longer with us. To all of those amazing people, I thank you. While it might have seemed like it early in this post, this is not about me and this is not about RocketPower. This is about the over 300 people that are currently part of RocketPower and those who have moved on to other amazing opportunities but have left behind their best and helped us get here. Thank you to all. I am humbled by each and every one of you and I look forward to more posts like this where I thank even more people as we hit more amazing milestones in the near and distant future.