Never Quit
By Paul Schaefer, Vigilant COO
A Vigilant Values Series
“Our goal is to win the day, period. We don’t quit on each other; we don’t quit on clients.”
In 1940 in the “The Rotarian” magazine, George Herman Ruth (Babe Ruth) wrote:
“If Henry Ford hadn’t kept going in the early days despite ridicule, we would never have seen the Ford car. It’s been much the same with almost every great man you could name. He kept plugging when everybody said his chances of making first base were nil. You just can’t beat the person who never gives up.”
If you look deeper into the Ford legacy, you will discover that Henry & his team ran into a major crisis early in manufacturing. When he was ready to scale up production based on demand for his cars, he assumed that doubling his assembly staff would double his car production. That assumption turned out to be very wrong and forced him to dig deeper. Henry and his leadership team were forced to solve this problem to meet demand.
The production teams completely changed their process to an iterative approach, the tooling needed to support the process changed, and finally changed how they trained employees that were from many different countries and were faced with language barriers (they assembled based on country of origin). That process is still at the core of how cars are made today. He didn’t quit, he knew they could figure it out, and they did. To catch everyone up, he invented cars, then had to invent a new process on how to make them to increase production to meet demand BEFORE getting up to full capacity, wow. Side note, I drive an F150!
Vigilant has been around for over 12 years and, just like any growing company, we constantly solve process & technical gaps in our services. When I say “gaps,” what I mean is someone on our team innovates inside of our service loop. From onboarding a new client, dealing with a technical issue in the field, or spinning up a new service. These gaps translate to how we serve our clients even more effectively and even more comprehensively. This ultimately empowers us to be the best provider out there.
When these gaps are discovered, we roll up our sleeves and get to work. One of our clients had a special need and wanted us to provide a unique risk report for them that aggregated several pieces of threat information. That teammate grabbed their working group and the team figured out how to provide that report. Now, that client is getting custom intel on that area of concern for them. We add those innovations to our product backlog to determine if other clients would benefit from a similar report, and if so, we make it available to others. This is a prime example of how our innovation loop constantly cycles.
Looking at the Ford production example above, don’t we all face these challenges? I would argue that any technology company faces these challenges on a regular basis. How you deal with those challenges & gaps is what’s important. And this is what we mean at Vigilant by “Never Quit.” It is a mentality. It is a comment on effort. It’s the grit and desire to solve the problem in front of us. It’s in our DNA as a company, and we talk about this allot. From daily standups to our quarterly all- hands meetings, we don’t quit.
For more information on our services, please visit www.vigilantnow.com or contact sales at 855-238-4445 OPTION 5.