Hello.
I try not to get to tactical in these musings. Instead I try to bring the tone above the personal and strategic happenings at work. Today is a bit different. Today is the day our strategic partnership is over with our largest client. A client that makes up a large amount of our monthly revenue. A client that has helped me tremendously in my career. So today, I am breaking my cadence. Today is a message to all of Sprague.
Today is the first day since 1981 that we do not do Copesan work. What an interesting twist. We don’t do Copesan work anymore. We are our own company. Today is Day 1.
It has been so long since we were our own brand, thinking about the things our customers would like through only our own lens - our ability to define the future with our own decisions. What a great new world we enter. Day one is symbolic, a day that everything is different and yet nothing is different. Will we deliver the same great service we normally do? Of course. Will we do it for Copesan? Nope.
I am going to miss our clients and our back and forth with Copesan. They ultimately helped us mature as a company. Copesan mattered. The mindset around Day 1 matters too. The philosophy around Day 1 means that we will embrace the world as though everything is new. That we will look and scrap for every opportunity. That we will be our best now, even when our best isn’t as good as we’d like it to be.
I keep thinking about what Jeff Bezos said in his Amazon 1999 shareholder letter;
Jeff, what does Day 2 look like?” That’s a question I just got at our most recent all-hands meeting. I’ve been reminding people that it’s Day 1 for a couple of decades. I work in an Amazon building named Day 1, and when I moved buildings, I took the name with me. I spend time thinking about this topic. Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1.
I want us to always be thinking about how we can improve knowing we are the ones who are setting the tone for our customer and pushing the boundaries for our services. Today is Day 1. So is tomorrow. Let’s do this.
-Ross