The Year That Almost Knocked Us Out

It was December 2016 and we were against the ropes at our company, GO EARN IT. The previous four years were strong growth years as we brought our company from a concept to a legitimate clothing brand that was quickly expanding in our home state of Illinois and beyond. That year, heading into our busy fall season, we hired more people to keep up with the growth and we expected things to keep going, and growing, as they had before. I was arrogant in my thinking when I assumed we were now entitled to continuous growth and this arrogance/ ignorance ended up hitting us hard that year. I made poor decisions and hired people with little or no customer service experience and I also did a poor job of training them on how to take excellent care of our customers, which was the very foundation of how this company was built. I naively expected everyone we hired to care as much as we did about the business, and to give the same level of care and attention my brother and I had given our customers,but I quickly learned that wasn’t the case. Unfortunately I did not learn this lesson fast enough and by the end of 2016 we were out of money and the mistakes that were being made (almost daily) on customer orders were destroying the reputation my brother and I had spent years building. If falling down and getting back up builds character then we were building a skyscraper of character over those few months because every day it was like getting punched in the gut over and over again when we saw the mistakes piling on and realized we were no longer providing our customers with the service and products they deserved . It seemed like it got worse with every rock we turned over. More mistakes, more upset customers, and more damage to the foundation we had spent four years building. My brother and I decided to clean house and start from scratch. We spent the next 6 months cleaning up the mess and contacting every single customer to rebuild the relationships. We had to fight for another opportunity to earn their business. Fortunately most were willing to take another chance on us and it paid off, for both parties.

One of the most important lessons we learned was that, as we continued to grow beyond the capabilities of me and my brother, our company was only going to be as good as the quality of the team members we hired. It was a painful lesson but an invaluable one. If you want to be the very best, you have to surround yourself with the very best.

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