Celebrating 9 Years in Business
This week, we celebrated 9 years in business at 33 Sticks and as we have been thinking back through the experience of building a brand from the ground up, we have been filled with emotions thinking about the brands and people who have helped get us to where we are today. So today’s article is a bit of a thank you to those companies who helped get our company off the ground.
The Beginning
As you may imagine, getting people in the door of a newly created business is not easy. No one wants to be the only one eating in a new restaurant, if there are no cars in the parking lot, chances are most people won’t venture inside. It’s no different for a services company, a lot of potentially interested companies are driving by, waiting for the 1st customer to show up to signal that this is a safe place to do business.
To those very first customers that took a chance on a newly created company, with a funny name, that no one had ever heard of before, THANK YOU 🙏🏼
Going Big
Our first year in business, large, multinational companies wouldn’t even give us a second look. While we had established a track record of being a stable business that was producing valuable results for our clients, we were still seen as being far too risky for big companies to do business with.
That was until one big company decided we were worth the risk. In the Spring of 2014, a little over a year after starting the company, we got our big break when Hallmark signed with 33 Sticks. This was a magical moment, Hallmark, a multi-billion dollar, 100+ year old company, working with 33 Sticks signaled to the market that we were the real deal. From there, the list of global brands wanting to do business with us began to multiply.
To those first few enterprise brands, especially the people at Hallmark who are heroes in our journey story, THANK YOU for being the very first big brands to take a chance on us 🙏🏼
Becoming Guides
We finally arrived, we finally were seen as a “real business”, whatever that meant. What was next? We wanted to elevate the level of our services and our brand. We weren’t content just “doing the job” of analytics. No, we had a much bigger vision, we wanted to transform the company from experts to world class guides. We wanted to be seen as the elite of the elite. We wanted to attract companies looking to truly transform their people, their teams, and their businesses with the help of the most accomplished guides in the world.
To reach this state, we needed to design, build, and test different business strategies. That meant we needed a core group of clients that were willing to go on this journey with us, to help make us stronger, faster, better…the best!
To these special brands, and more importantly the people at these brands, that have helped us elevate our brand, THANK YOU 🙏🏼
And to all of you who are reading this, you too are a very special part of our journey as we continue with our mission to build a company that challenges the way work is done, that puts people first, and that hopefully serves as a great example of doing business in a more humanistic way…
THANK YOU 🙏🏼
