Before Liberty Supply started, I spoke to a handful of advisors. I’m fortunate to have relationships with smart people across many industries. In each case, they posses the unique ability to objectively look at a situation and provide clear, unfiltered advice. Throughout many conversations, there was one whose advice I think about every day. Before I pass it on, I’ll provide some context.
Growing up, I was taught the inherent value of work. It didn’t matter what the task was. It mattered how the work was done. It mattered that your best work was always given—focused, deliberate effort. I’ve written before about how I was shaped by digging ditches. To this day, I am indelibly programmed by a particular set of principles built on my experiences, and those before me.
My father was the eldest of seven children. His father passed away at 39, and his mother was left to raise the family as a retail employee. Working wasn’t a choice for my father. Working was survival. As the eldest child, he was responsible for assuming a role he didn’t ask for. Part of that role was managing the little money that his family had. He became good at it.
At 28, my father started a wealth management firm. Sounds fancy. It wasn’t. Long before there was success, there wasn’t enough money to pay for people to clean the office. My older brother and I were the cleaners. To us, it was normal. It was the expectation. That’s what it took to build something from nothing. Work.
Over time, the nature of our involvement in the business evolved. We graduated from vacuuming floors, cleaning windows, and dusting offices to running ethernet cable and building the company’s first 10BASE-T corporate network. I assembled their first server and hooked it up to this new thing called the Internet through an ISDN modem. The work evolved, but the expectations never changed.
Fast-forward a few decades, and the lessons learned by building something from nothing are as relevant as ever. The gamut of people whose advice I take to heart and head remains wide, but their paradigm is thematically similar. In the months before Liberty Supply started, one of the people whose advice I sought grew up as a farmer. I explained to him all the dynamics of my situation. After the explanation, I said I was thinking about starting a business. He looked me square in the eyes and said: “If you got the drive, get to work.”
That advice had a profound impact on me. It did so because of who it came from and how obvious it was—actions, not words. The crops don’t care how you are feeling. They need to be tended to. The cows don’t care about your leisure plans. They need to be milked. You cannot control the weather, but you can control that you wake up every day and get to work.
Customers, suppliers, and our team often see me wearing a John Deere hat. I wear the hat as a reminder of that individual’s advice. He came from a John Deere family. But, more impactfully, he came from a mentality. To me, the hat is a symbol of that mentality.
“Just because something is basic, doesn’t mean that it’s easy.”~ Kobe Bryant
Discipline and hard work are more important to me than talent. Caring more is a competitive advantage. I remember a specific conversation where a customer asked me what separates Liberty Supply from everyone else. Without missing a beat, I said we’ll work harder than anyone else is willing to work for you. Simple as that may be, I believe it’s a differentiator. Discipline and hard work compound. Talent absent this mentality is fixed.
Last month, Liberty Supply smashed all of our internal KPIs. That’s the result of a team putting in the work. Over time, inputs are highly correlated with outputs.
“If you got the drive, get to work.”
That was the advice I got when I talked to a farmer.