The Long Game

My dad felt like quitting many times. He has said this himself. There were years with one employee. Years where he did not know if there was a next year. He stayed because, as he puts it, he was unemployable. He had to figure it out.

Fifty years later that stubbornness is the entire company.

I think about that a lot. The version of this business that exists today is only here because someone refused to quit during a stretch that probably looked, from the outside, like a failed business. The people who saw him in those years and wrote him off were not wrong about what they saw. They were wrong about what was coming.

Most founders I know quit about two years before the curve bends. Not because they are weak. Because it is genuinely hard to hold on when you can not see the other side. And nobody tells you the other side is there.

I am not going to tell you the other side is always there either. Sometimes a business is actually failing and you should let it go. But I will tell you that the timelines in manufacturing are longer than most people understand. You do not build anything real in two or three years. You are still laying foundation.

We have been in business for over fifty years. We have made over a million hats. That did not happen fast.

Patience is not passive. It is a strategy. You keep your head down. You get better at the thing you are doing. You outlast the people who are better funded but less committed. And eventually the market catches up to what you built.

Or it doesn't. But I would rather find out by actually finishing.