Counting the Cost

When I was sixteen, I ran away from home to Italy.

My parents would tell that story differently, and they would be entitled to. But there is a piece of it I have carried into every job I have held since.

I did not simply want to go. I priced it. A year abroad cost a specific number, and I did not have it. So that summer I took three jobs. I drove a bus before dawn, caddied through the afternoon and restocked grocery shelves at night. Eighteen hour days, all summer. In late September I took the train to JFK, dropped a letter to my parents in a mailbox and boarded a plane to Rome.

What that summer taught me was not that wanting something is enough. Wanting something is common. What is rare is counting the cost honestly, and then paying it.

So before I accepted this position, I did the same thing. I read five years of financials. I read the trajectory. And I found something almost no organization in this sector can claim. Thirty years of solvency. Growth every year since inception. Not one year of retreat.

Understand what that is. That is not luck and it is not the market. That is thirty years of people counting the cost and paying it, long before I arrived.

Then I found one more number, and it is the one that decided me. Our attrition is three percent. The industry average is fifteen. For every person who leaves here, five leave somewhere else. In a field that burns through good people, this organization keeps them.

No Margin, No Mission. This organization has held both for thirty years, and the reason is sitting in this room.

I paid that price once, for one year, for myself. You have been paying it far longer, and for someone else. That is the difference between us, and it is why I am glad to be here.