Which Team Are You On?

I've been thinking a lot lately about the people who helped build our company and the people who will help take it to the next level.

When you're building a small business, you learn pretty quickly who your "ride or dies" are.

They're the people who worry about money being wasted, even when it isn't their money. They notice when something isn't right and do something about it. They'll learn a job they've never done before because it needs doing. They don't spend a lot of time figuring out whose responsibility something is. They just figure out how to get it done.

They care about the company as if it were their own.

As a former soldier, I think about it like being given a hill to take. You look around at the people beside you, and you know. Some of them would follow you up that hill in the worst possible circumstances. More importantly, you would follow them.

That's a special kind of team.

But something interesting happens when a small business grows. We add departments, managers, processes, policies, and layers of responsibility. All things we need. We can't operate a large company the same way we operated a small one.

But somewhere along the way, it's easy for the mindset to change.

"That's not my job."

"That's not my budget."

"That's somebody else's problem."

I've watched some people who helped build this company slowly adopt that mindset. I've also watched others double down on the very things that made us successful in the first place.

And I've watched brand-new employees walk through our doors and immediately become the kind of teammates you'd want beside you on that hill.

That has taught me something.

Ownership isn't about how long you've been here. It's about how you show up.

I don't expect everyone to work around the clock. I don't expect everyone to know everything. And I certainly don't expect everyone to agree with me.

I do expect people to care.

Care about the money we spend. Care about the quality of our work. Care about the person working beside them. Care about our customers and, most importantly, the warfighters counting on what we deliver.

Care enough to speak up. To learn. To take responsibility. To solve problems instead of passing them along.

Growth is going to test us. It already has.

And maybe one of the most revealing things about scaling a company is discovering that the team you started with isn't necessarily the team you'll finish with. Not because people are disposable, but because people make choices about how they want to contribute, and those choices can change.

We have an extraordinary team at Mettle Ops. Some have been with us since the early days. Others just arrived. Every day, people are earning their place beside one another through the way they work and the way they care.

There's room on this team for anyone who wants to be part of it.

And the beautiful thing is, we all get to decide what kind of teammate we're going to be.

I've come to believe that a dream team isn't something you get hired into. It's something you choose to be part of, over and over again. Nobody earns a permanent spot based on what they did five years ago, and nobody has to wait five years to prove they belong. Every one of us gets to make that choice today. Including me.

When the hill is in front of us, I hope you'll look around, recognize the team you're on, and decide to take it with us.