Crossvale CEO’s reaction on receiving Red Hat’s “Customer Solution Success Partner of the Year 2021”
To say I was astounded and humbled recently is an understatement. The news almost brought me to tears – 2020 and into 2021 had been a beating not only to me and Crossvale but on a global scale.
What news had me speechless (I always have got something to say) and emotional?
It was the call from Red Hat to say that our company had been recognized for outstanding performance in a category and we had won a Red Hat Partner of the Year award.
The award is validation. The award is recognition. The award is appreciation.
Validation of worthwhile effort. Recognition of the work that had to go into keeping things moving. Appreciation of out of the box, innovative thinking coupled with investment.
So, again back to the question – why so emotional? When I broke it down, I think it really comes back to three things:
Passion, Trust and Delivery.
As a company we are passionate about what we do. I personally love it. I mean it. I love what we do. Getting up in the morning and working with talented folks like Akshith, Ulises, Pablo, Ken, Jason, Carissa and many others is what I really love to do. Be careful of asking me about passion because I will talk your ear off! I will tell you yarns about LaMont being stuck in an ice storm (Very funny now, not funny then) en route to delivering solutions for a banking customer. I will chatter at length about software delivered in Riyadh under the most stressful and difficult of situations. We can recount the decision to open our European operation and then expand that into a Spanish subsidiary because we genuinely believed that there was a need for our services and that we could bring value. Each one of these tough decisions (and funny stories) had at its core, a real passion for what we do.
Much like each of you I had many sleepless nights over the last 12 months. From a business standpoint, like countless other companies, I had to make some very hard decisions, that were not taken lightly.
The health of family, colleagues, friends, and partners was top of mind but at the same time the health of the company as we employ quite a few folks who depend on our business for mortgage payments, healthcare, work visas and to simply put bread on the table.
When you have to make these decisions that have real-life results, it can impact trust. I felt like I had let some folks down and lost their trust when we had to let a few folks go and this really hit me on a personal level. I know the rest of the management team were as devastated by the decision.
Trust is a core tenet of mine and our company and when we lose trust it hurts us deeply.
That being said our clients and our partners such as Red Hat trusted us a lot and vice versa. Trust is earned not given or bought. The trust we put in Red Hat is without question and I think the award in an indication that this is a two-way street.
As I sat and thought about the Red Hat award, I started to think about how the award committee made their decision. There are a lot of exceptional partners in the eco system. I know many of the partner leaders personally and we have a great relationship.
As I said, the partner program is amazing, and I think a large part of that comes from follow-through. Say what you are going to do, and then do it. It is a simple concept, right? It’s disappointing that we see it less frequently than we would hope in today’s world. What we at Crossvale strive to do, and what Red Hat excels in doing, is Deliver.
We deliver what we say we will Deliver. We Deliver on time. We Deliver to the best of our ability.
As I said earlier in the post Passion, Trust and Delivery were part of the reason I think Red Hat made the very humbling decision to award Crossvale this year.
It so happens that these are our core values at Crossvale:
Passion, Trust and Delivery.
We try and live them every day and we strive and have been successful finding staff who live, breathe, and essentially have these core values as part of their DNA.
What are your core values? It is not an easy question to answer but one I think that everyone should consider. You might find yourself happier when you work it out.
Thanks,
Conor
