Catedral de Chartres – França – By Valéria Lima
Por Eline Kullock
It is with great pride that I think of my team. The people who work hard and work with me. Above all when I look back, I see how my business, Grupo Foco, started out. And today on Oct 28th Grupo Foco celebrates its seventeenth birthday.
I don’t want to talk about the 17th birthday in itself. However, I do want to raise the question of how we can build things, even in the midst of various obstacles, if we are in fact determined and dedicated enough.
We started out small, with 5 people, and one computer. Today we’ve come a long way. A lot of people have been part of this history, each person adding a special something to the mix. Every single person believed that they could build a wall. And these are the walls that cathedrals are made of.
I look at the size we’ve grown to today, and I think of our capacity and of the people who believed in a dream and really ran after it, doing everything possible to make it come true. That’s beautiful. I love the sentence in which an anonymous author declared “Without knowing that it was possible, he went there and did it.”
It takes a lot of teamwork to build a cathedral. Often we don’t even know that we are capable of something so grandiose. But with hard work we create something even larger than our imagination.
One thing that I never compromised on is finding a team of people who knew what mattered. A team with solid values, strong work ethic, and friendship, creating a pleasant and challenging work environment, that demands a lot from each member of the team, and from the team as a whole. We all know that you need to break down paradigms to be a success. You need to experiment and make mistakes. And of course, you need to get it right!
Everybody talks about teamwork, but I can honestly say that my team really knows what the word means. Building in their own way, in a special and successful way. Of course in the middle we faced people who did everything wrong. People who actually slowed us down, rather than adding value to the company. These individuals were skeptical of new ideas, especially the really innovative ones. We encountered a lot of this during our 17 years. Yet, luckily, the majority continued to work really hard, building something, tile by tile, lifting up heavy walls. In the end, not just building one, but many cathedrals!
Congrats to all who work in this way, building not only businesses, but the best world possible.
Cheers!
