I am proud to announce our new partnership with Charlotte’s Red Ventures — one of the fastest growing brands out there, Red Ventures employs more than 3,000 people and is the country’s largest technology-enabled platform for growing sales and marketing businesses. Success is driven by advanced internet analytics, proprietary technology and the company’s greatest competitive advantage – their people.
As my colleague John Blanchard frequently challenges me to know “my why,” I realize, “why” really is the question to answer. Let me share with you a portion of an inspiring open letter from Ric Elias, the CEO of Red Ventures that helps to explain:
“More important than what we do is why we do it, and for someone to truly understand who we are and what unifies us as Red Ventures, they must understand what we believe.
We believe everything is written in pencil and that in time it will be either obsolete or proven wrong. We believe in focusing on the climb (inputs) and not on reaching the peak (outputs).
We believe in home-grown talent and are very committed to meritocracy with a heavy investment in learning and development for those who are culture carriers and strong performers. We believe in the constant struggle to get better every day and in winning the right way.
We believe we must behave like we are running out of time and constantly feel like we are jogging up the escalator. We believe we have little time to worry about the past or about what we can’t control. We b
elieve that the world is changing faster than most humans and companies are able to handle, so for us failure is always an option, but never an outcome.
We believe that our many failures are stepping stones instead of roadblocks, and the only goal is to avoid any terminal ones. We believe that most of our success has been due to luck, but throughout time we have built a secret weapon – a culture of adaptability.
We believe that we are all line employees and that our leaders’ jobs are to maniacally focus their teams on getting better every day. We believe that our stars are those who focus on problem solving and ultimately are able to get important things done. We believe that people should feel free to say what they think, not what they think leadership wants to hear.
We believe that if someday you feel like it’s time to give back then you probably took too much along the way. Therefore, our focus is investing now in our employees and in the communities we operate in.
We believe that just because something is a fact doesn’t make it a reason. We believe we must have the courage to pursue opportunities and ideals bold enough to scare us.
We believe we should take our work but not ourselves seriously, so fun is an important aspect of our work. We believe in an employee-first culture where growth and the discomfort it produces are why people stay longer than they planned.
We believe that the bigger we get, the smaller we need to act, so we constantly change the way we organize our work. We believe that growth hides many sins and we must not get complacent about our culture or our performance.
We believe that our culture is constantly evolving and our goal is to empower our employees to be the authors of who we will be.
We believe that our true purpose is to do all we can to positively alter the trajectory of the lives and careers of those that we touch. We believe that as long as we are clear and focused on this, our journey will be like no other.
We believe in leaving the wood pile higher than we found it.”
Red Ventures is vested in the journey of the student-athlete and has provided Game Plan student-athletes with leadership lessons straight from their team. These lessons will be available in the Game Plan eLearning courses this September.
Red Ventures plans to hire 600+ college graduates this coming year and will be working with Game Plan to identify student-athletes from the network to join their amazing culture. We couldn’t be more thrilled to be working with such an exemplary company.
Welcome to the crew Red Ventures! We could not be more excited about our new partnership!
— Vin
