Go Fast or Far

Hey, good morning team! Can you believe it? It is almost September. Summer just went by fast, didn’t it?

Today’s quote for Monday’s Message is: “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” I don’t know who said it, but it reminds me of something I’ve used many times. If you’re out on the water— when I was a young man, I had a youth pastor friend of mine who had some jet skis, and we went out a couple of times. I was hooked. I was immediately hooked.

We lived in Hood River at the time. We were just down the road here, down the highway, living in Hood River. And so Karen and I, we bought a Jet Ski. Karen loved it on really hot days when it was flat and it was like glass calm. We’d go out, we’d ride together and stuff, and it was a blast. It was real true joy. Boy, I tell you what, you can turn around on a jet ski on a dime. When you’ve got two people on the boat, you turn fast, one usually gets thrown off.

It reminded me of being in the military and going places and you have aircraft carriers and things. I don’t know how many of you guys have ever been on a cruise ship or a big boat. But when you were carrying three to five thousand people plus planes and automobiles and other kinds of things like that, those ships, they don’t move super duper fast, and they don’t turn quickly like a jet ski.

So it reminds me of that kind of same statement. Go fast or far. If you want to make a course correction on an aircraft carrier, you need to do it. Or if you want to turn around on an aircraft carrier, you’re going to need a big piece of ocean in order to do that, and it’s going to take a minute to turn and change course and move in a different direction.

Whereas on a jet ski alone is fun; it’s fast. You can spin around. You can get things done, and it’s a blast. But it’s sometimes lonely. Right? I mean, it’s fun for a little while, but at some point, if you’re not out there with other people on jet skis and stuff, you can get pretty darn lonely, or you could get into trouble. And if you’re anywhere alone and you get into trouble and you have nobody there to help you, you have to rely only on you. We’ve all seen and read about how people that go hiking alone get lost and sometimes never come back, how people that go out swimming alone sometimes never come back, people that go out and do a lot of different kinds of activities, they never come back because they’re alone.

And you can’t get a lot accomplished alone. So the message today, and you know how our core values work and resolve and invested and teamwork and humility in that core purpose, right? To be valuable because nothing less will do, we have an aircraft carrier—maybe not quite that big. I mean, we’re about 200 strong now, but with 200 team members and all their families, we can’t all fit on a jet ski. We can’t go fast, and we can’t turn around and make huge giant course corrections quickly.

I know that sometimes can seem frustrating for some team members, but if we want to go far—and Northwest Enforcement now is moving towards its 24th year—can you imagine? It’s beyond me sometimes to even think about what we have built here together. What having you guys banding with us together to accomplish and the things that we have done. For that, I’m super thankful and grateful to all of you for your hard work and dedication.

As we continue to move forward into the rest of this year and with the growth that we have seen both in the team and within contracts and clients and so on and so forth, I want to remind you that our goal is to go far, not fast. We want to get things done, but we don’t—we’re not in it to try to get somewhere fast. And that’s why, because there are so many of us, it takes a little bit more time, it takes more effort to communicate both sides of the fence, both ways on the highway. Communication is a two-way street, and so we’re going to keep working harder at communicating with all team members.

Team members, we would really appreciate you communicating with us, and we prefer, especially much of our communication, to be in writing, documented, and sent to us via email requests. And it doesn’t matter what those requests are, but you send them in via email—concerns, issues—so that our team can take the time to read through it and answer your questions in a thorough way and to solve your problems that you may have in a thorough way. We can’t do it all by phone anymore, and so that’s another important thing. And I know there’s information coming out to talk a little bit more about that in the coming weeks.

Again, I just want to tell you how much we appreciate you, and together we are going to go far. We are—we have made such progress, but we’re not going to be able to go fast. We can’t turn quickly; we can’t move fast because we’ll lose people in the process. So we’re gonna move through together, and we’re going to get there. What a journey it has been, and what a journey it is. We’re looking forward to our future because of all of you who have joined with us to accomplish these great things.

All right, so guys, again, it’s another Monday. It’s a beautiful week. Think about how you can be valuable because, you know, nothing less will do. God bless you; I’ll see you next week.