Baton Rouge. GateCheck — a virtual ID and training app for the people who badge into chemical plants. Shell, Chevron, a hundred-plus workshops with the workers themselves.
Workshops with every employee. Workshops with linemen. Gate access, safety protocol, course quality, badge printing, apps. I even taught a class once, for some reason.
Version one of GateCheck was excellent, in a conference room. Out at a plant gate at it was useless. Cold hands. Work gloves that don't register on a screen. One bar of signal. A line of trucks behind you and a guy who's been awake since four and is not interested in your onboarding flow.
Every assumption we made was made indoors, by people who were warm.
So we went and stood out there and rebuilt it for gloves and bad signal. Security-check failures down twenty percent, course completion up ten. None of that came out of the conference room.
But that's not what those two years were about.
I came in to change the world and to prove my worth through what I produced. I knew products. I did not know that the people inside a building already have a culture, and it was not waiting on me.
By the time I could see my own wake — my discoveries landing on people as something other than good news — it was hard to turn back. . I wanted to build things that saved lives. What I got was a lesson in patience, which was not a personality trait I got to skip.
So I quit and started my own company. Not great at taking my own medicine.
Boats make a wake. Watch what your decisions do to the water around you.
A product doesn't change a culture, and one person rarely does either. Change takes time — which means patience isn't a personality trait, it's a requirement.