Irrational Persistence

6 Value Values

Your beliefs become your thoughts, 

Your thoughts become your words, 

Your words become your actions, 

Your actions become your habits, 

Your habits become your values, 

Your values become your destiny. 

—Mahatma Gandhi

So many people believe that business is about compromising your values.

Compromising your product in order to hit financial margins.

Compromising your employees for profit.

Doing whatever is necessary to make the sale, whether it is in your customer’s interests or not.

Giving back to your community only when it is in your company’s best interests to do so.

Adhering to your core, human values, however, can actually put you at an advantage, an advantage that over time will help you create more value than you ever will by compromising them for short-term gains, for apparent business reasons.

Over the course of my first decade at Garden Fresh, we faced several significant challenges, often existential in nature.

The core, human values that we held dear throughout these events in the end truly shaped our destiny.

And created tremendous value.

RESOLVE

Just after I became a partner at Garden Fresh, a competing brand of fresh salsa, also emanating from metro Detroit, was launched: Chuck & Dave’s.

It rocked Jack and Annette to their very core.

I had never met either Chuck or Dave, but Chuck was Garden Fresh’s former operations manager and Dave had been Garden Fresh’s production and maintenance supervisor.

So integral to Garden Fresh operations were ...