I was honored to receive the Women’s Executive Circle Vanguard Enterprise Growth Award on behalf of Thinc Strategy. There were photos. There was applause. There was a very nice piece of glass. And I’ve spent the days since trying to work out what, exactly, I was holding.

Here’s where I’ve landed: an award like this looks like a moment. It isn’t. It’s the sum of every year it took to get here, compressed into a single evening so that it fits in your hands.

The years the award doesn’t show

Enterprise growth gets recognized when it becomes visible: when the headcount is real, the client roster is long, and the trajectory is unmistakable. But growth doesn’t happen at the moment it becomes visible. It happens in the years before, when nobody is watching and nothing about it looks like an award.

I think about the early days of Thinc Strategy, when the vision was considerably bigger than the client list. When “the firm” was a handful of people and a lot of conviction. When we were still finding out whether the way we want to work, pushing clients to think bigger rather than simply delivering what was asked, was something the market actually wanted.

I think about the years when growth was slow and the wins were small. Nobody hands you a trophy for surviving those years. But those are the years that decide whether there will ever be a trophy to hand out.

The clients who took a chance

No firm grows itself. The first thing this award recognizes, whether the citation says so or not, is a group of clients who took a chance on a young company with more ambition than track record.

The first bet is easy to romanticize and hard to overstate. Someone had to look at us before there was proof and decide we were worth the risk. And then, this is the part that actually builds a business, they had to come back. They had to trust us with harder work as we grew, to let the relationship stretch as our capabilities did. Growth at the enterprise level is really just the accumulation of that kind of trust, one engagement at a time.

The people who stayed

Behind the clients are the mentors, supporters, friends, and family who believed in this long before there was anything to point to. Belief is cheap when the outcome is obvious. It’s expensive when the outcome is uncertain, and the people who paid that price early are the ones this award belongs to as much as anyone.

They stayed through the slow years. They asked how things were going and meant it. They offered introductions, advice, patience, and sometimes just the plain reassurance that the thing we were building was worth building. You dont get to the stage without them, and you can’t fit them all on the stage once you’re there.

My partner

This award recognized enterprise growth, and I want to be precise about something: Kelli Snider’s fingerprints are on all of it.

Kelli has been in every hard decision and every win along the way. Every time we chose the harder, better path over the easier one. Every time we bet on the team, the client, or the idea before we were sure. Every time we had to decide what kind of firm we were going to be. Those decisions are what growth is made of, and I’ve never made one of them alone.

Thank you, Kelli. This one has your name in it too.

The team that does the work

To the entire Thinc Strategy team: you are the reason we keep growing. Not the strategy, not the brand, not the leadership, you.

You own the work. You push our clients to think bigger, which is the while point of the firm. and you do it with a level of care and rigor that makes me proud every single day. When a client trusts us with hard work, it’s because of what we did with the last piece of work. The growth this award recognizes is the trail you leave behind you.

The community that makes it matter

To WEC: thank you for building a community where women leading growing enterprises are seen, connected, and challenged.

That last word matters. It would be enough to be seen and connected. but the WEC does something harder, which is to put women whoo are building serious companies in a room together and ask more of them. It sharpens you. It reminds you that the bar is high and that plenty of people are clearing it. so you’d better keep going.

The award is an honor. The community is a gift.

This one is shared

So what does winning mean? It means that a lot of people, over a lot of years, made a lot of decisions that added up to something worth recongizing. It means the slow years counted. It means the trust was well placed.

To everyone who has been part of this journey, you know who you are. I get to hold the glass, but I’ve never once been holding it aline.

This one is shared.