Today, I am thankful and grateful for an amazing team.

We cannot stress this enough, hiring and having the right people around your business makes your overall business thrive. There is really no substitution when you are trying to grow your business as the tasks that you must do to maintain your business become more and more dependent on you as the business grows.

Gather and Forge has been going some sprouting lately and we are feeling the pain of it in our knees, growing pains I think is what they are called. When you are just starting and all of the day-to-day tasks need to be done, more times than not, those tasks are all done by you. Well what we are learning is that there is literally only 24 hours in a day and as your business grows, not only your old day-to-day tasks have to get done but more things constantly keep getting added on. This is when it is time to bring on other sets of hands.

This past year has proven to be a year of growth for not only the business but for me as well. There are things that I have accomplished this year that I could have only dreamed about in years past. We went from having just myself and an amazing employee to having 7 total people working on the business. ALL of us are busy as heck and we are constantly tryin to figure out ways to innovate our process and tighten our user experience. Things are going GREAT!

In the past 8 months, we have had the great pleasure of bringing back one of the original Founders of the company (a lesson to never burn bridges), allowed some of the best talent in Austin to be apart of the journey and we have continued to be supported by all of those people that have kept us going this whole time. There are different ways that people approach who they bring on, how they operate, what their goals are, and why they are doing those things. The reality, at least in my opinion is that we should all strive to provide a good environment for our people, They deserve to want to come to work, and if they don’t than that means we are not doing our JOB as bosses. Our main job is to make sure that there is food on the table and a stable work environment for people to walk into. Now, of course this is easier typed than done but it is something that we all need to be aware of. We might as well add another thing to our plate and we can’t wait to tell you guys about it!

Moving forward, Gather and Forge is starting a Supper Club in Austin, Texas that will benefit those in need. These next few months, a team member of Gather and Forge is the candidate and we are going to try our very best to make sure that we help as much as we can in order to dig our guy out of the weeds financially. The restaurant industry is broken, if you work in the industry, you know this but what you don’t know is just how this affects the lives of the people that have to deal with this stuff. Most of the time, naturally we just think that insurance is going to cover these things and we don’t ever think about what the person on the other side is thinking. We first flirted with the idea of the supper club months ago and have done 3 of them thus far. All 3 were not for profit but they weren’t for charity either, we were doing them for marketing reasons. Things that we have learned during our journey take shape in the form of “money isn’t everything”. In fact, health and longevity are everything!

In The Weeds is now presented to you. A Culinary experience that embodies the broken business model that we call a restaurant and takes that brokenness and uses it as awareness to help people that are in the weeds financially. There are times in your life that you just have to go with your gut and do the right thing. There are ways that we all can help and sometimes it seems like it is a little scary to do those things. Those things allow us to grow and help change the world, even if it is not going to “payoff” right away. Searching for the right thing to do in a charitable way all comes down having the right people around you. The people that are going to be down for the work, and up for the cause. Here is to the people that make Gather and Forge great. They deserve the award, because without them, we go nowhere! Onward and Upward. Cheers.

-Ryan