Admittedly, we’re pretty bad at celebrating our anniversary. It’s often been a moving target for us – from using the end of January as a general milestone because it was our first client work back in 2016, to celebrating our first year of existence three months late – I guess that is pretty indicative of the small business life.
January 12th 2016 – was the day we officially registered Relate. Well, Relate Consulting. We went with Relate because Robyn and I believed firmly that everything in philanthropy – and in life – comes from great relationship management. The R also stood for Rogers and Robyn, which was handy. So there we were, Relate Consulting.
Except, I wasn’t crazy about the name, at least not the ‘Consulting’ part. This stemmed from the fact that I didn’t see us as consultants, but if we weren’t consultants, then what were we? In my mind, consultants jump in, tell you what to fix and then disappear into the horizon, and we knew that that model just simply wouldn’t work for our clients – we needed to execute, we needed to be a part of the team…we needed to relate.
Exactly three months later, on April 12th 2016, we re-registered as Relate Social Capital. A friend suggested adding Social Capital – to be honest, I wasn’t exactly sure what ‘social capital’ meant, but as soon as I looked into it, I knew it was perfect.
‘Social Capital’ refers to the collective value of social networks, and the tendency of these networks to support one another, enabling that society to function effectively.
Throw in a few bad reiterations of our logo (I drove Robyn absolutely crazy sending her version after version that essentially all looked the same until we found the perfect one), some very bad proposals, lots of tears, so many wins, way too much imposter syndrome and here we are, turning 3.
I’m not going to lie – this is hard. Year two in particular, nearly buckled us. You see, Steve Jobs’ words ring so true to me: never start a business, start a movement. We always knew we wanted to do something together but we didn’t know it would be a business. We didn’t know we’d be focused on sports. We didn’t know people needed our expertise. We didn’t know what we were doing, until we knew – we were going to change the landscape of sport philanthropy. We were going to start a movement.
So a toast to turning three, here’s to so many more achievements, failures, successes and adventures we haven’t yet dreamed up!
