Earn Your Place Every Day
Without a humble but reasonable confidence in your own powers you cannot be successful or happy. — Theodore Roosevelt
When people talk about entrepreneurship, they talk about vision. They talk about freedom. They talk about scaling.
What they don’t talk about is the mornings.
Not the big ones with cameras and wins and headlines. The quiet ones. The ones where you wake up at 5 a.m., sit down at your desk with cold coffee, and work through the things nobody else knows how to do—or wants to.
Nobody ever talks about watching the inbox at 6:30 while the house is still dark, answering warranty emails from two time zones ahead, just in case that person’s mission depends on their watch working today.
They don’t talk about standing in the conex in your driveway with a can of spray paint and an assembly line of grenade cans, making sure the last thing a customer sees has been done by the same hand that started this company.
But I do.
Because that’s how you earn your place. Every day.
At the Agency, I lived by a saying. Not written down, but deeply understood. “What did I do today that gets me invited back tomorrow?” That line haunted me—in the best way. Because when you’re working in a place that doesn’t guarantee tomorrow, every day has to earn its own reason.
You can’t coast. You can’t count on yesterday. You can’t point to your resume or how well you did before. The invitation to return comes from what you did today.
When I left after thirteen years, my last official day was a Wednesday. That Thursday morning, as a civilian, I was invited back in to meet with leadership and discuss what could be better.
Not because I asked. Because I’d earned it.
And that stuck.
So when I started ARES, I didn’t bring that line as a motto. I brought it as a mandate. Everything we do—every part we cut, every call we take, every product we ship—has to earn its place. We don’t get to exist because we have a website. We don’t deserve customers because we’re American-made.
We have to prove it every day.
That’s why we double-check specs that already passed. That’s why we remake parts when they’re “close enough.” That’s why we reblast cases that only we would notice had a finish inconsistency.
Because we’re not just earning a sale. We’re earning a place—on someone’s wrist, in someone’s trust, in someone’s mission.
It’s easy to work hard when people are watching.
But the real test is what you do when they’re not.
When no one’s posting. When orders are flat. When the shop is cold and the parts are late. When the pressure isn’t external—it’s internal.
That’s when leadership shows up.
Not in how many people follow you. But in how deeply you follow through with your people.
Servant leadership isn’t about being in charge. It’s about being accountable. And around here, accountability starts before dawn. We work in obscurity by design. The people we serve don’t want fanfare. They want dependability. They want clarity. They want things that just work, over and over, without drama.
So we build like that. We structure our days like that. We lead like that. We do the work before the light comes up. Because when it does, the work should be ready.
Reputation isn’t something you own. It’s something you rent—and pay for daily.
You don’t earn your place once. You earn it again and again.
By getting up. By showing up. By finishing what others don’t even see.
That’s the discipline. That’s the posture. That’s the promise.
Earn your place. Every single day.
