“You have to always be default alive.”
In this conversation, Kent Waltman, Chief Administrative Officer, and Will Trepp, Co-Founder and COO of Rockport, explain why a business should never be structured in a position where it must succeed immediately or risk failure. A bootstrapped mindset reinforces discipline and ensures the company is always operating from a position of survival rather than urgency.
They discuss how pressure can compress decision making and shift focus toward the short term. They also highlight why customers value long term partners who are built to endure and not operate transactionally.
Being default alive means building a company that is positioned to survive year after year.
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You have to always be default alive. It's this flashy term now that means you can't be running at such a pace that you can run out of money and run out of business. That's the benefit of a bootstrapping mindset, which is default alive. You're always in a spot to survive. You should never be putting yourself in a spot where it's succeeded at something or die. That's exactly right. And often what I've witnessed is the other thing that happens is you get on that treadmill and decision making, human beings, you know, are driven by that urgency.
And so, decision making becomes, can become very short-term focused to, hey, just get through the quarter, just get through the year. I think at the end of the day, the key component of that is your customer. And understanding your market, understanding your customers, and having deep relationships with those customers. Again, it's not transactional and at times that means that you're going to have to invest in that relationship for long-term success. Now you can be honest, and you should be honest with your customer about that.
I've always appreciated clients who valued sustainability. They want their, the counterparty who's providing those services and products to, at the end of the day, be doing it in such a way that they are going to be default alive. To survive, yeah. Right? That they're going to make it through the year, they're going to make it through a five-year period, that it's a long-term relationship and they view it that way and not in a transactional fashion.