“Gritty” has become a popular term in our culture to describe a person or an athletic team. Even the pro hockey team the Philadelphia Flyers mascot is named “Gritty,” which instantly makes sense to us because hockey is a sport that embodies how our athletic culture views this word. What other team sport can you watch which allows and celebrates fist fights as part of the game? As our culture has sought to downplay and disdain good old fashioned masculinity, it’s pretty awesome to see words like this making a comeback and being popularized.
The word traces its origins to Middle English, back to the 1590’s, originally “greot”, which described sand, gravel, and other hard, tough materials. As this word has evolved with the English language, we have fortunately landed on “grit” for spelling and pronunciation. It doesn’t take much thinking to understand how this word would come to be used as an adjective in our popular vocabulary. If you have ever been hit by a rock or had sand thrown in your eyes (I had two older brothers), you quickly come to respect the substance and most times the person using the substance against you.
At Home Brands we have decided to use it as one of our five core virtues that describe who we are as the type of people that excel in our culture.
Gritty: We are to get things done no matter the circumstance.
It takes a rare combination of perseverance and toughness to launch, build, and scale a small business. It is not easy, and we are honest about this from the start.
Being “Gritty” answers these questions that we all ask ourselves:
- Am I going to finish what I started?
- Am I going to “grit” out the long days and nights it takes to get this thing off the ground?
- Am I going to get this job done today because that is what we promised the home owner we would do?
In the small home services business, “Gritty” answers all those questions with “yes, I am” and is one of the main recipes of success.
