After 96 programs, 230,000 miles, and countless hugs given, the Swift Kick team is calling it a wrap on 2017.
In 2004, I started Swift Kick with the goal of making it a world-class leadership training company. Nothing about the past 13 years has been smooth sailing. But 2017 was our best year ever – not only in terms of revenue, but more importantly in terms of how many leaders we’ve been able to train and lives we’ve been able to positively impact. And it’s not just with leaders and teams we worked with this year that we’ve seen the impact. We are hearing from people we worked with several years ago. They are still saying how our philosophy of Dance Floor Theory is helping them in ways not even we could imagine. Check out this story of someone standing in line at a deli.
While it may not seem like it from the news headlines, I feel a shift in the consciousness of society is underway. It’s a shift towards cooperation. A shift towards humanity. A shift towards community. We built the idea of #TeamHuman out of this consciousness. It’s a consciousness that believes we are better together, and that together we can go much further than alone.
“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”
From classrooms, to municipalities, to boardrooms, a movement of cooperation is happening and we see it as the net result of our trainings. Individuals become teams, students become leaders, and customers become family. When we care about those around us, those around us care about us. That’s what it means to be on #TeamHuman, and that’s what it’s like to build a Culture of Connection.
As we look ahead to 2018, here’s what we have in store:
– Unified Trainings
We used to say a major skill of ours is that we can take any training and “Swift Kick It” to make it amazing. While this is still true, moving forward, we are only going to focus on creating trainings that teach leaders on how to run their teams and organizations more effectively.
– A Leader Book
We are long overdue to put our core philosophy into a book. A “manual” on our core teachings will help leaders expand their knowledge long after they’ve gone through a training with us.
– Online Trainings
While in-person trainings are the most effective, not everyone can afford to bring in one of our facilitators. So we’re going to build out a whole suite of online trainings so that we can reach even more leaders.
– Regional Trainings
There is power in bringing together the best and brightest into one room for multiple days, to really go deep. We will create regional trainings for leaders that do just that.
– Growing The Team
With the record year we had in 2017, the team was already pushed hard to perform at top capacity. So, it’s only natural that as we move into 2018 and plan for an even bigger growth, that we’ll be bringing on additional trainings as well as support staff.
The irony of writing this very hopeful, future-focused post while a pipe bomb went off several blocks from our office here in NYC is not lost on me. Yes, it seems like so much division is happening around the world. It’s in these moments, however, that real change can, and will, happen. Swift Kick is positioned to be the leader in training those who know that a better future of cooperation is yet to come. And through cooperation, real success will happen.
Here’s to the start of 2018 and the start of something even greater!
