Shaping The Company

According to Google, an engineer is a person who designs, builds, or maintains engines, machines, or public works. You speak with any engineer and more than likely their dream is to design a new innovative technology–to create something that solves a problem. What I perceive as my “innovative technology” is a system of people working together to change lives. Less technological, but requires engineering nonetheless.

Finding the solution to a problem is probably one of the greatest feelings in the world, especially if you connect with the problem you’re trying to solve. I connect with people and love seeing how each individual fits within the larger picture. Everyone has different experiences and fresh perspective that play into the world that we live in. So, you can probably understand why Morph has become a passion and why envisioning the operations is so fulfilling. Morph started off with myself, then turned into a founding team of five, and now it’s becoming an entity that will operate with more players involved. While each will have their own role in the grand scheme, they are all so interwoven within the fabric that makes up Morph’s mission. Collaboration and cohesion has been the key focus when creating company roles because these focus areas, coupled with our diversity, are what has made the founding team so successful to-date.

So far, progress has consisted of steps–now, soon to be leaps.

As an engineer and an entrepreneur, it’s a dream coming to fruition and words simply can’t explain the feeling. The journey has just started, and I can’t wait for you all to see what we create within communities around the world.

The Team

“The Team” was starting to come together. After a number of months, the organizational structure was finally starting to fall into place. Of course, that is what I thought anyway—change is so fluid in a startup that things are constantly falling into place at about one million miles per hour. I remember the feeling I had during our first meeting at The Nook in Huntsville. It’s very similar to the feeling I have right now as I write this post. A surge of electricity that flows through the entire body with a sense of confidence that makes you feel that you can take on the world. And that’s exactly what we were setting out to do.

So, who was the team that turned out to be Morph’s co-founders? What was it that made them stand out and how are they all each vital to Morph’s success? Most startups struggle trying to find a group of individuals, let alone one individual that truly understands the vision and problem a company is seeking to solve. An obvious problem may make it even more difficult, because an individual may understand the need but whether or not they’re the right person for the team is an entirely different question.

So what separates this group from those that just relate to Morph’s vision? Dedication. Not only that but the excitement and wide-eyes that come natural while talking about the bigger picture. The trust and understanding that they have with me and each other to make this dream a reality. The shared confidence that we all have moving forward in revealing that Huntsville is a great place to live. We all have a different relationship with the city due to our diverse experiences, but we’re all able to relate to one thing, and that’s Huntsville. We love our city and we are invested in making it shine for others that move here.

I want to go back to talking about my perspective though because I love talking about my team, and what they’ve done to allow me to grow as a leader. To receive trust, trust must be given. This became a powerful source of energy, as a leader, to know that the decisions that I make to ensure this vision comes to fruition would be supported. In return, it gives me the confidence to trust them in calling out my bullshit sometimes (not all ideas are good ideas and I’m glad that I’m free to shoot out a couple bad ones sometimes; they got my back to call me out).

Morph has become my baby, my heart and soul. The very fabric of its vision is drawn from my own experience moving to a new city and attempting to draw a bridge between that and the experience I’ve had growing up with my incredible friends and family. However, I know that if Morph is to succeed on the very fabric it was founded, it would need to be implemented into our culture. That’s exactly what I’ve found in Morph’s co-founders—family.

I found the kind of team that’s going to put the mission above each other’s gains as if it was their child. The kind that’s going to make sure each piece of the family succeeds at what they do (and call out each other’s bullshit). The kind that’ll have laughs together and dream bigger than anyone could understand; our dreams would develop our own inside jokes. The kind that would infect new members of the family with the same euphoria that we felt. The kind that each had an important role to fill and would complement each other so that each person could count on one another to get shit done.

Much like a start-up, the team needs to be fluid in their understanding and communication while the vision remains a commonality. As the founder, I’ve come to recognize this over time; something that the team has helped me realize and understand. While it started out as one with a dream, has now become a family. We’ve only started, but I consider Morph to be one of the most successful startups, but then again, I’m a little biased.

Just like any family we’re going to have our problems, every startup does, but we’re going to get through them when they come up because our mission is bigger than each of us. It’s bigger than all of us put together. However, our strength as a team is enough to carry the weight.