Good morning,
Plenty of entrepreneurs are shaped by their childhood experiences. Gassia Gerges spent her youth in Beirut watching bombs and bullets cross the sky like fireworks.
When she was 12, her Christian family fled to the U.S. to escape religious persecution during the Lebanese Civil War. The memories of that harrowing experience--sheltering from airplanes under trees, hiding in basements for weeks--stayed with her through college, graduate school, and a 20-year Memphis-based career in IT staffing. That proved crucial in 2014, when Gerges’s company was bought out by a private equity firm--prompting her and a colleague to quit and launch their own startup, which they called 1Link Technology.
Getting a business off the ground is never easy. For Gerges, it was particularly challenging: During 1Link’s first 18 months, she suffered intense personal grief, professional heartbreak, and a noncompete agreement preventing her from doing business within a 50-mile radius of her old clients. Instead of throwing in the towel, she doubled down--and built a company that generated $6.3 million in 2019 revenue en route to its second consecutive appearance on the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing companies in America.
Check out her inspiring tale to learn how embracing struggle helped make this founder more resilient. |
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