In the West, the holiday season summons different memories and plans for different people. The thought of gorging on a selection of delicious fowl and carbohydrates. Spending time with friends or family or loved ones for a gift exchange, or maybe not so loved ones for the obligatory once a year meet and greet. Maybe you volunteer at a local soup kitchen to serve those in need.

In the IT industry, as well as many other professions, working long and late hours is part of the job, and the thought of sleeping in a couple extra hours for a day or two could be at the top of your holiday break to-do list. Others may stay up all night for the official retail kickoff to the busiest shopping days of the year. For many, the activities will be a combination thereof, but whatever your yearly holiday rituals may be, the mere essence of the holiday season can help us remember to reflect on what we are thankful for. In our fast-paced world that we live in, it’s hard not to have blinders on at some point in time. Gratitude should be practiced every day of the year, but an explicit reminder is never a bad thing.

My wife and I recently relocated to the Northeast coast, and we have many reasons to be thankful this year. Having the ability and freedom to make the move is immense, and we are extremely thankful for this opportunity. One positive aspect to traveling so much as a consultant has been the ability to vet many different areas of the country, and decide which region would be the best fit for my family. The largest factor in our ability to move comes from the flexibility gained by running our own company – Heraflux Technologies. Since we have no required city or state to live in, we just need access to an airport and a stable internet connection readily available. Although some states are considered more advantageous to growing a business over others, we were able to focus on quality of life. Because we whole-heartedly believe that in the pursuit of running and growing the very best company we can build, day-to-day quality of life is a vital component and is both directly and indirectly related to our goal. We are here to serve our clients in the best manner possible, meaning making decisions in their best interests, with ethics as one of our guiding principles. We are ever so thankful to all of our clients, as they have given us the ability to transition our efforts to living our passion every single day. Although the written words don’t seem powerful enough, thank you to all of our clients and business alliances!

As we continue to grow and hire employees, we cannot forget those who work with us. I want to emphasize work with us over for us. Working for Heraflux Technologies means things like receiving your pay, benefits, and W2 with the words Heraflux Technologies somewhere on a physical document, but our stance even before we hired our first employee was reciprocal respect for the employee and employer relationship.

Our practices couldn’t have been better surmised by Bryan Johnson, who sold his company Braintree to Ebay for $800 million. He has shared that from the beginning, Braintree had three goals: employees would say it’s the best company they have worked for; engineers would say it’s the best payments platform in the industry; and customers would write love letters to the company. Get these three things right and everything else takes care of itself.

Our approach is to empower and value employees as much as our wonderful customers. Without the hard work they put in day in and day out, we would not be where we are today, and these key components hold the potential to get to where we are going. So with that said, we are extremely thankful to those we work with and for, and I challenge more organizations to share their gratitude for their fellow employees not just over the holiday season, but also throughout the year.