April 16, 2019 · 7:42 PM · message one
The first thing anyone said in this group chat, you said.
Two minutes earlier you created the group and added twelve guys. You did not know yet that this thread would run to 9,162 messages, or that the word you would use three days later would end up on a building in Lindon, Utah.
Everything on this site came out of the archive itself. Every quote is real, every timestamp is real, every heart was counted. Nothing was written for effect. It was written by you, at the time, mostly late at night, usually about logistics.
April 19, 2019 · 10:13 AM · day three
The word appears.
The word grit occurs eighteen times across the entire archive. This is the first one. It is three days into the summer, and it is not a brand. It is a complaint about losing to Pittsburgh.
Then you can watch it get away from you. Nobody voted on it. Nobody made a logo. It started showing up in other men’s mouths, and then it stopped being a word and started being the name of the thing.
- Apr 19Ben “We don’t lose in the grit.”A standard, stated once.
- May 10Josh Nilsen “I saved this as a story on the grit Instagram”Three weeks later it has an account.
- May 13Josh Nilsen “Team Grit, WE KNOCK IN THE RAIN”Now a proper noun and a creed.
- May 28Josh Nilsen “Today is what grit is all about and you all embody that”It has become a thing you can embody.
- Jun 18Cody Olive “The mans got grit!”It has become a compliment.
- Jul 14Jordan Massey “Amazon has a suggestion for the Grit”Capital G. It has become an entity.
- Jul 24Dylan Hafen “BIG GRIT!!!!!!”It has become a shout.
- Aug 13Jack “the grit legacy will last forever”Four months in, they call it a legacy.
- Aug 23Robbie Hutchins “Grit baby”It no longer needs explaining to anyone.
You did not name a company on April 19, 2019. You set a standard and refused to explain it twice. The company is what happened when the standard outlived the summer.
2020 to today · the echo
The standard outlived the summer.
Eight months after this chat went quiet you co-founded Grit Marketing with John Taylor and Garth Massey. John Taylor is quoted inside this very archive, on June 8, 2019, giving advice about confidence and mindset. Jordan Massey was in the group. The company was already in the room.
Thirty-seven Golden Doors out of one organization in a single season. And in 2021 Grit partnered with Aptive, the company whose 78% you were beating in a group chat in June 2019.
Robbie’s estimates
Those last two are Robbie’s back-of-the-napkin figures, not public numbers. He is guessing, and he knows he is guessing. You are one of about three people alive who knows what the real ones are. The point is not the accuracy. It is that a guy who was in your car groups in 2019 now has to estimate your company in hundreds of millions, and he still lowballs it out of habit.
Ben,
I still had the Philly group chat, so I had Claude read the whole thing. All 9,162 messages, all 1,086 of yours, every timestamp and every heart. I was looking for the big speeches and it found them, but that is not what got me.
What got me was the stuff neither of us could have counted by hand. The 3 AM car groups. The night you told us to leave the door unlocked for a kid getting in at 12:30. That you answered forty-eight guys in a median of under two minutes for four straight months. That on the biggest sales day any pest control team has ever had, the thing you said to us was to drink water in Delaware.
I was 22 and I thought that was just how it worked. Everybody had a Ben. Then I went out into the world and found out that almost nobody does, and that the reason nineteen of us ended up running things is that we all quietly copied a guy who was making it up at midnight in an apartment in King of Prussia and never once let us see him do it.
You said we were your guys forever. That went both ways and you should know it.
Thanks for the standard.
Robbie
The archive · what you were actually doing
Seven things you did every week without calling them anything.
None of this was written down in 2019. It is visible now only because the chat kept the receipts.
Close the loop.
You invented a read receipt inside a group chat because you refused to let critical information be optional. It is the single most repeated move in your entire corpus, and men answered it every time.
Coach them one man at a time, by name, on a schedule you wrote at midnight.
You did not run group trainings and call it development. You posted named time slots in blocks of ten and fifteen minutes, over and over, and you made them bring evidence.
Build the system, not the hero.
Your most-liked message of the entire summer is not a speech. It is you announcing that you had gone and joined a group chat with every technician in the region so the sales guys could point at a truck on the street. Then you benchmarked it.
Lead from the front, including the parts that hurt.
You were still on doors yourself in August. You got stung mid-pitch. You are allergic. You kept knocking.
Jul 27, Brad Neuhaus · “How about @Benjamin Egan finishing with 8 above $800”
Name the enemy.
You never once asked the team to beat a number. You asked them to beat a city. Pittsburgh, Detroit, Chicago, Louisville, Princeton, Cherry Hill. Abstractions do not get anybody out of bed at 7:30 in the rain. A rival does.
Protect the name when it costs you something.
Third most-liked message you sent all summer. Not a rally. A correction, delivered to a team that was winning, about a joke that was not hurting anybody yet.
Say it out loud, to men who would never say it first.
Young men do not tell each other this. You did, in writing, in the middle of a sales chat, at twenty past two in the morning.
And the one you never said out loud until it broke.
August 12, the morning before the hardest day of the summer. Nobody makes a leadership principle out of this one. It belongs here anyway.
He apologised. To them. For sleeping.
April 16 to August 24, 2019 · 128 days, counted
What it cost, in timestamps.
Everything in the first table is measured directly from the archive. No interpretation, no rounding in your favour.
| What | Value |
|---|---|
| Days on dutyOut of 131 calendar days. You missed three. | 128 |
| Longest streak without missing a dayTwo and a half months, unbroken | 73 |
| Working span, median dayFirst message to last, measured 5 AM to 5 AM so a night belongs to the day that earned it. Median first: 10:32 AM. Median last: 11:23 PM. | 12 h 17 m |
| Longest single dayAugust 13. 7:00 AM to 2:55 AM. The rain day, straight off the shortest night of the summer. | 19 h 55 m |
| Days longer than sixteen hours | 14 |
| Days that ended after midnightOut of 128 | 48 |
| Sleep ceiling, median nightGap between your last message and your first the next morning. This is the maximum you could have slept, not what you slept. You were running meetings inside this window. | 11 h 14 m |
| Nights with a ceiling under six hours | 4 |
| Shortest night of the summerThe night of the rain speech. Posted 11:31 PM, still going at 2:15 AM, back at 7:00 AM for the 7:30 meeting. | 4 h 42 m |
| Median time to answer somebodyForty-eight guys. 218 replies came back in under two minutes. | 1 m 55 s |
| Messages that were you answering someone41% of everything you wrote was reactive | 424 |
| One-to-six-word answers“930”. “Yes”. “Ready”. “Knock it”. A third of your summer. | 328 |
| Written pieces over fifty wordsThe speeches. Longest was 192 words. | 105 |
| Words written159 a day, every day, on top of the job | 20,390 |
| Distinct people addressed by nameIn a group of forty-eight. You were tracking more than double the roster. | 106 |
One hundred and six people. You wrote a hundred and six different human beings’ names into that chat, by hand, and the median time it took you to answer any one of them was one minute fifty-five seconds.
One ordinary Thursday
Not a record day, not a rivalry week. June 6.
From 2:48 AM to 11:53 PM, and the message you spent 3:03 AM on was telling everybody else to sleep in.
The heartbeat
Every message in the group, by day, across the whole summer.
It starts as a dozen guys. It builds through June. It spikes in the second week of August and then, within days of the last knock, it stops. Nine thousand one hundred and fifty-nine of the 9,162 messages were sent in 2019. After that a handful of stragglers, then five years of silence broken only by the notice that somebody left the group.
What the day actually cost
The chat can only see what you typed. It cannot see the calls, the drives, the one-on-ones, or the doors. So this table is a model, not a measurement. The evidence column is what the archive supports. The hours are estimated.
| Activity | Evidence in the archive | Est. |
|---|---|---|
| Running the morning meeting | Meeting time posted nearly every day: 9, 9:30, 10, 11. Agendas written out in advance. | 1.5 h |
| One-on-one pitch reviews | Named schedules in ten and fifteen minute blocks, run in groups of four. | 0.5 h |
| Car groups and area assignment | 86 posted rosters, roughly 25 names each, plus the corrections after. | 0.5 h |
| Routes, jobs, technician coordination | Constant. Booking, rescheduling, chasing Ashley, moving jobs to Donzza. | 1.5 h |
| Answering people | 424 reactive messages, four separate bursts a day, median response under two minutes. | 0.75 h |
| Your own doors | Still selling in August. “Finishing with 8 above $800.” Stung mid-pitch and kept going. | 4.5 h |
| Before a single mile driven | Reconciles with the measured 12 h 17 m median span. | 9.25 h |
Whatever the true figure was, it went to other people. Eighty-two per cent of everything you wrote that summer was either a reply to somebody, an operational instruction, or a one-line answer. The speeches everyone remembers are the other eighteen.
August 12 and 13, 2019 · the loudest day in the archive
Twenty-four hours, 179 messages, and rain.
Going into the last full week against Chicago, barely ahead, with a forecast that would have given anyone an excuse. At half past eleven at night you wrote this and went to bed.
Twenty-seven minutes later Josh answered. Note what he does with your words. He does not paraphrase you. He cites you.
They went out at 7:30 the next morning in the rain. August 13 became the loudest day in the history of this chat: 179 messages, more than any of the other 138 days it was alive. At ten past ten that night, with the day won, you wrote back the part that separates you from every other manager who has ever given a speech about rain.
August 7, 2019 · the phone call
Somebody told you it was not sustainable.
August 20, 2019 · ten thousand
The record went down live, in this thread, in real time.
Six weeks earlier, on the Fourth of July, Josh had called the shot out loud: “Can’t wait to do over 10,000 accounts.” Here is the night it landed. Read the timestamps.
Thirty-two accounts from the biggest pest control summer any single team has ever put up, with the whole group counting down in the chat, and your contribution to the moment was to remind everyone to drink water.
That is the entire thing. That is why nineteen of these men went on to run teams. Not the rain speech. The 3:37.
And at 12:26 AM, ninety minutes after the record fell, you were back in the thread asking who had Collin’s truck keys, because Ashley needed the truck at nine.
August 15, 2019 · 12:26 PM · the last ask
The final thing you asked that summer was not for a number.
The roster · forty-nine men
These are the names, as they appeared in the chat.
Nicknames left exactly as they were set in the summer of 2019, because that is who these people were to each other.
Nineteen of them went on to lead teams or build companies. Nine are still at Grit today. Every one of them learned what running a team at the highest level of this industry looks like by watching one guy do it in Philadelphia when he was young enough that nobody would have blamed him for doing it badly.
1,086 messages · search your own summer
Everything you wrote, April to November 2019.
Every message Ben sent in the Greenix Philly group, verbatim. Links stripped, nothing else changed. Try Detroit, brethren, rain, car groups, or somebody’s name.
Loading the archive…
Built from the complete Greenix Philly GroupMe archive: 9,162 messages, April 16, 2019 to July 6, 2024, 48 members. All quotes verbatim, all timestamps and heart counts as recorded. Times shown in Eastern. Grit Marketing figures from public reporting (GlobeNewswire, 2021; PR Newswire, 2026). Rep and revenue totals are Robbie’s estimates and are labelled as such. The 2019 account total and the record itself are his account of the summer.