It’s hard to imagine a bigger challenge for a startup than an earthquake that shakes your entire operation in the middle of the night. This is a story of that triumph and how we handled everything 2019 threw at us like true Ninjas. 

The big earthquake

April 22, 2019, the Philippines got hit by an earthquake that devastated the country. Clark, the heart of our Ninja operations in the Philippines, saw buildings and homes destroyed, being within 200 Kilometers from the Epicenter. While Natural disasters are inevitable, it doesn't mean that they cannot be handled well. Our Ninjas got out safely and kept each other safe from harm. 

‍
Operations returned to normal within days with the help of Clark’s structural engineers. They checked the building and the SupportNinja office for signs of serious structural damage and assessed whether it was safe to return to our normal operations.  

Once the structural engineers declared that the building and the office were both safe for work, most of the Ninjas immediately started to report back to work. Yes, the earthquake damaged some parts of the building severely, but it could never bring down the resilience and intrepidity of the entire SupportNinja community. After all, we are Ninjas.

Solidifying the bond

About a month after the big earthquake, we ventured to a beautiful place around 4 hours from our office in Clark to have our Ninja Admin Retreat with over 60 of our admin team members.  We worked on improving our family’s strength and the level of personal trust we have in each other. We discovered that we can now achieve bigger things and aim higher than ever after having risen back up after the earthquake, proving to ourselves that there isn’t anything we can’t overcome. 

86th on the Inc. 5000

After all the struggles we all went through, we were taken by surprise as Inc Magazine’s annual Inc. 5,000 Fastest Growing Companies ranked us as the 86th fastest growing company nationwide with a three-year growth rate of 3,684%. If you want to learn more about how exactly did we nail that 86th rank, check out a piece that we wrote a while back where we get into the details a bit more. We were also listed by Austin Chamber’s A-List Awards as one of the “Most Innovative Home Grown Companies” of 2019. Additionally, we were listed as a part of the Austin Business Journal’s Fast 50.

How do we plan to keep up with this rapid growth, you may ask? The rational thing to do is to build out a new, bigger and better office so we can expand our company, right? Well, guess what? We already FINISHED doing that too!

Mission "New Office”: accomplished!

In preparation for our rapid growth as a company, we finished building out our new SupportNinja Hideout and it is an absolutely wonderful place where we can stretch our legs as a company and focus on improvement. Our achievements this year and in the previous years have all been a product of the unity and the level of trust that we share with each other. Recovering from the earthquake and all the achievements we’ve had wouldn’t have been possible without the amazing resilience of the Ninjas and our inspirational leaders. 2019, thank you. 2020, HERE WE COME!