In 2012, I walked into Robert Gibson’s office to say goodbye.
I had just given notice to the firm where we both worked. The managing partner told me to leave that day. So I went to find Rob, to shake his hand, to close that chapter. He had worked with me for two years.
I told him I was leaving the firm. Starting my own thing. Rob listened. Then he opened his drawer, took out a toothbrush, a small jar of M&M’s, an apple-shaped cutting board, a knife, and a few other belongings. Put them in a briefcase. Closed it. Looked at me and said, “Where are we going?”
He then went into the same managing partner’s office and told him he was quitting right then and there. Got in his car and followed me to the new office.
I didn’t even know if we could fit in the small rented office room I had set up. I wasn’t planning on hiring anyone immediately. I called ahead and asked if they could fit a second desk. They said yes, as long as the desks faced each other. So Rob and I sat face to face.
What started as a constraint with those two desks, became philosophy. I built a firm around collaborative work.
I recently asked Rob what made him follow me. I wondered if it was faith in me, belief in what I was doing, something about our working relationship.
He was honest. He figured once I left, the managing partner was probably going to let him go anyway. He could see where the clients were going. He knew what the firm looked like without me. And he was curious to see what I could build. It wasn’t blind loyalty. It was a calculated bet on potential he couldn’t fully see yet. He stayed for real reasons, not performed ones.
He also told me that on the drive over to the new office, following me in my car, he had one thought running through his head: can Judd actually pay me?
Rob and I have a relationship I don’t have with anyone else in my life. We don’t break bread outside the office. We don’t text or call socially. I don’t know where he goes on vacation or what’s happening in his family. Rob is private and I respect that completely.
And yet, he has been there through everything. The growth, the chaos, the years that were hard, the versions of the firm and of me that weren’t easy to be around.
At this 10-year anniversary, I gave him a new Rolex. Time: literally and figuratively. A marker of what had been built, and what it meant that he was still there when we reached it.
I also recently asked Rob what he would tell the version of himself standing in that office about to follow someone into something that didn’t exist yet.
He said: keep the long view.
He was 32 when we left that firm together. He’s nearing 49 now. And what was built over those 16 years is not something either of us could have seen from the start.
The long view. I’ve been thinking about that since he said it.
Lately, I’ve been writing about the people who stay. What I keep finding is that their staying isn’t simple. Rob didn’t follow me out of that office because it was his Jerry Maguire moment. He followed me because he saw possibility and had nothing to lose. And over the years he found something worth staying for.
That’s not a loyalty story. That’s a better story. A man who made a pragmatic bet and discovered over time that it was also the right one.
Rob, thank you for closing that briefcase. And for the 16 years since.