How Struggle Built Strength: The Perseverance Story Behind Elite Jumps’ “1% Better Every Day”

Nov 03, 2025Jordan Lindstrom

"Life is difficult. This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths." 

M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled

"Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope.”

Romans 5:3-4

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A few years ago, this business almost folded.

We had decided on a rebrand from Elite SRS (our name at the time) to Elite Jumps. This was a big undertaking with lots of moving parts. In the midst of this process, my business partner and I had a big disagreement that we couldn’t resolve. We decided to sell the business and go our separate ways. Over many conversations over a few months, I realized I wasn’t ready to sell, and I still wanted to see what was possible if the ideas with the rebrand were fully implemented.

We worked out an agreement, and I bought out his interest. Within a couple of months, we implemented the rebrand.

But things did not go well…

When you rebrand a company, you don’t just change the name. You change the domain name. You change the website. You change packaging, etc. The month we flipped the switch (Oct. 2023) results were initially good. But within a couple of weeks, we lost about 60% of our traffic. It turns out we had all kinds of technical problems with the new domain name (elitejumps.co) that put us in the penalty box both with search engines like Google and email services, which all of a sudden started marking our emails as spam. It was like taking our business and moving it from a busy street corner in town out into the mountains with only one bumpy access road. Customers all of a sudden had a hard time finding us.

It was scary. Sales slowed enough that I worried about covering our expenses and payroll. Whereas before I had a business partner to help share the load and the mental strain, now I was on my own. It seemed everywhere I looked, new problems popped up. I started having trouble sleeping. I thought I made a mistake, but I couldn’t turn things back.

I love what I do, and I love this company and the people I work with. But I started dreading going to work. I didn’t know how to fix the problems. I felt like I was letting people down. I didn’t know how to move forward.

So one morning I prayed, asking God for help. He didn’t answer right away, but as I was pulling out of my driveway, He asked me a question I’ll never forget.

“What blessing are you looking for?”

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I knew right away what He meant. Over the last few years, I’ve read a few good books about personal growth like “The Road Less Traveled,” “Man’s Search for Meaning,” and “The Road to Character.” The essential finding: character is not automatic. Adversity seems to be the secret sauce for personal growth.

The blessing on offer in that moment WAS the struggle. The journey. The opportunity to climb out of the big valley I’d found myself in.

So, as painful as it was, I embraced the process. I resolved not to give up and to stop second-guessing past decisions. I stopped looking for quick fixes and stressing about where we were at. I just decided to come to work every day with the attitude of making things a little bit better.

I made a big spreadsheet of all the little things we could start fixing and improving and at the top of it, I wrote the word “PLOD.”

Next to it, I wrote “1% Better Every Day”. Then I asked our team to think about all the little things they could see and do that could help us improve. On it are things like “Upgraded sports performance handle”, and “system for drawing down retail bags accurately” and “a/b test and improve Amazon hero images for ropes”.

Most of the items by themselves seem small and innocuous. And to a degree, they are. But as we’ve plodded our way through about half the 147 tasks (and counting) added to that spreadsheet, at a rate of about 2 completed a week, something cool has happened: we’ve become a whole lot healthier. Much healthier, in fact, than we were before the rebrand. It’s just taken about 2 years to get here.

Along the way, this idea of making things “1% Better Every Day” has become a part of our DNA. Now we love the journey. We’ve even realized we’re not “plodding” toward some ultimate destination. We’re just enjoying the process of making things a little bit better. Our products. Our website. Our customer service. Our app. Our systems.

I’m so thankful for the struggle and adversity that brought us here. Patient, process-driven, plodders. It’s who we’ve become.

And because we think this idea is so powerful, not just for a business like ours but also for us as individuals, we want to share it with you, our customers, in a meaningful way.

Today, we’re releasing our Perseverance Collection with the tagline “1% Better Today”. These are a mix of our most popular jump ropes, including our 6mm PVC ropes and our 1” beaded ropes. The colors aren’t bright and flashy, nor are they dark or stark. They are somewhere in between, recognizing that most of us are somewhere between where we were and where we want to be.