Don’t pop the champagne too soon. You know how they say in baseball, when it’s a great game, don’t tweet that it’s a great game before it’s over. Or when your at the end of a race and you’ve definitely taken the lead, you don’t stop before the finish line to look back at your defeated opponents to celebrate, right?
Point being, when you win that big fat juicy new biz, you should hold the clinking cheers until after the project has launched. It’s not to say you should not acknowledge the hard work and good fortune that came out of winning the business – you should definitely pay your respects! But then put those heads back down and get to the real meat of the project.
It is hard to accept that you may have just won the business on preliminary visual ideas and hastily prepared research and scrapped together strategy. Then what? You win the clients heart over to do the real work and you’re like, but we did it already. Wrong. This is where you need to hold your own work up to a mirror. Remember now you are being paid to do the actual work. If the client liked a direction from the pitch – all the better for you. However, you still need to go back and put in the due diligence and time into the thinking. Otherwise you’ll be left scrambling from beginning to end.
Winning the biz is definitely something to be proud of. It should be highlighted in the next full company wide meeting. It should be counted as a win for the team. But remember – winning the business is different than launching the final project. And that is something to be accounted for.
Photo by Scott Warman on Unsplash