My inbox is full of cold email sales pitches that honestly suck. They are lazy, automated attempts to generate as many leads as possible — regardless of the quality of the lead or the likelihood that the lead is the ideal buyer. It’s a lot like dragging a giant net behind a fishing boat, hoping to catch a certain type of fish. Sure, you will catch a few of the fish you are looking for but you will be a whole lot of irreparable damage in the process.

For the last 14 years, one of my primary goals has been building new business, be it for my past two employers and now for my own company, 33 Sticks. Over those 14 years, one thing has become very clear, i tend to take a very non-traditional approach to building companies, to managing teams, and to acquiring new business…here is how i do it.

No one. Let me repeat. NO ONE, plays at the top of their game without first making a lot of mistakes and falling on their ass many, many times. If you aren’t falling down, you aren’t pushing yourself hard enough. If you aren’t falling down, you are not stepping outside your comfort zone. If you aren’t falling down, you aren’t progressing.

“When you've done well and another has benefited by it, why like a fool do you look for a third thing on top—credit for the good deed or a favor in return?”

~ Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 7.73

Recently, at 33 Sticks, we found ourselves in an interesting situation. Two of our existing clients, let's call one Massive European Electronics Retailer and the other let's call Totally Crafty Retailer. Both of these clients asked us to participate in an RFP (Request for Proposal) process to "win" the current engagement that we have with them.

Businesses are finding that the gap between the insights that executives are demanding and what is being delivered by today’s digital analyst is widening at an alarming rate.

So what can be done to ensure that future analysts are able to move beyond setting up dashboards and distributing reports to being true analysts that are able to provide insights and recommendations to help guide the decision making of business executives?

It’s no fluke that the most talented among us are the most likely to collaborate. Talented people know the secret that the more you give, the more you receive. Unfortunately, those who are in the most need of collaboration, are the ones who fall into the trap that, “If only I can hoard all my knowledge, I will become indispensable.”  However, knowledge can not be hoarded, you can’t keep knowledge safe inside some sort of virtual Fort Knox. Knowledge is free and if you don’t share what you know, someone else will.

Managers seem to get caught up in things like timesheets and quarterly goals and corporate process and OKRs and you get the picture. Don’t get me wrong, those things can be valuable but it’s the little things that happen everyday, like managing out of pocket, that have lasting impacts on employees and ultimately make the employee, the manager, and the organization as a whole so much more successful.

The greatest lesson i ever learned was the importance of sportsmanship. With time, i could no longer go 5 sets on the tennis court and gone were the days i could pull up for a transition 3 but what i learned about how to treat others has never left and it is a skill that has prepared me well for a successful business career.

If you don’t have a purpose, you get a “default purpose” defined by profit and the process put in place to ensure that the lowest common denominator isn’t hurting your profit, this is the same purpose that drove the factories and we already know what happened to them.