Hippie CEO Life #23 - Chickens & Eggs & Counting
September 16, 2022
“Do not count your chickens before they are hatched.” ~Aesop
We’ve all heard the advice, never count your chickens before they hatch, probably more times than we can count but still, how often do we forget this little nugget of wisdom and go on counting, only to find ourselves disappointed?
As a small business, maintaining the health of our cashflow is one of the most important parts of my job. This at times can be tested as we look to bring on new clients, i have to ask myself, “Do we have the ability to take on a new client? If no, when is the right time to hire so that we maintain a healthy cashflow while balancing the importance of creating a good onboarding experience for new employees?”
This delicate balance becomes even more difficult when working with massive, multi-billion dollar, global brands. These brands have incredibly complicated, time consuming, procurement processes that often take between 4-6 months to complete. This means from the moment someone says, “We want to work with 33 Sticks!!!” it takes on average 4-6 months to process all the necessary paperwork for the formal relationship between Client and Agency to actually begin.
AND…..nothing good ever happens in that 4-6 month window or as i tell my team, “Not once in 10 years has a company come back to me during that window and said you know, we are really excited about this project and we’d like to pay you double your asking price.” It never happens. What does happen is economic downturns, changes in leadership, a procurement specialist waking up on the wrong side of the bed, natural disasters, which cause the entire process to crumble, the hundreds of hours spent navigating bureaucratic red tape wasted, the deal lost.
When things like this happen, it is very easy to get frustrated, lash out in anger, burn bridges, vow revenge, i know because i’ve done all of these things after spending untold hours filling out endless piles of paperwork, seeking the thumbs up of multiple approval committees, completing forms, and on and on and on.
But this angry response has never produced anything of value.
What has been valuable when these things happen was to take a huge step back, walk away from everything in order to balance and recenter my mind, and then calmly and strategically address the situation by asking two very important questions:
What can we do to save this deal?
What can we change in how we do business to limit the negative impacts of long client procurement processes?
We may still end up losing the deal but by calmly pondering and answering these two questions, we will walk away having gained value from something that otherwise would have been a total loss.
