I don't like losing.
Not a ballgame. Not an insignificant wager. Not my place in-line at the grocery store.
I certainly don't like losing a client who paid me month-after-month for about seventy months.
Even so, despite the loss of revenue, I'm not disheartened.
Neither am I really upset. Because as much as I liked this client personally, and as much as I believed in what his company's mission was, and as much as I trusted the efficacy of his products and services, he pissed me off.
Maybe I fucked up.
Maybe I was too nice.
Maybe I should have told him he was pissing me off and why.
My pissed-off-ness, it must be said, had nothing to do with baroque briefs and Net90 payments.
My pissed-off-ness had everything to do with a malady I see more and more people/clients succumb to.
They work and work and work and work and work on messaging. (Or having me work on messaging.) They spend their days consumed by messaging. They perseverate about messaging.
They do everything pertaining to messaging.
But then they fail to spend money on messaging.
The other day up here on the Gingham Coast which often feels more like 1950s "Leave It to Beaver"-land, with white picket fences, lush lawns and kids riding bicycles than it does systems-collapse-amerika, I saw two approximately 10-year-old boys standing alongside the road. They were trying to sell lemonade, at a dollar a cup, to cars speeding by at between 35 and 55 miles-per-hour.
They had no table out on the sidewalk. (No store-front.)
They had no signage anywhere. (No media.)
They had no signage anywhere. (No media.)
They were shouting at passing cars. (No reach.)
The client who axed was similar to the lemonade kids in those three respects.
He said to me when he told me we were separating, "George, you've written the first three pages of fifty decks fifty times, our mission, our positioning so many times. But we're not selling enough."
He said to me when he told me we were separating, "George, you've written the first three pages of fifty decks fifty times, our mission, our positioning so many times. But we're not selling enough."
I'm stupid in very many ways.
One: I do my best to believe in the efficacy of the things my clients make, do and sell.
Two: I do my best to boil that "promise" down to something I call an "epigram." Something on the order of "The Ultimate Driving Machine." Or "When it absolutely, positively has to be there over-night."
In fact, I always work to make my clients offering "the cure for cancer." That is, something no one can live without. At its very simplest, that is the essence of our jobs. Not to lie. But to make our clients success inevitable.
Three: I believe if you have something that's needed, articulated in a compelling way and you spend the money to get it viewed, people will try it.
Like the kids (not) selling lemonade up here, my client figured out what the market needed. He created a product that answered that need. He found a way to say it.
He just never told anyone.
I don't like losing.
But if you do, that's a perfect way to do it.
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