The Pickier You Are

Pick the Gold

Here’s a piece of advice you won’t buy (until you finish reading the post): don’t be the agency with the most accounts, don’t be the client service team with the most clients, don’t be the business that tries to appeal to the masses.

If you’re shooting for success, whether it’s in entrepreneurship or freelance, you have two options. You can be the best in terms of producing a select few outstanding accounts/clients/products or you can be the best in terms of producing the most accounts/clients/products.

With the latter, you sacrifice a lot. You take on clients who don’t have high expectations of themselves. You end up running client services for clients you don’t care about. You create products without any heart, without a story worth buying.

With the former, quite plainly, you get to practice your best. Now, I can’t express enough how important it is to define success for yourself. Even if it’s an assorted list of things, feelings or goals. You don’t need some four paragraph structured mission statement. Life isn’t cut and dry enough for that to work anyway. To define success is to understand what being the best really means.

Success – or growth of that matter – are not always by the numbers. Think of yourself as a publisher. Do you take on 5,000 novels a year, pushing them out the door as quickly as possible? Or do you get picky and cater to the 100 novels that are sure bestsellers?

This example is about to get interesting, so keep up.

Perhaps you’re going into PR. Are PR agencies looking to hire as many aspiring specialists as possible to build the agency up? Or are they going to seek the few specialists who actually represent their title of “special”its? Let’s flip this around now.

You’re looking for a job in PR. Are you going to shotgun your résumé to all the big agencies that run through new interns like a laundry list? Or are you going to seek the small agency that pours every drop of their heart into the work they do (after all, they have the time since they aren’t trying to baby an intern a week)?

You have an option to be remarkable, to be picky.

 

Stay Positive & Why Waste It?

Photo credit

Garth Beyer
Latest posts by Garth Beyer (see all)

Share A Response