Celebrating Caliber Wins

By Casey Schultz, Agency Partner

You’ve got to celebrate your wins. No matter the size.

Everyone likes to celebrate. After all, it’s a sign of accomplishment, achievement, persistence and maybe even a stroke of good luck. We’d all like to think that our teamwork, hustle and passion outweigh the luck, but a little luck never hurts. So, no matter how big or small, you’ve got to celebrate your wins for many reasons.

Maybe the most obvious reason is simply the feeling of accomplishment that you’ve successfully completed the task at hand and have done it in a satisfactory fashion. Now, the team here at Caliber certainly enjoys checking another project off the list… or developing a new brand… or launching a new website, but there are quite a few other hidden ‘wins’ that are combined in each and every scenario.

Let me explain a couple sample scenarios that we’ve experienced over the past couple months here at Caliber.

First, our team celebrated a ‘win’ for one of our client’s annual events that we’ve been fortunate to help with for the past few years. I have to mention here that this particular client is very adamant about ‘doing it right’ (which we love) since this is a national event that is meant to be a fun, engaging and educational for the best-of-the-best of their employees. The event went off without a hitch and everyone agreed this was one of the best events they’ve hosted in recent memory. That’s a win in our book. Beyond that, the environmental designs, event branding, show production, tech coordination, set-up, tear-down, etc… all went great; maybe even better than imagined. Again, we’ll take a win here. And the final win in this scenario: the client relationship. A simple, hand-written Thank You note is all it takes for our team to understand how valuable they really are, even when they might be behind the scenes. You guessed it… another win for our team.

The other recent scenario that has our team excited as of late is the challenge we’re currently working through right now with one of our newest clients. In this particular situation, we don’t have as many tangible items to show off or to talk about (at least not yet) – but we’ve already chalked up a couple wins for our team. The first of which is simply engaging with the client to make sure we’re a good fit for each other, and that we’ll be in a healthy working relationship (that’s very important to us). The first few interactions went great. Everyone was polite, excited and eager to get to work on the new idea. When it came time to talk details, schedules, etc… we hit a snag. As we were trying to show a snippet of a project list, we were blind-sided with a ‘You’ve already failed me’ comment. Ouch. With a bit of a dazed look on our faces (I’m just assuming here), we asked where we got off track. Long story short, we talked through expectations from each side of the table and explained what we thought would be the best plan of attack going forward as well as what simply wasn’t realistic for us. We were honest and upfront, even if it meant that we didn’t land the client. Once back on track, we were excited that they believed in us to partner with them on this new venture and I’m happy to say we’re off an running on a handful of projects that has enormous potential for the future.

Hidden in all of this are a few wins; new client, trusting the process, educating our client; understanding expectations, etc… all of those are wins in my book, even though they might be small. Maybe the biggest win that seems to be a recurring theme is that our team does an amazing job of coming together when we need each and everyone’s expertise to contribute to a project. It feels good to be on a winning team. It’s never easy, but the hurdles and bumps along the way only make the wins feel that much better.