Earlier this year, we were sad to wind down a relationship with an eight-year client. It wasn’t unexpected. Few projects take eight years to complete, and despite the need for close and meticulous ongoing campaign management, sometimes when you’re in bed together for eight years, it’s perceived that you’ve run out of ideas. We were instrumental to taking the company from below $500,000 in annual revenues to above $50 million. We’re proud of that. We did our part. We were also frequently blown away by the client’s drive, guts, and innovation.
In addition to inviting us to come by for a barbecue at a future, unspecified date, the client reflected: “I don’t know if you outgrew us, or we outgrew you, or what.” It’s probably neither. They grew 10,000% on our watch, to be sure. But then again, we work for much larger companies than them. Size isn’t the issue per se, but very rapid growth — compounded — can leave you with a “floating in space / uncharted territory” feeling. That intimate one-to-one casualness that works for any very small organization is, on one hand, calming to the nerves, but on the other hand, it can be inappropriate to the wider universe you’ve now found yourself in.
That’s nothing, though.