The work was the marketing

I never spent a dollar marketing my own company.

No ads. No funnel.

A decade in, and every new client came from the last one.

The work was the marketing. That was the whole strategy, and I didn’t choose it on purpose. It just turned out that a job done well goes and sits in a room I’ll never be in, and talks to the next client for me. Reputation is the one asset that compounds while you sleep.

The catch is it cuts both ways. A rushed job compounds too, just against you.

So I started treating the last 10% of every project like it was the pitch for the next one. Because for a client I hadn’t met yet, it was.

When you wrap something up, are you closing it out? Or auditioning for the job you don’t know about yet?

Originally posted on LinkedIn.