The Hard Lesson

Table of Contents

By Cathy-Anne O’Brien We lost a client today. One that had great potential for BlueSky. One that could’ve been a big game changer for our firm. It was a hard lesson.

What happened? Did we not demonstrate enough passion and excitement for the project? No. Did we fail to show creativity and strategic thought? Nope. Were we slow to deliver? That’s not it either.

We misspelled the name of the company. Twice. Yes, a big error and one I fully acknowledged. An unacceptable oversight, for sure. The error was in internal documents, but that’s beside the point. A company’s brand is paramount and we, as a communications firm, should know better. Boy did we learn our lesson. We just never thought we’d learn it quite so harshly, and that they’d walk away before we had a chance to execute anything of consequence.

While we lemisspellingarned a hard lesson here, and will go over and over in our heads what we could’ve done differently, while further refining our quality control processes to help ensure this sort of error doesn’t happen again, the reality is, it will.

We strive for excellence, but can we guarantee it? No. We are human. And it’s those same humans that come up with out-of-the-box ideas; those who read between the lines and see the slight nuances in a client’s feedback; putting ourselves in our client’s shoes before we send every email – humans who develop real, human relationships with real, human clients. There is something to be gained when you are allowed to be genuine, so while we’ll always strive for perfection, my bigger lesson here is to appreciate the clients who forgive us for being human.

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