For many of you, life is a matter of deal execution.
You make a deal and then keep it. A deal’s a deal, right?
Wrong.
Some deals are great (you are paid a fair or better than fair price for your efforts) and others are funky (highly discounted or underpriced). If you have too many funky deals, you have a broken business model. Your margins shrink. These deals become a monkey on your back and make work seem unrewarding.
Why do we still do non-standard deals? Inside, where you might be serving internal customers, you make exceptions to the rules to do a “solid” for a colleague. Outside, you might discount your work because it could lead to more business later or you are slow at the time. The fact is, funky deals are a slippery slope — you’ll eventually fall into a rut.
Recommendation: Don’t focus on NOT doing funky deals. As Voltaire once said, “perfect is the enemy of good.” The fact is that you’ll still be convinced in the future to do non-standard deals. You may wring your hands about it and say, “never again”, but you’ll still do favors, discounts and take flyers. I suggest that you treat it like any other part of business, make a budget for it. Tell yourself, I’ll only be involved in 2 funky deals per quarter. That’s it. When you are fully committed to funky deals, draw the line. Tell the deal-pitcher that you are funky deal full for the quarter. Eventually, you’ll get used to this system and pull back to one per quarter. Maybe only 2 per year. The point is that if you watch your funky deals, just like you watch how much sugar you take in, you’ll reduce them in your life.
