It’s a metaphor for accepting the challenge. You may think that something is unattainable, or out of your league, or you may just have no idea how to even begin. It doesn’t matter. The important thing is to set it in your sights. This applies to everything in our lives but for the sake of web and application development, I’ll focus on Freestyle Web Solutions and how we work with the clients we want to work with.
Here at Freestyle, we all enjoy a healthy, outdoors, athletic lifestyle. It’s one of the hallmarks of the San Francisco Bay Area. As founder and President of Freestyle Web Solutions, I try to encourage daily outdoor activities for our entire team. I was once the editor of Kiteboarding Magazine where I traveled the US, Caribbean, South America and Pacific Islands playing in the wind and waves, connecting with like minded individuals and living fully in sync with my passions. It’s this synchronicity that produces an effortless level of productivity, happiness and satisfaction. This is the philosophy and culture I try to create at Freestyle Web Solutions. Do what makes you happy and work with people who share the same philosophy and your cup will be eternally full.
So how does this philosophy influence who we work with? Well, we don’t look at any client as out of reach. If we identify a potential client as sharing similar philosophies and culture and they do something or offer products that excite us, we put them on our list. Once they’re on our list, it’s real. We can then tap into our network to see who can make introductions. The great thing about living by your philosophy is that you tend to surround yourself with people that have similar interests and share that philosophy. We used to attend networking events to try to prospect for new clients. It was not until we stopped trying to force it and just tapped into our amazing natural network of like minded individuals that we started finding that every referral that came our way was a good fit for our business and even more importantly, the people we were working with shared similar work life philosophies and quickly became part of our network and in a lot of cases, friends.
Something we have found is that a good VP of Marketing or CMO (the people we typically work directly with at our clients companies) are in high demand. They build a team, an amazing website and pipeline for their company and then move on to other opportunities. We typically wind up working with them at their next company and a lot of the time we find ourselves socializing with them outside of work. It’s the same synchronicity I found traveling the world in a completely different industry. It doesn’t matter what kind of work you do. Know what’s important to you, surround yourself with people who share those beliefs and look for clients that fit into that circle. It’s a recipe for happiness and at the end of the day, happiness is success.