Have you ever come across some of your early work and thought “What on earth was I thinking?”
Last weekend we attacked a storage room at the back of the garage. One of the treasures (not!) I found was a paper copy of our very first tender submission to a large mining company – BHP.
CRINGE!!!
I was clearly a raw beginner, with pretty much no idea what I was doing. Ian and I had a good laugh at what we wrote – what else could we do?
Of course, we didn’t win that tender. But it did spur me on to learn how to do these tender things better. I paid an expert to write some for us so I could learn how to do it properly. Expensive, but well worth it.
Twenty-something years on, we have definitely improved (we win quite a lot now). We don’t pay to get our tender submissions written by a professional any more, but I do send the odd one off to someone for a review – just to make sure I’m keeping up the standard. (It’s always easy to get a bit lazy …)
The lesson?
Sometimes, spending money is the best way to 1) make money, and 2) save money.
Come on, share some of your cringe-worthy experiences from your early days in business. You know you have them!
#smallbiztips #cringe #smallcompanybigbusiness
This post first appeared on LinkedIn on October 25 2021