As we slog our way through the last quarter of 2016 it feels almost like the last ten miles of an Ironman. This year has felt longer than most and it's been a fatiguing year in our country across all areas: business, politics, social upheavals, security etc. One of the KEY aspects which makes any Ironman or triathlon athlete for that matter successful is the notion of closing fast. You never want your best miles to be your first miles and I'm working to push harder than ever in the last few months. The best racers are always the one's who can push harder at the end. Right now it's easy to put it off until 2017, make up excuses that the holidays are right around the corner or just give in to the overwhelming workload of the last nine months.
I was out on a run and just thinking about everything our company does on a weekly basis and we really do have a smart, talented and hard working team. Boy are they smart! I'm constantly impressed with their level of work. Here is what I've come up with to outline what we do really well:
1. Conceptualizing, designing, building and managing kick ass experiential marketing programs. Our team is running around the country and pretty often far reaches of the globe executing some great programs on behalf of our clients, many of them blue chip companies. Like an Ironman this takes massive endurance and attention to detail week and week out.
2. Event production- which is bar none some of the tightest and well managed events I've ever seen. Whether it's a car race, charity event, beverage launch, corporate party or some other shin dig, the bandwidth and brain power we have is pretty incredible to witness. Important to note that the activation side of things is not my area so I just get to have the fly on the wall POV of the teams in action.
3. PR. Every week our PR team is somewhere observing, creating, writing and proofing some pretty compelling content which leads to some massive readership numbers. Our analytics department dissects, sorts and reports back to our clients excellent data which we get really positive feedback from.
4. If I don't mention our creative team then it wouldn't much of an article here. Our creative team is like taking in calories in an Ironman and by that I mean that everything else like training and recovery can go well but if you don't take in the right calories on race day than you'll go nowhere. Same for us. We can have the best ideas, data, biz connections but if we didn't have an excellent creative team to deign and communicate the message we wouldn't be able to produce the work. Our veteran designers and programmers just have me saying, 'No Way' and 'cool' constantly throughout the week.
What else?
5. Oh yeah, we're pretty good at sports sponsorship too. To date our team has sourced, activated and managed over a billion dollars in sponsorship. We do that pretty well.
This was much longer to type than what was in my head when I was out for a run and thinking about it. Over the next few months I'll keep in mind one of my favorite sayings from racing. Start fast, finish last. So here's to pushing hard and closing fast all the way to 2017.