Getty
Business development is the game worth playing, but to attract high-paying clients it is often a mental game. If you change your mindset you can change your results.
So what if you did not meet your client-attracting targets for the year? Holding a private pity party about it isn’t the answer. Instead, maybe the best thing for your business is a public funeral.
Staging a mock last rites and burial is the advice of Brenda Galilee, author of the upcoming book, CELEBRATE! The Art of Celebration/Tradition In the Workplace.
Galilee can testify a funeral turned the mindset of her team around.
Back in 1988 her fledgling Silicon Valley business of ten recruiters was rapidly approaching the end of the month with a big goose egg on the sales board. Although she had won a major award as the 1987 Fast Start Office of the Year, she was starting to believe that they were “going to be publicly outed as flash-in-the-pan imposters.”
After seven months of over $100,000 in sales per month, she was staring at an empty revenue column for the month. Nada. Zero. Zilch.
Then inspiration struck. This was no time for recriminations and shame.
“Clearly, it was time for a celebration and a funeral was what we needed,” said Galilee.
“Scheduled for the last Friday of February, our beloved salesman volunteered to make a coffin,” explained Galilee. “About the size of a large shoe box, it was perfect for our donations.”
One of her recruiters put in the coffin the resume of the engineer who had turned down her $80,000 job offer, which would have meant a $20,000 commission. Everyone donated something that represented the miserable month of disappointments. Galilee invited friend’s from upstairs — stock brokers who were still recovering from their own crash of October 1987 — to join in as they donned all black attire and formed a funeral procession accompanied by Requiem for The Masses on their boom box proceeding to the empty lot next door.
After Galilee shared some words of wisdom, they dug a hole and on that cold February buried the month. Pizza and beer were shared afterwards in the office as they said a final goodbye to the horrible month.
The message was that month was dead to them. Now is the time to reset their counters to zero and make the month of March come alive.
“March was a record month, and we went on to become Office of The Year in a 300-unit franchise operation for the next six years,” says Galilee.
Eventually her company grew into a $300 million public company with 3,000 employees on three continents known as Hall Kinion. During her tenure as CEO, Forbes named Hall Kinion "one of the 200 Best Small Companies" for three consecutive years. After selling Hall Kinion to a NYSE company in 2004, Galilee has been an industry consultant, public board member, and non-profit advocate where she works with a small group of Juvenile Lifers inside San Quentin Prison.
“No one wakes up and says, ‘I want to do a miserable job at work today,’” says Galilee. “And yet, when a person or a group of workers fail to meet a target they are often met with recriminations and shame. This only exacerbates the problem and extends the likelihood of a continued period of failure. Recovery from failure can be accelerated with celebration.”
