Once You're Lucky...

How do you know if you are lucky? Are you lucky if you land a big account? Are you lucky that you received a promotion? Do you create your own luck?

Luck is all perception. Earlier this evening I was recapping the search industry landscape with a friend of mine who works at another SEM Firm. We both happened to be talking about a few of the accounts we are working on, when I mentioned a meeting I had recently with a major company that spends $50k monthly on search. His reaction of “Wow, you would be lucky to land that account,” caught me off guard, but reminded me of a story I heard Mark Cuban tell once. When Mark sold his first company back in 1990, MicroSolutions, for $6mm, everyone always told him how lucky he was to sell the company at the right time. He said no one ever mentioned that they knew he had worked day and night without ever taking a vacation to build MicroSolutions from the ground up in order to have the opportunity to sell it.  I thought of that story tonight because I guess I was disappointed that someone was already trying to associate landing a major new account as luck. What they don’t know is how I hard I have worked in order to stay top of mind for this account over the past few months. What my friend didn’t realize is how I have sought out articles I know my contacts would be interested in reading regarding paid search and their industry, then emailing those articles to them to ensure they knew I was thinking of their business. What nobody realized is how I stayed in touch monitoring their current campaigns and offering any tips / advice / positive remarks to them about what they were doing online. Now I am in position to hopefully land the account and everyone will say “Wow, I wish I was that lucky.”

Well, I’m here to tell you. You are that lucky. Luck is what you make it. You can create your own luck. Trust me, but more importantly trust the story Mark Cuban told. Put the effort in and sooner rather than later, you’ll find yourself in one of those “lucky” situations.

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