Cascade Advisory

After months of paperwork, we finally signed the contract for the RFP we won months ago.

This was another big lesson for us: Everything about business development and closing deals takes time and patience.

We used this lesson for our 2024 planning, and we are now paying attention to how long, on average, it takes us to 1) agree in principle to work with a client and 2) sign the paperwork to get started.

Gathering that baseline information for multiple clients over time will help us get to better understand how to plan our pipeline of business.

A few months after creating the company, we had won our first project but the paperwork wasn't signed yet.

We had started off so strong, but now we were in the doldrums where we had meetings that weren't quite leads, or leads that weren't quite contracts.

At some point, I added up the number of one-on-one meetings I had had in the past month: just ten. What?

I had felt like I was doing so much, but I wasn't doing the single most important thing: I wasn't talking to potential clients.

After that rude awakening, I became more disciplined and methodical about reaching out. We built a CRM so we could track contacts and meetings.

Once I started talking to people, it felt like our opportunities really started to grow.

But it's easy to lose the momentum and lose the focus, so this is a discipline we have to revisit constantly.

Right when we had the germ of an idea for our company, we saw an RFP that we felt qualified for. It was due in two weeks -- and we decided to go for it.

We were starting from scratch: We had to create a company identity and brand, articulate our business model and qualifications, build a website -- oh yeah, and write a proposal.

Amazingly, we succeeded on our very first try and ended up winning half the project. That provided us an anchor contract and a major confidence boost.

Lesson: There's nothing like a deadline to motivate!

At my last full-time job, I noticed increasing demand for people who could communicate about climate and who could help grow climate-related offerings. When our organization had needs like this, we had almost no one we could turn to.

This was an ongoing gap in the policy and the corporate world. So when it was time to leave that role, my co-founder and I thought, "Why can't this be us?"

We started talking to potential customers and asked them about their pain points and when they hire externally.

Soon, we had enough of a concept that we thought we could start shopping it around.

We still iterate today, but it all started with those first observations.

We did it! We have multiple clients and revenue for a few months. Now, we can balance business development with actually executing for our clients and showing them what we're capable of.

My business partner and I are trying to take a more deliberate approach to planning for 2024 now that we have momentum. We are setting a revenue goal as well as other milestones.