Recently, an MSP member booked a call with me simply to thank me for helping him achieve incredible growth. He’d been working his tail off for about 18 months after going to a Rapid Implementation Workshop in order to get his marketing plan in place, and multiple campaigns and systems implemented.
Eighteen months of grinding and getting it done—website redesign, SEO, list building and cleaning, hiring an SDR to conduct outbound and follow-up calls, trade shows, a newsletter he sent religiously, and a seminar he hosted that he was absolutely terrified of doing but did anyway. BooYAH.
He was telling me how ALL of it was paying off and the cherry on top, the one BIG win, was that he’d just closed the most lucrative managed services contract of his career. A 200-seat manufacturing company. Monthly recurring revenue in the high five figures. Multiyear agreement. Growing company. HIGH margin. The kind of deal that changes the math on your entire business. He said, “I would have never been able to pull this off had I not put in all of the work.”
I was genuinely happy for him.
I asked, “So, what’s next?”
Dead silence. Then…
“Well,” he said, “I figured I’d take a little break on marketing to catch my breath. I mean, we just closed this major MSP contract. I’ve got to focus on onboarding them, making a few more hires in the service department, getting the team sorted out…”
I let him finish, then told him, “That’s exactly how you stall out and lose.”
When I interviewed Nick Saban, college football hall of famer and winner of seven national championships, he said most people handle success worse than failure. He called it “relief syndrome.”
You have a big win and feel relief. You accomplished the objective. Touchdown. But winning often leads to letting your guard down just a little. You think you’ve earned the right to exhale—and that exhale starts quietly eroding the habits, the preparation, the edge that got you the win in the first place.
Think about that for a second.
When you fail, you’re humbled. You try harder and keep driving. If you’re a winner, you do whatever it takes. But when you win? You feel like you deserve to celebrate. Lost 10 pounds? I deserve that cheesecake. Just hired a great SDR? I can take down the ads and stop recruiting. Landed that contract? We can dial back the marketing a bit and coast.
Saban’s point, brutal in its accuracy, is that you shouldn’t let up the intensity until the very last game is won. Because the minute you celebrate a win that isn’t the final win, you’ve already started losing the next one.
Alabama won 19 games in a row. Twice. Both times, they then lost to a team they had no business losing to. Why? Coach says it’s because their success got in the way. It made them relax. Play a little less aggressively. It seeped into practice. It infected preparation. It made them just soft enough, just comfortable enough, just distracted enough. They got exposed and a hungry competitor is always looking for any chink in your armor.
I’ve seen this happen over and over again. Someone comes to a Rapid Implementation Workshop and gets after it. They start raising prices, revising their offerings, upselling and cross-selling clients, reactivating old leads, and BOOOOOM, $250,000 to $900,000 in sales in 90 days. They’re happy…
But then the urgency evaporates. The prospecting and follow-up systems get “paused” because you’re slammed. Social media and blogs get skipped. The trade show or networking event? You’ll pass “this time” because you’re busy.
Then you wake up one day and the deals aren’t coming in anymore.
The pipeline you stopped feeding six months ago doesn’t announce itself as empty. It just quietly goes cold. Then you lose a major client due to acquisition or COVID or a competitor or any of a dozen other reasons. You need to replace that income fast, but the hopper is empty. The phone isn’t ringing and you’re back to scrambling, which means you’re back to taking bad clients at bad prices just to fill the gap.
This is relief syndrome.
Saban said that for this reason he was harder on his guys after they WON a game than after they lost.
Because when you’re winning, it’s critical you keep doubling down on the things that are working, not throttle back because you’ve earned a rest. Your competitors aren’t taking a break. They’re waking up every day with the goal of stealing your BEST clients, recruiting your top employees, and salting the earth you’re standing on.
Don’t hand them the saltshaker.
Related: Not *Just* Doing the Work
