The Hangover That Landed Us A Major Client

So this is my favorite bit . So you had a pitch situation where you might have been slightly intoxicated . Is that correct ? Absolutely intoxicated , yeah .

So when you said , like , tell me about some mistakes you made in business , I've got lots . We're 17 years in in tall and I had a business before that for five , six years , so there's lots of mistakes made . But I think , look , I so there's lots of mistakes made , but I think . Look , I think you learn off your mistakes and you pick yourself up and hopefully there's positives that come out of that .

But we'll talk about this one . So I think there's a couple of things I've learned from this , and if I'm spreading any advice is don't drink on a school night , even if it's an award . So we were out celebrating an award . This was an award so we were out celebrating an award um .

This was a fair few years ago . This is going back 10 years ago . It was um best creative agency award . All right , it's a big one , it's a big one ?

yeah , absolutely , and we won it . And then you know you've you've been drinking a couple of beers and you've had a white wine with your dinner and then someone brings some red wine and you wouldn't drink like this normally . You'd have in different drinks and then you'd have all have a whiskey because it's celebrating the next thing . You're very , very drunk and you can't remember the taxi on .

This was me on a normal thursday night , completely forgetting . At 9 am the next morning I had a pitch . So it's not like I can call up another creative director of my business and oh no , because it was already written , right it was already done . It was booked in and ready to go .

Yeah . Right Already written yeah . So at least you had it written . Yeah , that was the great bit .

Whether that helped me at all in the morning was a completely different scenario . Now , thankfully it was a local pitch . I won't say whether I drove or not , but it's just probably an autopilot getting there and I can't remember the pitch at all . I remember going in the room , but I can't remember actually pitching the pitch .

Barging into the room , yeah , or slamming back into the room , and I dread to think now because the client were there . It was a well-known bread company . And I just think , just think , oh god what . Almost I smell like like pure yeast , like in the room .

That's a bit like severance , isn't it ? If you're , uh , you've got no memory of , yeah , what happens in the room , yeah , so yeah , um , so awful . So then come monday you're thinking , oh my god , I better contact the agency we were dual pitching with because we were using their officers . It was .

You know , this is Guy from Tarl . He's the digital expert you can imagine . Were you on your own from Tarl ? Yeah , I was on my own .

So you were in another agency's domain , and then you were wheeled out of the scene Standing up for Tarl's brand and representing Tarl Halfcut . Now the good news , talking to the other agency owner , is he didn't have a clue . He said , oh really , no , I didn't get that at all . I was like , wow , we found out a week later .

We won , we won the pitch . So we were against the other agency , we won the pitch , but you've got no idea what you promised . I have no idea what I promised , which gets to the learning bit in a second , but yeah , so I think the lesson learned there is , I think , for me and I don't drink on a school night and if it's awards , take it easy and try not to book anything out the next 24 hours afterwards . I think you've been harsh on yourself there , mate , because , like , if we're going out , we wouldn't get , absolutely , you know , thunderbolted on a Thursday night , but if we've won an award for best , you know we've won best PR agency a few times .

If that happens , I remember going Sambuca's on offer literally it's the one time where you you know you've got to celebrate and the fact that you forgot , you know I mean what I would say . There is the lesson there is plan your diary better . If you need to plan your diary better , you need to speak to Will Ockenden because he's brilliant at planning his diary . Maybe that model works perfectly .

Have you tried it ? I'm just going to say well , I think the lesson learned from it was because I think prior to that , because I didn't read the notes , I didn't read the pitch , I think I just pitched- no , that was the thing . Yeah , yeah , yeah . So I think the lesson I learned from it was I used to really , really over-prepare for pitching .

I used to , like you know , have the cues and the notes , and I used to get myself so wound up thinking I've got to deliver everything in a certain way , in a certain and I just don't do that anymore . I don't prepare . Obviously , I need to understand what it is I'm pitching , I do my research , but I don't prepare the actual pitch order , because what I've found is actually you're not as natural , you're not being able to pull from your experience and your knowledge in the right way , because you've already formatted it .

So if there's a question or you have to pivot within the pitch scenario , you can't because you're already rigid and you throw yourself off . Does that ? make sense . So I think what I found out after that was if I can win it drunk , then surely I can win it sober .

But what I've learned from it is like chill out a little bit , just have a little bit more of a relaxed sort of way of presenting your knowledge and skills and experience .