Your clients are not lotto tickets. You don’t have winner and loser clients, you aren’t betting on them $5 at a time. You aren’t going to make it rich on one deal that looks like a winner while you’re throwing your loser tickets away. I see plenty of developers treating each client or project as though if they don’t win on Wednesday night then it’s never going to win.

If you are doing this – please stop, or at least throw your Thursday morning lotto tickets to me. Your clients are much more like a 401(k) investment – you put in your money and time and you wait for it to mature. I didn’t pick a retirement account on accident. If you invest in your clients and your projects, and you keep putting that investment in and make it work, one day you won’t have to work.

Lotto winners often go broke afterwards because they don’t know how to maintain that level of success. It was a lightning strike, a personal best performance. People that put away a ton of cash for retirement rarely die broke, they remember how to work their investments to work for them.