If Suffering is Part of Your Strategy, Something’s Broken

February 9, 2026 | Business Development, Leadership, Time Management

If Suffering is Part of Your Strategy, Something’s Broken

Don’t confuse this with discomfort.

Discomfort is normal in government sales.

Cold outreach.

Learning a new agency.

Walking into your first conference solo.

Presenting to a contracting officer who has zero patience.

That’s growth.

Suffering is different.

Suffering looks like this:

60 to 80 hour weeks

Proposal after proposal with no lift.

Back-to-back conferences.

Constant travel.

Client meetings stacked on top of each other.

Contract startups that never seem to stabilize.

And after months of it… nothing changes.

Same pipeline stress.

Same revenue pressure.

Same fire drills.

That’s not grinding. That’s a signal.

Something is broken.

Usually it’s one or more of these:

Process.

Focus.

Staffing.

Culture.

We all have sprints in this business.

Proposal crunches

A major conference.

New contract startups that need attention.

That’s normal.

What’s not normal is doing this for months straight.

Working through paid time off.

Missing family commitments.

Convincing yourself it will get better “after this next submission.”

That’s suffering.

And suffering doesn’t make you sharper.

It leads to burnout.

Bad decisions.

Sloppy proposals.

Missed follow-ups.

Government sales is a long game.

If your strategy requires constant exhaustion to survive, it’s time to step back and fix what’s actually broken.

 

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