2025 Gametape Review: The Slow Burn
In September, we began our fifth year in business. This came as a slight shock—the days and hours having accumulated around us as imperceptibly as snowfall. During the early years, while we were adrift in the calendar’s thicket, we were coming to terms with our business—which is to say, we were narrowing down our services, smoothing out workflows, discovering our ideal audiences and determining our preferences for what kind of work we wanted to do instead of what type of work we were eager to take on for the sake of revenue. These are all processes that take time and sometimes get sidelined in the great panic to make money to pay for life. As it turns out, sometimes you must go backward to move forward—a process that feels cripplingly inefficient. This phase of business can’t be rushed. This year we learned, often impatiently, that progress meant making decisions, undoing them, and occasionally remaking them, each time finding a bit more clarity. If you had asked us when we started Cowbird, Will it take you four years and change to begin to understand what it is your business provides? We would have laughed and laughed. But now we know better. Here are a few other things we learned the hard way in 2025.
Someone Outside of Our Own Brains
In deep summer, when business was at a trickle, a slow panic about the future began to grip us, and we found ourselves second guessing every decision. We are forever telling clients that every writer needs an editor. It’s something we learned first-hand in graduate school through many, many writing workshops. We applied this logic to our business life and decided that we needed an editor for Cowbird, someone who lived outside the circuitry of our brains who had traveled the small business path and could give us a few hot takes. Ultimately, we did the most radical thing that two control-loving Cowbirds could have imagined: we asked for help. We applied for a mentor through Score, a non-profit that supports small business owners.
And then, we met Doug.
God bless him. Doug took us on, despite already supporting a large, unruly roster of small businesses owners and entreprenuers. Doug has changed our outlook and our business completely. He has taught us to consider the big picture and often reminds us to make decisions that will set us up for success in five or ten years down the road. He has helped us learn to value our time and encouraged us to track our working hours so that we can understand our true profit margins. Doug was appalled that we were doing almost zero outreach for new clients, and over many weeks he detailed the finer points of prospecting—a tactic we had passionately resisted. Doug gave us a strong framework to start out but allowed us to do things our way. To set our own pace.
Perhaps most importantly, Doug saw in our language and demeanor that we weren’t thinking of ourselves as experts in our field. He could sense our lack of confidence, and he called it out. He encouraged us to step into our authority and take up space in our industry. He reminded us that right now someone, somewhere was offering the same services as we were at half the competency and double the price. He saw who we were and truly understood our potential. At times, we needed clear direction and specific business guidance; at other times, we needed encouragement and support—and he provided both.
As we prospected like the wind and began to step into our own authority and hone our workflow processes, the outreach began to pay off. We started booking more discovery calls. We landed a handful of new clients in record time. Turns out: Doug was right. Prospecting is essential. We still hear his voice ricocheting in our heads: Never. Stop. Prospecting. We take his words to heart.
Frameworks and Strategy
We’ve been building systems and roadmaps for our brand and web services for years, but we wanted to refine them into a repeatable process we could use with every client. If we could create a strong framework that provided value to clients and cut down on all the surplus hours we were spending on each project, we would have the potential to become profitable. Additionally, we sharpened up our sales funnel and added a brand audit at a comfortable price point, which allowed us to attract more clients and get to know them to see if we were a good fit for before partnering for a longer project.
Now that we’ve had a few more branding projects under our belt, our understanding about our purpose and our value has evolved. We’ve come to recognize just how deeply Cowbird is rooted in strategy—we think carefully, ask the right questions, and rely on proven frameworks supported by intense discussion and collaborative workshops. Before any design work even begins, we take the time to truly understand a company and where it fits within the industry as a whole. We uncover an organization’s challenges and differentiators and ask questions that sometimes bring skeletons out of the closet one by one. This discovery work happens up front and forms the foundation of every brand build we undertake. Moreover, we believe the strongest outcomes arise from partnership, which is why we aim to work with our clients long term, helping them grow and empowering them to prioritize strategic thinking over hasty brand decisions.
This year has been a slow burn. At times it has felt soul-sucking, unproductive and unmanageable. But we reached out for help, and we discovered that the sluggish, sometimes frustrating process of learning what truly defines Cowbird has ultimately made us stronger and more confident in our mission. Bringing in an outside perspective and embracing strategy has not only helped us refine our approach, but it has also deepened our commitment to meaningful partnerships with our clients. Moving forward, we carry these lessons with us—knowing that the path ahead will require continual adjustment, the courage to say no and (unfortunately) relentless prospecting. We’re excited for what the future holds and eager to keep evolving with intention and clarity in 2026.