How to Become a Closer
Starting is easy. Finishing is hard.
In startups and creative industries alike, there’s no shortage of big ideas. Everyone wants to brainstorm, prototype, and imagine what could be. Everything sounds like a great idea, until you try to execute and realize just how difficult any project is to finish.
Closers are the people who bring ideas across the finish line. They are the ones who take ownership when the fun part wears off, who find energy in polishing details, and feel pride in seeing a job well done. They are the ones that will hit repeated road blocks and somehow figure out a way through and won’t stop until they are happy with the results.
Becoming a closer is a skill. It is a muscle that anyone can build. One of the fastest ways to get ahead in your career, and build trust with leadership, is to become a closer.
What Makes Someone a Closer
Closers have three defining traits:
Ownership: They take full responsibility for outcomes, not just tasks. “It’s done” means that not just their part of the work, but the entire product/feature/project. They catch anything that falls through the cracks and navigate the messy work of finishing something with a team.
Pride in the Work: They care about the details of their own work but also all the areas that their work touches. They elevate the work of others and set a standard for the entire team. They make everyone else’s job easier in how they communicate and hand off their work to others.
Grit: They don’t hit a problem and wait for someone else to fix it. They find ways to push through obstacles and know when to ask for help.
You know you’re working with a closer when you don’t have to ask twice.
Why Closers Matter
Teams and companies build up debt. This could be technical debt, product debt or cultural debt. Closers pay off debt. They clean the slate.
A culture without closers breeds half-finished or barely finished work. People stay busy but rarely feel progress because nothing ever gets done well enough that the team can move on.
There is a difference between “technically” finishing something and finishing something well, and that difference often matters much more than people realize. Going through the motions and getting something “technically done” is doing a disservice to the entire team that contributed to that work. You all owe it to yourselves to always finish strong and never settle for “technically done”.
In games, the final polish separates the playable from the magical. In startups, the follow-through turns prototypes into enchanting customer experiences. Teams that close well move faster not because they rush, but because they finish cleanly and can focus on the next challenge.
How to Become a Closer
Define Done: Before you start, agree on what “finished” means. Write it down. If the team doesn’t share a definition of success, closure becomes subjective.
Learn the Process: Understand where your individual work fits into the entire process. Make changes in your own work that improves the work of others.
Own the Final 10%: The last part of a project reveals everything about a team’s discipline. This is where the details matter most: QA passes, final fixes, build verifications, all the dirty work to see something all the way through.
Don’t Stop Until it is Done: This sounds so simple but it is the most important part of being a closer. Continue to follow up and stay engaged until the job is fully done.
Building Teams of Closers
To create a team of closers, you need systems that reward project completion, not just individual effort.
Celebrate Finished Work: Publicly highlight launches, fixes, and completed milestones, not individual tasks.
Incentivize Closing: Tie bonuses, recognition, or promotion criteria to follow-through
Hire for Grit: Ask candidates about times they closed something difficult and how they dealt with it.
Define Roles: If a team is struggling to close, deputize a specific person to follow the project all the way through.
Delegate and Trust: Give the team a chance to show they can close out a project. Support them when they have questions but don’t solve all their problems for them.
Model It: This means holding yourself to a high standard on closing out strong on any project.
You know you have built a team of closers if you can delegate projects and trust them to finish the job well or ask for help when needed.
Final Thoughts
The best people I have ever worked with are all closers. I could trust them to do their job well and raise the bar for everyone else. I knew they would push the team to create something great and not stop until the job was totally done. They would never go through the motions or pass the buck to someone else. I aspire to build teams of closers and to mentor and coach anyone that works with me to become a closer themselves.