I Lost A Customer Once Over A Phone Call I Never Made.
That’s the whole crime. No bad work, no blown job. I told a woman I’d call her Tuesday to set up a time to quote her gutters. Tuesday I got busy, which is the word we all use when we mean I didn’t feel like it. Figured I’d catch her Wednesday. Wednesday I figured Thursday. You see where this is going, and so did she. By the time I finally called, she’d booked somebody else, and she said a thing that’s rattled around in my skull for twenty years.
“I figured if you couldn’t call when you said you would, you probably weren’t gonna show up when you said you would either.”
She was right. And she’d never even seen my work.
So naturally I hung up mad at her. At HER. Can you believe that? Sat in my truck building a whole case in my head. She was impatient. She was cheap. She was never gonna pay anyway. I had a beautiful little story all loaded up so I’d never have to look at the ugly true one sitting right next to it.
Took me years to pick up the true one. Here it is.
Distrust isn’t the customer’s problem. It’s yours.
And here’s the part nobody hands you when you’re young and hungry and dead sure the pitch is what wins. Trust is the slowest thing you’ll ever build and the fastest thing you’ll ever break. You stack it up one brick at a time, one kept promise at a time, and you can flatten the whole wall with a single missed call. One no-show. One “I’ll send you the before and after pics” that turns into pics you never send.
Build it slow. Break it once. And good luck buying it back, because it’s not for sale. Not to that customer. Probably not to the three people she warns about you at book club either.
Sounds heavy. It’s actually the best news in this whole letter. Because if trust gets built one small thing at a time, guess who’s holding the trowel? You are. Every phone call, every appointment, every promise you keep when nobody’s checking, that’s you laying brick. You’re not some leaf floating down the river hoping the market’s nice to you today. You’re building the thing that makes the market drive to your house.
Let me show you where trust actually gets built, because it’s nowhere near where the amateurs are looking.
It’s not in the pitch. It’s not in some slick closing line you practiced in the mirror. Trust starts the second they hear your voice. How you answer the phone. Whether you answer it at all. Whether you sound like a guy who’s glad they called or a guy they interrupted. They’re grading you before you’ve said one word about windows or gutters or price.
Then The Appointment.
You said Thursday at ten. Are you there at ten? Not 10:15 with a heartfelt little story about a school bus. Ten. Because they’re standing at that window watching the driveway, and every minute you’re late is a brick sliding back out of a wall you haven’t even finished stacking.
Then the promise, and this is the big one. If you tell a customer you’ll take before and after pics so they can see those gutters are actually clean, you take the pics. Every single time. The day you tell yourself “eh, they’ll never know” is the exact day you find out they always know. Customers keep a tab you can’t see. Every little thing you say, every little thing you do, it all goes on the tab, and they settle up by deciding real quiet whether you ever get invited back.
I know it cold, because I’m on the other side of the counter now. When I hire a guy for my own place, I’m watching all of it. And I run a dead simple test. Look the part and act the part, we’re good, come on in. But when a fella shows up acting the part and not looking the part, or looking it but not acting it, something’s off. The math doesn’t add up. And the trust is gone before he’s got the ladder off the truck. He’s not coming back to my place. More than likely, I won’t let him.
That’s not me being fussy. That’s every customer you’ve ever had. Every one of them is running that same test on you right now, whether they could put words to it or not.
So Here’s What I Want You To Do With All This.
Quit waiting on some big shiny moment to win them over. The perfect pitch. The killer deal. It doesn’t get won up there. It gets won down in the boring stuff nobody brags about. The call you return. The ten o’clock you actually keep at ten. The tiny promise you honor when blowing it off would’ve been easier and not one soul was watching.
Do the small things right and you win. Not maybe. Not if the economy cooperates. You win. And I’ll let you in on something that ought to make you mad you didn’t start yesterday. It’s not hard. You don’t need a bigger truck. You don’t need a slicker website or a logo that cost four grand. You need to call people back when you said you would. That’s the whole secret the average Joe never cracks.
The day this finally clicked for me, my sales didn’t climb, they went through the roof, and I swear I wasn’t working one lick harder. I was just keeping my word. Same guy, same truck, same squeegee. I just stopped letting bricks fall out of the wall.
Or don’t. That road’s wide open too. Be like every other average Joe. Don’t learn it, break trust without ever noticing your hand did it, lose the customer, and drive home cooking up a story about how the whole thing was their fault. Plenty of parking on that road. It’s never crowded, and everybody on it is broke and blaming.
You get to pick. You always did.
So build the trust in the small stuff. Then guard it like it’s the only thing you own, because in this business it just about is. Do that, and I promise you’ll never chase another sale as long as you live. They’ll come find you. They’ll bring their neighbors.
Now go call somebody back.
Worth before net worth.
