Put on a show for me, Mr. business owner

We, humans, are horrible at judging talent, especially if we don’t know the first thing about the field we are observing. It’s hard to judge the top figure skaters, beyond the “I like her more, she’s cute” level. It’s hard to learn the subtleties of a certain move that seem easy and yet, if you skated yourself, you would know it’s unbelievably difficult.

Yet, in figure skating, we can observe the act itself, the gracious moves. But what about something more common, like a web developer building a website or even more obscure, a delivery firm delivering a much-awaited package. How do we judge that, from our point of view of outsider, uninitiated in the art of package delivery, how do we price the “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these carriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds” attitude? By the way, this is actually not the motto of the U.S. Post Office. There is the obvious quality of service, yet many times services have hidden flaws. That beautiful website might be gorgeous, yet, in the same time, completely counter-intuitive to use, coded backwards, a complete mess for search engines to read. Not to speak of the nightmares it gives you when you want to update the smallest thing. But hey, it’s beautiful and it costs half the money the other guy was saying it is worth. And about that package, you only got 4 out of the last 5 packages, but hey, the ones that made it though were here fast, one a little crumpled, but fast!

As sure as the fact that’s snowing right now in Bucharest, there is a way in which you, the business owner and the master of an intricate and well oiled system that provides great service, to show your average un-initiated customer with a great service and a way to tell that you do your job well.
Just put on a show! Make a point of how fast you delivered the package and how reliable you are. Do it again and again, put on a show. Talk to your customers and give him an inside look at the many steps and things you had to consider when you built his website, show him a piece of code to get him grasp the sheer amount of typing you had to do, show him the 50 prototypes and sketches you made, until you found perfection.

It might seem like a scam or bragging but it’s not. You need to give a glimpse into the pains and efforts it takes you to be good a swift so that your customers appreciate you and value your work at its true value. Otherwise you will get exactly what Dan Ariely describes in his locksmith story. The, “What? 50 bucks for 10 minutes of work? You gotta be kidding me, pal” attitude. Yet, make them understand that it took you 30 minutes to get there and 30 minutes to go back and you saved her 200$ a the trouble of buying a new lock and that you performed an act that it took you 10 years to master and it would take her 10 years to do. Suddenly the 50$ for 10 minutes of work seem like a bargain.

Put on a show, don’t overdo it, but put on a show. My father always says that if you don’t brag yourself about your real achievements, nobody will do it for you.