On choosing a silver lining

The second business I wanted as a client here was a shop whose services I actually need.

Their website had not been touched in about ten years. You could tell it had cost real money once. Somebody had put proper work into being found on Google, page after page of it, and then it had been left alone while the rest of the web moved on.

That made them the perfect prospect. The expensive half of the job was already done.

So I did the work before asking for it. A full draft of a new site, every page and every link kept exactly where Google already had them, in a design I was proud of. I showed my wife and she said it was a massive upgrade.

Then I built the offer. Do not pay me $500. Give me $500 of credit in your store and I will spend it with you. Whatever their margin is, the real cost to them was probably half that.

The introduction came through somebody we both knew. I told him plainly that I was going to use his shop either way, offer or no offer.

He said his website had not been touched in ten years. He said he knew it was outdated. He said it was not that important to his business, that he was busy enough already, and that he was happy with the platform he was on.

I had an answer for all of it. You keep your domain. You keep your email address. You own every piece of it. Nothing changes except that the site looks like it was made this decade, and the whole thing costs you a credit note.

I got through every objection. Then he sighed.

Yeah, but then I would be letting down my friend who made the website for me.

And there it was. The real reason, which had nothing to do with any of the things we had just spent ten minutes on.

Here is the part I am less proud of. Somewhere in the weeks of building that offer I had quietly made it the test of the whole business. If a man will not take a modern website for store credit, from someone who is going to be his customer anyway, then what am I ever going to sell to anybody?

I was gutted for about a day.

Then I remembered something I had been chewing on. Tony Robbins calls it the meaning maker. The world you walk around in is not reality. It is reality after it has passed through the thing inside you that decides what events mean. The same event can happen to two people and leave them living in different worlds, because they made different meanings out of it.

So I made a different one.

That man is so loyal to the friend who built his website that he will keep a ten year old site rather than let him down. He will make a decision that costs him money, where people can see it, to protect a relationship. That is not a closed door. That is the most valuable quality a customer can have, and a stranger had just demonstrated it to me for free.

I came into this thinking the technical part was the business. It is not. The work has to be better than what is already there, and it will be. But the relationship is the business, and the technical part is how you earn the right to have one.

A customer who will not walk away from a friend who helped them is a customer who will not walk away from me either. Every one I win is worth more than I thought.

The other thing that helped is a phrase I took from Seth Godin. It's not for you.

That is the whole sentence. You put an offer into the world, it is for some people and it is not for others, and when somebody says no the correct response is not to re-examine your entire life. It is to say, clearly this is not for you, and go to the next door.

There is an enormous amount of freedom in that. It is the permission you need to keep making offers at all.