In a service business, the one thing you have to establish is trust. Because you can’t be trusted if you’re indistinguishable.
What I mean is, if the client doesn’t trust you, you’re just another name on a list of vendors who all say the same thing. In a word, you’re replaceable. And when something goes wrong (which Murphy’s Law says it will) that trust is the only thing keeping the lines of communication open.
I had an unusual opportunity to build that trust recently. It wasn’t through what we were hired to do. It was through something I was pretty sure wasn’t my job.
How things go a little sideways
We were brought in as a small vendor on a large project for a Philadelphia-area company. Other players had the bigger roles – contractors, electricians, and lots of other guys with large trucks. Our job? Pretty minor. We could have Uber’d to the job site. In the hierarchy of importance, we were hanging out somewhere near the snack table.
But the project had one flaw: no one was coordinating. Timelines didn’t align, updates didn’t flow, and eventually, the CEO got frustrated. And when a CEO is frustrated, it doesn’t matter who messed up. It only matters who steps up.
At one of the company’s locations, our technician showed up to install a firewall and discovered someone else had already installed one. Surprise!
That’s when I realized what was missing: communication. So, I volunteered to fill the gap. (That’s not as selfless as it seems. I can’t have my techs traveling to distant locations for zero work.) I started checking in with the other vendors and sending the CEO a simple weekly update on everyone’s status.
If you’ve been in a similar situation, you know I wasn’t trying to win a gold star. I just wanted the project to stop spinning in circles. But the small act of telling the CEO what was happening – and documenting it with a basic Excel spreadsheet – completely changed his tone with us. He started trusting us more. Started calling me for updates. In his eyes, I was his point person… even though we weren’t running the job.
Don’t let a client hear crazy cuckoo clocks in their head
So this isn’t a story about building a flashy brand or being the best salesperson. It’s about noticing a vacuum in an inconvenient place and quietly filling it in a way that creates trust with a client you’d like to keep.
In this case, trust didn’t come from the technology we were hired to install. It came from being the one vendor who noticed that everyone else was so focused on their part of the project that they forgot to talk to each other. And to the guy at the top.
If you’re wondering how to spot opportunities like this, look for the silences in larger projects. When no one’s updating the client, when timelines feel fuzzy, when people start asking the same questions more than once and it’s not clear who might have answers – that’s your cue. You don’t need to take over the whole project. Just fill one communication gap, offer one clear update, solve one coordination headache.
Because trust is built in those small moments when a client realizes, “I can count on you.” And in this business, that’s everything.
