“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
-Maya Angelou
You know how at the end of a phone call, people will sometimes say, “Thank you for taking the time to speak with me?”
It’s usually a platitude, an overly formal sign-off uttered by someone hoping to sell you something.
This week, I had a buyer say these words to me, and he said them with sincerity and palpable relief.
Why would this quiet man thank ME for selling him ghostwriting services?
Because for the past two days, he’d been on phone calls with a hired closer at hard-sell ghostwriting factories. The people he’d spoken to were trying to rush him into a purchase, pitching him upsell after upsell anytime he lapsed into silence to think.
Like I said, he was a quiet man; it took him a minute to formulate his words. I got the impression he had a hard time with interpersonal conversations as a whole. But he had a story to tell and he wanted to know if I’d write it for him.
Of course I would.
But more than that, he wanted me to actually listen to him, to hear his story and to genuinely weigh if I thought I could write it properly.
And I did. I listened to him. I didn’t interrupt when he took a pause midsentence to gather his thoughts. And I didn’t try to sell him something he wasn’t asking for and didn’t need.
Which is why he hired me.
Growth over Service?
There’s an irritating trend in entrepreneurial circles: an emphasis on growth at all costs. Hire more staff, they say. Move menial tasks offshore, they insist. Watch your income skyrocket and work only an hour a day.
Yeah… but at what cost?
For the past year, I have indeed been hiring staff so I can increase my annual number of clients. And this week, I launched a new website, one with all the bells and whistles and (unlike my amateurish old site), it plays nice with search engines.
I’m pretty excited about it because the new site, in addition to looking better, will make it easier for people to find me, preferably BEFORE they get stuck on the phone with one of the overseas ghostwriting factories.
Even with this growth, one thing I won’t do is let people walk away feeling like they’ve been taken advantage of. The writers and editors I hire are all personally vetted. I know them. I know their work. I didn’t just pluck them out of the bag ‘ resumes I got from LinkedIn.
I think we’re all tired of businesses treating us like garbage and charging us more for the experience. Rude staff, sub-par work, barely competent management… I don’t know about you but it makes me pretty choosy about where and with whom I do business.
Be the Change You Want to Be
I took the option to tip off all my invoices and removed the suggestion to tip from my end-of-job email copy. Because US tipping culture is out of control and I’m sick of it. I bet all my clients are too. No more tips. You’ve paid for your service and that is enough.
I added the ability to text me on WhatsApp. Not every question is worth a call, and yeah… I take a while with email sometimes. (Sorry… I recently hired a VA to help me with that too.) And no one likes to be left hanging. So you can send me a text. Even if I’m up to my eyeballs in work, I have my phone next to me, and I can answer your quick question.
It’s little things like that. Making people feel that they matter. Because they do. And personally, I don’t want to do business any other way.