Lexington Computer Repair Blog

There is a rather famous quote for which the author is apparently unknown that says

My goal is to someday be the person my dog thinks I am.

I believe we all know viscerally what this means. Our dogs adore us and wouldn’t we all love to feel that we deserve that kind of devotion.

In life few, if any of us, live up to our own expectations for ourselves much less to those our dogs seem to mistakenly have. But it seems to me that in business, which is much less complicated and ambiguous than life in general, high standards should be achievable – but not easily and probably not within the standard business models we see today.

Bearing in mind the name and topic for this blog, let’s confine ourselves to small personal service business for now, the ideas can then be expanded from there if we want to. If we take, for example, a hypothetical computer repair business, I imagine that the owner’s dog expects that business is run with integrity. Now this word integrity can be pretty easily thrown around by people in business so maybe we should try and define it. In The Speed of Trust, Stephen M. R. Covey uses a story about Mahatma Gandhi to illustrate a definition of integrity:

At one point in his life, he was invited to speak before the House of Commons in England. Using no notes, he spoke for two hours and brought an essentially hostile audience to a rousing standing ovation. Following his speech, some reporters approached his secretary, Mahadev Desai, incredulous that Gandhi could mesmerise his audience for such a long time with no notes. Desai responded:

What Gandhi thinks, what he feels, what he says, and what he does are all the same. He does not need notes … You and I, we think one thing, feel another, say a third, and do a fourth, so we need notes and files to keep track.

OK, I admit that I’m a sucker for almost any story about Gandhi and this one is no exception. How does this apply to our business?

I believe that the average Pug or Cavalier King Charles Spaniel believes its owner speaks to his/her customer from conviction, “I’ve listened to you, I understand your problem, here is what I think should be done, here is what I will do.” All that remains then is execution.

Now, as a great man I knew used to say, “That sounds great if you say it fast”. I think you would be hard pressed to find a businessman who would say they don’t live up to this … and I think you would be equally hard pressed to find a businessman who actually does. Why? Because, alas, we are human. We fall short of our own goals, our dog’s faith and our customers’ expectations. We juggle the motivations of integrity and profit, we wrestle between confidence and competence, between pleasing our customers and our bosses. Gandhi didn’t have these problems, he notably abandoned the personal services business on the road to becoming great. Alas, we mortals are left to struggle with these issues on a daily basis.

If I have an insight from the combined wisdom of Gandhiji and my dog it is to have a bad memory. Gandhi did not memorise a bunch of great ideas, he lived a great life and spoke from his convictions, conversely, every day is a new one to my dog, he doesn’t (apparently) remember or care that yesterday I didn’t feed him on time or walk him long enough or that I did not give him the proper amount of attention. To apply this to business well, I think means to apply a certain consistency in customer interaction and a purity of purpose that ignores the profit motive but trusts that it will take care of itself.

More on this in the future.

This isn’t just a rant entry, it’s meant to illustrate a point about trust.

In my previous blog on Indian Call Centers I wrote a number of entries around the concept of trust. It is my conviction that all of business and indeed all of our society is based on trust. Conversely, no trust = no business, no trust = broken society. I won’t try to address the societal implications here in this article but I would like to briefly examine the business angle.

Without trust, I have no business. People bring me their computers and leave them with me to repair. I give them a piece of paper with some scratchings on it that suggest they’ve given me a computer, but what is that really worth? My customers trust:

• That I’m going to give their computer back to them
• That I’m going to fix it competently
• That I’m not going to steal their personal information off of it
• That I’m not going to, say,  put spyware on the the computer rather than take it off (as many programs you get on the internet do)

Similarly I trust that my customers are going to pay me if I fix their PC. After spending a few hours of my time and perhaps installing some new parts in it, I hand a customer his/her computer often in exchange for a small piece of paper with some scratchings on it that promises to increase the balance in my bank account (which I trust the bank will hold safely for me – but don’t get me started on that either). In the absence of these trusts, commerce simply doesn’t happen.

Now in my case I think that this trust relationship often begins when someone looks at my website for the first time. They have a computer problem and I think the primary question in their mind is, “Do I trust these guys?”. Some people don’t bother with my website because they trust a brand, they look up “Geek Squad” in the phone book and trot over to Best Buy with their computers to have them fixed. They don’t care that I might provide better service at a fraction of the price, they trust the brand and reputation of the Geek Squad franchise. I have no quarrel with that thinking, trust is personal. But trust can be squandered and it’s hard to get back once it’s lost.

Stephen Covey has written some great stuff on trust, in fact his book, The Speed of Trust is sitting on my coffee table begging me to read it. Covey talks about the loss of trust in 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, how we have a trust bank with people (and entities) and how difficult is is to come back from having a negative balance of trust. Legalzoom.com has a negative balance of trust with me.

My little business needs to be an LLC. If I want to sign proper reseller contracts and ensure that if someone falls down my steps they can’t sue me for my daughter’s college money, I need to incorporate. A company called Legalzoom.com advertises on television and the sharky lawyer Robert Shapiro lends his credibility to the outfit. Legalzoom.com offers to draw up and submit the proper papers for $149, which could save me the trouble and expense of hiring a local attorney or trying to do it myself. So, like the slightly above average businessman that I am I think about how many computers I’ll have to fix in order to pay them to do this rather than sort it all out myself. OK, business decision made, it’s worth the expense. Trouble is, when I get to the end of legalzoom’s questionairre, after they’ve asked for and been given my credit card number, company info, email, phone numbers etc., I see that my bill is not going to be the $149 advertised but actually $377. Yikes!

Do people just shrug this sort of thing off? Apparently so. I swear to you, there is no button on the payment page to go back and edit your answers to eliminate the additional charges your arbitrary answers caused. It’s either pay up or give up. I gave up. Legalzoom broke my trust, they charged me significantly more for a product than they promised to and if they are dishonest about their pricing then I expect they are dishonest about their products as well. I don’t need a dishonest lawyer or dishonest accountant any more than my customers need a dishonest computer technician. I want to work with someone I can trust.