That’s not what we sell

We’ve all been doing this long enough that it’s hard to really put ourselves in our customer’s shoes. I’ve certainly been guilty of talking over a client’s head, leaving out details, or assuming knowledge they don’t have.

So anytime I end up on the flip side of that — when I’m the one with little experience — I try to pay attention.

This weekend it came in the form of replacing the faucet in our bathroom sink.

On the surface, it seemed pretty straightforward. And it wasn’t my first time (though it’s been years). So a quick trip to Home Depot, a few tools out of my toolbox, and I thought I’d be done in 20 minutes.

That, of course, is not how the story went 🤣

A couple hours later, I found myself back in Home Depot, covered in grime, with a arm full of sink guts, frustratedly wandering the aisles for parts I couldn’t even name.

That’s when a guy who worked there walked over, took one look at me, and said “rough afternoon?”. And without skipping a beat, he took the parts out of my hand, walked back to the section I had passed by a dozen times at that point, handed me everything I needed, and gave me a quick run through of what went wrong and how to fix it.

When I got back to the bathroom, it didn’t take 5 minutes to finish the job.

Replacing the faucet was never the hard part. The hard part was not knowing what I was looking at.

Once someone who understood the situation took a quick look and pointed me in the right direction, the rest was easy.

Neither sinks nor websites are rocket science… but if you don’t know what you’re looking at, they might as well be.

We spend years learning the tools, the platforms, the best practices, the edge cases.

There’s no doubt that all that experience and knowledge is valuable… But that’s not what we sell.

What we sell is the ability to look at a messy situation, recognize what’s actually going on, and point to the right solution.

I paid $5.32 for the parts I needed, but the clarity I received was easily worth 100 times that.