After I hung up from a phone call recently, my wife commented that she always finds my business calls interesting.
“ You were on the phone for an hour, and talked about business, then personal topics for a while, then back to business, then personal…”.
Thinking back through the years, it’s always been my approach to build personal relationships with people that I work with, be it those in the same organization, clients or partners.
Rob Didlake and I have worked together since about 1987 and one of the reasons we have always gotten along so well together is that we have the same approach to many things. We both “grew up” in a service organization and learned how important it is to take care of people and meet their needs.
We found our best approach in business is to make relationships, learn what people’s problems are and the see how we can help them. This has been easy to do because it is part of our nature.
We aren’t always able to provide a technical solution to a client – sometimes they buy things from other companies, but we always strive to build that relationship anyway. The value of people far exceeds money and I hope that we can always keep that mindset.
One of the things that makes coming into work every day fun is because I get to work with so many friends. I hope that we can all value who we are talking to as we go about our days and remember to put people before business.
