Your Business Got Bigger and Your Customers Got Further Away
There is a strange moment in the life of a successful business. The owner who once knew every customer by name becomes the person who reads a report about customer relationships. The business grew. Departments formed. A sales team arrived and marketing got sophisticated. All of that is good, and it took years to build. But something can get lost on the way. We get very good at reaching people. Sometimes we lose interest in meeting them. If you have spent fifteen or twenty years building a company that now runs on systems, the answer is not working harder. It is getting closer. Closer to the customer who stopped calling. Closer to the team member who is feeling disconnected. A funnel can introduce you. Someone still has to meet the person, and that takes shoe leather.
From Edge of the Napkin, Episode 408 of Paper Napkin Wisdom.
The promise of customers who arrive already convinced
Someone proposes the perfect inbound funnel. A better website. Some automation. A campaign that moves a stranger from awareness to interest to a scheduled call. Numbers appear on a dashboard and move from one column to the next. Traffic, leads, conversions, cost per acquisition. All of it measurable.
That is genuinely attractive, and the value is real. Technology makes a business easier to reach. Good sales systems give a team more time for customers. A system can remember a birthday, prompt a call, tell you which customer hasn't been contacted in 90 days. Those are useful things.
I wonder, though, what happens when the desire to scale becomes a desire to avoid the human part. You want the customer to arrive already convinced. The new partner should understand the value before anyone has to explain it. The new opportunity ought to land on the calendar, polished and qualified, ready to close.
It's a beautiful picture. It also leaves something out.
A funnel and a series of nudges are built to move someone toward a decision. A relationship gives you the chance to understand what kind of decision would actually help them. One can support the other. They are different jobs. It's not a rejection of technology, it's a reminder that people still need people.
Five minutes on a brutally cold January morning
I was reminded of this while working on my book, Dynasty DNA. There's a story in the foreword that takes me back to the University of Ottawa.
A few of us had a crazy idea to start the Entrepreneurs' Club. We wanted a business dinner that seated students beside professionals doing the work those students hoped to do one day. A student interested in accounting would sit beside a partner in an accounting firm. Someone interested in finance would spend the evening with a person in wealth management or mergers and acquisitions.
The university wasn't convinced. Neither was the faculty. They gave us a condition they believed we couldn't meet. Find a keynote speaker who could fill the event, and they'd support it. We had a month and a half between selling the first ticket and the night itself.
There was one obvious name. Bruce Firestone had just finished bringing an NHL franchise to Ottawa. People knew his story. Everybody wanted some of his time. A student club had almost no chance of getting a brand new professional sports team owner into their school, on his schedule and then on ours.
Today you might build a beautiful campaign around that challenge. An impressive email sequence, the right introduction, a polished deck. Track every open and figure out exactly how to nudge it along.
Back then I had a different idea. I learned when Bruce was returning from vacation. On a brutally cold January morning I went to his office at six and waited outside. He arrived four hours later. About an hour after that, I got five minutes.
He said yes. We secured roughly twenty thousand dollars in sponsorship within days and held the dinner. The Entrepreneurs' Club endured. Toast to Success went on to be the flagship business event of the faculty.
The point isn't that you should surprise people in parking lots. That's generally frowned on, times have changed, and respect for someone's time matters. What matters is the choice underneath it. There was a person we needed to reach, and the answer was never going to come from staring at the plan. That five minute conversation had more possibility than a month spent admiring the idea.
Bruce's yes didn't do anybody else's job. The event still took planning, other people's commitment, and a ton of effort. What his yes did was give everyone involved a reason to move.
Why the reports look healthy right up until they don't
Your company may have done twenty million in revenue. Maybe there are managers who manage managers. Your calendar probably looks nothing like it did when you made every sales call. At some point it feels reasonable to say you shouldn't have to be the one knocking on doors anymore.
For the daily sales work, that may well be right. Being free of every sales activity is a different thing from being disconnected from the people whose trust sustains the company.
When the reports look healthy, it's easy to assume the relationships are too. Then a major customer leaves. A long-standing supplier takes an opportunity somewhere else. A good employee gives notice and the reason surprises you. Sometimes the first warning was a conversation nobody had.
Because the signals people give you personally rarely fit neatly into a reporting column.
What a conversation gives you that a column can't
You notice hesitation when somebody answers. You hear the concern underneath a polite sentence. The customer mentions something happening in their family. They tell you about a problem their company has that has nothing to do with your proposal, and suddenly you're talking to a person rather than evaluating an opportunity.
That changes what happens next. Sometimes it produces a sale. Sometimes the right response is to help them solve something you don't sell. Either way, they remember how they were treated.
Think about your most valuable business relationships. Someone calls when they have a problem. A customer gives you the chance to fix a mistake before taking their business elsewhere. A partner brings you into a conversation because they trust how you'll treat the person on the other side. How many of those exist only because somebody saw the right ad or got the right nudge?
An ad may have been the first introduction. Somewhere along the way, someone listened, a promise was kept, and there was another conversation. Trust accumulated through what that person experienced with other people. You can't look at that sequence and decide to automate the human part. Technology can prompt you to care. It can't care on your behalf.
Why going back out there can feel like going backward
Here's something else I wonder about. For some successful owners, the resistance to shoe leather has very little to do with efficiency.
The business has reached a point where certain activities feel like they belong to an earlier chapter. You were once the person who knocked on doors when nobody knew your name. Now you employ people to do that work. Going back out there, even face to face with your own team, can feel like going backward. There's a certain pride in needing to be needed less.
You've earned that. You've also changed what you notice.
There's a second kind of friction, and it's smaller and more honest. You can't control exactly how a real conversation will go. Someone may be busy. You might hear something difficult. A marketing dashboard lets you study people at a distance. A conversation requires you to participate. That friction is powerful, because it puts you back in contact with the people your business exists to serve.
So notice the call you've postponed, and consider whether the obstacle is really your schedule.
What the team learns from where you spend your attention
I'm not suggesting a founder with a substantial business should spend every morning prospecting. You have people and systems for good reasons, and a team should own the relationships it has been trusted to build.
Leadership sets the example for how much those relationships matter.
If your team hears you talk only about conversion rates and KPIs, that's what they'll pursue. If they see you make time for a customer who needs help, or for a team member who's struggling, they notice that too. The standard gets established through what you value when there is no immediate payoff. Your presence tells people what the dashboard can't.
It also matters how you measure. There's a real difference between measuring activity and measuring whether a relationship is growing. Ten calls can be ten interruptions. One conversation can change the direction of a business. The number of dials tells you somebody was busy. It doesn't tell you whether anyone was understood, or whether any real question got asked. That's worth considering the next time you review your pipeline.
And imagine a great sales system that frees your team from repetitive administration. What do they do with that time? Another hundred automated messages, or a handful of meaningful conversations where they can actually hear what matters most. You probably need some of both while you're growing. The second one deserves a lot more attention than it gets, because it's uncomfortable.
Put some shoe leather into this week
You've probably heard me talk about Focus, Align, Act. It fits here, and it doesn't need to become complicated.
Focus on the kind of company you want people to experience. A company that sees its customers as people makes different choices than one that sees everyone as a cog in a system.
Align by noticing where your behavior matches that belief. Look at your calendar. Look at the conversations you keep postponing. Notice who has gone from being someone you knew to a name you scan in a report.
Act. Make one real connection this week. Try for one every day.
Pick one person you haven't properly connected with. An existing customer. A former customer. The supplier who helped when the business was small. The person who gave you a chance when you needed one. Maybe it's the team member on the front line who doesn't know you exist.
Call them. Ask if you can visit. Meet for a coffee or just walk by. If distance makes that difficult, arrange an actual conversation where you can both pay attention.
Leave the pitch behind. Ask how things are going and listen long enough to find out. Find something useful you can offer, even if it isn't you, even if it never turns into a transaction. If you promise something, follow through.
Notice how you feel before you make the call. There may be a little resistance there.
Thirty-five years later, the interesting part of that January morning isn't the waiting. It's that a brief connection became the starting point for something that lasted. The Entrepreneurs' Club still runs the Toast to Success business dinner, and I'm still connected to Bruce Firestone. I wonder which relationship in your business is waiting for that kind of attention now.
Wearing out shoe leather may never look impressive on a sales report. There isn't always a clean number to put beside a conversation that matters. You can change the way somebody experiences your business. Something you didn't know gets said out loud, and another conversation gets earned.
Related Insights
If growth has put systems between you and the people whose trust sustains the company, it helps to see the pattern that put them there. The Growth Pattern Diagnostic
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