Seth Godin has done it again…his post on “Trustiness”  encapsulates the way we’ve worked here from Day One. He differentiates between “Trust” and Trustiness”; the former is genuine, the latter a PR tactic that’s liable to backfire:

The difference should be obvious. Trust experienced is remarkable, trustiness once discovered leaves a bad taste for even your most valued customers. The perverse irony is this: the more you work on your trustiness, the harder you fall once people discover that they were tricked.

Our RapidFire Proposal/Agreement doc is a single page of pretty large type. Sure, it’s got all the major points — cost, schedule, video length, what’s included. Our “fine print” is superficial and not particularly fine. One page, One side. The result?  In almost three years, we’ve had zero misunderstandings or debates with clients (during or after production) regarding the terms of our engagement. And yes, much of the time it’s because we simply agree to go a little above and beyond what we technically have too: a little extra video time, last minute changes, even a request for delaying payment.

The result is the long-term reward: we get all our business through word of mouth. All of it.  Yeah, we play with Google ads a little, we keep up with folks via social media, but most of our clients show up saying “I got your name from X, who said you were a pleasure to work with and I shouldn’t even spend time comparing to competitors.“. It’s a nice thing to hear, and even nicer that we can work on projects all day instead of running around trying to cold-call clients.

With every client-oriented business decision, I ask myself the same question. As Seth puts it:

 ”Are we doing this to create the appearance of trust, or is this actually something trustworthy, something we’re proud to do? Building trust is expensive. You can call it an expense or an investment, or merely cut corners and work on trustiness instead.”