"There's Not Much to Tell"

“There’s not much to tell, really.”

Whenever somebody says this to me, I know I'm probably about to hear something interesting. It's become almost a rule.

The people who insist they have fascinating stories occasionally don't. But the ones who tell me they're boring? They're dangerous.

Give me 20 minutes and a few questions and we'll probably uncover an employee who's been there since 2009, a customer who hasn't left since the Howard government, a near-disaster involving a broken machine and a Sunday morning, and some homemade system everyone in the company now considers completely normal.

But apparently there's not much to tell. Right.

“We're just a small business.”

Another warning sign - and I hear this one a lot.

Okay.

How long have you been operating?

“Twenty-three years.”

How many people?

“About 35.”

Still family owned?

“Yep.”

What happened when Dad retired?

“Oh, that was a whole thing…”

Of course it was.

And off we go.

Suddenly there are stories about succession, arguments around kitchen tables, employees who've been there longer than some family members, difficult years, brilliant years, terrible decisions, lucky breaks and customers who've somehow become friends.

Nothing to tell indeed.

My favourite phrase might be “We just…”

Business owners use just constantly.

“We just look after people.”

“We just get on with it.”

“We just fix the problem.”

“We just make sure it gets done.”

The word is doing an extraordinary amount of work.

So I like to remove it.

You look after people.

How?

You fix the problem.

Tell me about one.

You make sure it gets done.

What happens when getting it done becomes incredibly difficult?

That's usually when the story changes.

The 17-year client

Someone once mentioned having a long-standing customer.

Nothing unusual about that.

How long-standing?

“About 17 years.”

I can't remember whether I actually shouted SEVENTEEN?, but there's a reasonable chance I did.

The owner seemed completely unfazed.

They'd worked with the client for so long that the relationship had stopped registering as an achievement.

They'd been through management changes, changing requirements, problems, growth, new systems and all the other things that happen over nearly two decades.

To them? Just a client.

And that's when I realised something I've seen repeatedly ever since:

People stop noticing the things they do well when they've been doing them for long enough.

Extraordinary eventually becomes Tuesday

Think about your own work.

The first time you handled a serious problem successfully, you probably remembered it.

The 50th time? Tuesday.

You know who to call. You know what not to do. You can tell from one strange noise that a machine is about to ruin everyone's afternoon.

You recognise a potential problem in an email that somebody with less experience wouldn't notice.

You have a backup for the backup because of something that happened in 2018 and which nobody is ever going through again.

You don't call this expertise. You call it work.

But somebody standing outside your business sees it differently.

“But everyone does that, don't they?”

No. They really don't.

This conversation happens more often than you might think.

A business owner tells me something. I get interested. They look puzzled.

“But everyone does that, don't they?”

Nope. Sometimes everybody says they do it. That's very different.

Everybody cares about quality. Everybody provides great service. Everybody has experienced people. Everybody is responsive. Everybody is innovative.

And if you ever want to lose the will to live completely, apparently everybody is also committed to delivering innovative, best-practice, customer-focused solutions.

Please don't get me started on that sentence. Too late.

Tell me what happened

This is where things get interesting.

Don't tell me you're responsive. Tell me about the phone call at 6.30 on a Friday night.

Don't tell me your employees are loyal. Tell me about the person who started as an apprentice and now runs a division.

Don't tell me customers trust you. Tell me about the customer who has stayed for 17 years.

Don't tell me you solve problems. Tell me about the problem. What happened? Who noticed? What did you do? Did it work? What did you learn? What changed afterwards?

That's a story.

The best information often arrives accidentally

I've noticed that the most interesting things people tell me are rarely delivered with a fanfare.

They're usually an aside.

“Oh, actually…”

“I don't know if this is relevant, but…”

“We've got this little system we developed…”

“There was one time…”

“Our supervisor actually started with us when…”

That's when my ears prick up. Hang on. Go back.

Tell me more about that.

And quite often the person finishes explaining it and says:

“I'd never really thought about it like that.”

I love that sentence.

Because I haven't created anything. It was already there.

We're all too close to our own stories

I suspect this applies well beyond business.

We're inside our own lives every day. We know the ending of every story before we begin telling it.

We remember the messy bits nobody else saw.

We know how ordinary we felt while supposedly impressive things were happening.

So we discount them.

It wasn't brave; I didn't have a choice.

It wasn't difficult; I just got on with it.

It wasn't clever; I just figured something out.

It wasn't an achievement; it's my job.

Just.

There's that word again.

So, tell me the story

If you think there's not much to tell, I have a challenge for you.

Think about something in your work that you consider completely ordinary.

A customer who has been around forever.

A colleague everybody relies on.

A process nobody remembers inventing.

A mistake that changed the way you do things.

A crisis that became a funny story several years later.

Then ask yourself one more question.

Why?

Why did the customer stay?

Why does everybody rely on that person?

Why was the process invented?

Why did the mistake change things?

Why can you laugh about the crisis now?

Keep going.

Because the first answer is almost never the answer.

And if you still insist there's nothing particularly interesting about your business?

Well.

Famous last words.