The Business of Making Connections

Written 7/22/09 from Availing Wisdom

*The Names of the Following have been changed to protect the innocent… but mostly the guilty*

It occurred to me the other day as I was merrily strolling to work that if we view the company as a person, as a real entity, then something must give it life.  Almost as if God were sending me an object lesson, my next stop showed me exactly what I needed to know.

On a whim I decided to stop in at a local industrial firm that happens to be on my way to work.  We’ll call them ABC Electric.  I have always been curious as to what they actually do since the name is so generic and I haven’t seen any literature about them.   The building stands on an intersection and looks like your typical concrete building constructed in the 70’s and refurbished to become a headquarters.  The front lobby was not well marked, unannounced visitors a rarity I surmised, but eventually I found my way to a pair of opaque glass doors.

I walked in to a very plain front room with white tiled floor and gray walls.  Front and center was a fairly unpleasant looking woman, not because of her natural looks, but due rather to the intense scrunching of her face.  I could only assume this was my fault or that she just ate something unpleasant for lunch.  I walked up to the over sized airport terminal-like desk and asked in my friendliest voice what her company did exactly.  She stared at me for a beat and asked:
“I’m sorry…Do you have an appointment?”

I told her I didn’t, that I just stopped by to see what this company was about because I have always wondered.  She stopped a beat again, almost as if she weren’t able to comprehend what I was saying.

“We can’t really help you, if you want to make an appointment then we could do that.”

I was flabbergasted.  I tried three more times to no avail and left the office with a feeling of utter defeat.  But it got me thinking about connections and companies and life cycles.  Obviously that business is still around, concrete building and all, but how long can it last in a market that demands personal connections?

Start Ups fail because they can’t get the blood flowing, or enough of the good blood rather.  The “blood flow” represents the connections they make with customers, and those can be tenuous at best.  Once the quality connections run out then the business dies.  Quality connections with customers are the blood of a business.

But an organization like this has passed the opening stages and moved on to a new cycle where they are even more equipped to capitalize on any connection, or they should be at least.  Your next contact could be worth a million dollars, but you have to have your touch points aligned with your values or that contact will be wasted.  I still don’t know what ABC Electric does, but if they would have spent just 5 minutes showing me, you can bet at that point I would have been an evangelist or at least a referral.

Makes you wonder how many opportunities they’ve missed already.  How many are you missing by not being prepared?