The A La Carte

Friday morning, I was sitting down with a new client.

Except “new client” doesn’t really explain the relationship.

I’ve known him for a while through the business world. Somewhere along the way, we went from people who knew each other professionally to actual friends. We’ve gone out, talked about our businesses, talked about life, and generally discovered that we get along pretty damn well.

Last week, he vented to me about some things happening in his business.

He’s currently preparing to move the entire business to a new location. Because apparently physically relocating a business while simultaneously continuing to run said business isn’t complicated enough, there are also some internal changes happening and plenty of inefficiencies that need to be addressed.

You know, my kind of chaos.

As we talked, he mentioned that there were people he didn’t really feel comfortable venting to because he didn’t want them to think badly about his business.

I understood that.

Owning a business is weird sometimes. We’re all supposed to show up and talk about how great everything is going while quietly Googling “how to fix everything I’ve ever done” from the parking lot.

Okay, maybe not literally.

But you get the idea.

With me, he didn’t have to do that.

He could tell me something really sucked, and I wasn’t going to think his business sucked. I was going to listen, ask questions, probably tell him about something in my own business that also really sucked, and then start figuring out what was actually happening.

When we were trying to figure out the next time we could hang out, I told him we didn’t necessarily have to go do something.

We could hang out and work.

I knew he needed to start putting together a plan for the move, and I could help him make a to-do list. Not as someone he was hiring. Just as his friend who happens to be really good at looking at a giant mess and figuring out where to start.

The next day, I got a text.

“I think I need more help than I’m willing to admit.”

Well.

Funny you should mention that.

Obviously, getting another client is great. I’m a business owner. I enjoy when people pay me money. That’s generally how this whole thing is supposed to work.

But this one felt different.

There was a sense of pride in knowing that not only did I see how I could help him, he saw it too.

So Friday morning, we sat down and started getting into the nuts and bolts of his business.

And I mean really getting into it.

The move is one piece, and it’s a big one. My job will be to take as much of the logistics off his plate as possible while we simultaneously figure out how the business keeps functioning during the transition.

But we’re also looking at the bigger picture.

What’s working? What’s inefficient? What’s taking too much of his time? What needs to change? What has fallen through the cracks? What can I eventually take over completely so he doesn’t have to think about it anymore?

At one point during that conversation, he told me something that has stuck with me ever since.

He said he knew right away that he could implicitly trust me.

I’ve gotten a lot of compliments about my work over the years.

I’m organized. I’m good at figuring things out. I can build a spreadsheet. I can manage chaos. I can learn new software. I can take seventeen disconnected pieces of information and somehow turn them into a functioning process.

Tell me I’m good at one of those things and I can probably give you examples to prove it.

Tell me I’m someone you implicitly trust?

Apparently that one hits differently.

Because trust isn’t really a business skill.

It’s a character trait.

And if I’m being completely transparent, I have a much easier time seeing my value in what I do than in who I am.

My personal life hasn’t exactly been a glowing case study in self-esteem.

I can tell you why I’m valuable to a client all day long. Ask me what makes me valuable when I’m not fixing something for somebody and the answer gets a little harder.

Somewhere along the way, I got really good at equating being useful with being valuable.

Which, as it turns out, is incredibly convenient when you own an administrative and operations business.

It’s slightly less convenient when you’re trying to be a human.

That’s probably why his comment meant so much to me.

He wasn’t saying he trusted me because I’d already successfully moved his business.

I haven’t.

He wasn’t saying it because I’d fixed all of his inefficiencies.

Definitely haven’t done that yet.

He wasn’t complimenting a finished project or something I had accomplished for him.

He was telling me something he’d already decided about me.

And maybe that’s something I need to get better at paying attention to.

I spend a lot of time looking at myself through my own very critical lens. I know every mistake I’ve made. Every insecurity. Every thing I’d like to change. Every part of my life that doesn’t look the way I thought it would by now.

Other people don’t necessarily see us through that same lens.

They see how we show up.

They notice whether we listen.

They notice whether they can tell us something without feeling judged.

They notice whether we do what we say we’re going to do.

They notice whether they can hand us something important and breathe a little easier knowing we’ve got it.

Friday night, a group of us went to a baseball game.

My new client was there, but mostly my friend was there.

We could talk about something happening with work for a minute, answer a question, laugh about something, and then go right back to being friends watching baseball.

We haven’t really had to figure out how to turn one relationship off and the other one on.

Maybe we won’t have to.

There will be boundaries to figure out, of course. There always are when friendship and business overlap.

But there’s also something pretty cool about getting to do good work with people you genuinely like being around.

And maybe there’s an even bigger lesson in how this whole thing happened.

I didn’t pitch him.

I didn’t convince him that I’m trustworthy.

I didn’t make a presentation explaining all the reasons he should hand me a significant piece of his business.

I listened.

I showed up as his friend.

I offered to help when he was overwhelmed.

And somewhere in all of our conversations, he figured out who I was.

Maybe that’s the reminder I needed.

We spend so much time worrying about how we’re perceived, what we’re accomplishing, what we look like, whether we’re successful enough, useful enough, interesting enough or just… enough.

Meanwhile, people are paying attention to something else entirely.

They see how we show up when there’s nothing to prove.

They see who we actually are, not just what we say we are.