Trust is the only currency for success in business (and in life).
“Everything has to be taken on trust; trust is only that what is taken to be true. It’s the currency of living. There may be nothing behind it, but it doesn’t make any difference so long as it is honoured.” — Tom Stoppard
I've been reflecting lately on what, against all odds, has enabled me to be successful in business as an entrepreneur. And really the key fundamental concept it comes down to is trust. The trust I was able to establish with the people that gave me a first chance, and who then ended up contributing to my success afterwards. The trust I was able to create with the dozens of employees, coworkers, and the handful of business partners I was lucky to work with to deliver value to hundreds of clients and ultimately to the businesses I had started.
I say against all odds because nothing in my academic education (Fundamental Physics) or my upbringing had predisposed me for being an entrepreneur. On the contrary my unstable teens tinted by the divorce of my parents and its collateral financial consequences should have encouraged me to play it safe and find a “real” and stable job. Instead I broke the status quo of a stable career path in IT after my six months of working for an IT service company and I started my first business with no entrepreneurial or sales experience whatsoever at the age of 25.
There is something very surreal about being entrusted for the first time. Especially when you don’t know if you can be trusted because you’re doing the work for the first time when you start your career.
To trust seems to be part strong gut feeling, part strong intellectual rationalization, at least at first. It often feels like the person who is about to trust you for the first time is either taking a leap of faith or a very calculated risk. Depending on the person’s personality and what is at stake with their decision, it feels like there is an internal debate between emotions and intellect where one weighs in more than the other in the end. Some people just don’t trust anybody ever, but for those (and most do) who want to develop a relationship based on trust (and hopefully fairness), earning that trust and delivering on your promise, is in my opinion the most powerful thing you can do and the most rewarding endeavor you can engage in.
I will always remember this pivotal moment when in 2003 the CFO of a large movie production company in France decided to entrust me and my small IT service shop (my first business) to fix their email server that had crashed several times that week. He could have insisted on using the IT company he had initially contracted but they had failed him too many times. He could have called upon another more renowned company that had been trying to get his business for months and was bidding on a larger RFP he had put out. But instead he chose me and my handful of system administrators to solve his problem.
In the two hours meeting when we first met, I had managed to convince him that we knew what we were doing, and that we would do whatever it would take to solve his server issues in the shortest possible time. Something in my arguments, and in my body language, made him trust my expertise and the integrity of my commitment to resolving his critical problems. We had never met before, and I had been introduced to him through a friend of a friend.
What he didn’t know is that my company was one week away from bankruptcy and that because of his leap of faith — that moment where some sort of chemistry happened that skewed the odds — he created the opportunity for us to develop a longer term relationship with his company (we basically earned the job for that RFP) that saved my business and put it back in the black within three months. We had been bootstrapping for almost a year after dramatically downsizing to survive the dotcom bubble collapse where we lost over half of our client portfolio overnight.
The few times this kind of experience has happened to me, and these are often pivotal moments, it feels like I have won the lottery. In other words, I feel that I have been lucky against all odds and that something magic has just happened. Of course there is a part of me that has earned the win, but if you define luck as “an opportunity meeting a predisposition”, you don’t control the conversion of that predisposition into a win.
I often think that establishing that initial trust is strongly related to projecting a strong image of confidence and integrity. Some people are really good at faking that behavior (a lot of sales people and corporate executives are for sure) but a lot of people work really hard to earn it fair and square. For me it has always been a matter of personal integrity. “My word is my word. My word is all I have”. And I think that this strong personal value set is what has enabled me to start over from scratch more than once and rebuild successful businesses.
The hard work however is not earning the business, in my opinion. After a while, especially in sales, you have the right storytelling, you ask the right questions, you nail the right triggers to build that initial trust and close the sale, and if not, you at least build a fertile ground for a future relationship.
The hard work goes into maintaining and growing that trust into a long term relationships. That is the real test of time of your integrity and your ability to deliver consistent value. In my case, and very fortunately — because in business as in life there is a lot that you don’t control — it is what has enabled me to keep on working with clients up to this day that I had closed in my first years of business back in the late 90s in France. And still today, I make sure I don’t take their trust for granted and value the opportunity of still working with them after all this time.
I’ll finish with this quote from the late and honorable Stephen R. Covey from the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People:
“Trust is the highest form of human motivation.”
When you understand the power and enablement of earning and building trust, it is indeed one of the most powerful motivators in human behavior.
