The stuff that doesn’t fit on the quote

Every week or so, an e-mail lands in my inbox that says more or less the same thing. Somebody’s forwarded me a price from another IT company, and underneath it, one line: “Can you beat this?”

Fair question. It’s the only question that seems to make sense, because from where you’re standing all of us look like the same company wearing different logos. Same vendors. Same words: cloud, cybersecurity, backups, support. Same qualified engineers, same certificates on the wall, prices all bunched up in the same narrow band. So you do the natural thing. You treat it like printer paper. And you buy printer paper on price, because printer paper is printer paper, and a ream from one shop keeps the lights on exactly as well as a ream from the shop across the road.

But after years of watching customers arrive, and sometimes watching them leave, it is extremely rare that they go over the technology itself.

Not once has a new client sat down across from me and explained that they jumped ship because the last lot couldn’t configure a firewall. The real reasons are much more human than that: we never really knew what was going on, we spent more time chasing updates than getting answers, it always felt like we were logging a ticket instead of talking to someone who actually knew our business.

Not one of those is a technical complaint. You could have the finest firewall in the province and still hear every single one.

There’s a reason for it, and it’s the same reason you can’t tell a great surgeon from a merely adequate one while you’re lying on the table. You’ve no idea what good looks like from the inside. So you reach for the things you can read. Years ago somebody went and studied malpractice, who gets sued and who doesn’t, and the punchline is one of those facts that rearranges the furniture a little.

It wasn’t the clumsy surgeons who got sued. Skill barely came into it. What predicted a lawsuit was the tone of voice. The rushed ones, the curt ones, the ones who made you feel like a nuisance: those were the ones who ended up in court. The warm ones, who sat down and let the silence breathe, walked away clean, mistakes and all. We can’t grade the medicine, so we grade the bedside manner. And it turns out the bedside manner is doing an enormous amount of quiet work.

My clients do exactly the same thing, and they’re right to. Almost none of them could tell you whether a backup environment has been designed beautifully or bodged together with tape, and they shouldn’t have to. That’s not where their genius lives. What they can tell you is whether my engineer remembered that month-end payroll couldn’t wait until Tuesday. Whether somebody phoned before they had to go asking. Whether they came off the call standing a little taller than they went in.

None of that survives contact with a spreadsheet. There’s no line item for it, no product code, no box to tick. It’s the mechanic who knows your car by its noise before you’ve finished doing the noise with your mouth. The one who calls to say he hasn’t fixed it yet, but he hasn’t forgotten it either. It looks like nothing.