A Good Kind of Weird

I had a weird professor in college.

A good kind of weird.

Without knowing it, he taught me something I still see today:

how easy it is to confuse people.

And then blame them.

That was Professor Guasco.

He had long hair, almost completely white.

He spoke slowly, deliberately, and gently.

He taught physics.

A subject many find boring.

Or useless.

But with him, it was different.

He’d say things like:

"We'll start class in a sixth of an hour."

He used colored markers.

And every formula on the board ended up looking like a rainbow.

And he had a nice habit of not doing things like everyone else.

The value of gravity, for example.

It’s 9.8.

Well, to be exact, 9.80665.

But he decided it was 10.

Just because.

Because 9.8 forced you to pull out a calculator.

And he didn't want that.

He wanted us to learn physics.

Not the blessed 9.80665.

And that’s when I understood something I haven't forgotten.

Simple things get done.

Complicated things get abandoned.

And if you have people serving customers or selling for you, you'd better understand this.

How easy it is to confuse your team.

And then blame them.

You fill their lives with protocols.

Steps.

Diagrams.

Scripts.

As if serving customers were assembling furniture.

And then you say:

"People just don't get it."

No.

Many times, people do want to.

They do want to do it well.

They do want to serve better.

They do want to sell more.

The problem is elsewhere.

It’s one thing to understand something on paper.

It’s quite another to remember it in real life.

With a customer in front of you.

In a hurry.

Under pressure.

With a thousand things happening at once.

And if your people have to remember too many things to do it well,

you’ve already lost.

Not because they're lazy.

Not because they don't care.

But because it was too complicated.

And be careful.

I’m not telling you to let them improvise.

Of course, they need guidance.

Of course, they need structure.

But it's one thing to help them do better.

And another to give them something so convoluted it gets abandoned as soon as real life begins.

That's why the best guides are more like gravity at 10.

Not because they look more sophisticated.

But because they can be remembered.

They can be used.

And they actually help.

Your team remembers it.

And uses it.

And then the customer notices.

They notice they're being served better.

That there's clarity.

That there's intent.

That they’re not being read a script.

Because serving well isn’t saying twenty correct things.

It’s doing a few things,

but doing them well,

always,

and on time.

Your team works with more clarity.

Your customer feels it.

And you stop fighting with processes that look beautiful on paper,

but no one pays attention to in real life.

If you want to clear up doubts and see if your business has a real sales system, or just good days and bad days, here's a test for you.

It's 11 questions.

Take the test here

Carlos Agami

Service is the way.

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Shopology S.A. de C.V.

Av. Pacífico 468 Local C, Coyoacán, Ciudad de México, CP 04330, México.

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