Danny Meyer has a story in his book Setting the Table that I think about more than I’d like to admit.
On every table in his restaurants there’s a salt shaker, and it’s supposed to sit in the center. It just moves. Meyer’s point is that the job of the person running the place is to keep moving it back to the center. Not once. Every single time. The standard doesn’t hold itself up. Somebody has to keep putting it back. And oftentimes it might be your own team members.
I had a salt shaker morning today.
One of our repeat clients, someone who has already hired with us, grew his business literally 1,000% with our hires, and liked it enough to come back, asked about hiring a developer. That’s about as warm as a sales opportunity gets.
Pretty much the equivalent of boiling water on the sun…
So what happened?
The team member replied with a thumbs-up emoji, passed it along to the recruiting team, and then nobody did anything. No reply in words. No “got it, we’ll come back to you by Thursday.” Just a little yellow thumb.
I woke up, saw it, and did the math. A warm request from a client who already loves us was going to sit about 24 hours before anyone actually answered.
First reaction was typical of founders and business owners.
How could anyone not know this? How is this not obvious? A client asks for something, wanting to hand us money and you send an emoji?
But here’s the deal:
That reaction feels good for about ten seconds and fixes nothing. What’s actually true is less fun. I’m the one who sets the standard, and if the standard wasn’t clear, that’s on me. I thought our SOP covered it. It says clients get a response within one business hour. Maybe it wasn’t clear that this includes requests about new placements. Either way, it needs to be crystal clear, and making it crystal clear is my job, not theirs.
So here’s the new line, spelled out so nobody has to guess.
Every client request gets acknowledged in words within one business hour during working hours. An emoji is not an acknowledgement. You don’t have to solve it on the spot, and most of the time you can’t. But you have to say you’ve got it, and you have to tell them when you’ll get back to them. Then you get back to them when you said you would.
That’s it.
That’s the whole rule.
And this is the part that every founder hates. To you, it’s so glaringly obvious that it feels a little insulting to write down. It’s painful to spell out something you assumed everyone already knew. But your team isn’t you. They didn’t build the thing. They didn’t lose sleep over the first client who almost walked. What’s obvious to you is just one of fifty things to them, and the salt shaker drifts.
Know this:
Writing it down is the best thing you can do for yourself, and for them. Once a rule is written down, the rule becomes the bad guy.
You’re not the boss who’s annoyed today because you got up on the wrong side of the bed.
You just point at the page.
“The SOP says one business hour, in words. What happened?”
It’s not personal. It’s the standard. And a standard that’s written down can be taught, checked, and enforced.
That’s the job. Notice the drift. Move the salt shaker back to the center. Write it down so it’s clear. Then enforce it, calmly, the next time it drifts, because it will.
It’s the same thing I tell every client who brings on a remote hire. The person you hire isn’t going to read your mind across an ocean.
If you want them to work to your standard, the standard has to exist somewhere other than your head.
The best hire in the world can’t hit a target if they didn’t know it even existed.
If you want a hire who knows what the standard is from day one, and a team that keeps putting the salt shaker back, book a call here:
