There Is No Such Thing as a Small Mistake With a Client

Here’s the deal. This topic has come up multiple times, and I have never written about it before. I do not think I know more than you. I just wish people would share more in this industry, and this is my attempt to put my money where my mouth is and share something that might help the people I care about out on the front line. It is a strong opinion, and I would like you to test it for yourself: there is no such thing as a small mistake when it comes to a client.

Short answer: There is no such thing as a small mistake with a client. Inside your own company, you can treat a mistake as a micro-failure or a two-way door and ask what was learned. With a client, you cannot devalue a mistake, because that devalues how they feel. Dig in, be empathetic, fix it, and turn the complaint into a remarkable experience, so the relationship ends up stronger than it started.

Why Can You Forgive Mistakes Inside Your Company?

You have probably been taught, much like I have, that when a mistake happens, you do not go marginalizing people and punishing them.

There is a story I think is in How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie, though I really feel like it could be in a Patrick Lencioni book, and I might be merging two stories together. Somebody made a significant mistake on a deal, I remember it as at least $500,000, in South America. The location has nothing to do with it, other than helping you recognize the story if you have heard it. The person came back expecting to get fired. The senior leader asked what was learned, and the person walked through this, this, and this. And he did not get fired. The comment was, why would I fire you? I just spent $500,000 training you.

So when people make mistakes inside our own organization, we have an opportunity to be super benevolent and say, hey, this is not a big deal. In fact, we say that quite a bit in our organization. There is also the idea of a one-way door and a two-way door. A one-way door is a mistake or decision you cannot come back from. A two-way door is an easy mistake or decision to come back from, because it is not high stakes.

The other thing I have heard a lot from Katie with raising kids is the idea of a micro-failure. We want kids to have micro-failures at home and make their way through them well, so that if something big ever happens in life, they have the experience.

Why Differentiation Matters

One of the truest things I have ever learned is differentiation. It is actually anti-batching, meaning we cannot batch principles and assume one principle applies everywhere. I will go deeper on this in another post, but here is one example.

Sometimes people tell me, Jason, you are pushing. If you actually notice, that so-called pushing always happens in pre-construction, before the activity. I would call it driving, to preserve my ego. And I drive in pre-construction because I know I will not push or drive on a construction project. I am not going to wing it, figure it out, or try to recover on the actual jobsite.

So does the principle of not pushing, or not starting too early, apply the same way to construction and pre-construction? I would say it does not. The more you can do, the earlier you can start, and the more effort you can put in, even working a couple of late days in pre-construction, the better. Every hour in pre-construction is worth a day, and every day is worth a week in construction, because I know I am not going to push in the field.

What a Foreman Taught Me About Being Ready

I learned this the hard way. When I was a kid, I experimented with having a business doing driveways and concrete foundations. I would put things off and procrastinate, and then the concrete was already on the way. I did not have all the forms set. I did not have the jointers ready. The ready-mix driver would be waiting on me. When I finally got everything buttoned up and placed the concrete, it would go off on me, I did not have all the construction joints, and it looked terrible.

Dennis Eccles was a foreman I worked under at Conco Construction in California when I was a young man, and he was the opposite. He would say, we are not leaving today until everything is ready. That meant:

• The visqueen, the plastic that goes on the walls, all up and taped.
• The truck inventoried and clean.
• The soap ready. This is an old practice that works well. You mix dish soap with water, get it sudsy, and paste it all over an adjacent placement so you do not get stains from the new placement.
• Everything graded, screed boards up, and rebar caps on everything.

That is how I am now. I get these things done ahead of time so that I do not have to panic, rush, and push tomorrow. Everything ready to go is a habit, and it starts before the work does.

How I Learned That No Mistake Is Small to a Client

Differentiation matters for mistakes too. Internally, a mistake might be a micro-failure, even if it is a big one, and if the person cares, maybe it works out in the end, like that $500,000 of training. But we have to differentiate that from a client. You can devalue a mistake all you want internally, when the consequences are your own. You cannot devalue a mistake with one of your clients, because then you devalue the way they feel, and you are not responding to it properly.

I remember doing a job for the University of Arizona. The director of construction came out and said, Jason, if a butterfly farts on the jobsite, I want to know about it.

When I was a superintendent there, the director of construction asked me why I chose the color I did for the screen on the fence. I had chosen tan, and it was supposed to be dark green. I think DPR now has a standard for the screen color, but nobody told me. Another time, they wanted lights along the fence, and I thought you could see perfectly. In my head, these people were unreasonable. I was being a victim.

Becoming an Extension of the Client’s Team

Lorna Gray, who is amazing and one of the top mentors in my life, told me, Jason, you outnumber us as a project delivery team. You have resources we do not have. You have to look at yourself like an extension of our team, and look at this like you are us. It was a state university, so they were dealing with government bureaucracy. They had to deal with:

• The news, and staying off the news.
• Pedestrians and complaints.
• Motorists.
• The facilities group and other departments.
• Finicky politicians.
• The university itself.

I thought, oh my gosh, that is overwhelming. And they said, see, this is the world we have to live in. We are asking you to care about it, whether you think it is ridiculous or not.

DPR’s culture helped me with this too. I pivoted. I switched my perspective, and I started caring about it, like I worked for them, like I was an extension of their team. And I realized that no mistake, no matter how small, is actually small to your client.

Why Is Dismissing a Client’s Concern So Costly?

I have relearned this recently in our own business. My default has been to protect my own internal people first, and then look at client satisfaction. We have had clients be super unhappy because their own superintendent is not taking it seriously, while we are doing everything we can, short of running the project for them, to get it done. They say, we are not happy with your services, this is not what was promised to us. My first reaction is to push back. But what I should do is be empathetic, help them with it, and help them work through how they feel.

Here is the main point. If we dismiss it as small, then we do not dig in, and we lose the connection, the vulnerability, and the opportunity to fix it and lean in that we could have had. Is it painful to hear these things? Yes. But does it end up making for stronger relationships? A million percent.