Giving to Receive

The notion that we should do all we can to exceed client expectations is one we hear trumpeted in almost every inspirational business seminar and in nearly every keynote speech during trade shows.

There are very good reasons for this: After all, when you perform beyond your clients’ expectations, they’re far more likely to be pleased with the process, more reasonable in their requests and, ultimately, readier sources of the referrals that will keep your business hopping. Not only that, but there’s also something wonderful in making people happy – if for no other reason than in doing so, we tend to make ourselves happy as well.

In the watershaping world, conjuring those good vibrations is right up there for me alongside doing the work itself to the highest standards. Yes, we all need technical expertise, but as I see it, when you combine that competence with top-notch client relationships and a winning personality, you’re basically unstoppable – even in the toughest times.

Through the years, I’ve learned a simple extra step in the relationship-building process – one that cinches the positive impressions I always try to make and that invariably ends up making my clients very happy indeed: I give them gifts.

THROW IT IN

In raising this concept of gifts, I’m not referring to bottles of champagne or dinner out at a nice restaurant to celebrate completion of the job. Those are good thoughts, but they’re not what I’m recommending here.

Rather, I’m after gifts that are integral parts of projects – unexpected features of some kind that clients don’t know they’re getting in addition to contracted details. My aim here is to surprise them with these bonuses at the end of our on-site work.

It could be in the form of spray jets on a deck, for example, or LED lights that change colors. Maybe it’s a foam jet in a shallow lounging area or an added fire feature or a dimmer on the lighting controller or something as simple as an extra sleeve for an umbrella – or the umbrella itself. It helps, of course, to find something that you believe the clients will like, so what I often find myself doing is making mental notes about items they’ve brought up in passing or have deleted from their initial wish lists for one reason or another.

Why on earth, you might ask, should I give away money that way, especially if I’m bound and determined to make the clients happy anyway?

My own first experience with building a surprise gift into a project had to do with including four foam jets in this pool. Although it ended up being a more generous proposition than my partner or I thought it would be, this gesture set a pattern I follow and recommend to others to this day.

As I see it, you’re not really “giving away” anything. First of all, a complementary add-on that doesn’t gut your bottom line should be easy to find if you’re in the practice of doing accurate take offs in the estimating process. Armed with a complete and accurate understanding of your material costs, labor, markups and profit margins, you can either choose to insert a line item for a gift, factor it into your mark up or simply decide to make a bit less on a given project.

This accuracy is good business practice anyway, but when it comes to going the extra mile for your clients, good take offs and estimates help you know exactly what it’ll cost to make your clients very happy indeed. Yes, I know some people who can look at a set of plans and almost instantly determine a price, but I’ve always believed in being very precise in estimating in the belief it gives me greater control over the entire process. My point here is no matter which way you choose to manage your business, I would argue that the costs of giving your clients a gift are far outdistanced by the benefits.

In fact, once you try this, you’ll be amazed at what it does to your clients’ mindsets and attitudes. I’ve found that they’re not only happy, but almost instantaneously became the world’s strongest advocates for you and your business. It’s as if they just can’t wait to advise their friends, relations and associates to give you a call.

In that sense, giving gifts and surprising clients with them is a straight investment in marketing and in building future business – one that is far more effective than any form of advertising or promotion I’ve ever found, bar none.

A TOE IN THE WATER

My first foray into gift giving came back in the day when I built watershapes with my partner, Lars Wiren. He and I were both committed to the idea of making clients happy in ways that went beyond just doing a good job with respect to design and construction.

Lars, in fact, was something of a role model to me in going absolutely out of his way to do anything and everything he could to respond to clients’ concerns in ways that fostered their comfort with the construction process. He returned calls immediately, listened to any and all concerns and never, ever left clients hanging. He was also truthful in discussing time frames – and when anything went wrong, he took responsibility and corrected the situation as quickly as possible.

As a team, we always focused on outperforming other businesses in communicating with our clients and in our on-site practices – and we had the referral business and client testimonials to prove our success along those lines. Even so, we were always on the hunt for ways to elevate our game in our clients’ eyes, and we decided at one point to surprise a pair of them in a substantial way.

It was a wonderful project for a great couple, but the site had been less than fully cooperative: The soil was unstable, and we’d needed to install the pool atop a system of piles while also thickening the decks. As a result, the project had cost enough that, even though they stretched and kept a number of nice features, they’d definitely felt the pinch.

It was a cool project from end to end, with a large, shallow lounging area, nice lighting, a sheeting water effect we installed in the chimney of an existing outdoor fireplace/barbecue structure, a tile catch basin below the weir flowing into a spa that, in turn, appeared to spill over into the pool across an acrylic window. It all worked beautifully in the setting.

At that time, Genesis 3 was still a young organization and had just started what has proved to be an enduring relationship with the folks at Crystal Fountains of Toronto. As we all learned more about fountain technology, I began to think about ways of include fountain effects in swimming pools – and then it hit me: I called Lars and we quickly decided that we’d include something cool in this project as an experiment for us but also as a surprise gift to our clients.

With that settled, we asked the technical people at Crystal Fountains if they could modify their foam jets for flush mounting in the shallow lounging area. Being cooperative and creative souls, they came up with a modified component that was perfectly suited to the task. It was all going so well, in fact, that Lars and I decided to install four of them in the lounging area – and not to inform our clients about the addition until we turned the pool over to them.

We found that setting up the system was more involved than we thought it would be and so made the gift a bit more generous than we’d originally intended, but ultimately we completed our work and hid the nozzles so well that they were basically invisible on the big day.

THE BIG MOMENT

It was standard procedure for Lars and me to make a production out of demonstrating completed systems to our clients. We’d always present them with books of documentation that included sheets on each piece of equipment along with plumbing plans and numbers (mostly ours) clients could call with questions or problems. On site, we’d go over every feature and show how to operate them in detail – and left plenty of time for questions, repetition of key points and letting everything sink in.

This process typically involved a bottle of wine – one of the many reasons we almost always scheduled these sessions for the afternoon – and we did all we could to make these events both upbeat and fun and yet another way to build a sense of happiness into the process.

In this particular case, when we were all finished with everything, we paused and said, “By the way, there’s something else we want to show you.” At that point, Lars pushed a button, and suddenly, four beautiful, two-foot-high plumes of water emerged from the lounging area.

The clients were stunned and immediately asked why we’d done all this. We simply said, “We thought you should have this,” and then proceeded to tell them about the fountain jets and how to operate them. As they began to appreciate what we’d done, he asked how much it had cost, to which we said, “Nothing at all: It’s a gift.”

At first, they didn’t quite believe it, but as the news sunk in, the delighted smiles on their faces spoke volumes. Not only did they love their new pool and think well of how we’d performed, but they had also become friends for life.

Shortly thereafter, Lars and I received a call inviting us and our wives to a dinner party. We showed up to find that the clients had invited two other couples for a lovely dinner, some good wine and a fantastic evening. Best of all, our clients made a huge point telling their friends that they absolutely should work with us when the time came to build their own pools.

From that point forward, it was as if we had engaged the services of an independent marketing firm. This couple referred everyone they knew to us, and to this day they’re still great friends and amazing advocates for our work.

In this case, the gift was quite generous, given custom components and our learning curve. But when I consider the ultimate payback with respect to new business and good will, the investment yielded returns manifold times greater than the original cost.

From that point forward, Lars and I were always on the lookout for gifts we could include in our projects. To be sure, few were ever as costly or complicated as that first one, but nonetheless, every one of them resulted in the positive responses we were after – and in additional business.

WORKING FOR OTHERS

My partnership with Lars Wiren ended years ago and I only do design work these days, so including gifts for clients is much more difficult for me now. More often than not, however, I encourage the contractors who execute my designs to give it a try. Consistently, those who do report that it’s worth the effort and the expense.

Case in point: I recently designed an elaborate waterfront project for a couple in the Daytona Beach, Fla., area. The pool included a large, shallow lounging area that spilled over a vanishing edge into a pool with a broad, radiused vanishing edge. There was also a separate circular spa with a perimeter overflow, an associated fire feature and a step-down overflow from the spa into the pool.

There were supposed to be two planters in the space between the lounging area and the pool, but the clients decided to place fire features there as well. Completing the package, there were to be laminar jets arcing from the deck onto the lounging area, which also includes foam jets similar to those described just above. Suffice it to say that these clients wanted a complex and impressive list of features.

As a designer, I can only advise those building my projects to follow my gift-giving lead. In this case, builder Ed Iannarelli went above and beyond by including a number of fiberoptic ‘stars’ in the lounging area of this pool at no charge – a gesture that may have played a role in the nice tip he received once his work was completed.

The builder in this case was Ed Iannarelli of Ed’s Spas, Solar & Pools (Ormand Beach, Fla.). He’s a great guy, and throughout the project I was impressed by his attention to detail and overall performance. (Sometimes I’m disappointed by the companies my clients choose to execute my designs, but in this case it was the opposite: Iannarelli is definitely one of those who “gets it.”)

I ran into Ed at a trade show in February 2009, where he told me that, at the end of the project, the clients had given him a $10,000 tip!

Clearly, Iannarelli had exceeded their expectations and then some. He told me that, in addition to all the features designed into the project, he had also – on his own without consulting me or the clients – decided to install a set of color-shifting fiberoptic “stars” in the lounging area. It was a gift, he said, that he’d used to surprise the clients at the conclusion of the project.

Whether or not the gratuity he received was entirely the result of his gift to the clients, I can’t say for sure. There is no question, however, that it was part of a job done to near perfection and with outstanding client service and communication throughout. The gift was part of a great picture, in other words, but I like to think that Ed’s generosity was the proximal cause of his clients’ returning the favor.

If I have one final recommendation when it comes to this form of gift giving, it’s that you need to do it with panache. Watershaping is all about luxury, pleasure, excitement and enhancing our clients’ lifestyles. We create art by creating spaces where life happens, where play and exercise happen, where fun and happiness occur. So when you give a gift, be sure to do it with joy and enthusiasm and a sense of ceremony – and do your level best to make it a surprise: It’s the proverbial icing on the cake.

Of course there are no guarantees that this approach will result in referrals or tips or any other sort of reciprocal gesture, but based on my experience and what I’ve heard from others, my hunch is that when you give a little, you stand to receive a much, much more in return.

Brian Van Bower runs Aquatic Consultants, a design firm based in Miami, Fla., and is a co-founder of the Genesis 3 Design Group; dedicated to top-of-the-line performance in aquatic design and construction, this organization conducts schools for like-minded pool designers and builders. He can be reached at [email protected].