The Monday Morning Building Product Advisor
Issue #136

Steadfast Steve, Part 1

Our design team had a problem at the front door.

We were working on a research tower for a big client in town, and our team wanted the main entrance to make a statement. They wanted the curtain wall to blend smoothly into the limestone. With no bulky frame where the glass met the stone.

It looked great on paper, but it would be hard to make it happen during actual construction.

“Steve” sat at the end of our conference table. He had a roll of bumwad and a pencil and was working with our technical team on the jamb detail. He determined where to place the anchors and seals and how to hide the mullion.

[If you don’t know what “bumwad” is, it’s what some architects call tracing paper. It’s also called flimsy, onion skin, or just trace. We usually call it whatever our favorite professor called it.]

Anyway, Steve isn’t the product rep’s real name, but we’ll call him “Steadfast Steve” because... well… that’s what he was.

What I didn’t realize then was that Steve knew he probably wouldn’t win that job. His curtain wall system wasn’t the market leader in our area, and the project would likely go to the usual brand. He knew it, and so did we. Still, he spent most of that morning helping us solve a detail on a building he likely wouldn’t get to supply.

And this wasn’t even a one-time thing.

For about 3 years, Steve came to our office more often than some of our consultants. Whenever a team hit a snag on a curtain wall detail, he’d sit down to help. It didn’t matter whether he’d lost the project or it was outside his region, where he had no chance of getting the work.

If we had a question, he always showed up.

If you’re a product rep, you might be thinking about the numbers. Three years of helping with details for free, with nothing to show for it, sounds like a lot of wasted time on the road.

Hold that thought for a moment, because now we’re going to talk about….

Roller coasters & right hooks

When you ride one of those rickety old wooden roller coasters, the first part is always slow and a bit boring. The chain clanks as you’re pulled up the hill, staring out at the parking lot.

Most riders don’t realize that once the car reaches the top of the hill, there’s no motor. Every drop and turn after that uses the energy the car gained as the chain pulled it up that hill.

In physics, we call this potential energy. If your school memories are a little rusty, that’s stored energy an object has because of its position. The higher and heavier something is, the more energy it stores. But it just sits there until some action releases that energy.

Now, let’s look at this from another angle…

Gary Vaynerchuk wrote a business book about this idea, but he left out the physics part.

He called it Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook. The jabs are what you give freely, like help and real attention to what matters to the other person. The right hook is when you finally ask for something. His point is that most people just keep asking or “throwing hooks” and wonder why it doesn’t work.

If you put these two ideas together, you can see what Steadfast Steve was actually doing. [Whether he knew it or not…]

Every time Steve sat at our conference table, it was another jab. Each one took him a little farther up the hill, building up that potential energy.

The energy he built up was in his relationship with our firm, not just in one project.

That’s what makes the numbers add up.

The research tower didn’t work out for Steve’s product, but it wasn’t a dead end for him. The potential energy belongs to the roller coaster car, not the track it’s on. The same principle applied when he helped us on a project across the country. He didn’t get the project, but his relationship capital kept growing.

And so did that potential energy.

There’s one more thing to consider if you don’t mind a quick return to the physics lesson. Potential energy depends on how high and how heavy something is.

A quick ‘just checking in’ email is like carrying a piddly-ass feather up the hill. You can do it a hundred times, and it won’t store much energy. But if you help solve a tricky curtain wall, it’s like carrying a concrete block up there. It’s more valuable than a year of check-ins. It addresses a real issue for the design team when they need it most.

So when people debate whether you need 3 jabs or 7 before you ask, they’re missing the point. Don’t worry so much about the number. Focus more on the weight.

Steadfast Steve takes a right hook…

A few years later, the same research campus began phase two: a second research tower.

This time, Steve made his move. He sent in a substitution request to use an even newer curtain wall system he now represented.

Here’s how architects typically view requests to substitute major systems like this. Most of us have had bad experiences. A product looks fine on paper, so we approve it, only for it to cause on-site problems that take months to fix. So we usually say no right away.

A substitution request from a product rep we barely know feels like a surprise right hook. But there’s no energy behind it, so it doesn’t go anywhere.

But that wasn’t the case for Steve. Three years of steady effort, or jabs, made the difference.

And he didn’t just make his case in a letter. He had another project nearby using the new system, so he invited us and the client to visit the site. On one side of the building, we saw the team installing it, and they assembled it much more smoothly than usual. On the other side, we saw the finished result for ourselves.

That tour convinced both the client and our team. We approved the substitute, and the contractor installed Steve’s system on the second tower.

Three years of hard work built potential energy into the relationship. It all paid off with one job site visit.

So what does this mean for you this week?

If you really want to put this into practice, choose the one architect you’d most like to work with a year from now. Think about your last ten interactions with that firm. This includes emails, calls, office visits, and lunches.

How many of those were just feathers? How many were concrete blocks?

If your answer makes you cringe a bit, that’s actually a good thing. It’s better to know now than to find out the hard way when they reject your next substitution request.

I made a short worksheet to help you score your interactions, measure your potential energy, and plan your next big one. I’d usually ask you to reply JAB or something like that at this point, but that doesn’t seem as effective these days.

So, I’ll just put the link to the worksheet right here. Worksheet - Potential Energy Assessor​

I’d still love to hear from you if you find it useful. That way, I know these are still worth my time & effort.

Next Monday, I’ll share what Steve did after he got the approval. Most reps stop putting in effort once they get the win, but that’s where Steadfast Steve set himself apart.

So be sure to come back and check it out.

That’s it for this week!

Cheers to building more than just buildings, and see you next week,

Neil "too old for roller coasters" Sutton​
​Architect | Speaker | The Product Rep Coach

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P.S. Do you really want inside an architect's head?

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