How important is your “Image”?
About a year ago, I was going through a rough period with WiseUp: I felt like we were doing really good work, providing good value for our customers, and treating our employees well. We were doing the things that all those inspiring articles on Techcrunch and Business Insider preached… and it sucked.

Our competition was doing the opposite: selling “snake oil”, providing little value for the customer, delivering unfinished products, but somehow… they seemed to work less, earn more and have happier customers. I was distraught.
I did not want to “sell out”, I did not want to compromise on my ethics but I wanted to do well. So I went to talk to a mentor, which is also a family member, with huge experience in the business world: Mr. “N”.
Mr. “N” is that type of person who always does excellent work. He is one of the few people that I admire and I know he cares about his work deeply. I went to him out of an emotional decision so he could tell me what I wanted to hear: “keep going”, “it just takes time”, “you are right”, “if you build it, they will come”. Instead he told me something that I never thought I will ever hear from his mouth:
Mr. N: “George, image is the most important thing!”
Me: …
Also me: But isn’t doing good work the most important thing?
Mr. N: “No! The customer already bought and by the time he figures out the work is bad, it is already too late for him!”
I was shocked… I felt betrayed without knowing why. I appreciated him, I admired him, was he “just like the rest”? He was not, he was just more mature and he understood some things better.
“Why a good image works better than doing good work and no image… for a while”
When we first come in contact with a product or a service, what we buy is the image. Be it the brand, peer recommendations or commercials, the first purchase is always based on image. Recurring purchases and retention are based on other factors: real value, cost of switching, lock-in mechanisms etc. But the first purchase is on perceived value: IMAGE ONLY!
So the math works like this: to start you need customers. And since first purchases are based only on image, a really good image helps acquiring these initial customers. If you do bad work, you will ruin your image and customers will not come back, but purely mathematical… that is a problem for later.
Usually businesses that start with a really good image, but bad capacity and quality on delivery, have higher revenue at the start, and then they dip. They cannot deliver on specs, quality and budget so they drag on projects or have low customer retention.

“A good image does not mean doing bad work.”
When you are starting up (either as a freelancer or as a company) and have limited time and resources you can not do many things at once. So you need to start with something: usually the thing that you are best at. If you are really good at delivery, you will do only that for the beginning. You will have little time left for building a good image and will rely on recommendations from customers that worked with you. Your “image” is the trust of your previous customers.
But as you grow… you have to start working on your image or you will not acquire more profitable customers.
