Service is not a dirty word
Or Service is dead, long live service! [First published on Ooomf.com]
“Do you know the difference between a straight guy and a gay guy?”
“A twelve pack.”
This was a favorite joke of his — after that he’d invite you to his house to drink a bottle of Jack. His other was “You look like a young Johnny Depp.”
“From the neck up.”
Admittedly I was a little heavier that summer. Free helpings of Amaretto Penne & Parmigiana di Melanzane were going straight to my hips, but I really didn’t care.
I was working as a busser at a fine dining italian restaurant that took the name of its local celebrity chef. The jokester was their head waiter. In his mid-30's, he was a career server who loved getting a rise out of the young boys working there for the summer.
Service for him, was an art form. He swooned in on high rolling customers like Don Giovanni on an unsuspecting woman.
He knew everyone’s name. Whether they’d been there last week or last year. He knew if they had children and what they were doing the last time they’d been in the restaurant. He complimented the women as soon as he greeted the table. “Oh, don’t you look fabulous” was repeated 20 times daily.
You wanted to roll your eyes every time. But it worked.
Every glass served, every plate that touched a customers table was meticulously poured over. Every Pasta dish was checked for sauce splatters or sloppy plating. Every main course was served in the “5:00" position. Every plate was cleared from the right, every time. Any other way caught you an ear full.
He averaged tips well above 20% — and he deserved it. It was a lot of work, but paid off night after night when his section was full and other servers were standing around with their hands in their pockets.
Nearly ten years later, I quit the service industry. It was one of the happiest days of my life. I had no idea what was next, but at least I’d never have to clean up some else’s smashed pizza and hamburger bits from underneath their table again.
My roommate Ethan & I had just lost 4k on a lingerie fashion event we threw in Downtown LA. Our goal was to make rent & meet models. Mainly the latter, but we failed miserably on both counts. (Side note: before they were opening for Lady Gaga, the Far East Movement headlined the event).
While I was busy submitting internship applications at failing record labels, Ethan was teaching himself PHP in order to build a client project he was charging my yearly salary for, plus sales commissions. It seemed obvious I was doing it all wrong.
There was a catch however, Ethan is brilliant. Beyond his brilliance he has a knack for human relations.
He did the work that didn’t make him immediate returns.
He remembered his clients wives’ and kids’ names. He’d know the weather in their city and the upcoming weekend events. He would check the sports stats of their favorite team before every call.
He consistently showed progress on the project — even if it meant doing extra work to showcase functionality that wasn’t necessarily built on the backend. This kept the clients happy and at ease.
This extra effort made all the difference between a struggling freelance developer and an abundance of referral work — so much so that I supported myself off of his overflow work for the first year I freelanced.
I thought I had escaped the service industry for the ‘freedom’ of freelance work. But — I never left the service industry.
They may not have come streaming in at 6:30pm with hunger pains and screaming babies day after day, but it was up to me to keep my clients happy & believing that I was the one they needed for the job. You can disappoint your clients — they will go away. It costs much more to find new work and acquire new ones than it does to service your current clientele.
As a young freelancer struggling to build my own client list, I looked up to the “big guys” such as Jesse Bennett-Chamberlain & Matthew Smith and their ability to take a client project and turn it into art. No oversized logos. No rainbow color schemes. They designed what the client needed, and designed it well.
While many of us may not be as proficient and disciplined as Jesse — his dedication to serving a single project at a time, giving that project the time and attention it deserved, always showed in the end result.
Service is the work we do to do the work we love.
Today, as Tiny Factory move’s into product — we’ve put service at the forefront of our business. We’ve focused on setting up infrastructure so we can get support tickets in front of the people who have the answers. We require everyone on our team to bring in beta testers on release days so they can see the issues users hit and bring a human perspective into bug reports and feature requests.
Service is everyone on the team’s job, not just our marketing & support teams.
Service is dead, long live service!
This article was originally published on the ooomf blog. For more articles like this as soon as they’re published, enter your email here.
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